For Your Consideration: Joe Pera Talks With You Season 2 (So Far)

"I've never been bored, not once in my life."

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Even though I've only expounded upon my love of Joe Pera Talks With You on one other occasion that nobody read, my adoration of the show is a rather open secret. There are few shows that I've walked into not knowing what to expect only to be completely floored (which seems to be something Adult Swim has done an increasingly great job at), but Talks With You accomplished that with complete ease.

While I do consider myself a critic, there's something intrinsically hard to assess about Talks With You because it's so original and true to itself. It doesn't trudge in the footsteps of obvious predecessors; it's a one-of-a-kind product that walks to the beat of its own drum and never doubts itself. That's what made Season 1 so amazing to me: the dreamy quality it possesses in waxing on the simplest things in life with earnest. Some people find the show boring for that very reason because there's no dramatic conflict, and arguably very little happens, but that's what makes everything work.

For Your Consideration: Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal (Episodes 1-5)

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(Note: this review is almost entirely spoiler-free in regards to plot developments.)

I'll admit that Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal, the latest addition to Adult Swim's line-up, almost flew under my radar entirely. I was well aware of the show leading up to its release and liked what I saw from the trailer, but it never really jumped out to me as a must-watch. At best, I assumed, it was just another experimental show for Adult Swim's roster, and my lack of a history watching Tartakovsky's other works (Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack) meant I didn't really have any frame of reference for what sort of show Primal would even be. It was by a stroke of good luck, then, that I decided to check out the first episode to fill a little bit of spare time, because within 22 minutes, I was utterly blown away.

It's rare to see a television show of any variety, cartoon or not, that gives off an aura of knowing exactly what it wants to be doing by its first episode, but within minutes, it's clear that Primal has fully recognized its ambitions. With such a straightforward premise, too—the miniseries is centered around the unlikely camaraderie between a dinosaur, Fang, on the edge of extinction and a caveman, Spear, at the dawn of evolution—it's astonishing how unique Primal is able to feel, for which Tartakovsky deserves all the credit in the world.

For Your Consideration: Rilakkuma and Kaoru (Season 1 Review)

It's interesting how Netflix, over the past few years, has slowly worked towards accumulating an exciting library of animated shows for 2019, starting with the anthology series Love Death & Robots and, in the near future, Lisa Hanawalt's Tuca & Bertie—it's also been a great year for ampersands, apparently. (Cupcake & Dino Season 2 May 3rd!) But wedged between those two more critically-attractive shows was another that captured my attention almost immediately: the Japanese, stop-motion animated slice-of-life show, Rilakkuma and Kaoru.

Based around the incredibly popular Japanese cultural figure of Rilakkuma, a cuddly, dango-obsessed bear with a rather inconspicuous zipper on his back, R+K (his first television series) drags in other characters attached to his franchise, including pet bird Kiiroitori, bear cub Korilakkuma, and most importantly, Kaoru, a woman who discovers Rilakkuma in her house one day. (A new character, a young boy named Tokio, also makes occasional appearances.) While Rilakkuma is at the forefront of the show's advertising, and often wrings out the series' finer comedic moments (however subdued), Kaoru is the show's greatest asset, becoming more often than not the heart of the show.