I have affiliate relationships with Bookshop.org and Malaprop's Bookstore in beautiful Asheville, NC. I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase merchandise through links on my site. Read more on my affiliate page.
Welcome back to (re)Viewing Last Month: June 2026, my monthly recap of the movies and television series my husband and I have been watching! Works appear in the the order in which we finished them.
Title: Northern Exposure: Season 4
Seen before? No
Based on a Book or Story? No
Reason for Watching: Continuing the series
Source: DVD from the library
Season four was pretty good overall but roughly the first half of the season focused too much on Holling and Maurice, the two older men in the town of Cicely, Alaska. The issue isn’t that they’re older, it’s that I don’t particularly care for either of the characters. Maurice is a racist old bigot but he admittedly does have a few good moments (I literally cheered when an unexpected character told him off though). Holling is more enlightened but his romantic relationship with Shelly, who is at least 40 years younger, is disturbing in 2026. She sleeps with a teddy bear for heaven’s sake! The second half of the season shifted toward the rest of the cast and I liked that a lot more. Adam Arkin makes a guest appearance and the episodes where he shows up are some of our favorites. I often find myself wishing that I could sit down and have a conversation with whoever wrote Chris’s philosophical monologues. They might not be to everyone’s taste but I find them fascinating. But the season finale was one of the worst episodes of the entire show. I don’t know what the writers were thinking.
Title: Resident Alien: Season 2
Seen before? No
Based on a Book or Story? Yes. The Resident Alien comic written by Peter Hogan and illustrated by Steven Parkhouse
Have I Read the Book? No
Reason for Watching: Continuing the series
Source: Netflix
We laugh so hard watching this series! We like Alan Tudyk when he appears in whatever we’re watching but he really outdoes himself here. We don’t know how he or the actors around him keep a straight face with some of his antics! We generally like the supporting characters as well, though one in particular tends to annoy us. She was getting bad enough to almost turn us off the show but the writers seem to have turned back from that edge. Thank goodness. Watch this if you like your science fiction with a big helping of hilarious absurdity.
Title: Pompeii
Seen before? No
Based on a Book or Story? No
Reason for Watching: The only thing on a hotel TV
Source: Cable
We don’t know if it was trying to be a gladiator movie, a love story, a revenge story, a disaster movie, or something else. Whatever the goal, it did not succeed. There was too much going on. I understood that Harington’s character was angry at the Roman Empire for killing his family when he was a child but other than that, I don’t know what anyone’s motivation was for anything. We were told a lot of random stuff but we weren’t shown anything. And then the volcano explodes and the credits roll. The average rating for this title on Letterboxd is 2.4 out of 5 but I was shocked to start reading reviews and realize that seven of the twelve most popular reviews were praising director Paul W. S. Anderson’s brilliance. I don’t think those reviewers watched the same movie I did. This was an absolute mess.
Title: Shardlake: Season 1
Seen before? No
Based on a Book or Story? Yes. Dissolution by C. J. Sansom
Have I Read the Book? Yes. My 4-star review
Reason for Watching: My husband and I both loved the book.
Source: Disney+
Now, this show was fabulous. I loved the character of Matthew Shardlake in the books. Arthur Hughes did a fantastic job as the outwardly confident but inwardly insecure lawyer. I read the book in 2009 so I have forgotten a lot of the details but my husband and I both wondered why Shardlake’s assistant, John Barak, seemed so different from what we remembered in the books. We looked it up and he wasn’t even in Dissolution. We don’t know what else was changed for television but this was still an atmospheric mystery that we really enjoyed. It was canceled after one season and we don’t understand why. Luckily, this season wraps up nicely, so I highly recommend watching it.
Title: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Seen before? No
Based on a Book or Story? No
Reason for Watching: Continuing the series
Source: Kanopy
I watched the original The Terminator for the first time fairly recently, so we chose the sequel one evening. The stunts and chase scenes were cool, even if some of them do look a bit dated now. Arnold is doing his Arnold thing. After watching Linda Hamilton in her evil general phase in Resident Alien and Stranger Things, it was a lot of fun to see her as a young fighter in an early resistance. I really don’t know how Robert Patrick as T-1000 managed to show absolutely no emotion for the entire length of this movie (as required by the part), but it was quite impressive. I couldn’t do it. Overall, I have to say that this was really entertaining.
That’s it for us. What did you watch last month? Anything you would recommend? What do you think of our choices?
