STREAMING TIP

Garth Brooks: The Road I'm On

Netflix

This two-part documentary first aired on A&E a few years ago but, inasmuch as all my TV time has been focused on re-watching every episode of the "Clutch Cargo" cartoon adventure series, I only just now got around to "The Road I'm On." Now that I'm Clutched out, it was fascinating to see this remarkably open and revealing look at Brooks, the biggest selling solo recording artist of all time. While I have great admiration for his work ethic and love a lot of his songs, I wouldn't consider myself a huge fan. But after seeing this documentary, I certainly would like to be his pal. He comes across as ridiculously down-to-earth, still astonished by and dazed/appreciative of his own success — and remarkably candid and thoughtful. The variety of interview sources and tangential subject matter only adds to the irresistible quality. In this age of our thirst for Fame for the Sake Of It, "The Road I'm On" is well worth your time for all the right reasons.

— Rick Koster

TV TIP

What We Do in the Shadows

10 p.m. Thursdays on FX

Don’t we all need a Guillermo in our lives? This comedy about centuries-old vampires in modern-day Staten Island is like a good “Saturday Night Live” sketch, with wacky characters, some amusing one-liners, an irreverent attitude and occasionally sloppy execution. While this “gang that can’t shoot straight” collection of vampires are entertaining, what gives the whole eccentric enterprise some much-needed grounding and humanity is Guillermo, played by Harvey Guillen. Guillen brings the comic timing of Josh Gad and a unique sweetness to the role of a “familiar,” meaning a human servant. He is wiser than the dimwitted vampires, but he is amused by and fond of them — and he saves them more often than they know. It turns out he's a secret vampire slayer who last season killed other blood-suckers who had it in for his group.

— Kristina Dorsey

BOOK TIP

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth

This novel is a creative, witty, present-and-past gothic tale that performs all sorts of literary gymnastics that bounces back and forth from Hollywood's hip film world to eerily supernatural, doomed and forbidden romantic relationships at an elite all-girls boarding school in turn-of-the-20th-century Rhode Island. Danforth wields a sharp observational pen and has a great deal of fun skewing not just outdated notions of sapphic love but whole slabs of the narrow-minded and oft-idiotic tendencies of pop culture itself. Everything centers around a 19th-century memoir by lesbian rebel Mary MacLane and its effect on the boarding school — not to mention an entire film company when, over a century later, they attempt to bring the book and its notorious past to the screen. Employing elements of meta fiction, superb period-style drawings from illustrator Sara Lautman, deft and deep characterization, and remarkably realized vision and ambition, "Plain Bad Heroines" is a giddy triumph.

— Rick Koster