Overrated/Underrated: Netflix remains a comedy powerhouse with ‘Lady Dynamite’

There’s a lot of pop culture to sort through week after week. Times staff writer Chris Barton offers his take on what’s up and what’s down in music, movies, television and just about anything else out there that is worth considering.

UNDERRATED

The comedy chops of Netflix: Though Netflix often gets notice for all the bad it generates — a regularly misunderstood euphemism for a date, a troubling determination to further Adam Sandler’s career — it deserves credit for carrying the flag for comedy in stand-up specials and off-beat programming despite the middling results earned by attempts at new iterations of “Arrested Development” and “Wet Hot American Summer.” Recently it gave us the best of all in Maria Bamford’s “Lady Dynamite,” a show that finally offers the proper platform for her strange and deeply wonderful comic talents.

The Clientele’s ‘Strange Geometry’: Maybe a band is asking for cult status if their big break is a musical cameo in a mid-aughts Keanu Reeves drama (“The Lake House”), but this London group deserves another listen with this 2005 album, which was just reissued on Merge Records. Led by the breathy, reverb-soaked vocals of Alasdair MacLean and framed with enough wistful atmosphere to score a ‘60s film about a trying autumn at Oxford, “Strange Geometry” captures the best of bookish U.K. pop. Sample the surrealist spoken word of “Losing Haringey” or “My Own Face Inside the Trees.”

Overrated/Underrated: Pop culture’s best and worst >>

OVERRATED

From left: Zack De La Rocha, Brad Wilk, Tim Commerford and Tom Morello at the Ambassador Hotel on Aug. 13, 1999.

(Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times )

Rage Against the Machine’s inability to get along: Sure, bringing together three-fourths of these politically charged rap-rock veterans with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Cypress Hill’s B-Real is enough to pique one’s curiosity, as with the newly announced supergroup Prophets of Rage. But if a band that once shut down the New York Stock Exchange and played searing unsanctioned sets before the 2000 political conventions can’t put aside their differences with original vocalist Zach de la Rocha for one more run at a political season fueled by rage, just what hope is there for all of us?

Superlatives: For being a theoretically limitless space, the Internet loves its absolutes. Looking on social media, few songs, albums or movies are ever well done or interesting, they’re the best ever, the worst ever, something where we won’t believe what happens next or, in one deeply improbable descriptor that was recently deconstructed, “everything.” While strong declarations generate curiosity and, in our click-driven media climate, that is truly everything, isn’t it more realistic to allow for whatever bubbles up in the pop culture stew to stand alone as part of a creative continuum? That would just be the best.