Look around you and you will see too much to consume. Too many new series arrive every week; hours of drama to critical acclaim or with mixed feelings from critics. How many hours do you have these days? Save it for later and you’ll forget about it because the new season of stranger things just started, or if you’re really particular, you don’t watch anything until the prequel to The iron Throne starts in August.

Also, much of what is currently streaming or arriving weekly on cable amounts to a cry of anger, rage, or pain. And there’s enough real-life stuff going on to give you the jitters. So, remember that summer is short and passes too soon. With that in mind, here are two devilishly short articles. This is a short list of fun shorts for short attention spans.

Trap (airing on Bell Fibe TV 1) is six 10-minute episodes of fun and antics from much of the same team that made the eccentric and hilarious madman vollies. That is, Jonathan Torrens and his gang of pranksters in Nova Scotia, with a few new additions.

The gist of the show is that the real Nathan Macintosh, playing himself, spends a week at his home in Truro and gets embroiled in all sorts of shenanigans. (It’s about turning life into laughs – Macintosh’s acting career was on the rise when the pandemic forced him to return home. He had appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – things were going well.) For example, his mother (the wonderful Trina Corkum) pesters him to find a job or collect unemployment benefits. His insistence that he’s only home for a short time gets him nowhere. It’s that kind of wacky, insane show.

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In a beautiful scene, Macintosh accompanies his mother to the Service Canada office where she will investigate his eligibility for benefits. When Nathan reveals how much he earned doing comedy the year before, Mom and the benefits agent are stunned. Mom says, “They told us to make a trade. They never told us to make jokes!

But the meat of the small and delicious series involves Nathan being tricked, or blackmailed, into doing a day’s work at his old job. It’s selling shoes at The Toe Shelf, a department store run by Jerry, an aggressive madman (Ron James has plenty of time). No sooner has someone been hit in the head with a Croc shoe than things get complicated. It involves more craziness with mom, romance, and revenge. It’s fun-filled gaiety with no wasted scenes or lines of dialogue.

fanatyk (streams on Netflix) comes from a different place – Poland – but this 33-minute gem is a little dark comedy masterpiece that shares something with Trap. It’s about obsessions and family dynamics.

Teenage Jakub (Mikołaj Kubacki) is in therapy because he’s become introverted, dropped out of school, and spends way too much time on the internet, doing god knows what. Then you wonder if he is the one who belongs in therapy. He lives at home with his mother, father, and brother, the latter being the so-called sane of the house. It is his father Andrzej (Piotr Cyrwus) who controls the house and what controls him is the fishing. He’s a fanatic and the house is filled with fish-related paraphernalia. There are fishing trophies everywhere and so much fishing tackle and hooks that it is dangerous to walk around barefoot. Jakub always has a hook stuck in his foot.

Not only is Dad obsessed with fish, but he’s at war with the Polish Fishermen’s Association. Something to do with fishing rights and whether pike is the king of all fish, or something. Then Jakub mischievously introduces his father to the internet where the man obsessively posts about fishing and starts all sorts of trouble. Meanwhile, Jakub’s mother, Zona (Anna Radwan), tries to keep her husband calm while obsessively trying to learn to speak Spanish. It all ends with a little story about a fishing boat that is both comedy and surreal madness. Directed by Michael Tylka and based on copypaste text by Malcolm XD, fanatyk Delightfully evokes both comedy and generational fury in its short duration.

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