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Oasx
Oct 11, 2006

Freshly Squeezed
I just finished For all mankind, it was quite good. Are any of the other Apple+ shows worth checking out?

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Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013

Oasx posted:

I just finished For all mankind, it was quite good. Are any of the other Apple+ shows worth checking out?

Servant, The Morning Show, Little America.

I've not seen everything Apple TV+ has done, but everything I've seen so far I ended up thinking was good.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


RBA Starblade posted:



Is there anywhere in the US to stream Year of the Rabbit?

It airs on IFC, so if you have a cable login you can watch it in their app.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer

Oasx posted:

I just finished For all mankind, it was quite good. Are any of the other Apple+ shows worth checking out?

Little America, definitely.

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"

Alchenar posted:

Nah that bit, to the extent they did it, is fine. The theme of the show is that every character is working out how to deal with trauma and how much memory makes up the person you are. The problem with S2 is that there's no mystery at all - really early on they reveal the common thread between who's being killed, the reason why is obvious, which makes the twist later on not actually a twist - it's the introduction of a character you don't care about at all. Whereas in S1 the twist character is revealed earlier, had always been an integral part of the plot, and the mystery held and was a good old Conan Doyle style 'the method was obvious all along, you just couldn't see it because you didn't understand the motives in play from the relevant characters'.

If they get a season 3 I don't think there was any indication they were going to go after the elder civilization stuff at all. None of the characters are on that path.

I went back and watched season 1 and the visuals were much, much more interesting. That and as you said, the story felt a lot less predictable. The slices of the world around everyone we got in each episode livened up the show, which is something season 2 missed.

cant cook creole bream
Aug 15, 2011
I think Fahrenheit is better for weather
So, apparently Netflix is doing a chose your own adventure story to continue their (quite good) Carmen Sandiego show. This feels kinda weird, but given the origin oddly appropriate.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Panzeh posted:

I went back and watched season 1 and the visuals were much, much more interesting. That and as you said, the story felt a lot less predictable. The slices of the world around everyone we got in each episode livened up the show, which is something season 2 missed.

S1 had a lot of cool details from the books, S2 going and doing its own thing cost it a lot of that material to fall back on. It makes things feel way more generic. Down to calling the aliens elders. Even “Martian” is a better name than “elders”.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
You know what the biggest dissapointment is about this season of altered carbon? The soundtrack. The soundtrack to S1 kicked absurd amounts of rear end and this ones been all orchestral score. No awesome moments like Tak shooting his way out of a black site to a PJ Harvey song.

Also focusing on the aliens is so loving lame. “Let’s ignore all the stuff that makes the setting unique to focus on aliens, that’s a good idea!

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"

Ugly In The Morning posted:

You know what the biggest dissapointment is about this season of altered carbon? The soundtrack. The soundtrack to S1 kicked absurd amounts of rear end and this ones been all orchestral score. No awesome moments like Tak shooting his way out of a black site to a PJ Harvey song.

Also focusing on the aliens is so loving lame. “Let’s ignore all the stuff that makes the setting unique to focus on aliens, that’s a good idea!

Yeah this has nothing like the great parts where the Neo Nazi guy plays 3 different people in his sleeve- "ok, yeah yeah now we've established the setting we're going all in on plot" and the aesthetic is almost all the most boring part of season 1(the parts on Harlan's World).

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
What bugged me most was this songspire tree inconsistency, which played a big part in the second season. Feels like a stupid retcon for the sake of creating a story. How in the gently caress can you dick around hundreds of years around these things on Harlan's World, even plan and organize a rebellion, over an extended period of time, on exactly the same spot that'll give you troubles eventually, and never ever whatsoever get hosed up by the thing that drives the second season? Nevermind all the grenades going off there in the first season? Then again, I don't know how it's all working in the books.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Combat Pretzel posted:

What bugged me most was this songspire tree inconsistency, which played a big part in the second season. Feels like a stupid retcon for the sake of creating a story. How in the gently caress can you dick around hundreds of years around these things on Harlan's World, even plan and organize a rebellion, over an extended period of time, on exactly the same spot that'll give you troubles eventually, and never ever whatsoever get hosed up by the thing that drives the second season? Nevermind all the grenades going off there in the first season? Then again, I don't know how it's all working in the books.

In the books theyre just there. Occasionally they smell like mustard. The aliens are just a background detail except for a cool bit in the end of the second book, where they end up on an empty Martian spaceship that’s fighting... something. They’re not responsible for the stacks, they just kind of filled the galaxy with stuff that xenoarcheologists go nuts for and vanished.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Ugly In The Morning posted:

In the books theyre just there. Occasionally they smell like mustard. The aliens are just a background detail except for a cool bit in the end of the second book, where they end up on an empty Martian spaceship that’s fighting... something. They’re not responsible for the stacks, they just kind of filled the galaxy with stuff that xenoarcheologists go nuts for and vanished.
So they retconned them into a memory bank for the second season? That's kind of dumb, given all the ruckus without any consequences around these structures in the first season.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Combat Pretzel posted:

So they retconned them into a memory bank for the second season? That's kind of dumb, given all the ruckus without any consequences around these structures in the first season.

Yeah, the show runners and writers for this are kind of terrible. At this point I’m pretty sure the book doing the heavy lifting, plot-wise, is the only reason S1 turned out as well as it did.

Big Mean Jerk
Jan 27, 2009

Well, of course I know him.
He's me.
Reading these spoilers makes me feel slightly vindicated for never getting past episode 3 of the first season, even though on paper it should have been a slam dunk for me.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Big Mean Jerk posted:

Reading these spoilers makes me feel slightly vindicated for never getting past episode 3 of the first season, even though on paper it should have been a slam dunk for me.

S1 doesn’t go off the rails too bad until episode 7, which is when they start really diverging from the books. It did a lot right, the casting for Kovacs and Ortega was basically exactly as I imagined them, and it looked fantastic. Plus, that soundtrack kicked rear end.

S2’s plot is stupid, a bunch of things don’t make sense, and Anthony Mackie is a pretty bad Kovacs. In S1 they were really good about keeping the mannerisms consistent between the different actors playing him, but Mackie just does his usual thing. He doesn’t talk like Kovacs which is a major problem when he’s double sleeved and sharing screen time with Will Yun Lee who talks and moves completely differently.

E:bringing Poe back was the kind of move that told me they were going to completely gently caress it up. He had a good arc in S1 but then just deciding that Kovacs got him running again because he was popular with fans shows where their writing priorities are.

Ugly In The Morning fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Mar 2, 2020

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Ugly In The Morning posted:

E:bringing Poe back was the kind of move that told me they were going to completely gently caress it up. He had a good arc in S1 but then just deciding that Kovacs got him running again because he was popular with fans shows where their writing priorities are.
At least they were straight forward about things at the end of season 2 with Poe somehow magically backing up Kovacs' DHF the very last minute.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
It really sucks when you get a big budget for a sci-fi or fantasy series and amazing sets and actors and costumes and then the writers are just... dumb

Looten Plunder
Jul 11, 2006
Grimey Drawer

Vanity Fair put out so much good poo poo. From these scene breakdowns, to the "Expert in X Field breaks down scenes in movies of that field" videos, to the "Accent guy breaks down accents". Even the "stars answer google questions about themselves" are worth a watch. Quality stuff!

bentacos
Oct 9, 2012
So apparently Terriers is back streaming with FX on Hulu tomorrow?

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Everything FX is streaming on Hulu tomorrow including new episodes (a day later).

muscles like this!
Jan 17, 2005


FX is also running new shows that will only appear on Hulu, like the one from Alex Garland, Devs.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Ugly In The Morning posted:

S1 doesn’t go off the rails too bad until episode 7, which is when they start really diverging from the books. It did a lot right, the casting for Kovacs and Ortega was basically exactly as I imagined them, and it looked fantastic. Plus, that soundtrack kicked rear end.

S2’s plot is stupid, a bunch of things don’t make sense, and Anthony Mackie is a pretty bad Kovacs. In S1 they were really good about keeping the mannerisms consistent between the different actors playing him, but Mackie just does his usual thing. He doesn’t talk like Kovacs which is a major problem when he’s double sleeved and sharing screen time with Will Yun Lee who talks and moves completely differently.

E:bringing Poe back was the kind of move that told me they were going to completely gently caress it up. He had a good arc in S1 but then just deciding that Kovacs got him running again because he was popular with fans shows where their writing priorities are.

Yeah Mackie was a very poor choice. He didn't bring anything interesting to the Kovacs portrayal and it didn't seem like he acted any differently then he did in the Marvel movies only sadder and angrier in general.

S1 could led into a great S2 by keeping Kovacs on Earth as a private detective gathering resources looking into finding Quellcrist and solving bizarre crimes.

Instead he's apparently gone from this super mysterious powerful fixer to bouncing around different sleeves until a basic bounty hunter bags him on a random planet to send him off to her boss.

And hands down the dumbest thing I've seen in years as a plot device

the whole wolf DNA thing being hyped up only to mean...that the Mackie sleeve can't pull the trigger on Jaeger due to alpha male/pack mentality

pentyne fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Mar 2, 2020

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

I'm actually okay with 'the holo transmitter Kovacs has on him at all times? DHF backup to Poe'.

The existence of the Elder itself was fine, because the big villain needs the same motivation as everyone else in the season but on a grander scale. But it would have been better if they'd stuck to the pacing of S1 and revealed it in Episode 5, so that Episodes 6, 7 and 8 could have been the build up to trying to defeat it. Instead too much resolution gets crammed into the final episode and it's all ultimately down to one fight sequence.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer

muscles like this! posted:

FX is also running new shows that will only appear on Hulu, like the one from Alex Garland, Devs.

So excited for this omg

nate fisher
Mar 3, 2004

We've Got To Go Back

muscles like this! posted:

FX is also running new shows that will only appear on Hulu, like the one from Alex Garland, Devs.

I love me some Alex Garland, but I didn’t know about this.

Oasx
Oct 11, 2006

Freshly Squeezed
The Morning show was good, but i'm not quite sure where all the money went, wasn't this supposed to be one of the most expensive shows ever?

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Probably on the star’s salaries and them 8K cameras.

Zero One
Dec 30, 2004

HAIL TO THE VICTORS!
Judge Judy is ending. Long live Judy Justice...

https://twitter.com/thr/status/1234315023276748801?s=21

Rhyno
Mar 22, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

Oasx posted:

The Morning show was good, but i'm not quite sure where all the money went, wasn't this supposed to be one of the most expensive shows ever?

I thought that was See?

Hakkesshu
Nov 4, 2009


It certainly would not surprise me if See was the most expensive piece of trash ever produced for television.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Ugly In The Morning posted:

S1 doesn’t go off the rails too bad until episode 7, which is when they start really diverging from the books. It did a lot right, the casting for Kovacs and Ortega was basically exactly as I imagined them, and it looked fantastic. Plus, that soundtrack kicked rear end.

S2’s plot is stupid, a bunch of things don’t make sense, and Anthony Mackie is a pretty bad Kovacs. In S1 they were really good about keeping the mannerisms consistent between the different actors playing him, but Mackie just does his usual thing. He doesn’t talk like Kovacs which is a major problem when he’s double sleeved and sharing screen time with Will Yun Lee who talks and moves completely differently.

E:bringing Poe back was the kind of move that told me they were going to completely gently caress it up. He had a good arc in S1 but then just deciding that Kovacs got him running again because he was popular with fans shows where their writing priorities are.

Oh good; there is somewhere to talk about Altered Carbon this season. :sigh:

Season 2 striking off on its own pretty much told me it was going to be baaaad the moment they announced it, and I'm sad I was proven right. 95% of the good parts of season 1 (the others being Skinhead Abuella, that kid's backpack he always had, and Poe) were what was directly adapted from the book, and literally any time they changed something, they hosed it up in some stupidly basic way. Making Envoys into Summercamp Jedi is a big example. And well, all the rest of Episode 7. To be clear; I don't think changing elements for an adaption is necessarily a bad thing, it's just really, REAAAALLY, badly done in Altered Carbon.

The first episode just laid bared how creatively deficit the Showrunners are without a book to fall back on; In the first twenty minutes we have another Meth wanting someone to protect them, oops now ~we're solving their murder~, we're based out of the same hotel, and we have a glitchy Poe back somehow despite being erased. Harlan's World is supposed to be heavily Japanese and Russian in its culture and genetic makeup (hence a name like "Takeshi Kovacs"), and is mostly small islands on a large ocean world. With its own veritable Imperial-esque dynasty ruling the planet in the Harlans treating the peasants like poo poo (it's why the Unsettlement happened). Instead we've got a generic Caucasian woman and a British man brown-nosing up to her as the "governor" of a planet that looks generically sci-fi and they mine "ALLOY". Not a specific mineral of any kind, just... "~ALLOY~" :nallears:. They're throwing random bits of the second and third books together for this trainwreck and I'm morbidly curious to see how this one crashes and burns under its own power without the safety net of a book's being adapted verbatim to fall back on. I doubt we're getting Samedi

I fully expect this show to get to a point where the big finale is "We made resleeving go away because it was the morally right thing to do" if it somehow escapes the Netflix Curse and gets a third season. The writers clearly can't come up with any interesting ideas on their own, and don't even understand what makes the elements in the books good or interesting.

Also special mention to what's quite possibly the most hamfistedly-bad plot recap I've ever seen in a television show between Poe and that bounty hunter in the bar at the start.


Ugly In The Morning posted:

Yeah, the show runners and writers for this are kind of terrible. At this point I’m pretty sure the book doing the heavy lifting, plot-wise, is the only reason S1 turned out as well as it did.

I was saying this repeatedly in the show's thread last season. If you go into the show having read the book, it's a fascinating mess watching them systematically break a fairly well-constructed detective story to tell their own badly-written one. All the elements in it are meant to feed into different parts of the plot as a whole, and they just did not understand that if you remove or alter something, it's going to affect other parts of the story too.

Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Mar 2, 2020

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK
Sep 11, 2001



I mean there are things to complain about in s2 of Altered Carbon, but the planet not being islands and one of the antagonists not being Russian or Japanese seems insanely nitpicky. If those were "fixed", how would it have affected the story at all?

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:

I mean there are things to complain about in s2 of Altered Carbon, but the planet not being islands and one of the antagonists not being Russian or Japanese seems insanely nitpicky. If those were "fixed", how would it have affected the story at all?

It was more in the general setting and part of the larger problem with the way the show's made; Harlan's World is generally implied to be heavily based in Japanese culture and architecture, and instead we get generic future buildings and streets functionally identical to New York, and a generic ~corrupt/authoritarian governmental figure~ instead of a family of infighting nobles to play with. It's just reductive and boring compared to what could be pulled from the books and played with.

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Ya'll need a thread for this so I don't have to skip over everything before I watch it.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
Plus, it would have helped with another major problem of S2. It’s nowhere near as visually striking as 1 was as far as crazy sci-fi locales. Bay City in S1 looked awesome, and here they have an opportunity to make something cool looking yet completely unlike what was in S1... but :effort:

Oasx
Oct 11, 2006

Freshly Squeezed

Rhyno posted:

I thought that was See?

From what I can see Morning show cost 15 million dollars per episode. Apparently Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon got 2 million each per episode.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Oh good; there is somewhere to talk about Altered Carbon this season. :sigh:

Season 2 striking off on its own pretty much told me it was going to be baaaad the moment they announced it, and I'm sad I was proven right. 95% of the good parts of season 1 (the others being Skinhead Abuella, that kid's backpack he always had, and Poe) were what was directly adapted from the book, and literally any time they changed something, they hosed it up in some stupidly basic way. Making Envoys into Summercamp Jedi is a big example. And well, all the rest of Episode 7. To be clear; I don't think changing elements for an adaption is necessarily a bad thing, it's just really, REAAAALLY, badly done in Altered Carbon.

The first episode just laid bared how creatively deficit the Showrunners are without a book to fall back on; In the first twenty minutes we have another Meth wanting someone to protect them, oops now ~we're solving their murder~, we're based out of the same hotel, and we have a glitchy Poe back somehow despite being erased. Harlan's World is supposed to be heavily Japanese and Russian in its culture and genetic makeup (hence a name like "Takeshi Kovacs"), and is mostly small islands on a large ocean world. With its own veritable Imperial-esque dynasty ruling the planet in the Harlans treating the peasants like poo poo (it's why the Unsettlement happened). Instead we've got a generic Caucasian woman and a British man brown-nosing up to her as the "governor" of a planet that looks generically sci-fi and they mine "ALLOY". Not a specific mineral of any kind, just... "~ALLOY~" :nallears:. They're throwing random bits of the second and third books together for this trainwreck and I'm morbidly curious to see how this one crashes and burns under its own power without the safety net of a book's being adapted verbatim to fall back on. I doubt we're getting Samedi

I fully expect this show to get to a point where the big finale is "We made resleeving go away because it was the morally right thing to do" if it somehow escapes the Netflix Curse and gets a third season. The writers clearly can't come up with any interesting ideas on their own, and don't even understand what makes the elements in the books good or interesting.

Also special mention to what's quite possibly the most hamfistedly-bad plot recap I've ever seen in a television show between Poe and that bounty hunter in the bar at the start.


I was saying this repeatedly in the show's thread last season. If you go into the show having read the book, it's a fascinating mess watching them systematically break a fairly well-constructed detective story to tell their own badly-written one. All the elements in it are meant to feed into different parts of the plot as a whole, and they just did not understand that if you remove or alter something, it's going to affect other parts of the story too.

Woof. That's pretty much exactly what I feared based on the previews, synopsis, and the bad stuff in the first season.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Take a drink every time somebody says "what, don't you recognise me?".

No, no I don't recognise you, because you've changed sleeves.

There's just so many of these moments that just don't make sense in the setting. Like the poor family, clawing their way out of the slums, who somehow have custom engraving on their stacks . Or upon finding a dead body with its stack ripped out, our heroes immediately conclude the stack must be nearby and frantically start searching for it. It just...what? I don't want to be that guy who nitpicks characters reasoning for not being perfectly logical, but so much of what they do and say is completely incoherent.

Sleeveless
Dec 25, 2014

by Pragmatica

Zero One posted:

Judge Judy is ending. Long live Judy Justice...

https://twitter.com/thr/status/1234315023276748801?s=21

Personally I think it's pretty great that it took like a week from her going masks off to everyone becoming aware of her being a millionaire family court ghoul with a terrible court record to her empire crumbling.

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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK
Sep 11, 2001



Strom Cuzewon posted:

Take a drink every time somebody says "what, don't you recognise me?".

No, no I don't recognise you, because you've changed sleeves.

There's just so many of these moments that just don't make sense in the setting. Like the poor family, clawing their way out of the slums, who somehow have custom engraving on their stacks . Or upon finding a dead body with its stack ripped out, our heroes immediately conclude the stack must be nearby and frantically start searching for it. It just...what? I don't want to be that guy who nitpicks characters reasoning for not being perfectly logical, but so much of what they do and say is completely incoherent.

That first spoiler was hilarious to me and I loved how it made no sense at all except to clumsily advance the plot.

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