Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013

Chairman Capone posted:

Also probably the biggest ratio of cast who are also writers and/or directors on it.

Surely that's It's Always Sunny (three of five regulars, plus Cricket) or The X-Files (two of three, plus The Ciggy Man).

That said, I love it when shows turn actors into writers - Ben McKenzie on Gotham being the biggest wtf.

(Or Gillian Anderson on the X-Files, if you want to talk about times this went really bad.)

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013
Enjoying Physical, but wow did the ads not prepare me for how toxic Rose Byrne's monologue is. Or the way that both she and her husband seem to low key hate their child.

The prominence and cruelty of that inner monologue makes the aerobics scenes, where it fadea away and things are allowed to finally slow down, all the more effective IMO.

It's hard not to feel bad for her all the same, but this show is really not pulling its punches.

(Also is it just me, or do a lot of Apple shows take two or three episodes to fully explain their premise and status quo? Not complaining, they're not Netflix style pilot seasons, but they don't really do pilots either. )

Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jun 24, 2021

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Esco n Idiom, at it again!

I like Physical more than I expected from the reviews but it commits two cardinal streaming sins of 1. feeling like it’s stretching a regular pilot premise out over multiple episodes and 2. starting off with a useless in medias res opening that isn’t even that interesting

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



This new episode of Mythic Quest is very good. Called the final "twist" pretty easily but lol at the idea that they're just gonna make Second Life.

Chef Boyardeez Nuts
Sep 9, 2011

The more you kick against the pricks, the more you suffer.
If they get a third season they should call it Mythic Quest 2.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Central Park s2 is good so far. Really liked the third episode about Molly’s issues, and Emmy Raver-Lampman is a great replacement for Bell

Trig Discipline
Jun 3, 2008

Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.
Grimey Drawer

Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:

If they get a third season they should call it Mythic Quest 2.

Mythic Question Season 3: Mythic Quest 2 does have a nice ring to it.

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



Oh yeah I forgot to mention: At the start of this episode they have someone putting up the graphic of the female character where... it always has been.

"Yeah, that looks great. Awesome work."
But... that's always been there. I get the feeling there was a cut scene where he had it taken down at some point? Or am I missing something?

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius
I wouldn't put it past him to have it removed when she changed offices.

Spacebump
Dec 24, 2003

Dallas Mavericks: Generations
For All Mankind season 2 felt a lot slower than season 1. The last three episodes were incredible and made the season worth watching. I can’t believe I waited this long to watch.

Trig Discipline
Jun 3, 2008

Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.
Grimey Drawer

Spacebump posted:

For All Mankind season 2 felt a lot slower than season 1. The last three episodes were incredible and made the season worth watching. I can’t believe I waited this long to watch.

Yeah I agree with this. The first half of the second season I thought was good but not quite as good as season 1. There were a lot of little side plot things that were fine for what they were, but I wasn't quite sure why we were spending time on them. Then at the end of the season a huge chunk of that turned out to be really important in setting up character motivations and background that became super relevant to how things played out.

Trig Discipline
Jun 3, 2008

Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.
Grimey Drawer
The teasers for the new Foundation show have got me pretty excited, I must say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvOAA1U0li8

ONE YEAR LATER
Apr 13, 2004

Fry old buddy, it's me, Bender!
Oven Wrangler
Finished season 2 of Mythic Quest and I enjoyed it a lot, but I really do not care one bit about the playtesters as characters and I don't think they add anything to the show. Less of them and more of anything else for season 3, hopefully.

One other thing that bugged me, and it's real minor and not even about the quality of the show but the second to last episode ends with the Willy Nelson version of The Rainbow Connection playing but it's timed to play over the credits and it cuts off right before the songs refrain! Just have it start like 5 seconds earlier and it would end perfectly as the verse ends! Why go through the trouble of getting a song and then go and cut the legs off by a few seconds when it could end perfectly otherwise? I know this is a very much me thing but I notice when this constantly happens in shows and it kills me every time!

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013

ONE YEAR LATER posted:

One other thing that bugged me, and it's real minor and not even about the quality of the show but the second to last episode ends with the Willy Nelson version of The Rainbow Connection playing but it's timed to play over the credits and it cuts off right before the songs refrain! Just have it start like 5 seconds earlier and it would end perfectly as the verse ends! Why go through the trouble of getting a song and then go and cut the legs off by a few seconds when it could end perfectly otherwise? I know this is a very much me thing but I notice when this constantly happens in shows and it kills me every time!

Nah, I noticed it too and it bothered me.

They really wanted you to sit through those particular credits too.

Trig Discipline
Jun 3, 2008

Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.
Grimey Drawer

ONE YEAR LATER posted:

Finished season 2 of Mythic Quest and I enjoyed it a lot, but I really do not care one bit about the playtesters as characters and I don't think they add anything to the show. Less of them and more of anything else for season 3, hopefully.

Yeah I actually like them as characters but the show doesn't seem to know what to do with them in season 2.

Paddyo
Aug 3, 2007

Trig Discipline posted:

The teasers for the new Foundation show have got me pretty excited, I must say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvOAA1U0li8

I mean, I understand the need to put together a narrative that's easier for a TV audience to follow, but it sounds like they are basically just inventing their own plot and characters out of thin air. It's hard to trust the writers with that much heavy lifting, although For All Mankind and Ted Lasso are two of the best-written shows out there these days.

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

Paddyo posted:

I mean, I understand the need to put together a narrative that's easier for a TV audience to follow, but it sounds like they are basically just inventing their own plot and characters out of thin air. It's hard to trust the writers with that much heavy lifting, although For All Mankind and Ted Lasso are two of the best-written shows out there these days.

The point of Foundation is that the characters aren't important so I can give them some leeway.

Trig Discipline
Jun 3, 2008

Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.
Grimey Drawer
Yeah it's been a decade or two since I read the Foundation books and I think I remember a grand total of two characters (Hari Seldon and The Mule). I honestly couldn't give a poo poo whether it adheres closely to the books as long as it's well written and gets the central ideas across.

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

Trig Discipline posted:

Yeah it's been a decade or two since I read the Foundation books and I think I remember a grand total of two characters (Hari Seldon and The Mule). I honestly couldn't give a poo poo whether it adheres closely to the books as long as it's well written and gets the central ideas across.

Yeah, those two characters are most essential, and some of the others later on are important. But for the most part, the characters in the core Foundation trilogy are important for their roles in the plot rather than who they are precisely and there's a lot of flexibility in how they're presented and interpreted. It changes a lot over the course of the series...which is another thing. The books were written over a literal 50 year span, with the earliest Foundation stories written in 1942 or so and the last actually written by Asimov in the early 1990s shortly before his death. There was a 30 year gap between books at one point, but in between that he wrote whole other series of books that he later tied into Foundation as an enormous shared universe spanning tens of thousands of years. It's an understatement to say that the themes and technologies referenced in the books were all over the map, including when he came back to revisit the same in-setting time period from different real-world decades.

I'm not saying there isn't a lot of room for the TV showrunners to screw up or diverge heavily from the "heart" of Foundation such as it is. There totally is. But there's oddly a lot of flexibility in how a valid adaptation could be made and so far nothing seems too bad.

Paddyo
Aug 3, 2007
Man, I wish I was more optimistic. I just think that in order for it to work as a scripted drama they are going to have to invent so many characters and so many plots out of thin air that the central idea of the series gets pushed aside in favor of clichéd violence, sex, and forced intrigue. Foundation is about the life / death / rebirth cycle of civilization. It's super big-picture and cynical, and that's what made it interesting to me, and what separated it out from all of the generic space operas out there. I think David S. Goyer is just going to turn it into a mix of comic book movie and Game of Thrones.

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013
Heads up: this season (series?) is based on the prequels. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Open Source Idiom posted:

Heads up: this season (series?) is based on the prequels. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

I don't think it's really based on the prequels. Inasmuch as anything from Asimov's actual writing is in this, there's one element so far from the prequels (Eto Demerzel) while the rest (Seldon's warnings, his trial, and Gaal Dornick) are from the first story from Foundation.

Paddyo posted:

Foundation is about the life / death / rebirth cycle of civilization. It's super big-picture and cynical, and that's what made it interesting to me, and what separated it out from all of the generic space operas out there.

I honestly don't think that Foundation was all that cynical, especially compared to the other space opera stuff from the 30s and 40s like Heinlein, Stapledon, latter Wells. The sequels that Asimov wrote in the 80s are a bit more cynical but the original trilogy at least has always seemed very straightforward, with the core of the story being faith that a better future is inevitable.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
I wanna stan more for Home Before Dark. It’s a really cool mystery show that’s kinda like if Veronica Mars had been ten years old. Not the best show on Apple, but probably the most underrated.

Has anyone checked out Lissey’s Story?

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013
Physical has Sera Gamble as a producer (The Magicians, You, Supernatural's most misanthropic seasons just after the creator left). This explains a lot, down to some of the casting. Still enjoying it. It's a drama that'd be too much to handle as an hour long, so it's only half as long. I appreciate that. It feels like a mean spririted GLOW, and there are other times it reminds me of Aquarius, another Sera Gamble joint which was a sort of 70's serial killer melodrama with a David Duchovny procedural gaffertaped on.

That fondue scene was gross.

Escobarbarian posted:

Has anyone checked out Lissey’s Story?

Me! I have!

I really enjoyed the first few episodes, and I thought the show's woozy editing and interweaving of plotlines really worked to tell this story of a woman who's slowly slipping into a kind of supernatural dementia. But now a) I'm not too sure that's happening, and b) it's got a bit slow. I do think Stephen King was the right person to adapt this material. He's good at bringing out the nuances in the script (or the director is, it looks very nice -- at times very, very nice).

It looks beautiful, and some of the acting is insanely good. I'm definitely watching it to the end. But it's a Mare Of Easttown -- good, but I'm not nourished by it and I'm not going to think about it too much five years down the track.

Edit: I've also found parts of this show insanely moving -- not the parts that I think the series was sold on (the relationship between Julianne Moore and Clive Owen) but the instead the relationship between the three sisters. Say what you will about overqualified acting, but Jennifer Jason Leigh is very good as the third, outsider sister. The bond between the three of them is very good, and papers over a lot of frustration with the earlier parts.

Michael Pitt gives one of those performances where you really wish he hadn't ended up being ousted from acting for a while. He's very unnerving, and gives one of those perfectly commited horror performances that skirts just the right side of camp (think Robin Weigert's strong WTF horror performance in American Horror Story Roanoke).

euugh. i've watched a lot of tv

Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jul 4, 2021

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Speaking of Asimov-related shows on Apple+, I rewatched the Backstory episode of Mythic Quest and liked it even more the second time. It made me realize that the guy playing young Peter was pretty clearly working to imitate William Hurt. Also, much as I liked the acting throughout, my favorite part is absolutely the smile that F. Murray Abraham gives at the end when asked if he'd ever wanted to write a video game.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Schmigadoon premiered and it’s quite a lot of fun although could get old fast. Not sure how long the season is.

Also still watching and enjoying Home Before Dark, Central Park, and Physical. Also rewatching Ted Lasso s1 in anticipation of season 2 premiering soon. That could probably do with its own thread, right? I can’t remember if it had one last year.

It’s crazy how Apple has been like by far the best streaming service for me so far this year

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013

Escobarbarian posted:

Schmigadoon premiered and it’s quite a lot of fun although could get old fast. Not sure how long the season is.


Only six eps. Not sure if it's a miniseries though.

Apple's been loving fire ngl.

Spacebump
Dec 24, 2003

Dallas Mavericks: Generations
Apple’s original content has been some of the best on streaming this year. I just wish they’d fill out the service with rotating movies and old shows.

I’m still kind of shocked they didn’t outbid Netflix on Cobra Kai season 3.

Spacebump fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jul 16, 2021

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013

Spacebump posted:

Apple’s original content has been some of the best on streaming this year. I just wish they’d fill out the service with rotating movies and old shows.

I’m still kind of shocked they didn’t outbid Netflix on Cobra Kai season 3.

They seem interested in making a wholly original library, with an aim of creating the kind of thing HBO was producing back in the 00s, except more modern (similar to how Amazon started out).

I don't mind the lack of back catalogue if their overall standard is this high though.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



I had to laugh in the week when I got an A+ notification saying they were celebrating their 34 Emmy noms.

Just to be dicks, HBO Max emailed the next day with essentially the same message but for 130.

smackfu
Jun 7, 2004

quote:

Carpool Karaoke: Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama Or Variety Series

Really???

ONE YEAR LATER
Apr 13, 2004

Fry old buddy, it's me, Bender!
Oven Wrangler
I've only watched the first episode of Physical but as someone who has always had issues with food the whole thing with her berating herself all day about food and then finally just snapping and binging on a bunch of garbage but saying it wont happen again (it will) is pretty much exactly how it goes in real life.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
Yeah the depiction of bulimia is rough. Definitely something I would warn people about beforehand if I thought it would affect them

ONE YEAR LATER
Apr 13, 2004

Fry old buddy, it's me, Bender!
Oven Wrangler
I dunno about the whole series but there is a content warning message at the start of the first episode.

Open Source Idiom
Jan 4, 2013
I've found it easier to deal with the further I got into the show, but those first few episodes were very intense -- more intense than I thought they would be, even given the warning.

Good show though. Rose Byrne is amazing, and I love the blonde gym couple. They're very charming.

QuoProQuid
Jan 12, 2012

Tr*ckin' and F*ckin' all the way to tha
T O P

I enjoy Schmigadoon but, man, the boyfriend is awful.

Mental Hospitality
Jan 5, 2011

I recently got an Apple TV so I've been going through the ATV+ shows. Started with For All Mankind because, well it's a Ronald D. Moore show in space, and really enjoyed it. Morning Show was good, better than I expected but in reality, I didn't know much about it going in. Now watching the first season of Ted Lasso and it's an absolutely lovely change of pace. Lots of smiles, and surprisingly emotional at times.

What should I watch next? I see a lot of chatter about Mythic Quest but it's another show I'll be going into completely blind.

I must say, I've been very surprised and delighted at the quality of the shows in this service.

socialsecurity
Aug 30, 2003





Mental Hospitality posted:

I recently got an Apple TV so I've been going through the ATV+ shows. Started with For All Mankind because, well it's a Ronald D. Moore show in space, and really enjoyed it. Morning Show was good, better than I expected but in reality, I didn't know much about it going in. Now watching the first season of Ted Lasso and it's an absolutely lovely change of pace. Lots of smiles, and surprisingly emotional at times.

What should I watch next? I see a lot of chatter about Mythic Quest but it's another show I'll be going into completely blind.

I must say, I've been very surprised and delighted at the quality of the shows in this service.

Mythic Quest is good, Central Park is decent depending on how much you like the singing in Bob's Burgers. Servant is fantastic and probably the best they have.

Escobarbarian
Jun 18, 2004


Grimey Drawer
drat I forgot to make a Ted Lasso thread and I’m working all weekend. Loved the premiere

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Mental Hospitality posted:

I recently got an Apple TV so I've been going through the ATV+ shows. Started with For All Mankind because, well it's a Ronald D. Moore show in space, and really enjoyed it. Morning Show was good, better than I expected but in reality, I didn't know much about it going in. Now watching the first season of Ted Lasso and it's an absolutely lovely change of pace. Lots of smiles, and surprisingly emotional at times.

What should I watch next? I see a lot of chatter about Mythic Quest but it's another show I'll be going into completely blind.

I must say, I've been very surprised and delighted at the quality of the shows in this service.

Definitely seconding the recommendations for Mythic Quest and Servant. See is another show I'd recommend - it's a bit of a ridiculous premise but if you can accept it, the show itself is fine, and I think it does good worldbuilding.

And yeah, I think in terms of overall quality of original shows, Apple+ is at the top of the streaming list for me.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply