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I'm re-watching Stargate Atlantis. It's bringing me back to my time in university when it was airing and pretty much everyone in the gaming society watched it. It's entertaining, obviously nerd-servicey, busy setting up careers making steady income at sci-fi cons and there's a lot of really, really bad characterisation and decision making. I was mostly blind to all this as a member of my university's gaming society and fully bought into the show. Watching now it's easy before bed TV, although I can't take more than one episode at a time. Easy, mindless shows are where I am in my mind at the moment. I never watched the original Stargate, though (I did watch the film.) I think it was the lack of alien space station (ocean station?) that kept me away.
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Sep 7, 2018 19:25
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I just finished the three seasons of Travelers. It's definitely one of the better sci-fi shows I've seen, seeing as it manages to mix the big idea into the humanity of the people dealing with it. I knew it was cancelled as I started watching, and new it ended at a point that made sense, but it was an ending I didn't in any way expect. That it asks questions of what you've just watched really makes it stand out.
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Feb 12, 2019 04:23
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I've been watching The Practice, a less po-faced, more slick take on the legal side of Law and Order, and it's probably more accurate to the profession (for a very loose value of accurate) than Law and Order as well. The first season is only six episodes, and it carries forward something of significance from each episode to the next. As much as "modern" TV is about plotlines running over an entire season, I'm beginning to wonder how much memory is playing tricks on me as remembering all TV of that time as highly episodic. The second season is very much episodic, and it's the soap opera character drama that's serialised, but even then there's more continuance than my memory would have given it credit for. The Practice is definitely making me feel that there's a gap in television not being filled by current production. Sure, there's extremely high quality TV of serialised meaningful shows, and mindless entertainment where you don't need to know or remember much of anything about it, but there seems to be little mindless quality shows outside of comedy. The kind that is made well, acted well and written well, but is the equivalent of indulgent comfort food. I'm sure I'm wrong on this, and there is plenty of shows kind of like that, so some examples to watch sure would be nice.
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Feb 25, 2019 17:41
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Boris Galerkin posted:Anyone watch The Society on Netflix? It’s about a group of high school kids finding out that everyone in their town is gone. It sounds a bit dumb When I was seven or eight or nine, stupidly young, a friend showed me his essay that got him an A. It was about him coming downstairs one morning and finding everyone in his home was gone. He searched, he panicked. Then they came back from doing their shopping. Even as a seven or eight or nine year old, stupidly young, I thought it was a dumb story.
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May 18, 2019 13:05
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wormil posted:Netflix recommended How to get away with murder but I couldn't get through the pilot, too American. Every scene had to be the most intense and dramatic scene of the most intense and dramatic show with most intense and dramatic (and ultra cliche) characters you will ever see. I considered it would probably settle down in the series but the actors defaulting to angry for most emotions made them incredibly unlikable. Authority is not anger, projecting your voice isn't hollering. I didn't realise this was why I turned it off half-way through, intending to go back to it, but never did. You're exactly right though. All stakes are high stakes, woooo! kind of drama. Even the opening (?) scene with the hoohaa about the class being the most super important hardest class ever had me rolling my eyes. Like most of the people wouldn't be doing enough to get "just" a decent grade in the class leaving more room to focus on the rest of their classes.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:59
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The Expanse is a really bad and really silly show. The acting, with a few (actually quite good) exceptions, is awful, and it obviously suffers from being something based off an RPG campaign. The characters keep getting in bigger and badder hijinks, completely centering on them, and despite adding more and more people to the show they all become the most super duper important people in the universe. It's entirely run by nerds who think adding bigger, flashier more excitement, excitement after excitement, ramp up the bullshit excitement is the be all and end all of drama. It's a pointless show that offers zero humanity and is just as much nerd bait trash as the worst of superhero films.
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Feb 22, 2020 04:34
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wormil posted:I am vaguely interested about people calling The Wire a slow burn, or using words to that effect ... never on any forum before now have I heard it described that way and would not myself use those words to describe it. Is this because so many new shows focus on stimulus over depth? I think it's because with the first season it layers characters and plot up, on top of each other, over and over. You don't get any traditional resolution until the end of the season where things—from a storytelling perspective—come together. I remember being fascinated by the world when I first watched it, the people, the setting, the characterisation, the language, etc., but there was an "aha!" moment when the first season ended that made it all work in a traditional television way. It showed it could manage both, the sociological and the televisual storytelling. It's really well handled and why it roped so many people in, it showed it was relevant as a study of people and as a means of regular drama, but it made you wait for it, it wasn't punching you with it straight off. There was a delay on it that made it far richer.
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May 14, 2020 06:44
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wormil posted:For me everything about The Wire feels authentic, the story, the setting, the characters that are often selfish, self destructive, and competitive but I disagree that it made you wait for a payoff to any degree different than other storytelling. I think what it lacks is that visceral quality that constantly stimulates your senses, for example Carnivale or Penny Dreadful that don't have the most succinct storylines but the characters and setting constantly bombard your senses. That style seems to be more and more common on streaming series. I'd compare it to some forms of literature, that tell two separate stories (although they're happening at the same time.) You can see the parallels between them, but it's only towards the end that you see, from the storytelling perspective, clearly and directly, them uniting. Intellectually we know there is the police and the gangs, that there is the titular wire, that these two distinct worlds have to be joined, but it's only towards the end of season one that the storytelling unifies them from its perspective: from a single (figurative) camera angle. One of the major aspects of The Wire was to be different from other police stories where a wire, investigation, recording, raid and arrest all happens within an hour of TV. It was supposed to be stretched out, showing the distance between the police and the gangs (and it's a major theme of the show, how they're parallels to each other, similar in a lot of ways but kept apart by sociologically causes.) The fact that the raids towards the end of season one, what should be (according to other police shows) a triumphant moment (already dragged out longer than other police shows) are actually a disappointment because the assignment wanted to build up a bigger, longer, further reaching case is an indication that this isn't a show about rise, peak and fall of traditional storytelling arcs—not within episodes—and season two shows it's not even true across multiple seasons with The Wire. The Wire takes most of a whole season before it points at its own name (The Wire) and shows you what it means, even if it's building up evidence for it all the way to that point.
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May 14, 2020 09:33
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mcmagic posted:I watched Normal People on Hulu. I never read the book or anything but the performances in this were really excellent and it had some of the best, non creepy, sex scenes I've seen in a prestige TV show and the leads have great chemistry. I found the decisions the characters make and the plot to be a little frustrating but I would still recommend it. How shallow were the characters? I read the book and the characters never really showed any doubt about themselves or their scenario. There were doubts aplenty about the other people in varying situations, that they had about each other, but there was rarely the kind of depth where they thought, "Maybe it is I who am in the wrong?" with doubts about planned paths, situations, or especially their own mind. It made them seem far too certain and robotically confident.
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May 16, 2020 02:38
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I think I've watched the first season and a half/two seasons of Deadwood three or four times, and I'm going through it again. I'm up to midway season two in a few days, and I actually sat down and watched the first episode (i.e. just a few days after seeing it again, again) with some people last night. I think I know why I keep falling off it. The first few episodes/first season is really loving funny. The scene with Al, EB and the Irish guy, Doherty, making their mark is hilarious. Farnum is generally hilarious, Wild Bill's comments can be hilarious. Amidst all this horrific stuff there's some proper laugh out loud moments. During the second season there's one or two (and Jane calling people cocksuckers in general) but there's far fewer of them and what ones there are (EB masterminding his cook into spreading rumours) are overwhelmed by the bleakness. The first season has these really deft touches where the grim reality (an actual "reality" not grim-dark) is offset by some highly comic acting or hilarious turns of phrase. There's none, or very little of that, to be found in what I've seen after the first season.
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Sep 24, 2020 15:30
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I think what most impressed me about Ted Lasso was they had English/British, or at least people familiar with England/Britain doing at least some of the writing/consulting. It's not something I see in a lot of ostensibly US media. However, I do feel the show is a reflection of what people—these days—actually want from comedy, in some circumstances, at least. Not necessarily a show that has them laughing out loud regularly, but a comfortable show, where the characters are people you can enjoy, and the story has its tensions, and releases, but it doesn't weigh on you. It doesn't even ask you to admire its writing, cinematography, or timing (to a degree.) It's not an "intellectual" engagement. Ted Lasso (the show) is immediately familiar as "goodness." It's not attempting to upset your relationship with expectation; either for an emotional reaction, or to make you seriously, and immediately, consider what's happening. Which I think is what a lot of comedies are facing up to more and more. They're not "challenging" they're "relief-from." I wouldn't say escapism, which is something that's talked about in other media (film and books, a lot, and something I think ostensibly involves imagination, or imagining "another") but Ted Lasso and these shows have a comfort-food friendliness. And not even true friendliness, because they don't ask you for anything.
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Oct 12, 2020 03:53
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DuhSal posted:Currently going through Deadwood and I was not prepared for how loving funny this show is. I'm getting The Wire vibes with how they use humour in it but moreso. Just brilliant. And every actor crushes their role perfectly. I adore the doctor, Swearengen and Jane. I've watched the first season and a half three or four times now, and never got passed about two thirds of the way through Season 2. I think a lot of that is because it loses it's humour and becomes very serious. Watching the first episode with my parents after I watched an episode midway through season 2 just shows how loving funny the opening episode is, and it doesn't keep that up (although I don't know about Season 3.)
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Apr 11, 2021 13:20
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