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Unkempt posted:Analog is (used to be?) full of right-wing idiocy. I stopped buying it after an issue with not one but two stories making GBS threads on 'socialized medicine' in bizarre ways. Interesting. I used to read Analog 20 or so years ago, and gradually realised there was a lot of filler: stories that were blatant fan service, or only worked as genre (i.e. were poorly written but had the right tropes), bad stories from "good" authors ... I largely stopped reading science fiction after that. It seemed like the inmates had taken over the asylum.
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Jun 10, 2018 11:06
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Wheat Loaf posted:It's weird to think that Breaking Bad premiered more than 10 years ago and ended five years ago. I rewatched it recently, and there's already a few details that look weird: * The mobile phones are so old and clunky * The adults descending into a panic when they think Walt Jr might be smoking pot
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Jun 18, 2018 13:48
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Gaunab posted:Everything I hear about Oz makes me never want to watch it. I saw it in its prime and recently grabbed the whole run to rewatch it. And I haven't been able to bring myself to. I think Oz's dark-and-grittiness passed at the time and when you were watching an episode a week, a season a year. But if you binge over it, it starts to look pretty ludicrous and overly-intense: (spoilers for a 20 year old show?) * The Asian refugees who for no good reason are temporarily housed with all the murders and psychos in Oz. Then a few episodes later are just written out. * The experimental drug that ages people as a punishment. * Sealing the preacher (was it Jason Priestley?) up in the wall, where he hallucinates Jesus before being rescued seemingly months later. * Every member of staff being traumatised by their job but relatively few of them ever leaving.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:13
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Hattie Masters posted:
There's a lot of UK comedy from that era that fell out of fashion super fast: League of Gentleman, etc. I remember people who were ardent fans of early series turning on later series that were seemingly identical. Which is part of the problem. They all hammered their stock characters and repeated their catchphrases endlessly. And the humour was fairly base monkey-cheese randomness or lessened on gross out material which didn't help longevity. But yes, it was a cultural phenomena. Everyone recognised the references.
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Aug 13, 2018 18:06
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Pookah posted:Bo loving Selecta. Perfect example. And that went for years ...
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Aug 14, 2018 22:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:The problem with satire is that there's always quite a few shitheads who will happily take it at face value. From slightly later, there was the UK show "Men Behaving Badly", which was in the lineage of "Peep Show" with two lazy, idiotic dudes sharing a house and constantly screwing up their lives. Real popular, ran for years. The scriptwriter has spoken of how there's a significant part of the audience that failed to understand it was satire, thought the protagonists were heroes, and would write him with suggested plotlines where the male leads would go out, get horribly drunk and hook up after shaming the female leads. You can't make things obvious enough for some people.
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Aug 21, 2018 11:27
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StrangersInTheNight posted:Yeah she is. I read her book and it actually really changed 30 Rock for me, because I realized a bunch of things I thought were jokey-jokes making light of things were sincere. Could you expand on this? Because I recollect that her book got very favourable reviews. I assumed it was preaching a favourable message.
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Aug 29, 2018 16:40
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BrigadierSensible posted:Whilst we are on 70s/80s British TV and implied homosexuality: Am I the only one who thought that Kenny Everett was gay? I know his TV show had lots of beautiful women in skimpy clothes, (and young me thanked him for it), but he always seemed to me to be camper than a row of tents. Although given he was a 'weirdo' on UK TV in the 70s/80s, he is actually more likely to be a kiddie diddler than a homosexual. Everett was gay but - from memory - came out late in his career. But you're right, looking at his show now, he comes across very camp and there's lots of cheesecake like a man who trying desperately not to look gay.
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Nov 5, 2018 08:06
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Tiggum posted:There isn't really such a thing. There's never really been any overall consensus on what "psychopathy" actually means and a lot of the criteria were pretty subjective, so if you're looking at modern classifications then you're not necessarily going to find one that exactly matches up with whatever your understanding of psychopathy is. What about that whole line of work popularised in "The Psychopath Test"? There's a school of psychologists that use the term and feel they are referring to a defined thing.
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Dec 1, 2018 09:40
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Krispy Wafer posted:Butt cheeks on TV was such a big deal in the 90’s. People lost their loving minds over it. NYPD Blue had such a thing for getting their cast naked, it was a joke that if you showed your butt, you were bound for the permanent cast.Part of the gritty realism of the show? I also recollect that the 90s has several very mild lesbian moments that were "the kiss that shocked America": LA Law, Roseanne, some other shows? I don't remember much actual shock, just magazines saying there was shock.
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Dec 2, 2018 12:41
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Peep show is a great show starring two of my favorite comedians but I can’t bear to watch it because of the cringe. I’ve been trying to work my way through it for five years. You're not alone. The show is genius but it's like watching a car accident in slow motion. I keep having to hit pause and take a break.
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Jan 6, 2019 15:22
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Cleretic posted:There's interesting side-effects of how Captain Planet was written that made it kinda bad at doing the thing it was setting out to do. They made the villains cartoonishly, absurdly evil so that kids wouldn't turn against their parents for working for a car company or whatever, but their villains became so unreal that pollution itself started seeming like something not to be afraid of. I never saw a lot of Captain Planet but their villains were ridiculous: "I'm gonna dump all this toxic waste in the beautiful river! HAHAHA!" Like, why? What possible reason do you have for doing that? Is it because Captain Planet has failed to ensure that appropriate regulatory devices and disposal facilities exist, so there's literally nowhere else for the waste to go? Maybe if you zoned appropriately Captain Planet, emissions would be under control and not bother living neighbourhood. Come on, this is basic SimCity.
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Mar 13, 2019 10:43
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Solice Kirsk posted:I loved Parks and Rec, but watching after season 3 is nearly impossible. The stupid cameos, the "on location" episodes, the way they went from just ignoring/dismissing Jerry to flat out torturing the man. There were still good moments, but they were few and far between. People adore Parks & Rec but I think it went into the slow decline so common of many sitcoms. They think that people want to see more of The Characters and it slowly turns into a soap. Lets pair everyone off. Lets give everyone a happy ending. Lets get Duke Silver back, that was so funny the previous six times. It's akin to the Henry Ford comment, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" Comedy writers drift into giving people characters, catchphrases and revisiting their favourite moments. See The Simpsons, Red Dwarf, etc.
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Mar 21, 2019 17:48
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OutOfPrint posted:This right here. My wife put P&R on as her background noise show, and nowadays it carries that undercurrent of "If we leave things alone and not worry too much it'll all work out" that looks downright quaint these days. Someone once made a similar comment about Portlandia: it hails from a time where we thought everything was going to work out and just keep getting gradually better. In the current day, it looks a bit insular and oblivious.
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Mar 22, 2019 22:19
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:The least funny would definitely be April and Ann. April because Aubrey Plaza can't act or come across as anything other than lolrandom, and Ann because she never was given any defining character traits or reason to be in the show beyond season 2 or 3. The whole Ann character was odd. Everyone, Leslie in particular, kept on about how wonderful, amazing, incredible Ann is despite her lack of any distinct characteristics. "beautiful" was another oft-used word and while Rashida Jones is certainly good looking, I started to wonder if it was just to keep someone happy behind the scenes.
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Mar 24, 2019 22:11
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Maxwell Lord posted:They were supposed to get live action footage of the Rock in some kind of harness in front of a green screen (granted this was 2001 so still the very early days of motion/performance capture), but he had a slight injury of some kind and needed to stay healthy because he was gonna be in the main event of Wrestlemania that year. And of course the movie had to open in May so they rushed it. Was there not a goon who was on the team for that CGI? I recall him saying that the budget and time was cut drastically late in the process and so they just had to make do.
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Apr 14, 2019 11:13
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Blue Moonlight posted:There is a lot of Voyager and Enterprise that has aged poorly. Didn't one of the Trek movies have Spock (?) force a mindmeld on another Vulcan and it was presented as a drastic, violent act? Was it the Undiscovered Country?
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Apr 15, 2019 17:08
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Sir Lemming posted:This is why I've come to appreciate the work of Hayao Miyazaki more and more. He can make a movie where everyone is more or less a good person and treats each other with respect 99% of the time and still make it interesting. Too bad he didn't do sitcoms. That's a good call: there's drat few shows where people can conflict or disagree without at least one side being flagged as an rear end in a top hat / manipulative / insane / deluded / in the wrong / etc. For all its failures, the Battlestar Galactica reboot has a few instances where competent well-intentioned people tear into each other because they just don't see things that same way. The attempted mutiny is excellent in this regard.
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Apr 23, 2019 11:27
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PhotoKirk posted:The Shield pulled it off really well. Long-running plot arcs are usually rubbish but The Shield is a great counter-example. The show is headed in one direction from episode one and you get to see the protagonists dig themselves deeper and deeper into trouble. The only mystery is how long before it all falls apart.
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Apr 25, 2019 15:49
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Comrade Detective is already a thing. Not a good thing, and certainly not a culturally inoffensive thing, but it is a thing. Take that back. Comrade Detective is magnificent and if only there could be a second series. Echoing the recommendation for A Touch of Cloth: it's as close as you'll get to an English version of Police Squad.
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May 10, 2019 15:44
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Leavemywife posted:Firefly isn't an awful show, but it is definitely not the show the hardcore fans believe it to be. And I didn't know Molyneux was a libertarian. I just thought he made video games. Its short life contributes to the myth. They could kid themselves that if, only if it had been allowed to continue, its brilliance would be obvious to all. Because imaginary creations will always be better than ones besmirched by actual existence. How they accommodate the movie is anyone's guess.
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May 22, 2019 16:40
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There's a great series of old SF novels (the author's name is White and one of the books is called "Sector General"?) about a doctor working at a hospital in the middle of a space opera universe. He gets patients whose biology he doesn't understand, and they may not even be sick, there's cultural hijinks to navigate and hospital bureaucracy to defeat. I recommend them.
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Jun 10, 2019 16:57
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Randallteal posted:This is kind of a tangent, but I've been going through all the fifties and sixties-era TV on Amazon Prime the last couple weeks, and it's interesting to see how much society and personal interactions have changed, obviously, but also how much hasn't changed at all, and how many sixties sitcom scripts could be reused in modern sitcoms today without updating anything except the outfits. I suspect that lots of old sitcoms could just be refilmed and they'd fit right in. People might remember the sitcom Ned & Stacey (which I now find out finished in 1997 and looks ancient) in which the setup was that an advertising firm will only promote Ned if he's married, so Stacey moves in and they have a sham marriage. Apart from that reading as strange even at the time, I recollect an old b&w sitcom I saw in my youth that has the same plot, perhaps even down to the male character working in an advertising agency.
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Jun 30, 2019 07:17
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Iron Crowned posted:Interestingly the attitudes about women working didn't really change until well into the 90's. There was that episode of the Simpsons where Marge becomes a cop, and everyone acts shocked that she's getting a job. Per Wikipedia, The Springfield Connection aired in 1995. Things like are what surprise me: I remember 1995 and would have automatically said that it wasn't that bad or backwards relative to the current day. Then you're confronted by actual cultural evidence. On the upside, at least it shows we've made some progress.
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Jul 1, 2019 12:58
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It's not a good film, even in the so-bad-its-good stakes. Arguably it's self aware, but along the lines that it knows it's a terrible, cash-in film and doesn't attempt to cover it up. Back on the ginger thing, in the UK it seems to be a joke that people also take seriously while maintaining it's a joke. Like I've heard several British guys say: "I was unpopular at school. Not as unpopular as the ginger kid but ..."
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Jul 10, 2019 14:41
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Perhaps not a genius, but he certainly plays up the eccentric twit angle. Which has worked awfully well for him. I knew several people who voted for him when he was running for London Mayor "because it'll be hilarious".
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Jul 29, 2019 22:31
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Len posted:I mean maybe but I'm going to click the link see it's someone talking about a movie for 1/3 of the run time and close the tab. Ain't nobody got time for that when there's still shitloads of movies and TV shows I haven't seen. I've gone the same way. So many of those video essays are overly long, basic film crit / media 101 and full of skits / forced comedy that it's much faster to watch the subject show and turn off if you don't like it. Lindsay Ellis has made some fine points but she's practically part of the machine she's criticising.
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Aug 24, 2019 07:14
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Heinlein's an interesting case. He served in the military, but only briefly and in peacetime, so he absorbed all the pomp and pride without ever seeing action or even the threat of it. Which isn't a fault but it does color the way he sees the army. For a time I was prepared to defend Starship Troopers as just a setting but you look at his wider life, it's pretty clear he approves of it. It's meant to be a great system. In the rest of his life, he clearly took on the views of those around him, especially his wives. Thus he swings from gungho militarism to freelove to libertarian. Not so much an evolution of thought as "who have I been talking to lately?"
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Sep 3, 2019 15:40
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Don Gato posted:Post-scarcity wealth gap makes me think of the Diamond Age, where everyone has their basic needs met but the poor live in overcrowded slums while the rich literally can create islands in minutes populated with unicorns and dinosaurs at a whim. That's an odd book. In some ways its oddity makes it more interesting than other books by Stephenson. But it seem to me that he struggled with the idea of being part scarcity, so the poor still have replicators but they churn out low quality goods.
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Sep 4, 2019 16:12
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DrBouvenstein posted:But it still raises questions about HOW people can all manage to "do what they want" in this post-scarcity society. I was going to make a comment on how the Trek universe, like most fantasy universes, hasn't been really thought out much. Posters above have captured it fairly well. And we don't really have any idea how a post-scarcity economy would work anyway. Instead, I'll note that there's a strong thread in Trek about people climbing from inconspicuous beginnings and making themselves into something. That is, the polar opposite of Star Wars, where one is born great and much is made of bloodlines and heritage. Conversely, the cynic in me wonders if Trek is in-universe propaganda about their heroes, ignoring the benighted masses labouring in obscurity to fund the latest Federation starship that the bourgeois will fly around in, having "jobs" and "doing important work".
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Sep 5, 2019 13:28
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Henchman of Santa posted:A while ago I watched Spy Who Shagged Me with some friends and it was so unfunny to us that it made it feel like a Lynch movie or something. There are a bunch of pauses for audience laughter and we were all just dead silent. It’s wild to think that people in theaters were losing their poo poo over Fat Bastard in 1999. I'm not sure people were falling over themselves. My memory was that most everyone thought it was an average movie, but it was still at that point in history where you had to see a blockbuster / high profile movie and in any event, franchise inertia is a thing: the previous entries were good enough that you automatically show up to the next installment. How many mediocre films has Bond survived? Quality is poorly related to bid office performance. Back onto TV shows, I think there's been a shift in standards of appearance. You watch early to mid 90s series (Xfiles, ST:TNG, Friends) and at the beginning the cast look a lot more like normal people: a little pale, functional haircuts, not very muscled. As the series progress, they get more and more glamorous, for want of a better word, impossibly coiffed, wearing tailored and expensive clothes. This may be more to do with the cast getting more famous, but look at early XFiles. The leads are two very ordinary looking people.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:39
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Tunicate posted:That's actually a myth, restaurants are not worse than any other small business Nice find. Although I'll note that most small businesses of any kind fail. The figure I remember is 80% in the first 5 years, although google tells me that for the UK "20% of small businesses fail in their first year, 30% of small business fail in their second year, and 50% of small businesses fail after five years in business" and there are figures all around the place. Point being, I've known several people who have nursed a dream of opening a bar / bookshop / restaurant / skate store and I can't remember one working out. The people who opened an online / work from home business tended to do a lot better, but it's a lot less glamorous.
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Oct 31, 2019 14:26
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hyperhazard posted:I'm surprised that The Office is such a popular show with gen z. It was a good show and all, but it's slice of life that's very distinctly mid-to-late-2000s. The first season, Pam and her fiance have like a 2 or 3 year engagement that's supposed to be seen as super long and weird. Oscar comes out in the second? third? season and it ends with him kissing Michael while everyone gasps in horror. There's an episode about sexism in the workplace where Phyllis says that she's "not a feminist or anything" and everyone just kind of nods along. I'd be interested in what you'd make of it if you rewatched it. Late in it's run, I stumbled across a forum (maybe the AVClub) where they would dissect each episode as it came out, and they were watching it like a soap opera: critiquing lines for "not being in character", demanding that plotlines "get closure", talking about what characters deserve or need. Having only seen the UK Office, it was weird.
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Feb 9, 2020 19:27
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Interesting discussion on twitter today about how talkshow hosts used to jeer at celebrities with problems, punching down, and whether that has gone away. https://twitter.com/jonronson/status/1226613240941154307
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Feb 10, 2020 13:31
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Elissimpark posted:Yeah, it was Action. The main character is trying to make an action flick to come back from a major loss. It turns out the brothers own the rights for something relating to the script and they'll waive them if they can have their way with his assistant, who used to be a child star. She lets them, but it's treated as pretty traumatic. It's not just played for laughs, from memory. That was a good series. She wasn't an assistant however, she was a sexworker he'd raised up to executive level, one of a series of crazy moves he made. I have a dim memory that the lead character is actually meant to be crazy, like he's had a breakdown, but he was always an rear end in a top hat. There were plenty of references to post terrible things he'd done.
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Feb 16, 2020 09:24
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Laterite posted:Action! was loving great but a bit too inside baseball for mass appeal. I still, years later, get a laugh from the rising starlet who was called "Reagan Bush".
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Feb 17, 2020 18:05
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was him just giving up on any pretense of trying to even vaguely hide his fetish. Excuse me, CD makes it very clear that he's lampshading the criticism. It's ironic.
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Mar 25, 2020 08:12
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Vietnamwees posted:So I'm watching Star Wars The Clone Wars, and in the episode where a couple bounty hunter try to take out Padme, they pull out what is basically a small knife and try to shiv her. For a TV show that's supposed to be super futuristic, I thought that was kind of lame. It does seem weird but then Stars Wars is space opera / fantasy and lacks a whole host of host of technologies that would just make things too simple. Why don't they built droids into the starfighters, why don't the Mos Eisley cops use biometrics, why don't they bomb the rebels out of their bases with cruise missiles, why aren't comms encrypted, etc. etc.
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Mar 30, 2020 13:41
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Sweevo posted:If I sit down to watch QI and see John Sessions, Rory McGrath, Rory Bremner, Gyles Brandreth, or Jeremy Clarkson then it's getting switched straight off regardless of who else is on. Not a great fan of Arthur Smith either (he's someone only funny to other comedians). It's the natural lifecycle of the UK comedian to become low energy reactionary versions of themselves. Accompanied by writing a light comedic novel and having a column in the Guardian.
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Dec 17, 2020 08:38
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hard counter posted:not mention the fact that even when the paranormal wasn't being invoked, the old unsolved mysteries had a good knack for picking interesting cases where there was some genuine enigma to wrap your mind around that elevated it above other, more typical inquiries... like a murder victim apparently living a double life nobody knew about until the investigation that may have either caught up with him or may be totally unrelated, or a good old fashioned locked-room murder conundrum or some other truly unusual circumstance I noticed that a lot of the mystery / crime podcasts and YouTubers are trending this way as well: things that are mysteries in the sense that the answer is unknown, but they're not fundamentally mysterious. Crimes no one had been charged for, what does this weird tiktok mean, who is this odd Reddit user, etc. Maybe we're just running out of mysterious things
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Jan 18, 2021 16:56
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