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Random TV Show Thoughts

Stigmata

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Didn't see a thread specifically for TV shows.

If they'd ended the office around Season 5 it would've been one of the best shows of all time. Change my mind.
 

Totenkindly

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I really need to keep watching The Office.

I know that people said Steve Carrell leaving was a major turning point but I think that was Season 7 or something.

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There is too much shit on TV/streaming nowadays. Either there is stuff that looks interesting but I don't feel like I have time to commit to watching a lot of seasons; or there's just a lot to select from and I can't tell very easily what is worth the effort. Or I start watching something, like it, and then it gets canceled. It's almost easily to watch a series five years after it ends.
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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I really need to keep watching The Office.

I know that people said Steve Carrell leaving was a major turning point but I think that was Season 7 or something.

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There is too much shit on TV/streaming nowadays. Either there is stuff that looks interesting but I don't feel like I have time to commit to watching a lot of seasons; or there's just a lot to select from and I can't tell very easily what is worth the effort. Or I start watching something, like it, and then it gets canceled. It's almost easily to watch a series five years after it ends.

I think season 9 is better than its reputation, but season 8 is rough. He did well enough as the villain in Mannequin, but I didn't particularly find James Spader on the Office (which is during that season).
 

Saturnal Snowqueen

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I'm watching Ramna 1/2, I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of this 1980s anime. I've had a guilty pleasure for all sorts of old shows lately. Recently I finished Blossom-I really love the the main character herself. Both her and Six are ENFPs I think, but I think Blossom is a triple frustration tritype and Six a free spirit tritype so they present really differently. This show was ahead of it's time, it had a lot of mature themes that were presented as a normal part of life that weren't sugarcoated nor obnoxious. Blossom is basically Daria as an extrovert. I also really like I Love Lucy, it has a good reputation but I didn't expect it to be as hilarious as it was. It was funny when the guys trolled Lucy by making her think there's a fire and then they plan to go in and save her, but before they can go in their plans are foiled.
 

JocktheMotie

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Didn't see a thread specifically for TV shows.

If they'd ended the office around Season 5 it would've been one of the best shows of all time. Change my mind.

But then we wouldn't have Robert California.

It did get too absurd later on, and Michael's void was too large to fill.
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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But then we wouldn't have Robert California.

It did get too absurd later on, and Michael's void was too large to fill.

You're another Robert California fan?

I consider his season the weakest of the series, except for maybe season 1. I think the show follows a similar trajectory to Parks and Rec (or the Simpsons, for that matter) where it took until season 3 to really find itself.

Early seasons of comedy show tend to be weak because they seem a little too "grounded" to be good at being funny.

Also it's hilarious to me that Bart Simpson was considered controversial at the time in those first two seasons (the early 90s were truly a different time). It's interesting, he used to be kind of the central character, and then the focus shifted to Homer (which may have started in season 3).
 

fatgurl

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Santa Clarita Diet is hands-down the most hilarious tv show I've ever watched. I'm actually glad they ended it after 3 seasons instead of milking it till it got bad.

And I also loved iZombie. It was the first tv show that made me consider what a human brain tastes like.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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Season 2 of Star Trek TNG is better than most people think.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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Occasionally a great season comes late in a series’ life cycle, like Walking Dead season 9
 

Doctor Cringelord

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It’s crazy how typology central is already in what, the 14th season?!?
 

Totenkindly

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Started watching "Mare of Easttown" starring Kate Winslet last night. Episode 1 is out, for the miniseries on HBO Max.

Despite the British-y high royal sounding title, it's actually an American detective show and feels pretty true to the area (rural-ish suburb of Philly, in King of Prussia countryside area).

I also get a personal kick out of hearing Brits talk with American accents. I think Winslet is really on, she's not even doing a cheesy heavy American accent, she just sounds routinely American. Guy Pierce does this too.

The show actually feels pretty detailed and real, versus cliche. These are real people, and Mare isn't even likeable in some respects. She's good at her job and has good intentions, while at the same time being an individual with her own hangups and life problems she is dealing with.

The other thing I was loving at least for the pilot was seeing Cailee Spaeny. The first thing I really recall her from (a few months back) was DEVS (from Hulu), the Alex Garland TV show spinning around quantum reality / many worlds theory. Spaeny actually plays a boy prodigy on the show named Lyndon, Garland apparently screened a bunch of young men but they never scanned as a smart sensitive boy, they always seemed too old... and then he got the idea to test screen a few young women who would scan as pre-teen boys... and that is how Spaeny got cast. She's really great in DEVS, you can see and feel the difference in her physical presentation in the role, and so here it was kind of wild to see her as her actual gender and how she presents on-screen as female... she's small, delicate, her voice is much higher pitched, she reminds me of a young Natalie Portman in physicality and impression.

But the show has other people as well -- Jean Smart, Angourie Rice, and Evan Peters coming up. Julianne Nicholson too, for those of you familiar with her film/TV work.

The season seems centered around Mare investigating two different murders... but not in the cliche/conventional sense we typically see on police procedurals. This seems a little more true to life so far, in terms of small town police work.

One also cannot help but consider her role on the police force in a setting where she is known, and race relations. There's an episode where Mare chases a black guy (who was reported as a thief by his black sister), twists her ankle, but catches up with him -- and when her black cop backup shows up, she waves for him to reholster his gun and she ends up taking care of him and talking the guy out. She also gives space for the black sister to freak out and de-escalates the situation. Kind of a situation where in an encapsulated environment where people know each other, police can actually perform roles besides implementing the use of force, they have other tools in their toolkit and also have the personal connections to act as intermediaries to deescalate. She ends honoring everyone's needs in the situation, showing she's good at this work -- but her private life is totally a mess and she can be hard to deal with outside the role, especially if she carries over personal baggage.

It also doesn't glam up Winslet. More of a True Detective feel.
 

Totenkindly

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S1E7 of Invincible ("We Need to Talk") is an improvement on the prior ones. In fact, it might be the best episode of the season so far, aside from the shockers happening in Episode 1.

It feels like some of the voice acting has improved over the season as well, although I think some of the big-name casting has been irrelevant to the show except maybe for marketing. (Can anyone else play Walter Goggins' character? Yeah, definitely. That goes for many of them.) Gillian Jacobs (as Atom Eve) is still one of the best voiced characters on the show, and while she's been mostly irrelevant from a plot perspective, she's kind of a baseline for what a hero should be -- she quickly gets disillusioned with the superhero drama and battles, and is off living alone from her crazy parents (because her powerset allows her to survive on her own) and actually helping the world (again due to her powerset) to feed people, stop forest fires, and doing a bunch of actual humanitarian stuff as her own personal walk of faith and act of service. If superheroes want to help people, why aren't more of them actually doing that directly? (The answer in part has to be that their powers aren't really useful for SOME things but typically are good at putting a smackdown on uppity criminals.)

Anyway, this episode, the show finally moves past its quirks -- you can ignore those things -- because the plotting and subplots are finally pulling together. It's just such a gonzo episode, with the truth about what happened to the Guardians of the Globe finally acknowledged by most of the major players in the series, even if we still do not know "why" per se; and at this point secrecy is being set aside for everyone doing what they need to do to protect their interests.

A lot of things also come into focus -- like what Robot has been doing in his subplot. This feels ripped right out of anime and/or Akira -- so while being a bit derivative, it's actually kind of a cool and startling sequence and gives some more texture to the show. There's also the reality of "How do you solve a problem like Superman?" and the answer is maybe you don't, although if you have a monster called "Hail Mary" I guess that is a start. Everything hits the fan and starts escalating, culminating in a final moment of truth between Mark and his dad... which we won't see the result of until next episode, which might be the end of the season? But it's a crazy episode, more and more players drawn into this confrontation until pretty much everyone is on the board, one way or another.

my thoughts about Nolan's purpose:


My thoughts on Kirkland is that he has gained his notoriety because he takes established conventions and stretches/breaks them a bit. His failing is that he sometimes just gets too stark/depressing about them, rather than creative, and if given an open-ended platform, ends up recycling his own ideas so once his few good ideas play out to the limit of his ability, he then just sits there and spins his wheels / recycles them repeatedly until something moves on. Ending TWD abruptly might have been the best thing for him and for the show, which started out really intriguing but started rehashing itself by the end of Season 3 and made this into a boring artform by Season 6-7 but still refuses to lay down and die.

Bad heroes / anti-heroes seem to be the vogue nowadays on TV, some years after the comic book industry had their wave. I would have really liked to see "The Authority" done right on a video medium. There seemed more potential for story ideas there and character arcs, which the comics themselves dabbled in but never quite got beyond what was on the screen. Now there was really some unsettling stuff there. I think "The Boys" has generally been the best adaptation in the genre so far because it takes the ideas of the comic but then breathes new life into them -- I found the comics to just be a mashup and more focused on shock value and breaking taboo, without a lot to say (or distracting from its own message with the obsession of taboo breaking), while the show tries to find the humanity within each of its messed-up characters and give a sense of overarcing intention to the players.

Straczynski I think actually has done the best overall with having dark/realistic heroes while still preserving heroic qualities. (Yeah , the guy who wrote Babylon 5 TV series.) He did a lot of comics work. His Rising Stars series (about 45-55 issues?) was one of the best at this -- basically a cluster of kids all over the world were infected by some power in utero and so there were about 50 of them born and developing powers through childhood, all different kinds. What was the power? What was its purpose? And what did the kids end up becoming? That's what the series is about and there's just some really crazy dark stuff involved in this. The series switches at midpoint when some plotlines resolve, to "What are these grown-up kids going to do next?" and they stop infighting and decide to be real heroes in a realistic sense... but now it's the world that doesn't really want them because they are using their power to thwart those in power. This plays out to the final bittersweet ending and a revelation of what the power is and why it came. He also did a reboot of the Squadron Supreme under veil, but that was never completed; but it got really interesting and dark.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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I liked the way they did the old Romulan Bird of Prey in that episode of Picard. They kept the same basic classic lines and just updated the effects and lighting to make it look less like a cheap 60s studio model and more like an actual alien starship. There's really nothing wrong with the classic ship designs from the older shows, and I like it when they keep the same shapes and proportions but update the models/CG. I would like to see a Klingon D7 battlecruiser make a return--that was always a classic design, simultaneously elegant and menacing.

It was an obvious "member berries" moment ("oH lOoK aN oLd sChOoL bIrD oF pReY, mEmBeR tHoSe?!?!?") but still neat. It's plausible that older ship designs like that might still pop up in the hands of space pirates and whatnot.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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If DS9 was a writer's Star Trek show, then STD is a producer's Star Trek show. Seriously, the number of producers listed in the credits for that beast is telling. Insane. A classic example of way too many cooks in the kitchen.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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sorry, i'm not interested in a ton of TV, so expect a lot of my tv thoughts to revolve around star trek. maybe an occasional thought about twilight zone, seaquest dsv, or classic era sitcoms
 

Totenkindly

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well, you can go post that star trek stuff in the star trek thread so it doesn't infect this one.
 

fatgurl

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Watching AoT and man, I can't stand Gabi and anyone who supports or helps her. Falco is probably the only person who likes her that I also don't hate. They killed other children so I don't why they're taking so long to get rid of her.

She is so brainwashed more than anybody else in the show. Willing to harm the same people who help her just because she was taught to hate them. I swear, if she doesn't die by the end of this, I'm gonna be really mad.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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Seaquest declined so hard after season 1. It had some great episodes in the first, even if it was basically wet Star Trek. They actually tried to be topical and deal with a range of issues. Season 2 just turned into a monster of the week show. After season 1, they canned a good chunk of the original cast and replaced them with actors that looked more suited for bay watch or an Aaron Spelling drama. I won’t even get into what a mess season 3 was. I love Michael Ironside but he was a terrible fit for that show. Jonathan Brandis was good and twenty times more tolerable and talented than Wil Wheaton. Roy Scheider was cool but I could tell he kind of checked out about halfway through season 2. Also, having a romantic interest half his age was a little gross, it worked better with the cute British doctor in the first season (played by Stephanie Beacham) who happened to be much closer to his age and also generally more likable and charismatic than her bland replacement
 

Saturnal Snowqueen

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I've been wondering, why did 90s sitcom say, *insert celebrity name" as "character name" completely randomly? I'd get it if it was the main character, but like I was watching Blossom and they say, "Ted Wass" as Nick Russo when the dad was the least interesting character on the show. I wondered if Wass was some big star back then, but I did a little research and he hasn't had many roles. The same happened with Michelle on Full House when the Olsens were becoming popular, but yeah, putting her at the end of the theme song in the last season after all the newer characters and having that "as Michelle" just felt so odd to me. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but yeah.
 
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