Random TV Show Thoughts

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

 

[The Cat]

Well that's gonna leave a stain.

DC's star is in ascendance.

Finally.

Let's see if they can endure.

 

[The Cat]

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

This was just as good:

 

[The Cat]

This was just as good:

This really was a great show. Also probably where a lot of furries came from.

 

[Totenkindly]

Watching the final 6 episodes of The Umbrella Academy. Finished 4 episodes. it looks like it's getting review bombed for the ending -- I won't spoil it here, but if they did do what I think and justified it in the story, then I think that's actually cool, not awful -- lol.

The problem with this series has always been (1) tone, (2) writing room, and (3) subpar creativity. The concept is okay, but their story development has fluctuated a lot in quality. There are some subplots this season that are just kind of dumb or boring, as with every season. (While they were doing Number #682 dumb subplot, they could have been doing more interesting things.) One case in point is hinting that the father is actually an alien. They never really explain or follow up well on what that means exactly, if anything. Even this season doesn't necessarily feel like it follows decently from the last season.

Another problem with the writing is that it's just not great. At best it's average and it relies on quirk to carry the scenes. It doesn't thud as much as She-Hulk did but it set the bar a lot lower and I'm surprised that She-Hulk was even worse. Case in Point: I was ten minutes into S4E3 this weekend and just had to go look up who wrote the episode, because it was a HUGE jump in ability -- I was like, "OMG, these must be new writers -- and they actually know how to write dialogue and plot!" So I looked them up... and I see that the writing pair has not written any other episodes of this series including in this season, alas. Which means the finale might suck. but they did have some experience on other shows. It's so bizarre when you can immediately tell someone new is writing a series... and so sad when you see they are the best thing this show ever had and they only wrote one episode.

The tone almost seems like it WANTS to be tongue-in-cheek but it never quite nails it; it's like it wants to be taken seriously while doing quirky things and never quite threads the needle. We've all seen directors who can nail quirk and gravitas at once (like Tarantino). Deadpool is pretty much humor/quirk that accepts it will never have a lot of gravitas so it just loads up the fun. TUA just can't find that sweet spot.

And then we get into the creativity aspect. This most shows up with their musical selection. A show like "Killing Eve" has baller music -- it's usually stuff I'm not familiar with but immediately conveys tone and feels right and creates appropriate atmosphere. I feel like whoever programs TUA music selections is running music for the Trump campaign or something... It's usually the most obvious selection possible, stuff that is supposed to be "cool" but is heavily outdated or not nearly as cool as it thinks, etc. This is a show made for people who want to be creative but aren't quite, for viewers who aren't that creative either but feel like watching this show is cool in some way.

Anyway, you can also tell who the decent members of the cast are -- which pretty much amounts to Aidan Gallagher, Elliot Page, and Robert Sheehan. The rest are adequate. I mean, Colm Feore is an old veteran actor who is playing a cliche very well (no issues there), and there are some good seasonal guest stars, and I guess Ritu Arya is okay too (very distinct performance). But it's just a "middle of the pack" show that wanted to be more.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Watching the final 6 episodes of The Umbrella Academy. Finished 4 episodes. it looks like it's getting review bombed for the ending -- I won't spoil it here, but if they did do what I think and justified it in the story, then I think that's actually cool, not awful -- lol.

The problem with this series has always been (1) tone, (2) writing room, and (3) subpar creativity. The concept is okay, but their story development has fluctuated a lot in quality. There are some subplots this season that are just kind of dumb or boring, as with every season. (While they were doing Number #682 dumb subplot, they could have been doing more interesting things.) One case in point is hinting that the father is actually an alien. They never really explain or follow up well on what that means exactly, if anything. Even this season doesn't necessarily feel like it follows decently from the last season.

Another problem with the writing is that it's just not great. At best it's average and it relies on quirk to carry the scenes. It doesn't thud as much as She-Hulk did but it set the bar a lot lower and I'm surprised that She-Hulk was even worse. Case in Point: I was ten minutes into S4E3 this weekend and just had to go look up who wrote the episode, because it was a HUGE jump in ability -- I was like, "OMG, these must be new writers -- and they actually know how to write dialogue and plot!" So I looked them up... and I see that the writing pair has not written any other episodes of this series including in this season, alas. Which means the finale might suck. but they did have some experience on other shows. It's so bizarre when you can immediately tell someone new is writing a series... and so sad when you see they are the best thing this show ever had and they only wrote one episode.

The tone almost seems like it WANTS to be tongue-in-cheek but it never quite nails it; it's like it wants to be taken seriously while doing quirky things and never quite threads the needle. We've all seen directors who can nail quirk and gravitas at once (like Tarantino). Deadpool is pretty much humor/quirk that accepts it will never have a lot of gravitas so it just loads up the fun. TUA just can't find that sweet spot.

And then we get into the creativity aspect. This most shows up with their musical selection. A show like "Killing Eve" has baller music -- it's usually stuff I'm not familiar with but immediately conveys tone and feels right and creates appropriate atmosphere. I feel like whoever programs TUA music selections is running music for the Trump campaign or something... It's usually the most obvious selection possible, stuff that is supposed to be "cool" but is heavily outdated or not nearly as cool as it thinks, etc. This is a show made for people who want to be creative but aren't quite, for viewers who aren't that creative either but feel like watching this show is cool in some way.

Anyway, you can also tell who the decent members of the cast are -- which pretty much amounts to Aidan Gallagher, Elliot Page, and Robert Sheehan. The rest are adequate. I mean, Colm Feore is an old veteran actor who is playing a cliche very well (no issues there), and there are some good seasonal guest stars, and I guess Ritu Arya is okay too (very distinct performance). But it's just a "middle of the pack" show that wanted to be more.

Please forgive if I fucked up what I've written below. I did try to do some research, but of course I received conflicting answers.

I was interested in the show for its quirks and I thought the dynamic Vanya had the with the rest of her family was interesting. I found the character was an anchor into this world because she didn't have any powers, and felt inadequate and ignored by her family as a result. I had a great deal of sympathy for her. When it was revealed that she did have powers, and that moreover was the villain for that season, I lost much of my interest. I did finish the first season, but I watched an episode of season two and I wasn't feeling it. I didn't have any interest in seeing these characters navigate the 1960s.

Oh, another thing I really liked about season 1: The John Goodman-esque time assassin who wanted to give it all up for the donut shop lady. He was great.

 

[Totenkindly]

Watched Episode 5. The dumb plotline for Klaus and Allison continues.

• Ben and Jennifer's arc is just annoying and played like two teenagers in their first-ever romance, even as it threatens existence.
• Luther is played almost entirely for laughs this season, in a try-hard way, but it would have been effective if the rest of the characters were actually well-written.
• Likewise, the whole Five/Lila thing was almost good but never quite clicks over and has some dumb writing at times.
• I was going to eat my words -- the opening song was "Ahead by a Century" by the Tragically Hip, a tune I've never heard before and appropriate to the plotline. Then they fall back on the old tired stale music we've already heard used zillions of times in other shows.
• There's a kind of funny disturbing moment near the episode's end that is actually good.

I think if the show could lean into camp fully and REALLY nail it, that might have been its niche. But it's like not everyone on the creative team knows the assignment. It hasn't really been able to thread the needle.

Case in point, it tried to get a serious relationship between Luther and Sloane in Season 3. Sloane supposedly survives the events of Season 3, but despite his actual love for her and Luther going off to find her at the end, she is completely dropped from Season 4, lol. Like... what happened? There's a lot of stuff that instead of feeling campy feels like incoherence and inadequate writing, like the whole "alien" angle on Hargreaves, etc. Drama consists of explosions of conflict that are often somewhat childish emotionally. Is it just a bad writer's room, or too many people fighting over the direction and tone of the show, or what?

Please forgive if I fucked up what I've written below. I did try to do some research, but of course I received conflicting answers.

I was interested in the show for its quirks and I thought the dynamic Vanya had the with the rest of her family was interesting. I found the character was an anchor into this world because she didn't have any powers, and felt inadequate and ignored by her family as a result. I had a great deal of sympathy for her. When it was revealed that she did have powers, and that moreover was the villain for that season, I lost much of my interest. I did finish the first season, but I watched an episode of season two and I wasn't feeling it. I didn't have any interest in seeing these characters navigate the 1960s.

It had some interesting ideas, just the development has been odd.

I have not read the comics but I think Season 1 was the closest to the comics compiled Book #1, aside from the ending (where the asteroid never actually reaches earth in the book). Also, Hazel and Cha-Cha only show up in the second comics arc (Book #2) and only live a few episodes.

Season 3 has the Hotel in it (mirroring the comic series Book #3) but also the Sparrows, which are supposedly in Book #4 which has never been released.

I've kind of hate-watched the show since Season 1, hoping for something interesting. It keeps struggling at the edge of being interesting but never really transitions into a good show.

Oh, another thing I really liked about season 1: The John Goodman-esque time assassin who wanted to give it all up for the donut shop lady. He was great.

Hazel is one of those great guest stars I refer to -- he's played by Cameron Britton, who also played Ed Kemper in David Fincher's Mindhunter. He and Cha-Cha were one of the best elements of Season #1.

 

[Totenkindly]

Aaaaaand.... I was right about the ending.

And i was right that the ending was actually one of the best things they've done this season and maybe ever (in execution AND in concept).

I'm laughing my ass off that it's getting really bad audience scores on RT because of the ending -- and not because of all the shitty story development and writing, which left much of the season pointless or incoherent.

I still would say the ending conceit has been done much better in other shows (that actually had decent directing, writing, and story development) even on Netflix previously, but I don't want to spoiler those shows.


EDIT:
Aaaaaand case in point:

Netflix users outraged by ‘most disappointing series ending in history’

‘What the hell happened?’ one perplexed fan wrote

www.independent.co.uk

Besides saying something about their fan base (ugh), it highlights why story development is an essential part of this process. To whit:

I think it made total sense for Lila and Five, after spending 7 years together with no one else around (and Lila in a sad marriage to Diego) to fall in love with each other and especially if it seemed like they'd never get home again anyway. However, immediately after Lila finds out Five did find a map home, she insists on going. Lila (who is never a moral center anyway) wanting to go home, is really only for her kids, it's hard to justify the way they wrote her flipping out at Five at first, and it made more sense at the end when she eased off and said she needed to go back while acknowledging they had something.

This could have been set up better earlier in the season, aside from the cutesy "Five wearing a moustache and Diego thinks he's a little greek guy having an affair with his wife, rather than his brother." Story development.

Likewise, it's a powerplay ending to kill off your cast because they are the reason the universe keeps dying. The ending scene was actually written really well and kind of summarized the entire family and their relationship to each other, the method of death just felt kind of stupid. But it comes out of left field in the Delicatessen, and there's only 20 minutes to absorb that knowledge and then watch it all unfold. They should have been hinting at this all season and really nailing in place why their having marigold in their body sealed their fates and demanded this level of sacrifice. (Worse, if Ben hadn't spiked the liquor, none of them would have had marigold -- so they weren't even slated to die anyway.)

Instead we get a totally worthless subplot with Klaus and Allison and Claire that could have easily leaned into this (as Klaus can talk to the dead). We get really dumb CIA antics where Luther and Diego could have found scientific papers that would have suggested the impact of marigold. I could go on, but NONE of the arcs of the first five episodes led to the sixth and final episode in a tight and useful way, it all felt like filler shit. The stupid monster that evolves out of Ben and Jennifer seems to not follow and is really dumb -- as is Jennifer emerging from a giant squid in childhood, was there ever a point to that? Even accepting that the season might have been chopped down by Netflix, they should have tightened and had EVERYTHING in the season making it inevitable that they needed to all die to save reality. This is why people are pissed. They felt surprised in the last 20 minutes and like the writers were just murdering the protagonists.

It's hard to piece together that Hargreaves apparently was an alien who escaped from another world where marigold existed and had the same impact, destroying the planet, so he fled to earth... but then foolishly did the same thing here as well. (At least I think that is what is going on?) But again, bad story development.

Ironically, they've always had bad story development. It seems to be a feature of the series, not a bug. It's just that there wasn't a cutesy happy ending this time, so their fans who can't recognize story development (or the lack of it) when they see it ended up feeling really robbed.

This complaint cracked me up:

“What the hell happened?!?” one fan wrote, adding: “The first three seasons were awesome. Was there a different writer or something? Terrible final season.”

Hilarious, dude, no. This series DOES have a LOT of different writers on it -- but they were all involved in past seasons. Apparently the guy can't even take 2 minutes to check the wiki or IMDB.

I should also correct my mistake: The duo who wrote the "better written" episode this season did write a few episodes in past seasons, but as individuals and not as a team. I should rewatch those episodes to see if they are better than the others, lol.

 

[The Cat]

@Julius_Van_Der_Beak

 

[The Cat]

Three times they went there, I thought for sure there would be a Super MArio 64 show with the 3d animation at the time.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

@Julius_Van_Der_Beak

See, when he says "I'll get those plumbers", what he really means is that he's having problems with his toilet. He sounds angry because the water overflowed and he spent 2 hours trying to mop everything up, and he was just so frustrated that he decided he needed to get those plumbers so he would never have this problem again.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Three times they went there, I thought for sure there would be a Super MArio 64 show with the 3d animation at the time.

I was never allowed to have consoles growing up, although PC gaming was allowed until we switched to a Mac (which was more because there was nothing availahle for it at the time). I did occasionally play Mario while at somebody else's house. I remember I played that weird game you mentioned at least once.

I'll also point out that this was way before it was considered sexy and high-class to have a Mac. It was pre i-pad, pre i-phone, pre i-pod, even. To me, it was just a computer that couldn't do as many things as the one we had before.

 

[The Cat]

I'll also point out that this was way before it was considered sexy and high-class to have a Mac. It was pre i-pad, pre i-phone, pre i-pod, even. To me, it was just a computer that couldn't do as many things as the one we had before.

I loathe macs. And the only reason Im so up on Star Wars is because Lucas Arts was the one game company that released games for mac. I liked the Tandy better.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I loathe macs. And the only reason Im so up on Star Wars is because Lucas Arts was the one game company that released games for mac. I liked the Tandy better.

One thing that bothered me about that was that I never got to finish System Shock, which I loved. It inspired many other legendary games that I haven't played. But I always loved when games combined action with puzzles. That game even had other modes of action within it when you were hacking. The hacking was depicted like something out of Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care from Community, but it was extremely cool at the time.

I've recently come around on the Macintosh. I started using one for work, and I noticed that you could set it up without dealing with annoying system issues. That counts for something. You shouldn't be riddled with weird bugs right out of the factory. There are a lot of tools and programs that are actually designed more with the Linux shell in mind. The documentation will often include Linux commands, and while you will have workarounds with Windows often, you will frequently have more of an uphill battle getting things to work. That's something I don't want to be wasting my time with, installing something and setting it up. I would much rather focus my time on learning about software or using it to solve some specific problem.

The other thing I like about them is the Linux-style command line. I know this very well from school and from running Linux as my computer for a few years. I feel it's much easier to use and that it allows you to do so much more. My problem with Windows isn't just the different set of commands, though.

It's with the CLI program itself. They have two different command line applications, the Command Prompt and something called Windows PowerShell. I don't have much of a problem with the Command Prompt. That "new and improved" PowerShell is something else though. This program is a piece of a shit, and for some reason it's constantly experiencing bugs or other issues whenever I enter commands. If I'm in Windows, and I want to run a command, and the command isn't working, 9 times out of 10 I would soon find out I'm in Windows PowerShell, which Microsoft is constantly trying to force on you. I don't know how a newer program can be so much shittier than the old program, but this is what we're dealing with here, folks.

 

[The Cat]

I figure that was the point, but the British Men of Letters can fuck all the way off from first impressions alone.

 

[The Cat]

Sam. you of all people should know when you're choking someone out, you give it a minute AFTER they go unconscious before you let go. Or they're just gonna shake it off.

 

[Totenkindly]

Sam. you of all people should know when you're choking someone out, you give it a minute AFTER they go unconscious before you let go. Or they're just gonna shake it off.

Yeah, that always cracks me up. I know it would be boring to watch, but basically to choke, drown, or smother someone and ensure they are dead takes minutes not seconds.

Or like "knocking someone out" by whacking them in the face. Maybe the best example is in boxing, where people do get knocked out -- but they might be suffering brain damage if it happens repeatedly, and it's not like they are out for 10-20 minutes and then just wake up with no issues. I think really people knocked out would wake up pretty quickly, not like TV or movies where they're just out for the rest of the night.

 

[The Cat]

Yeah, that always cracks me up. I know it would be boring to watch, but basically to choke, drown, or smother someone and ensure they are dead takes minutes not seconds.

Or like "knocking someone out" by whacking them in the face. Maybe the best example is in boxing, where people do get knocked out -- but they might be suffering brain damage if it happens repeatedly, and it's not like they are out for 10-20 minutes and then just wake up with no issues. I think really people knocked out would wake up pretty quickly, not like TV or movies where they're just out for the rest of the night.

What really got me was not more than an episode or two back, the same thing happened to Sam, so like, he should have known if the guy who tried to choke him out did it for longer for him and he woke back up later. I get these guys are supposed to be the good guys, but please, when lives are in danger, actually take out the bad guy or girl, gather the discarded weapons, and you know shoot them in the leg, like they did you at least I just. lol it cracks me up that it bugs me but still.

 

[The Cat]

Archer starting the running jokes of being knocked unconcious being super bad for you, tinnitus, and guns are expensive precision instruments, i wont drop it, i'll place it gently down have been my favorite things in television shows in a long time