What TV series are you watching at moment?

  On 2/14/2024 at 5:17 PM, zero said:

The Americans is pure gold. one of those modern drama shows up there with the best of them, like Breaking Bad or Sopranos. hardly a drop in quality throughout the 6 seasons. 

Hell yeah! One of my favorites too. I remember reading an AMA on reddit by a former CIA agent, and him and his wife left the agency to open up their own business consulting firm. He said that the Americans came the closest to representing what it is like to be a spy in comparison with all of the films and TV shows him and his wife had watched.

Keri Russell is beyond compare. Some of the best acting I have seen on the screen. The show also helped me understand Russia/US relations during the Cold War. I am sure that a lot of it is over-dramatized compared with what actually happened, but I got a sense that the writers for the show put in real effort to understand the history.

Excellent news. Looking forward to watching it. 

Tokyo Vice right now. Scratches that neo noir itch 

  On 2/16/2024 at 12:40 AM, Berk said:

Tokyo Vice right now. Scratches that neo noir itch 

nice, will have to add that to the list

i've been watching S1 of A Black Lady Sketch Show and it's good so far. got plenty of just silly jokes, lots of good funny characters, tons of guest stars, and best of all a touch of surrealism/weirdness that the best sketch shows always pull in.

Criminal Record on Apple TV. It has Peter Capaldi in it and it started out ok  but quickly devolved to a sludgy fucking mess. And I’m pretty lenient on sloppy messes but this is just ugh. So thankful there’s only one episode left. Lol

Resident Alien seems to have completely lost its charm and sense of humor. The show runner must have changed, it’s plodding and bland now. 

i liked the final reveal of the story of True Detective S4, but the overall plot still felt very overbaked/convoluted. epilogue stuff felt unnecessary and silly.  

overall the season was just not very good imo, pushed way way too hard. some really good acting from almost everyone, i just couldn’t ever fall for the horror movie BS it kept trying to force in. a few tweaks (and ~3 more episodes worth of budgeting to allow the story to breathe) could’ve really made the season strong. as is it’s pretty middling, sadly. few redeeming qualities. 

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

  On 2/20/2024 at 9:33 AM, Hail Sagan said:

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

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So it’s completely unwatchable? Sounds like a 2/10

  On 2/20/2024 at 10:24 AM, o00o said:

So it’s completely unwatchable? Sounds like a 2/10

Maybe I’m in a bad mood or something. The first few episodes I would rate much higher at the time of watching them but yeah, by the end it was 2/10 territory personally. I’m grading on a curve though since it’s HBO. Can’t front, if this were Netflix and wasn’t a part of a series I really enjoyed I probably wouldn’t be so harsh on it. 

  On 2/20/2024 at 9:33 AM, Hail Sagan said:

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

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Mostly agree with all of this, and furthermore I have 3 gripes about the reveals in the finale:

  On 2/20/2024 at 12:52 PM, EdamAnchorman said:

Mostly agree with all of this, and furthermore I have 3 gripes about the reveals in the finale:

  Reveal hidden contents

1. Why the fuck did Navarro have to "disappear"?  She presumably resolved two major points that were massively unresolved for her: solving the Annie K's murder and finding her real name from her mother.  Seems to me that after having resolved these two things, she'd be pretty happy to return to her job.  What was her motivation for "disappearing"?  I get that she had the same thing as her sister and mother, seeing and hearing the dead and all that, but I felt like the disappearance was unnecessary so soon after having resolved her two major issues.  And did she really disappear?  I find it hard to believe that she was just hanging out on Danvers's porch drinking tea, or was that her spirit visiting?  Stupid.
2. The whole plot point of the scientists needing the pollution to accelerate this dumbass microbe that could save humanity was just stupid.  First of all, just fucking isolate some area of the permafrost with containment and subject that area to pollution in order to get what you want, you don't need to subject the whole fucking town to pollution.  Do the writers know how scientific experiments work?
3. This is an extension of point 2.  The whole microbe thing was really unnecessary.  It would've been better and more believable to just have the scientists in the pocket of the mine and faking the pollution numbers because they were paid by the mine.  That shit unfortunately does happen.  By introducing this stupid supermicrobe plot point, they make the scientists the bad guys for poisoning the town in pursuit of some scientific goal.  It would've been better to have the scientists murder Annie to cover up the pollution scheme and then Clark have a personal struggle of knowing that Annie died because he was a greedy fuck, then he'd have to reexamine his morals.  Instead he still felt her death was worth it because of this dumb microbe.  Fucking stupid.  Remove the whole (somewhat confusing, convoluted, complicated) microbe idea and the plot becomes better and more compelling by subtraction.

 

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My brain pretty much shut down in self-defense halfway through the finale so I didn’t even bother processing your first gripe. Shit is terrible man. Fully on board with gripes 2 and 3 as well. I wish they had the director’s commentary track for the finale.

Yeah it got worse as it went along, had that happen in a few shows I've watched recently, I thought how are they going to tie this all up in the last episode, they didn't 

  On 2/20/2024 at 2:05 PM, Mattthegoone said:

I thought how are they going to tie this all up in the last episode, they didn't 

 

Yeah they totally needed to hone their focus a bit and choose one or perhaps 1.5 main struggles, but instead we got like 4 protagonist / antagonist struggles, all half-baked and ALL revealed in the final episode.

Calling back to S1, sometimes less is more.

I saw the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith show.

Interesting take but could've been a movie.

unironically watching old Robot Wars with the missus and getting wrecked on what passes for cider round these parts

watching new season of "for all mankind" - it's so silly... the acting itself, the drama bits, the funny bits, feels so autodated... but I member thinking the same when I started watching the 1st season so... I guess I'll get used to it... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

edit: can't help but think that it's on purpose in homage to 80/90's stuff...

  On 2/22/2024 at 9:59 AM, cruising for burgers said:

for all mankind

this show is terrible. i bailed half way through season 3

I had to stop TD4 after the third episode.

Damn, it's so bad in almost all aspects.

  On 2/22/2024 at 5:38 PM, mlon said:

I had to stop TD4 after the third episode.

Damn, it's so bad in almost all aspects.

I finished the season (grumbling my way through) and it didn’t really get any better. 

Poisonous Liaisons

  On 2/22/2024 at 6:38 PM, J3FF3R00 said:

I finished the season (grumbling my way through) and it didn’t really get any better. 

i watched it all the way through.  it had a lot of issues but kind of passively enjoyed it or decided not to care enough to be mad about it. some people complained that it was like an x-files episode and if you approach that way it was ok. lots of plot holes and nonsense for sure. not really putting it with the TD cannon in my head

  On 2/22/2024 at 2:24 PM, exitonly said:

this show is terrible. i bailed half way through season 3

u still watched about 25 episodes though... xD

  On 2/23/2024 at 12:22 AM, cruising for burgers said:

u still watched about 25 episodes though... xD

yah but i spent most of season 2 and all that i saw of season 3 yelling at the show as it happened. it was so dumb. like these astronauts all hiring their immediate friends and family to be astronauts and then all competing with each other and then they are out of resources on mars but then someone shows up with vodka and then it’s a big party and then astronauts are getting into fist fights on mars. and then that first gentleman guy and his stupid bald cap that makes him look like a klingon. omg what a dumb show