What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I introduced my kids to Star Trek last night by showing them "The Trouble With Tribble." it was a big hit, I think I'm about to watch more Trek than anytime since middle school.

san il defanso wrote: I introduced my kids to Star Trek last night by showing them "The Trouble With Tribble." it was a big hit, I think I'm about to watch more Trek than anytime since middle school.

I LOVE that story! What are you going to watch next? How old are your kids?

ThirstyMan wrote: I don't give a fuck how the story was developed, only that the use of Hendrix, as a long lost activation signal, was inspired to cap off an excellent storyline.

The song is by Bob Dylan, ya twat. Fucking foreigners. . .

Shellie and I just watched the entire series. Last time we only made it about halfway through the 3rd season. This time we were determined to make it to the end. Toward the final episodes of the third season we had a fight because I couldn't take it anymore and threatened to bail. Shellie strong armed me into seeing it through with her. Then about the middle of season 4 she was ready to quit and I was like "Fine, I'll just watch the rest by myself!" but she gave in and we made it to the end. In the final analysis, it was totally not worth it. Sure we had fun cracking jokes about the soap opera feel to the final season (All of my Cylons), but ultimately it was just piles of wasted hours. The final episode is one of the stupidest most ridiculous hours of television I have ever seen. IMHO.

Oh, and that BOB DYLAN thing was HORRIBLE!

engineer Al wrote:

san il defanso wrote: I introduced my kids to Star Trek last night by showing them "The Trouble With Tribble." it was a big hit, I think I'm about to watch more Trek than anytime since middle school.

I LOVE that story! What are you going to watch next? How old are your kids?

They are six and eight. I was worried the old production values would be a turn-off, but I realized that they were responding well to the much-worse production values of classic Doctor Who, and I further realized that there was a pile of Star Trek available right on Netflix.

Since I started with a lighter story, the next one I considered was "Balance of Terror," so they could see a more martial episode. They are interested in checking out all of the series though, particularly TNG. My older son actually asked to try out a TNG story, so I might do that next. The nice thing about Star Trek is that you can jump around and pick and choose what to watch without much worry for continuity.

For TNG I was thinking something like "Yesterday's Enterprise," or "Cause and Effect," a personal favorite of mine. Something that is more introductory might be better though, I've read a lot of recommendations for "Measure of a Man."

Definitely open to any suggestions. Almost all of my Trek exposure came when I was an adolescent, and I haven't really dug into it much since then. A lot of episodes that I imagine to be good are actually pretty murky in my memory.

san il defanso wrote: Definitely open to any suggestions.

Well I'm really into TOS, but not much of a fan of anything after that. That said, City on the Edge of Forever is fantastic, but the end made my daughter cry so it might not be great for young kids.

I would recommend Amok Time or Devil in the Dark. Both are more serious, but also great fun.

engineer Al wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: I don't give a fuck how the story was developed, only that the use of Hendrix, as a long lost activation signal, was inspired to cap off an excellent storyline.

The song is by Bob Dylan, ya twat. Fucking foreigners. . .

Shellie and I just watched the entire series. Last time we only made it about halfway through the 3rd season. This time we were determined to make it to the end. Toward the final episodes of the third season we had a fight because I couldn't take it anymore and threatened to bail. Shellie strong armed me into seeing it through with her. Then about the middle of season 4 she was ready to quit and I was like "Fine, I'll just watch the rest by myself!" but she gave in and we made it to the end. In the final analysis, it was totally not worth it. Sure we had fun cracking jokes about the soap opera feel to the final season (All of my Cylons), but ultimately it was just piles of wasted hours. The final episode is one of the stupidest most ridiculous hours of television I have ever seen. IMHO.

Oh, and that BOB DYLAN thing was HORRIBLE!

I remember liking the back half of the series better than most people (though it's been a while). The downside is that there are a lot of standalone episodes, and the show never did those very well. I remember season four being stronger than three, especially when the mutiny becomes a subplot. That's when the political intrigue of the show really came back to the forefront.

The thing is that they show didn't really need to dig into its mythology, but kept insisting on doing it. There was this sense that they really thought the history of the Cylons was what needed to be shared. I don't have a problem necessarily with the more metaphysical aspects in the later seasons, but they rarely did them in ways that seemed like anything but a cheat. They seemed to equate the metaphyisics with a way to get out of narrative jams, which sucks.

BSG was my first foray into serialized television, and it led me toward Lost, which remains one of my favorite shows, so I still have fond memories of it.

engineer Al wrote:

san il defanso wrote: Definitely open to any suggestions.

Well I'm really into TOS, but not much of a fan of anything after that. That said, City on the Edge of Forever is fantastic, but the end made my daughter cry so it might not be great for young kids.

I would recommend Amok Time or Devil in the Dark. Both are more serious, but also great fun.

Great suggestions! Devil in the Dark is a really good one, because my kids love weird aliens like the Horta.

san il defanso wrote:
BSG was my first foray into serialized television, and it led me toward Lost, which remains one of my favorite shows, so I still have fond memories of it.

I think I skipped through the whole season where they were all stuck on fake earth and Balthasar was in charge. But I really liked a lot of the show, especially that giant space battle near the end.

Lost reminded me of my college girlfriend at BYU. She was my first girlfriend really, and I was still so clueless, socially, even at (23?). She seemed so cool, and was a hippy. She made me volunteer for the first celebration of Earth Day. She was mysterious, friendly, exciting and would make out with me! Then when it came time to seal the deal, to really commit, all of the minor flaws turned into major fissures and everything fell apart, like a cardboard playhouse in the rain. The last I heard she was working for a search engine optimization firm and running a mattress blog on the side for the affiliate income. And I teach technical writing.

That's how I feel about Lost.

A lot of people feel that way about Lost. I think it works for me as someone who really cares about the role of storytelling and belief in how we experience the world. But as a mystery show it doesn't provide a lot of conclusions, and as a sci-fi show it doesn't provide much beyond narrative pyrotechnics. It drove me crazy for years that so many people failed to see what I saw in Lost, but now I'm cool with it.

engineer Al wrote: Oh, and that BOB DYLAN thing was HORRIBLE!

Yeah, it was a complete misfit for the show. Suddenly Bob Dylan exists on this other planet and they know his music? When it first happened I thought it was something thought up by a 12 year old dungeon master. I understood the concept, but boy was it ham-fisted.

As for Then-Sag and Now-Sag, Then-Sag was looking for broody sci-fi and not finding it on TV. There had been some, UFO certainly had some grit going on and it was from two decades prior. But all in all TV was not offering much to choose from on that issue short of showing films.

san il defanso wrote: A lot of people feel that way about Lost. I think it works for me as someone who really cares about the role of storytelling and belief in how we experience the world. But as a mystery show it doesn't provide a lot of conclusions, and as a sci-fi show it doesn't provide much beyond narrative pyrotechnics. It drove me crazy for years that so many people failed to see what I saw in Lost, but now I'm cool with it.

I watched Lost season one when I was assigned to Moscow and didn't have any Internet at home, no English language TV, and no access to rentals. So of course we all swapped DVDs with each other. I was hooked and I loved the first season. So I watched the extra features on the disc. In the commentary they admitted that they didn't have any plan, they were just literally making things up the week before each episode in the writers room. I still finished the show years later, but for anyone to say there was the art of storytelling in that show. . .

Sagrilarus wrote: As for Then-Sag and Now-Sag, Then-Sag was looking for broody sci-fi and not finding it on TV. There had been some, UFO certainly had some grit going on and it was from two decades prior. But all in all TV was not offering much to choose from on that issue short of showing films.

I would definitely agree with the sentiment that the bar has been raised (and often met) in modern television. The thing with films is that the whole arc fits in a single showing. With TV the advent of TiVO and DVD boxed sets really changed the landscape. To say that everything before TiVO doesn't meet your now standards is moving the goalposts. Then again when I was younger the always heard saying was that the book is better than the movie. That is no longer the case (except for The Hobbit, that movie sucks).

I don't know if you consider X-Files as having grit. I was never into that series, and it episode mostly stood alone.

mtagge wrote:

san il defanso wrote: A lot of people feel that way about Lost. I think it works for me as someone who really cares about the role of storytelling and belief in how we experience the world. But as a mystery show it doesn't provide a lot of conclusions, and as a sci-fi show it doesn't provide much beyond narrative pyrotechnics. It drove me crazy for years that so many people failed to see what I saw in Lost, but now I'm cool with it.

I watched Lost season one when I was assigned to Moscow and didn't have any Internet at home, no English language TV, and no access to rentals. So of course we all swapped DVDs with each other. I was hooked and I loved the first season. So I watched the extra features on the disc. In the commentary they admitted that they didn't have any plan, they were just literally making things up the week before each episode in the writers room. I still finished the show years later, but for anyone to say there was the art of storytelling in that show. . .

I promised myself that I would not get involved in debates on Lost, because pretty much no one wants to discuss the show in good faith. But here I go again. Please understand this is not directed at you personally, I just have a lot of pent up frustration about this.

The show is about stories and mythology, full stop. It's about how a lot of different people process a lot of amazing things, and those things end up having subjective meaning based on their previous experiences. No one character in the show has the full scope of what is happening, so they fill in the gaps with their own assumptions and interpretations. They pass those on to other characters, who are then colored by everything else, and so forth. All of this is against a background that, whether you believe it or not, was pretty clearly set up in the first season, as early as the second episode. (That's why Locke, in the second episode, talks about a game with two sides, light and dark. That's the central conflict right there.) To really appreciate the show you need to be okay with the subjectivity of it all, and you need to be okay that the ultimate truth of it is essentially unknowable.

More than that it's about how we will respond to those events. Will we pretend they didn't happen, that they were impossible and mere trickery? That's how Jack approaches the show, and it's pretty clearly wrong. But then there is also Locke, who believes so entirely in fate that he absolves himself of every decision he must make in his miserable life. That is also not good, in life or the context of the show. Both extremes are pawns.

It is not a tidy narrative at all. There were some broad strokes laid out early on, but the specifics of how it would play out week to week was not plotted out. This "made it up as they went" card is played constantly by people who don't like the show, as if the highest crime was not planning out every beat as you went. Whether this was the case or not varies wildly from person to person on the show, but enough stuff played out well enough that to me it shows some form of high-level planning.

Here's the thing though...who cares? Even if they made everything up week to week, what does that matter? A lot of people derived so much pure joy from watching it unspool, and in spite of what you may hear, a lot of people even liked how it ended. I get that it didn't work for a ton of people, and that they felt cheated, and I'm sorry that was peoples' experiences. But as someone who is awfully religious, it has forced me to reckon with my own beliefs in a way that is extremely personal, and it has made me a better person by forcing me to consider how deeply held other perspectives are. If I was fooled by the writers, I don't care. Everything that happened, happened.

engineer Al wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: I don't give a fuck how the story was developed, only that the use of Hendrix, as a long lost activation signal, was inspired to cap off an excellent storyline.

The song is by Bob Dylan, ya twat. Fucking foreigners. . .

Shellie and I just watched the entire series. Last time we only made it about halfway through the 3rd season. This time we were determined to make it to the end. Toward the final episodes of the third season we had a fight because I couldn't take it anymore and threatened to bail. Shellie strong armed me into seeing it through with her. Then about the middle of season 4 she was ready to quit and I was like "Fine, I'll just watch the rest by myself!" but she gave in and we made it to the end. In the final analysis, it was totally not worth it. Sure we had fun cracking jokes about the soap opera feel to the final season (All of my Cylons), but ultimately it was just piles of wasted hours. The final episode is one of the stupidest most ridiculous hours of television I have ever seen. IMHO.

Oh, and that BOB DYLAN thing was HORRIBLE!

Jesus Christ. You think I don't know that ??

You're morons. The TV show was great.

Sagrilarus wrote:

engineer Al wrote: Oh, and that BOB DYLAN thing was HORRIBLE!

Yeah, it was a complete misfit for the show. Suddenly Bob Dylan exists on this other planet and they know his music? When it first happened I thought it was something thought up by a 12 year old dungeon master. I understood the concept, but boy was it ham-fisted.

As for Then-Sag and Now-Sag, Then-Sag was looking for broody sci-fi and not finding it on TV. There had been some, UFO certainly had some grit going on and it was from two decades prior. But all in all TV was not offering much to choose from on that issue short of showing films.

WOW! You really didn't understand the concept at all did you? IT WASN'T ANOTHER PLANET