What TV SHOWS are you watching?

WadeMonnig wrote:

Shellhead wrote: Good Omens was good. I read the book a long time ago, and found it pleasantly amusing but not actually The Queen soundtrack was used effectively, and the closing music for the final episode might have been a new Tori Amos song. Overall, it was the nicest possible show about the end of the world.

Tori posted on Facebook that Neil asked her to re record a song for the soundtrack. I believe she collaborated with someone and did just that.

Makes sense. Tori and Neil have been friends for a long time. She organized a tribute album to him (Where's Neil When You Need Him?) featuring various bands riffing on his stories. Neil in turn wrote an intro for Comic Book Tattoo, a hardcover collection of comic book stories based on various Tori Amos songs.

Joebot wrote:
I assumed there was probably some alteration / fabrication. I'm going to guess that the main character, the professor, is some sort of amalgam of multiple real people. He's the classic "Cassandra" character, where he's the ONLY PERSON who sees the truth, and he has to convince those around him who refuse to see it. It makes for good drama, but real life rarely works like that. It's fine though, because the show is not a documentary. It's a dramatization of real events, so some alterations are expected.

Also, Gorbachev??? Kind of a dickhead!!

Actually the main character is genuine. His female counterpart is the amalgum, representing many other participating scientists.

RolandHemisphere wrote: My current binge is season 3 of Riverdale. When the first season broke I described it as Twin Peaks meets 90210 (the original run, Riverdale even features Luke Perry (R.I.P.)); a teen melodrama with a moody background. Since then the show has blown up into something much more thrilling, camp, weird and melodramatic and it's bonkers and excellent. There's gangs, a teenage fight club, many many shirtless men, tons of family intrigue, and a demonic villain with a game like D&D at the center of the mystery. And at it's heart it stays true(ish) to the Archie comics.

It's a blast to watch.

I've been really enjoying this too. I feel like they are setting up a Sabrina crossover, which I will be all about, especially if plays "Gryphons & Gargolyes" with everyone.

Chernobyl was fantastic. I've read up on it in the past so didn't really learn anything but there's a big difference between reading about something and seeing it play out. Great idea to save the explosion for the last episode because the audience had learned so much about its cause and effects at that point for it to be much more impactful than if they had opened with it.

"Can you explain how an RBMK reactor explodes?" is the best quote related to the hubris of scientists since "Life finds a way".

Started watching Amazon Prime's version of The Tick, season 1, with low expectations.

I never read the comic, but really enjoyed the first season of the cartoon version in the mid-'90s. The quality was uneven after the first season, but there were still some hilarious bits like The Little Wooden Boy. I tried the original live-action tv show from the early '00s, but gave up after a couple of episodes because the show was trying too hard to be Seinfeld. Partrick Warburton was a great casting choice, but everything else about the show was wrong.

So I wasn't excited to see another Tick tv show, but finally decided to give it a try. Wow! It's actually good. Not great, but good. Aside from the Tick, the characters have a surprising amount of depth, and the overall writing is good. Arthur's sister Dot was a drab one-note character in the cartoon, but takes on life here as a moderately attractive blonde paramedic who is also on a roller derby team. Arthur has an interesting back story and is taking meds for mental illness. At one point, there is a very Fight Club moment when Arthur seriously questions if the Tick is real or just the latest manifestation of his mental problems. There is also some wry commentary on superhero comic tropes. One of the main bad guys is played by one of my favorite character actors, Jackie Earle Haley, who has also appeared in Watchmen, Dark Shadows (the movie), and Breaking Away.

My favorite part of The Tick is infectious enthusiasm of the Tick himself. Most superheroes are depicted as either stoic cliches or drama queens who suffer tragic lives as self-sacrificing crimefighters. By contrast, the Tick is pleased as punch that he has superpowers and can use them to fight crime and protect normal people. Whenever he uses his powers, he is bold, confident, decisive, and most importantly, joyful. And somehow that makes a big difference. When the Tick hits a bad guy, it feels good. When an SUV full of thugs is threatening his friend and the Tick knocks over the vehicle and casually shoves it two city blocks away, it's fun and thrilling. When the Tick shouts at the bad guys to STOP BEING EVIL and then shrugs off the resulting bullets, it's a delight. This is so rare in superhero action that it drew considerable attention when Mark Waid opted to write a fairly happy Daredevil run a few years ago.

I, too, enjoyed The Tick for the simple joys you describe. Sadly, they did not renew it for a third season.

Season 2 was really a mixed bag of some things better, some things worse. I didn't like it as much, but The Tick himself was wonderful.

Whilst on the Tick. I have to say I liked Danger Boat a lot even with its unrequited crush on Arthur.

Switched over to Netflix - a new season of Arrested Development has begun! But I hadn't finished the fourth season. So I start episode 2 and there's Alan Tudyk again (I'd forgotten he was Ann?/Anne?/And? 's father.) He was also Mr Nobody on Doom Patrol. He's becoming ubiquitous.

Watched episode 1 of A Touch of Cloth on Amazon Prime. It's written by the creator of Black Mirror, and is a British police procedural led by Batiatus from Spartacus, and humor straight out of Naked Gun. Highly recommended.

Speaking of Black Mirror, the new season dropped today. I watched the first episode. It's good... not amazing. But good.

Thanks for that - A Touch of Cloth is on Prime here in Oz as well. I've always wanted to catch up with it.

Finished the new season (only 3 episodes) of Black Mirror. While none of them are bad, I found eps 1 and 3 average at best.

But episode 2... that one resonated with me. It's got the best acting of all of them, and it's just a much more emotional story. I really liked it.

hotseatgames wrote: A Touch of Cloth

The first episode of this started out REALLY slow and not landing any punches. But about 20 minutes in it found its footing and my boy and I started laughing like hell. Thanks for the rec.

I'm 3 episodes into Dead To Me on Netflix, and this show is a great surprise. It is equal parts dramatic and funny, and really well acted.

Christina Applegate plays a widow who goes to a grief support group, and meets up with the sister from Bloodline (and Freeks and Geeks). They strike up a friendship, and things start to unravel from there.

As a bonus, you get some Ed Asner, who as it turns out, is still alive!

hotseatgames wrote: I'm 3 episodes into Dead To Me on Netflix, and this show is a great surprise. It is equal parts dramatic and funny, and really well acted.

Christina Applegate plays a widow who goes to a grief support group, and meets up with the sister from Bloodline (and Freeks and Geeks). They strike up a friendship, and things start to unravel from there.

As a bonus, you get some Ed Asner, who as it turns out, is still alive!

He was also just in Doom Patrol

Finished season 1 of Dead to Me. Highly recommended!

I watched the first episode of CHERNOBYL. I was actually a little afraid to watch it—I have a few years of experience in nuclear chemistry and worked at a cyclotron for a while (I had Rad Worker II training from the US Govt). I have had 30 kBq of Bk betas on my sole (a target aspirated) and I had to walk home in booties as EH&S decontaminated my shoe.

Don't give RMBK designs a bad rap—they aren't as bad as this makes them out to be. A lot of things had to go wrong and poor decisions get made to get it messed up that badly. That it is mess-upable is not great, but all kinds of things can get messed up and fail catastrophically. As reactors go, they are really very easy to run and have pretty amazing dual use as enrichment/energy facilities. They knew about the design flaws—in fact the whole point of the crazy test they were doing was to work around one of the flaws, but they didn't have the expertise in the room when they were designing and running that test to realize that the conditions they were modeling were so dangerous (i.e., due to neutron poisoning).

What is striking to me is how goddamned ignorant and obtuse everyone seemed to be about the POSSIBILITY of something like this happening and what it would look like if it did. There's a fucking building-wide beam of Čerenkov radiation shooting into the sky—for hours. That's not a little radiation—that is a lot. The metallic taste? The obvious beta burns? These people are so fucked. There's graphite everywhere. That's literally from the control rods, and it's all over the place. There is no way the core is present if the control rods are scattered hither and yon. It took hours for the folks at the site, who should know best, to acknowledge that there was a colossal mistake and they needed to respond appropriately.