What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I've watched the first four and am loving it. Puppets are so captivating and the political plot is very well done.

Michael Barnes wrote: ...which pretty much sums up the feudal nightmare that is capitalism.

Come for the TV tidbits, stay for the casual Marxism.

Just finished season two of The Deuce. The subject matter is not family friendly, with a focus on prostitution, porn, homosexuality, mob activity, and police corruption in New York City in the '70s. The first season covered '71 - '72, while the second season jumped forward to maybe '76 - '77. Because of the involvement of David Simon, I highly recommend The Deuce to fans of The Wire. There is a similar style, with a sprawling cast of memorable characters, jumping around to different characters from scene to scene, though focusing on a few specific characters overall. The show does a great job of capturing the gritty, dangerous, superficial glamour of Times Square, and the pacing is compelling. I dislike the choice of This Year's Girl by Elvis Costello as the second season theme song. It's chronologically and thematically appropriate, but Costello often has this unpleasant sour braying tone to his songs. Miss You by The Rolling Stones would have been a much better match, and they did use that song briefly in one episode.

Season three starts tonight, and reportedly jumps ahead a few more years into the '80s. I wonder if the theme song will be Angel in the Centerfold, by J. Giles. The Deuce did a remarkable job of visually aging the characters between seasons one and two, and I expect the same this time around. The show respects the viewer enough to show the story instead of directly telling the viewers what is happening, though HBO tacks on a couple minutes at the end of each episode to discuss the themes or the reality that the show is based on.

Michael Barnes wrote: Something else that bears mentioning is how unexpectedly political the show is. There is really quite a pointed message about the avaricious, rapacious ruling class (Skesis) and the ignorant, pacified servile class (Gelfling)...one of the characters questions the practice of giving a tithe/tribute to leaders who already have and control everything while they are left to fight over scraps...which pretty much sums up the feudal nightmare that is capitalism.

I think there's also a strong environmental theme to the show. The Skesis are knowingly and willingly destroying the planet and harvesting its resources (the Crystal of Truth) for their own personal gain. The analogy to the climate change crisis seems pretty pointed to me.

I'm trying to think of the last genre show I saw that was this openly and unapologectically political. Probably Battlestar Galactica??

The Terror is very overtly political in its current season about interment camps for Japanese in the 40s. You kinda have to be in that instance, but it's still a horror show.

I guess I need to get back on board the Dark Crystal train. I bounced pretty hard off of the first 30 minutes. The Lord of the Rings intro was immediately sleep-inducing for me and some of the blocking with the puppets in the close-up non-CG assisted scenes was just awkward as hell. I guess I can push through it... but to me it just felt like falling into a tepid bath of "the shards were distributed to the 7 houses of blahdiblah" with all of the Henson magic just sucked out of the world-building & direction.

My initial reaction is much like Frohike's. We watched the first episode and I gave it a: "Meh." While the puppetry is still fascinating and it's amusing to watch the Chancellor still do his "HrmmmMMMM" thing, there's nothing particularly compelling about bog-standard fantasy questing, especially given that it's a prequel so you know how it ends. I appreciate the political message that it's sending and there is a little bit of world-building intrigue to understand how all seven clans fit in to the end result, but... it's still bog-standard fantasy in most ways. What made Game of Thrones compelling is that it wasn't that. I was pretty tired watching the first episode, so maybe I just wasn't in a receptive mood.

As for The Deuce... Man, I love David Simon's work. The Wire remains the best thing ever put on television. But I watched the first season of this show with a real sense of detachment. The main characters weren't selling me at all. I know it's partially that I'm not a James Franco fan and he's playing two of them. But almost none of the minor characters had the kitschiness that made the world of Baltimore come alive. It was also lacking those dialogue moments that made The Wire so memorable. (That's one thing that made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so subpar for me: Tarantino's normally excellent dialogue was almost completely absent.) After the first season, I never bothered to look back in and how we have HBO turned off.

Frohike wrote: I guess I need to get back on board the Dark Crystal train. I bounced pretty hard off of the first 30 minutes. The Lord of the Rings intro was immediately sleep-inducing for me and some of the blocking with the puppets in the close-up non-CG assisted scenes was just awkward as hell. I guess I can push through it... but to me it just felt like falling into a tepid bath of "the shards were distributed to the 7 houses of blahdiblah" with all of the Henson magic just sucked out of the world-building & direction.

That's a fair criticism. The opening info-dump is pretty rough to sit through. And also totally unnecessary, I might add. There's nothing presented in that giant, clunky block of exposition that you don't learn by the end of the first episode. Exposition is a real art. Explaining the world, its rules, and the basic conflict (even when narrated by Sigourney Weaver) in a wordy, boring 5-minute intro sequence is about as artless a technique as I can imagine. Thankfully, the show improves dramatically after that rocky start.

I really hate the info-dump start to a movie or TV show. You see it in genre shows all the time. I always figured the creators don't have enough faith in the audience to stick with it long enough to figure out the characters/ word/ theme organically through dialogue and characterization. So they feel like they have explain everything up front. I can't think of very many shows that are improved by the presence of the intro info-dump. MAYBE Fellowship of the Ring.

The infodump at the beginning of the show isn't nearly as stilted or interminable as the one at the beginning of the movie.

Instead of waiting up for the first episode of season three of The Deuce, I looked around for other options and found the first season of Babylon 5 on Amazon Prime. I watched a couple of random episodes of Babylon 5's first season back in the day, and I also watched a couple of episodes of Deep Space Nine around that time, and they seemed to be the same show, more or less. So I ignored them both until now.

Babylon 5 did not impress me last night. The space shots look a little rough on my 4K tv, but that is understandable. The stories in the first two episodes were decent, but the acting and dialogue were notably poor even by general TV standards. At least there wasn't a stupid info dump at the start. The setting seemed potentially interesting. The set design and costumes were good, but the music was all 80's C-movie synthesizer and the aliens looked awkward. But Star Trek: Next Generation was pretty disappointing for the first two season before getting really good, so I could see how Babylon 5 could potentially get better over time. Not sure if I will give it that chance, but probably. On the other hand, I don't want to get hooked on season 1 if it turns out that the remaining seasons aren't on Prime. The library might have the later seasons, but the people who check out sci-fi tv shows from the local library seem to be unusually rough on the dvds.

The guys who conceived Babylon 5 presented it to the Paramount guys as a potential spin off for Star Trek. It was rejected, Deep Space 9 was announced three months later. Even the name was similar.

Life in Hollywood.

I find it hard to give Babylon 5 an unbiased assessment these days.
I was a big fan when it aired. Yes, they had a miniscule budget, and CGI was in its infancy, and the first season is pretty rough. But all that being said, it was one of the very first shows to have a series-spanning story arc. Nowadays, that's almost exclusively what we get from a season, but back then it was pretty revolutionary.

I think if you can get out of a critical mindset and let yourself get swept away by the characters and story, you will be rewarded. The character arcs of Londo and G'Kar alone seem worth the effort. But then again, I know I'm biased. Maybe it hasn't aged well, and I'm too nostalgic to notice.

(Oh, and if you do decide to stick with it, skip the last season and just watch the last episode.)

I never watched Deep Space 9 back in the day, but I knew that a lot of Trek fans revered the show. A couple of years ago I found it on Netflix and went ahead and watched the whole series. I liked it. It goes to some interesting places and takes chances that are unusual for a Trek show. I definitely get why people love it.

When asked, "Is Babylon 5 any good," my cow-orker told me this: "Yes, although Season 5 sucks. There's some genuinely good long-form writing in there, though sometimes you have to wade a bit to get to it. Think Trek signal-to-noise but with a series arc that was actually thought out ahead of time and (for the most part) does what it meant to accomplish. There's some hellish-bad acting, but also some very good. Bit of a mixed bag."

I do remember that Babylon 5 had a full-blown story arc, which was relatively rare for back in the day.

You get this second-hand, because at the time Babylon 5 was aired I was sick of aliens == ugly humans (and I don't like it too much now).

ETA: What Gregarius said above, except you're getting it firsthand from him.

A Brief History of Babylon 5 by ChristopherMD

The show was planned as a "novel for television" and the creator wrote about half the episodes in seasons 1-2 and every single episode, except a Neil Gaiman one, for seasons 3-5. The show was cancelled before the 5th season so plot lines were moved up into the 4th season to finish as much of the epic story as possible. Then when they got a 5th season they saved the series finale from the end of season 4 and aired it at the end of season 5.
Personally I think both seasons 1 and 5 aren't very good overall. Season 2, similar to DS9, is where the story really starts going and all the pieces put in place. Seasons 3 and 4 are both solid and best parts of the show. If I were to re-watch I'd only watch seasons 2-4. I actually prefer season 4 ending as a series finale over the episode they replaced.
Also, the show was shot in widescreen even though it originally aired in full-frame. As its a 90's show the effects shots were all done and edited in SD full-frame only. Original graphics files lost so can't be updated to widescreen and would need to be re-done from scratch. So if the CGI looks wonky even for a 90's show this is why.

ChristopherMD wrote: Also, the show was shot in widescreen even though it originally aired in full-frame. As its a 90's show the effects shots were all done and edited in SD full-frame only. Original graphics files lost so can't be updated to widescreen and would need to be re-done from scratch. So if the CGI looks wonky even for a 90's show this is why.

This sort of issue came up in a conversation at work the other day. IIRC, we were told that ST:TNG cost an arm and a leg because of that very same issue - that a lot of effects were done for SD, and a lot of the files were missing. But since Paramount didn't want mobs outside the building with torches and pitchforks, they bit the bullet and fixed what they could.