What TV SHOWS are you watching?

RobertB wrote: I also binge watched The Expanse, season 4. This show has gotten better with each season. Even Jim Holden has gone from nails-on-a-chalkboard to a solid meh. If you like hard SF I'd recommend it.

This is encouraging to me. I liked the first three seasons of The Expanse, but by the end of season three, I was sick of Holden's single remaining facial expression.

I watched the entire first season of Dracula on Netflix, even though it only came out yesterday. It's 3 episodes, 90 minutes each. This is from the creators of Sherlock, one of my all-time favorite shows. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite hit those highs.

It is, however, worth watching. The story has some twists that are enjoyable, and Dracula himself has some good lines, particularly when he's being funny. Episode 2 has a very Obra Dinn feel to it. I am not sure how I feel about the ending of episode 3...

My wife and I also finished the Dracula series today. Definitely enjoyable, especially Van Helsing. The ending seemed a little rushed. Overall, worth watching. You can tell it is from Moffat.

Unbelievable is great. It's the best season of True Detective since the first.

charlest wrote: Unbelievable is great. It's the best season of True Detective since the first.

Am I supposed to be confused by this? Is Unbelievable associated with True Detective, or were you being witty and I'm spoiling the joke.

Unbelievable was excellent.

I have been struggling to get to the finish line with Babylon Five, season four. At it's best, the show is moderately good, but too often it feels stale and fairly predictable. I don't dislike any of the main characters, but I have never particularly warmed up to any of them either. I only have a few episodes to go, so I might as well finish season four, but I think that I will skip season five since that is reportedly not as good.

Even so, Babylon Five is light years ahead of Space: 1999, which has literally put me to sleep for 4 out of the first 4 episodes. As a kid, I was so excited by Space: 1999, because it seemed to be the first tv show to dare to follow in the footsteps of Star Trek. I liked their uniforms and the icy plastic sets, and the Eagles looked plausibly realistic as space ships. I still like the theme song, which is a blend of thunderously dramatic orchestral music and a cheesy synthesizer melody. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain don't have impressive acting range, but they both have a decent presence in front of the camera. So why does the show keep putting me to sleep. At first, I wanted to say that it was the lack of action. Lots and lots of talking each episode, similar to The Prisoner, another show of that period from the same production company. But episode four, "War Games", featured a lot of action, property damage, and a death toll of nearly half the population of Moon Base Alpha. And yet I still went to sleep. I think my boredom is a combination of factors. The writing tends to telegraph every plot twist, and dialogue veers from shouting out the obvious to pondering the lack of information about the current crisis. And apparently tv writers hadn't invented the B-plot yet, because every episode has just one plot, and the pace drags until the next time they advance that one plot.

I recently finished season three of Mr. Robot, and it was great. Though very much inspired by Fight Club, the show definitely exists in the long shadow cast by the events of 9/11. Rami Malek is perfectly cast as the brilliant and mentally ill hacker. I recognized him immediately from the The Pacific, the sequel to Band of Brothers. Christian Slater is competent, but thankfully takes on a secondary role in the show. Portia Doubleday is okay but occasionally shows real acting ability. Carly Chaikin is great, and seems like the most New York character in a very New York show. Her mouth seems perfectly shaped for delivering both harsh truths and general profanity. Some great recurring characters, too. The real brilliance of the show is the bold storytelling that consistently delivers exciting twists and shocking revelations. Amazon Prime only offers the first three seasons, with the chance to rent season four episodes, but it turns out that season three somehow ends at both a cliffhanger and a decent stopping point. So even though I enjoyed the show, I'm fine with waiting for the chance to watch season four later at a more reasonable price, even though season four is supposedly the best season.

Sagrilarus wrote:

charlest wrote: Unbelievable is great. It's the best season of True Detective since the first.

Am I supposed to be confused by this? Is Unbelievable associated with True Detective, or were you being witty and I'm spoiling the joke.

Unbelievable was excellent.

Yeah a joke. It really feels like True Detective to me and is much better than seasons 2 and 3 of TD.

My wife is watching the trashy TNT show the Librarians and I kind of like it? It has a very Buffy/Angel crossed with X-files vibe and is very intentionally silly.

Shellhead wrote:

RobertB wrote: I also binge watched The Expanse, season 4. This show has gotten better with each season. Even Jim Holden has gone from nails-on-a-chalkboard to a solid meh. If you like hard SF I'd recommend it.

This is encouraging to me. I liked the first three seasons of The Expanse, but by the end of season three, I was sick of Holden's single remaining facial expression.

I am just wrapping up Season 2 and I really don't like this character, so it seems odd to have the whole damn show turn on him. He's Forrest Gumping his way through every significant event of the last few months, whines incessantly, and is generically less interesting than Dawes, Johnson, Draper, Amos, Naomi, his Mom, Avasarala, Avasarala's bodyguard, a stacked crate, two flashlights, and the Rocinante bings. I'd rather watch Epstein die for another hour than watch Holden hump some other crew member and then hold them sadly.

He's terrible, even worse, in the books too. It's a weird decision to intentionally make him sanctimonious as fuck and naive in an extremely unlikable way. I know in the book they sort of imply it might be because of his religious background but you still have to live with this motherfucker book after book even if there's an in-universe reason for it.

Haven't read the books yet. From watching the show I can't figure out Holden's deal with having several dads to get land rights. Can someone explain like I'm 5 please?

Shellhead wrote: I have been struggling to get to the finish line with Babylon Five, season four. At it's best, the show is moderately good, but too often it feels stale and fairly predictable. I don't dislike any of the main characters, but I have never particularly warmed up to any of them either. I only have a few episodes to go, so I might as well finish season four, but I think that I will skip season five since that is reportedly not as good.

Season 4 has a fine season finale for ending the series. I will note though that the actual series finale at the end of season 5 was originally filmed and meant to be the season 4 series finale. They just held it back when the show got a surprise renewal. So you can skip from the end of 4 to the final episode of 5 and not miss anything.

So land on earth is an incredibly scarce resource in the expanse world, and Holden grew up on like a big farm/ranch in Montana. The reason why it is so valuable is that Earth is overcrowded and has universal basic income, something that is explored in the books but I'm not sure about the show. So the government offers big tax breaks to families who don't have many/any children, because it means they don't have to pay basic and it reduces the resource load on the earth (remember, one earth government). So Holden's family (8) group married, which is sanctioned in the Expanse universe, and combined their DNA and had one of them carry Holden, so it meant they could afford to have this huge by Expanse standards plot in Montana due to the tax implications. He will inherit that land, but one of the big family disappointments is that instead he joins the military and goes on an itinerant life on a freighter when he was really the golden child with so much invested in him. That's the in-book explanation for why he's such a priviliged dickhead. He grew up with 8 parents who all doted on him and invested their futures in him.

I thought somewhere it is implied that Holden's parents are religious but it doesn't look like that's the case from the wiki, so i was wrong there. They are the equivalent of Idaho compound anti-government militia members, though, in that they're sort of gaming the government and are hostile to the government but aren't armed resistance or anything.

Gary Sax wrote: My wife is watching the trashy TNT show the Librarians and I kind of like it? It has a very Buffy/Angel crossed with X-files vibe and is very intentionally silly.

Have her queue up Leverage next.

Gary Sax wrote: He's terrible, even worse, in the books too. It's a weird decision to intentionally make him sanctimonious as fuck and naive in an extremely unlikable way. I know in the book they sort of imply it might be because of his religious background but you still have to live with this motherfucker book after book even if there's an in-universe reason for it.

I thought after a couple of books of him fucking things up, that Holden had learned his lesson. From what I remember of the books, one of the themes are that some things shouldn't be mindlessly blabbed to the world. However, those are very rare, and secrets should be rare.

For me, Idiot Holden in the show wasn't as much of a problem as the problem being that IMHO the actor wasn't any good. He either seems to have gotten better (not good, mind you, but better), or the writers and producers have figured out how to write around his weak spots.