What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I've been enjoying Rome, but have held off on the last few episodes because I'm not ready to see the end yet. So I resumed watching the original Star Trek, and just by coincidence go to the episode "Blood and Circuses," featuring an alien world with its own Roman Empire and late 20th century technology. It's a normal quality episode of Star Trek, but bothered me even as a kid because the coincidental development of another Roman Empire (complete with a literal city named Rome) on an alien world is absurd. This time around, I realized that there was a potential explanation that the writer should have used. There was an early second season episode Who Mourns for Adonais? that featured a powerful alien who was worshipped on ancient Earth as the god Apollo, along with others of his race who were collectively considered the Greco-Roman pantheon. They left Earth long ago, and might have stopped at this Blood and Circuses planet to introduce them to Greco-Roman culture.

Overall, the quality of this second season of Star Trek was more consistent and also better than first season, but there were quite a few episodes where they seemed to skimp on budget by using costumes and sets from other productions by the same studio. There was a gangster episode, a Nazi episode, and a few other episodes where the aliens just happened to look and dress like 20th century Americans, including one episode that literally takes place in America in the late '60s. It's been a long time since I last watched the original series, so one fun part is during the opening minutes of each episode, when it isn't clear to me yet which story will be told. The conflict between Bones and Spock is more heavy-handed than I remembered, and Shatner's Kirk is less hammy and more charismatic than I expected.

Dragged my feet for a while, but finally got around to Search Party, and it has such a fine line in awkward/dark comedy that I'm sorry I delayed. Exactly what I need currently.

Outlander - my wife is watching it again for the third time? Fourth time? I'm watching more of it than I planned, mostly to play MST3K with my daughter, and to get her raving about how useless Roger is. You'd think you could come up with some scheme to make some scratch in the 18th Century if you knew you were going back there, like inventing the zipper or the Minie' ball.

Stranger Things - Wife, daughter, and mother-in-law just finished watching it. It's good, but for me not "watch three times" good.

And since Covid has stopped making new episodes of Jeopardy, they're showing reruns. They just finished showing the Tournament of Champions where James Holzhauer won, then showed the first Alex Trebek Jeopardy. Back then they didn't have the lockout timer, and you could hear contestants hitting the buzzer as fast as they could read the question.

My wife loves Outlander but I've managed to avoid it.

I've been watching The Leftovers. My god this is good.

My wife and I are nearly through Cursed on Netflix. It is a woman-centered retelling of the Excalibur legend. It has been more enjoyable that I had figured going in. I was prepared for a CW level show. Definitely better than that.


Nimue is the focus of the story and it brings in different parts and interpretations of various Arthurian tales. Part of the fun is guessing which story did an aspect of the tv show stem from. The actor playing Nimue was the lead in 13 Reasons Why and does really well. Merlin is played by the guy who was Floki in Vikings and essentially reprises the Floki role, but with more of an English accent. We like to think of the director instructing him to 'not be Floki' during the read throughs, but the actor just can't, so they end u rolling with it after much rolling of eyes.


I have a gripe, but it may spoiler some things, so I will keep it to myself for now. It will be interesting to see how they play this tale out and if it even ends with a round table, grail questing, and encounter with Mordred.

I've watched the first two episodes of In The Dark on Netflix and am reasonably optimistic, at least for the first season. It's a murder mystery and my guess is that it's solved at the end of season 1, so the follow-on seasons may or may not end up on my list.

This is a blind woman that starts a murder investigation because the police won't. To add to the mix she's a pretty awful person, but the show manages to keep her just sympathetic enough to keep you on board. Pretty long odds from the sounds of it, but it's been interesting.

Have been watching The Dresden Files, a show about a supernatural private investigator. It is like watching Constantine if you replaced the sly antihero John Constantine with a nice guy from Chicago. Moderately entertaining, but I would trade it in a heartbeat for a second season of Constantine.

I need to pick up the books again. Harry Dresden screams Author Avatar, but I was entertained.

The old syfy (sorry, sifi back then) channel show or is there a new one on some streaming service?

I watched the show well before ever reading the books so I was never bothered by Murphy not looking book correct or the hockey stick or any of it. I don't recall much though, wouldn't mind a rewatch.

I do like the books but they take a bit to hit their stride. The first time you read one and get bored then stop. They keep heading down the fae rabbit hole and farther from noir as they go.

Hah, watching Dresden now on some random streaming service. What a fun show. I would have sworn it was early 2001-2002 not 2007.

Wonder if they bring the red court and all that stuff. This was a one season, if that, show IIRC.

So I just binged all 12 eps of Dresden Files. Damn that was a fun show. So many Syfy actors show up. It was a lot more violent than I remember, every ep usually has 3-4 deaths. A lot of Dresden staples like the Red Court make a token appearance in what is basically a monster (and a new Harry paramour) of the week format, but by the end we get a glimpse of the serialized show that might have been.

The show is oddly low budget, like I don't think you EVER see anyone actually drive or even be outside. It looks to be almost 100% sound stage and only 3-4 sets at that (maybe it filmed over the winter?). Magic effects are laughable, even by 2007 standards. But that really adds to the charm and oddly, keeps the show from feeling too dated because the hokiness of it all gives it a "coulda been made in the 80's, 90's, or 00's" vibe. Go watch any show of today with movie quality production values and you wonder why we really need it.

Gregarius wrote: It's also a documentary about obsessive behavior, both in the serial killer (obvs) and in the true crime writer. I think they've been planting seeds for this throughout. There's some speculation that she died from a drug overdose due to her inability to stop focusing on the book.

They actually went there in episode five. McNamara died of a combination of a heart condition and an overdose of Adderall, Xanax, and fentanyl. But ultimately, she died of obsessive behavior that drove her to the overdose. It's a shame. She had a loving husband and young daughter, and her publisher took away her deadline pressure and said that she could take as much time as she needed to finish the book.

There is just one episode of I'll Be Gone In The Dark to go, and I have mixed feelings about watching it. I am hopeful that the final episode will focus a lot on the killer, since they actually caught him. But this show has consistently disappointed me because I want it to be about the killer and it's actually about a "citizen detective" who got obsessed and died while writing a book about a serial killer. Episode five spent so much time on McNamara, and while she is an interesting person, she isn't interesting enough to warrant a mini-series. This episode did reveal an additional motivation for McNamara, involving a former boss who may or may not have raped her, but Oswalt was understandably skittish about the topic, so viewers are left with the odd impression that McNamara doesn't even know if she was a victim. Uh, okay.

In my opinion, McNamara was never going to solve this case, even if she was still alive today. She admitted that she was a perfectionist, and in my own experience, perfectionists have a serious problem with finishing major projects. She did bring a fresh and intelligent perspective to analyzing the individual cases, but had surprising gaps in her understanding of serial killer pathology. For example, this killer had a thing for taking certain types of objects from his victims, like single cufflinks. So McNamara thought it would be clever to search eBay listings to see if he tried to sell any of these cufflinks. But serial killers don't take things like cufflinks for their monetary value, they take them as trophies and would be very reluctant to part with their trophies. Besides, who would buy just one cufflink from a pair? The DNA testing that ultimately caught the killer was the obvious approach once the technology and data became available, and it was almost inevitable that he would eventually be caught due to the sheer volume of DNA he left behind.

Has anybody else watched Hollywood? I'm curious about what other people felt about the ending.

It sort of fell off the cliff of reality at the end.

Re-watched season 1 of True Detective. Still fantastic stuff. The way Marty looks at Rust as he is driving always cracks me up.

Also watched a Netflix anime called Japan Sinks 2020. It's about a family struggling to survive as earthquakes cause Japan to... sink. It's pretty good... depressing as hell quite often. Definitely not the feel good hit of the summer.

RobertB wrote:

dysjunct wrote: Finished season one of AVATAR with the spawn. I never watched this when it originally aired and then when the movie came out and got panned, I figured it was just another kids' show. But I thoroughly enjoyed this. It addresses some pretty heavy subjects -- war, refugees, genocide, etc. -- but always in an age-appropriate way. Great characters; the "bad guys" are some of the most sympathetic villains I've ever seen in a cartoon. Plus as a martial arts nerd it's fun to see the various moves used in the bending scenes. Ba gua for the win.

You're in for a treat then. S2 is better than S1, and S3 is even better. Screwing up the live-action version of that was a crime.

Hitting the home stretch; only a few more episodes left of S3. I am honestly blown away by the quality of the storytelling, characterization, and world-building. The pacing is great too -- some episodes are high-octane adventure, some are slower character drama, some are comic hijinks. Such a relief, especially when binging 3-4 episodes in between bathtime and bedtime with the spawn. So many shows are written to always try to out-adrenaline the previous episode, and it just gets tiresome.

Wife is currently watching CURSED, yet another Arthurian reimagining. It's forgettable. On one hand, I get that the way myths survive is to constantly reinvent themselves for each new generation, but this one rankles me for various reasons, most of them probably petty.