What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I just finished Detectorists -- a British comedy series about two metal "detectorists" searching the countryside for gold. Very low-stakes and gentle with typically subtle English humour. Great stuff, written, directed, and starring Mackenzie Crook (best known as Gareth from The Office [UK]).

Detectorists is a rare treat. Just a fantastic show.

It's incredible. Very funny without a cruel bone in its body.

I generally dislike Star Wars, but the Mandalorian was far enough removed to be enjoyable, but it's starting to intertwine itself with the greater Star Wars lore and I'm not super enthusiastic about that. I guess it was inevitable, but I'll continue to complain while still watching.

Finished both seasons of Stranger on Netflix. Highly recommended. I will be upset if they don't make more.

Essentially a Korean Law & Order, but with each season being a single long story. Season 2 goes in a wildly different direction compared to season 1. This show is good at making you care about the primary characters.

One thing that always amused me is the culture difference as it relates to cop shows. An American show would be "hey they found a body" and they would send two cops. This show is "hey someone stole a car" and 12 cops go running.

DarthJoJo wrote: ....I love Giancarlo Esposito same as anyone, but I don’t like his character. With the notable exceptions of Thrawn and Ysanne Isard, the Empire should be staffed entirely by English and German men. They look down on everyone who isn’t huMAN. They’re the Empire, not the Rainbow Coalition. I’ve heard Squadrons does the same thing, and it annoys me more than it should.

That's a real interesting (and depressing) take. Why are white men the only possible bad guys? It reduces the Empire to a poor Nazi knock-off which culture as a whole seems to be trying to get away from. If all other aspects of pop culture are chasing diversity then why not the bad guys?

In the 70's filming in england it made sense that the casting would skew virtually 100% white male for a space war movie. I'm not really sure if the lack of aliens in the Empire was a deliberate story choice up front or just a limitation of the effects (IIRC the rebellion was 100% human [and white and male aside from Leia] in ANH as well) that later got retconned to be some sort of species elitism.



I'm down with Empire (mostly) equals human in the upper ranks but to segregate it to just white men is straight up B$ in my opinion. Certainly the Sith don't adhere to this AT ALL so not sure why Palpatine would bake this into the Empire springing out of the Republic, which has more echoes of Rome than WW2 europe to me anyway.

jason10mm wrote:

DarthJoJo wrote: ....I love Giancarlo Esposito same as anyone, but I don’t like his character. With the notable exceptions of Thrawn and Ysanne Isard, the Empire should be staffed entirely by English and German men. They look down on everyone who isn’t huMAN. They’re the Empire, not the Rainbow Coalition. I’ve heard Squadrons does the same thing, and it annoys me more than it should.

That's a real interesting (and depressing) take. Why are white men the only possible bad guys? It reduces the Empire to a poor Nazi knock-off which culture as a whole seems to be trying to get away from. If all other aspects of pop culture are chasing diversity then why not the bad guys?

In the 70's filming in england it made sense that the casting would skew virtually 100% white male for a space war movie. I'm not really sure if the lack of aliens in the Empire was a deliberate story choice up front or just a limitation of the effects (IIRC the rebellion was 100% human [and white and male aside from Leia] in ANH as well) that later got retconned to be some sort of species elitism.

I'm down with Empire (mostly) equals human in the upper ranks but to segregate it to just white men is straight up B$ in my opinion. Certainly the Sith don't adhere to this AT ALL so not sure why Palpatine would bake this into the Empire springing out of the Republic, which has more echoes of Rome than WW2 europe to me anyway.

Of course the pool of Empire villains doesn’t have to be so limited, but my reasons are in-canon, for whatever made-up facts in a made-universe matters. One, yes, the Rebellion is just as homogeneous as the Empire in the first two movies, but by Return of the Jedi the the Rebellion briefing and pilots in cockpits includes a variety of people and species. They’re the Alliance. They’re a multitude of peoples coming together for a common cause. The Empire, upper-case E and lower, steamrolls the people and cultures it contains. Lucas isn’t a subtle storyteller. You don’t have to dig that deep to reach the point.

Second, and this only appears in Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron novels so it matters and exists even less now, but huMAN was a literal Imperial policy which makes the positions of Isard and Thrawn the more impressive and lets us know they aren’t a bunch of Ozzels. I guess, by that point, if you’re going to discriminate by species and sex, you may as well go all the way.

The Sith can’t be picky. Either you have midichlorians or you don’t. However, I think it’s telling that of the four Sith we see on screen, three are white men, two of whom are recruited from the Jedi. Given the option, we know whom Palpatine trusts with his teachings.

If you want a diverse group of Star Wars villains, there’s the court of Jabba or the Separatist council/high command/whatever.

I dunno, if you keep the Empire just white men then you are basically saying that they are the only ones capable of running a galactic civilization (since presumably the military and administration of the republic was what morphed into the empire, thus it was overwhelmingly white male humans as well and other races, genders, and species just weren't up to the task).

I'd rather think that Lucas WOULD have had the empire AND rebellion be diverse humans and aliens IF he had the ability to do so, and in later films he does get more diverse (we see very few empire meetings after ANH IIRC).

First Order..... I can see them as a more human centric group.

As for sith, 2 of them are related (Vader and Kylo). Not sure if they technically count as sith but there are several female or non human bad force users in the clone wars, rebels stuff to match what we see of the diverse jedi ranks (many of whom in the films/show are white men as well).

Anyway, moot point since I'm pretty much ready to declare only the OT and just the filoni stuff as canon

Edit-i'll add Rogue One into my canon list, that film was quite good. And maybe Solo if there is ever a payoff for any of it.

I got around to finishing my viewing of Deadwood. The tv show, not the movie that I plan to watch soon. I really enjoyed first season. Second season started out well, though funnier than expected. Than the writers got a little carried away with the flowery language and it dragged the show down in the second half of season two. The best actors could deliver it with a flourish, but most of the rest of the cast seemed to labor at getting those lines out.

Third season, the show took a turn for the worse. They built up Hearst in this huge intolerable villain who was going to get into a big shootout with the rest of the town, but it never happens. Cy Tolliver also nearly crackles with villainy and yet carries on as usual at the end. A troupe of thespians show up and waste a lot of screen time to only matter at one key moment near the end of the series. Most of the cast regulars are left floundering at the end, alive but generally screwed over by Hearst and feeling badly about it. It was a very deliberate choice by the writers but seemed like a calculated fuck you to the audience. I hope that the movie offers a more satisfying resolution.

The Deadwood movie is a nice visit with characters you missed, but I watched it having seen the show back when it was on.

You're spot on with Deadwood's ending: it more or less just stops rather than concludes in any meaningful way. The season 1 & 2 finales were more satisfying. As I recall, there was supposed to be a season 4 so I don't think the writers were consciously choosing to leave fans hanging although it certainly turned out that way.

I assumed that the series would end with a simulacrum of the real Deadwood fire of 1879 since they make several allusions to it but no.

The movie was alright.

Shellhead wrote: ... Most of the cast regulars are left floundering at the end, alive but generally screwed over by Hearst and feeling badly about it. It was a very deliberate choice by the writers but seemed like a calculated fuck you to the audience. I hope that the movie offers a more satisfying resolution[\b].

I would keep my expectations LOW, the movie was fun but was basically just an extended episode in the middle of a "never gonna happen" season 4.

Greg Aleknevicus wrote: You're spot on with Deadwood's ending: it more or less just stops rather than concludes in any meaningful way. The season 1 & 2 finales were more satisfying. As I recall, there was supposed to be a season 4 so I don't think the writers were consciously choosing to leave fans hanging although it certainly turned out that way.

I assumed that the series would end with a simulacrum of the real Deadwood fire of 1879 since they make several allusions to it but no.

The movie was alright.

The cancellation of the show came as a major surprise. They certainly didn’t write S3 thinking it would be the final season. They had even gone so far as to negotiate raises for key actors, then pulled the plug.

I do agree the writing was uneven in S3; the theater troop arc was a serious waste of time. I think they created it to set up the transformation of Swearengens saloon into a theater, which would mimic history.

The movie was OK but I think they took the aging of the characters a bit too far. And we didn’t get enough Mr Wu.

We got the usual amount of Mr. Wu, but I would have liked to have seen more of Mr. Wu throughout the series and less of the thespian troupe of season 3. I was pleasantly surprised by the Deadwood movie and found it to be a decent wrap-up of the series. It was like:

SPOILER