What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I liked Community quite a bit, I think it will stick and decades from now will still be remembered.

The "drowface" thing somehow being a blackface offense really ticked me off. I'm not sure how or why "orcs and drow are black people" was allowed to survive as a viable idea but it anchored itself into the consciousness for the worst. It basically makes almost all screen accurate cosplay pretty problematic.

Always Sunny had the Lethal Weapon ep pulled as well, right? That IS blackface but damn, that was a good ep and I dont think it was mean-spirited or demeaning to anyone (other than Richard Donner perhaps).

Gary Sax wrote: Everyone I know raves about it, but I just never felt any actual heart in Community. It was all basically just over the top cartoon characters to me, but lots of people I know say it has genuine character moments and such.

I don’t know if I’d say Community had heart. It definitely wasn’t a Parks and Recreation where the characters made each other better. Honestly, if Dan Harmon wasn’t misanthropic, he was at least cynical. What heartfelt moments there were, though, Donald Glover was there for them.

It’s greatest strength was its flexibility. You never knew what you were going to get with Community, be it a school dance or My Dinner With Andre homage or fake clip show or paintball, and it sold them. It was triumphantly weird. The closest thing I know to be a live-action Simpsons.

I accidentally started binging How I Met Your Mother recently. The episodes are relatively short, interesting, and funny, and the first season is exceptional. Based on my previous viewing, the show gradually becomes a little more serious and a little less funny with each season, and I think I bailed after the 6th season.

More than most shows I can think of, How I Met Your Mother suffered from its success. Beyond any individually bad decisions like the mind-numbingly terrible series finale or how awful Barney is post #MeToo or the usual afflictions visited upon a series that goes too long, the gimmick of Ted telling these stories to his children turns from charming to creepy as it devolves into a list of all the women he had sex with and how miserable the friends often were to one another. It could have worked for a few years, as warnings to the children, but by the seventh or eighth season, it’s psychopathic.

It’s too bad. For a while, How I Met Your Mother was the clear successor to the Friends throne of 20-somethings doing their thing due to the structure and editing of many of the jokes and ringer cast.

Watched the final episode of what is unfortunately probably just the first season of Invincible. It was ultra-violent, vile, stupid, and ugly. I don't consider it to be a valid form of entertainment, for featuring a scene where a devoted father literally smashes the teeth out of his teenage son's mouth in the midst of a brutal battle. Even when that abruptly leads to a touching flashback of said father cheering this same son in a little league game when the son is young enough to still be concerned about the tooth fairy.

We finally get the truth about Omni-Man, and it honestly isn't good enough. He has a childish lack of morality that could almost be based on an idiotic distortion of Nietzche's writing. This series is ultimately ruined by Kirkman's lazy writing. He could have built up to this moment with more subtlety and made a stronger and more interesting argument by having Omni-Man talk about our own historic atrocities. But instead, we get a revolting horror show of dismembered civilians and oceans of blood. If I ever see anybody let young children watch this show, I will be calling CPS.

I like comic books and cartoons as a medium. I like action, horror, heroics, science-fiction... and I have a dark sense of humor. Invincible should be right up my alley, and yet it most definitely is not. I can't recommend it to anybody, except maybe someone who likes snuff flicks, or at least Ichi the Killer.

The Handmaid's Tale has finally returned (from COVID delay.) We've only watched the first two episodes of season 4 (four have been released so far) and were a bit caught out.



I'm still enjoying the series, although I'm becoming kind of leery/weary of the messiah complex being assigned to June. I like that we have a strong, female character being the leader, but the outright deference being shown to her every impulse and decision is kind or breaking the suspension of disbelief in a few moments.

Yeah, that last ep of Invincible might have been the end for me. I guess blood red is the cheapest color to animate maybe? I feel for the poor animators that had to draw that stuff, though I guess I've seen worse.

The galactic aspect of the show is really weird. On the one hand Earth seems totally oblivious to the Vultrimite nature but on the other hand rando bad guys can call up Battle Cat.

Omni-man needs to work on his sales pitch. Earth seems to be swarming with near peer powered folk to a Vultrimite unless Omni-man was really just pulling his punches the whole time. I can't see us being a total push-over at times but then there are moments when we are so weak Earth doesn't even seem worth the effort to conquor.

DarthJoJo wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: Everyone I know raves about it, but I just never felt any actual heart in Community. It was all basically just over the top cartoon characters to me, but lots of people I know say it has genuine character moments and such.

I don’t know if I’d say Community had heart. It definitely wasn’t a Parks and Recreation where the characters made each other better. Honestly, if Dan Harmon wasn’t misanthropic, he was at least cynical. What heartfelt moments there were, though, Donald Glover was there for them.

It’s greatest strength was its flexibility. You never knew what you were going to get with Community, be it a school dance or My Dinner With Andre homage or fake clip show or paintball, and it sold them. It was triumphantly weird. The closest thing I know to be a live-action Simpsons.

I think I'd say to watch the first three seasons and call ita day (or a week?). If you go past those, just pick out the highest rated episodes via IMDB. I ended up watching the entire fourth season, thinking the fifth was the non-Harmon, but am only watching a handful of episodes from the fifth. Mediocre Community is still better than a lot of shows, but as many bitter fans have pointed out, it gets less character-driven over time.

Y'all are a bunch of pussies. It's cartoon blood, people. Sweet Christmas.

A Lad Insane wrote: Y'all are a bunch of pussies. It's cartoon blood, people. Sweet Christmas.

I believe the proper way to state that is, "Y'all need to grow a pair."

I laughed.

Finished The Falcon and the Winter Solider. Kind of underwhelmed. I think it comes down to two things. One, the characters were spread too thin. Sam was clearly the lead, but it wasn't his show in the same way WandaVision was Wanda's. Plenty of screentime that ultimately felt wasted was spent on Barnes and Walker's stories. I know they were going for a buddy cop vibe with Sam and Barnes, but he was so inessential to the plot that the show might have been stronger without him. They could have dropped the PTSD and amends storyline completely, and instead really focused in on the story of living up to the legacy of Captain America that Sam and Walker shared. I guess I did like that they remembered Sam worked in the VA with vets and strengthened his compassion as a character trait alongside cool and charming. There's that.

Two, the race theme. If you're going to do it, do it. If you're going to include a standoff with the cops and a storyline reminiscent of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, earn it. Don't shrug it off with Sam telling a senator to "Do better." The scene with the black super soldier really annoyed me. I loved the actor's voice and presence, but he goes off on how there could never be a black Captain America while Sam soldiers on. It felt so self congratulatory. You could see the Disney crew standing behind him nodding gravely, thinking "They said it couldn't be done, but we did it. We made Captain America black. We are brave."

It's probably asking too much for Disney and Marvel to say anything substantial on race. Even if they tried, the speed of current events would probably make it look dated by the series premier, but then all this talk on race became just so much window dressing, of no greater importance than the new uniforms.

I didn't hate watching it, but I am glad WandaVision came first and got me excited for this experiment in expanding the universe.

Finished watching Vincenzo on Sunday. Essentially, it's a Korean national adopted by an Italian couple, who eventually becomes a ruthless consigliere for an Italian Mafia. He's forced to return to Korea because of a falling out with the new head of the family, but he's got a backup plan... A secret, booby trapped safe filled with gold of a Chinese gangster who recently died, which is located in a building run by one of his associates.

He needs to get the gold out, but complications ensue. It's almost Shakespearean in a way, lots of violence, drama, and a dash of silly humor to keep things light. But, man... When you get on his bad side, you usually don't walk away from the encounter alive.

I highly recommend it.

My wife (and I, sort of) have been watching Mare of Easttown and I never really noticed the Pennsylvania accents, until I watched the SNL parody the other day and now it is all I can hear.

No real comments about the show; I’m not too interested in detective shows despite (probably because of) my wife watching all of them.

I've been watching Mare of Easttown. I am enjoying it almost solely because of Kate Winslet. It comes off as an attempt at a BBC-style detective show, but of course not as good, since British cop shows are almost always better than American ones. It also has hints of The Killing, but again, not as good.

The performances in Mare are all very good.

No chance to be as good as The Killing without Holder.