What TV SHOWS are you watching?

Two new shows on Netflix:
The Longest Night: A gang of mercenaries attacks a psychiatric prison in order to kidnap a serial killer. Has one of the stars of Narcos. Have watched two episodes and it is very good!

Resident Evil: watched the first episode. Writing is very hacky. I'll give it a bit more, but I'm not feeling this one.

The Terminal List - If you want to see Chris Pratt literally disembowel a bad guy, this is the place. Grim military/revenge/competence porn. There's nothing wrong with that if that's your thing (raises hand), but you get a lot of it. Maybe too much of it. Plot's kind of weak, acting runs from mediocre to okay.

If you're a connoisseur of that sort of thing, you'll like it. Otherwise you'll have a better time watching Taken, John Wick, and Reacher.

If you have a BritBox streaming subscription then you've probably already seen Year of the Rabbit. Imagine an absurdist, bawdy, crude, deadpan comedy send-up of Victorian police shows. The main character is the boozy inspector who breaks all the rules, along with a foppish upperclass twit sidekick, and brainy black girl who's desperate to be police but her white (never explained) police captain dad won't let her.

Some fun scenes from Season 1:
* a flamboyant version of The Elephant Man (the same historical Joseph Merrick) runs a troupe of sub-standard stage performers
* when a criminal is finally cornered and forced to confess, he attempts to kill himself but realizes he's out of bullets, at which point Rabbit (main character cop) helpfully lends him his gun, for which he thanks him and promptly blows his brains out with a revolver in his mouth, splattering brains all over Rabbit's partner
* Rabbit apparently has a horny sniper ex-gf who engages in a series of comedic rough sex exploits as they both attempt to identify on a map of London where the real sniper has been hiding
* a ranting street speaker whose increasingly comical rightwing rant inevitably comes around to blaming immigrants
* a series of street-urchin children selling increasingly bizarre food ("Twig sandwich! Get your twig sandwich here! Treat the kids!")
* every story starts with the 20th-century cop trope of every cop in the police station meeting room while the captain explains the crime and hands out the assignments, at which point one of the stock characters (never named, never otherwise referenced) utters his catchphrase "Looks like someone needs to shit or get off the pot!" at which point everyone just stares at him
* Inspector Rabbit learns how to use a phone when the mystery kidnapper calls ("Whoever I'm talking to is likely on the other side of this wall." "Why?" "Because that's where the wire goes.")

The first episode/pilot is probably enough viewing to see if you're interested, but the remainder of the 6-episode 1st season is worth a watch. If you're into it, it's hysterical, but I can only imagine some nice old granny tuning in expecting a period piece British murder mystery and getting a 6'6" British Indian character attempting to tuck his cocknballz to impersonate a woman because the police force has no women because the captain continues his insistence that "Women can't be police!!"

I watched Tokyo Vice. It's fine and a good watch. But pretty by the number crime boss/Yakuza stuff. Can't help but think that the show should really be a noir about Ken Watanabe's character and *not* insist on the journalist white guy the show is sort of about (based on his book).

Life was going a bit too well and we were a little too happy so the wife decided to start watching Euphoria on HBO. Talk about a way to put a downer on your evening, this is, 4-5 eps in at least, an extremely nihilistic show about teens abusing themselves and others through drug abuse, sexual abuse, blackmail, revenge porn, etc. About the only thing it is lacking is a school shooter storyline but I imagine that is coming. Anyway, take 30 years of the worst stuff high school drama imaginable and compress all of it into a group of 5 kids and this is what you get.

Zendaya does her dreamy slo-mo deadpan trademark style with a few moments of energy. This role is well suited to her. The support cast is the typical modern day menagerie casting but since it's HBO there isn't really a bad apple in the bunch. This COULD have been a bottom of the barrel CW level show, but excellent cinematography, sharp editing, and skilled actors keeps it rolling despite me really not liking anything on screen. Strangely addicting, which is a weird thing to say about a show with so much addiction.

On the flip side Peacemaker, also on HBO, is like a needle of narcan smashed right into your chest. Bombastic, ludicrous, hyper.....EVERYTHING, it is the perfect counterpart to Euphoria. John Cena astounds and there are some other people around him but who really cares? James Gunn shows that he is the master of pairing slapstick with violence and makes sure it all serves the story, something Taika Waititi, much less the folks who do The Boys, could learn from.

RobertB wrote: competence porn.

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND, 4pt docu-series on Netflix, based on the book from a few years ago.

Mostly good. Spoiler, it’s not how to change your mind as in, deciding to talk about your feeling today etc., but how to use psychedelics in the context of guided professional therapy to really change how your mind works on a deep level. Each episode covers one of four drugs: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, peyote. The episodes cover the history, how it became illegal, some case studies for how it works, and sometimes the host takes some.

Overall they are good, although the tone is consistently didactic: the show is convinced that psychedelics have huge potential for treating a wide variety of intractable mental problems. I was mostly in agreement with this going in, but it would have been nice to see some arguments from the other side just for a contrast. I am suspicious of any claimed panacea.

There’s also some nice sensitivity towards the native shamans of peyote and psilocybin. The shaman who shared the latter with western scientists regretted it and had a bad end. The current tribes who use peyote see it as a cultural component of medicine, and do not want people outside their culture using it (although they support synthetic derivatives being used to help outsiders).

I recommend it. It’s good but not great, but the promise of spurring wider acceptance of use in therapy has a tremendous potential to help people.

The book was a great read, by the way.

Cranberries wrote:

My sentiments exactly.

I just watched The Last Man on Earth

Season 3 episode 10

About the origins of a virus that kills most of the population because a vaccine was never developed. It aired in 2017 and was the scariest thing I’ve seen in a long time, even though it starred Kristen Wiig. Thinking about what might have happened freaks me out. I'm going to show it to my science fiction class in the Spring.

jason10mm wrote: On the flip side Peacemaker, also on HBO, is like a needle of narcan smashed right into your chest. Bombastic, ludicrous, hyper.....EVERYTHING, it is the perfect counterpart to Euphoria. John Cena astounds and there are some other people around him but who really cares? James Gunn shows that he is the master of pairing slapstick with violence and makes sure it all serves the story, something Taika Waititi, much less the folks who do The Boys, could learn from.

On paper, Peacemaker is my kind of show and Euphoria is definitely not my kind of show. In reality, I loved both shows. Make sure that you watch the two Euphoria specials that aired between seasons one and two, especially the amazing one featuring Zendaya. Euphoria goes a bit off the rails in season two, but you will probably still enjoy it. There is supposed to be a season three, but not for a couple of years, which is problematic for a show about high school kids.

Season three of The Boys ended well, with a big confrontation that we have all been waiting for, only bigger and more chaotic than expected. It closed with multiple scenes that I found moving, while leaving the door all the way open for a season four.

My ex had an uncanny radar for good tv and movies that I otherwise would have missed, so I got to see a really funny Mexican show on HBO called Los Espookys in 2019. Yesterday, I found a potentially similar Mexican show called Visitors, but it just isn't as funny. Visitors has an interesting premise, which is that two alien spaceships got into a late-night battle above a small town in Mexico, and the survivors continue a covert conflict on the ground. The protagonist is a rookie cop who was an unsuccessful game shop owner, and he still hangs out with his gamer friends/customers. His realtor wife is cheating on him. His fellow cops don't like him because his crazy grandfather was the previous police chief. His ex-girlfriend just moved back to town after her divorce, and is a science teacher who also does freelance labwork for the police. There are a couple of federales who appear to be a direct parody of Mulder and Scully. Everything is dubbed in English, but the gags just aren't funny.

TL;DR watch Los Espookys and don't watch Visitors.

I stayed up too late last night watching season three of The Umbrella Academy. I haven't finished it. I really appreciate the weirdness, but underneath the bizarre frosting it seems like another time travel paradox plot, which are not in short supply right now.

Finished all 6 episodes of The Longest Night on Netflix. I thought it was all going to wrap up... but no. It needs a second season.