What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I really liked Poker Face (well, most of the episodes; there were a couple clunkers), but I never thought I was supposed to be looking for clues. I just enjoyed watching how she figured it out, just like Columbo, which it is obviously an homage to. There's no mystery for the audience to solve if we see it all happen from the start.

Jackwraith wrote: Totally fair. (It's actually a "cold open" because there's no "warming you up" with credits, basic premise, etc.) You're right in that not every story needs to start that way. I just need there to be something compelling..

100% agree with you when the cold open is used to engage the audience (why did character B shoot character A, we all know she would NEVER do that?) with a twist to the story. But I just watched a flick called.....damn, already forgot, anyway about a town of vampires, zombies, and humans that have to work together to defeat an alien attack. They used a cold open but since we had no idea who anyone was it was hard to understand anything and the movie never really used the "vamp girl was eaten by the zombie guy in the opening" to frame the characters previous interactions in any meaningful way. It was just a shot of sugar into the system to keep you watching an otherwise turgid slog of set-up to get back to that opening scene.

I generally prefer the Bond style of "end of a previous episode you never get to see" opening if you really need to spice up a slow first act. That does help establish or advance character, give us some world building, or at least throws in some sex/action/gore/whatever without the need or expectation that it will pay off later.

I am nearly all caught up with my binge-watching. I have a few episodes of Pennyworth left, and few seasons of Friends to go before I stop (and I can stop any time I want, dammit), and that's about it. I felt completely neutral about the first episode of The Last of Us. I'm looking forward to True Detective season 4, but don't know when it will debut this year. Might be a good time to drop HBO Max and try something else, or maybe just spend more time outside this summer.

I've watched all four episodes of Citadel, and for me it kind of sucks. Action is awesome, but the rest is kind of bad. Jason10mm has hit some good points, in that the show doesn't really know what it wants to be. Stealing some of what he had to say: is it a spy rom-com? Is it kind of campy a'la Roger Moore James Bond? Is it The Bourne Identity with a bigger dash of "Trust no one"? I might stick with it for a couple more episodes, but I wouldn't feel all that cheated if I didn't see another one.

Me, the missus, and the mother-in-law have been watching Longmire. It's comfort food for a late-stage Boomer like me. Enough of an arc to keep me paying attention, plus the Murder of the Week.

Started watching Rick and Morty season 6, and it is somehow even more outrageous, transgressive, and funny than the previous seasons or anything else on television.

Still watching Friends and it hit an unfortunate milestone about midway through season 3, when the writers threw most of the laughs out the window in favor of major relationship drama between Ross and Rachel. Too many modern sitcoms get ruined like this, when the writers and the actors get too wrapped up in the characters and decide to play it seriously instead of continuing to provide the expected humor. Up until this point, I somehow managed to catch every single episode back in the day. Now I am seeing unfamiliar episodes, so apparently I lost interest in this show for the same reason, over 25 years ago. The post-breakup episodes are still mostly comedy, but the ongoing post-breakup tension between the characters is not amusing.

RobertB wrote: Me, the missus, and the mother-in-law have been watching Longmire. It's comfort food for a late-stage Boomer like me. Enough of an arc to keep me paying attention, plus the Murder of the Week.

I really dug Longmire, though it eventually succumbs to the same sort of writers rot that Shellhead mentions about Friends.

The wife has lots of family in Las Vegas (New Mexico) where a lot of Longmire exteriors, particularly around his sheriffs office, were filmed. Katie Sackhoff is on my Hall Pass (and I think she was dating/married to Karl Urban around the time of the show, he is on my wife's pass) so I'm kinda surprised we never made a visit to that town while the show was there. She has kinfolk that played background characters though. Swayze had a ranch around there as well, I wonder if he would have popped up on the show had he lived longer.

Damn, now I'm bummed out and want to watch Steel Dawn....

Once you know it's all shot in New Mexico and if you've been there, Longmire is very funny because it is obviously New Mexico.

I've been to Longmire's cabin several times in Valles Caldera.

After I got done watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the next thing in my list that would last a while is Alice in Borderland. I don't remember where I got the recommendation for it (maybe here?) but it's a post-apoc style story, which is always at least a "look in for a while to see if it hooks" for me. I'm in the middle of the second season right now so I guess you could say that it hooked me, in principle, but I only watch it when I'm exercising in the morning (There's no football on at quarter to seven in the morning on a weekday, strangely enough) and probably never would have watched it of my own accord if I was actively looking for something. So, interesting enough to watch while on the elliptical, but not interesting enough to see what happens in the episode I stopped halfway through that evening when I get home from work.

It's about the city of Tokyo being basically drained of people except for a few thousand that are forced to play these lethal games based on playing cards. Each suit is a different type of game and the difficulty ramps up the higher the card number. Anyone who refuses to play when it's their time gets eliminated by laser-armed drones. It's dubbed instead of subtitled, which can only add to the general cheesiness of it and a lot of it is shot through a blue lens to give everything a dark/otherworldly kind of feel. It's not really interesting at all and there's maybe one character out of a couple dozen who seems in any way compelling, but I'm still watching it to kind of see how they do the big reveal of who's responsible for this situation. I guess it's better to have something that I'm only watching for distraction purposes, so that I don't feel compelled to finish it sooner and, consequently, not have something to watch next time. Or I could find something else that's genuinely interesting, I guess. I also don't get the Alice theming. Down a rabbit hole, I guess? Playing cards are a vague attachment to the Queen of Hearts and they couldn't think of anything better? The second season is more like the Royal Flush Gang, in that each face card game is run by a unique individual.

jason10mm wrote:

RobertB wrote: Me, the missus, and the mother-in-law have been watching Longmire. It's comfort food for a late-stage Boomer like me. Enough of an arc to keep me paying attention, plus the Murder of the Week.

I really dug Longmire, though it eventually succumbs to the same sort of writers rot that Shellhead mentions about Friends.

The wife has lots of family in Las Vegas (New Mexico) where a lot of Longmire exteriors, particularly around his sheriffs office, were filmed. Katie Sackhoff is on my Hall Pass (and I think she was dating/married to Karl Urban around the time of the show, he is on my wife's pass) so I'm kinda surprised we never made a visit to that town while the show was there. She has kinfolk that played background characters though. Swayze had a ranch around there as well, I wonder if he would have popped up on the show had he lived longer.

Damn, now I'm bummed out and want to watch Steel Dawn....

Yeah, we're in the middle of S4 and it's starting to stumble a little bit. Henry as Reservation Batman scenes make me start doing my MST3K thing. At the very least it feels line a launching pad for a spinoff that never happened.

Katie Sackhoff is okay. She's acting rings around everyone on the show except for Peter Weller. Robert Taylor is perfectly cromulent as Longmire.

Gary Sax wrote: Once you know it's all shot in New Mexico and if you've been there, Longmire is very funny because it is obviously New Mexico.

I've been to Longmire's cabin several times in Valles Caldera.

Justified was just the opposite for me. I grew up in southwestern WV, and the geography is the same where I grew up as it is in Hazard County. They'll show a car driving down a road and I just say, "Nope. Not Appalachia."

RobertB wrote: Justified was just the opposite for me. I grew up in southwestern WV, and the geography is the same where I grew up as it is in Hazard County. They'll show a car driving down a road and I just say, "Nope. Not Appalachia."

Justified comes back in a month, this time set in Detroit. I'll at least check it out.

RobertB wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: Once you know it's all shot in New Mexico and if you've been there, Longmire is very funny because it is obviously New Mexico.

I've been to Longmire's cabin several times in Valles Caldera.

Justified was just the opposite for me. I grew up in southwestern WV, and the geography is the same where I grew up as it is in Hazard County. They'll show a car driving down a road and I just say, "Nope. Not Appalachia."

VIRGIN RIVER is my equivalent of this. It’s filmed in Vancouver BC but ostensibly set in Humboldt County, CA (where I am). The lush green trees are similar but everything else is tin-eared. Characters routinely say things like “I’m going to drop this off at my aunt’s in Shelter Cove before heading up to Eureka.” That is literally adding an extra 2-3 hours of driving, as the road to Shelter Cove is long, winding, poorly paved, and has speed limits of 25-40mph the whole way there and back.

On the other hand, it makes for a great drinking game if you take a drink every time a character references something local.

Same reaction for me with stuff shot in Atlanta or parts of North Carolina.

I guess I was so trained as a kid to expect everything in the movies to look like the rolling desert/scrub of southern california or the forests of the pacific northwest that it throws me off to see any other geography

RobertB wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: Once you know it's all shot in New Mexico and if you've been there, Longmire is very funny because it is obviously New Mexico.

I've been to Longmire's cabin several times in Valles Caldera.

Justified was just the opposite for me. I grew up in southwestern WV, and the geography is the same where I grew up as it is in Hazard County. They'll show a car driving down a road and I just say, "Nope. Not Appalachia."

IIRC the JUSTIFIED pilot was shot in SW PA , but yeah the main series was shot in CA - there is one isolated farmhouse from S1 I recognized from SONS OF ANARCHY. And the terrain was instantly recognizable as rural backlots in southern CA.

www.imdb.com/title/tt1489428/locations/?ref_=tt_ql_dts_3

Doesn't take away from the awesomeness of the show however. A top 10 for me for sure.

I watched The Bear on Hulu. That is a great show. They label it as a comedy but I would call it a drama. Season 2 is coming within a few days. It's set in an Italian beef restaurant in Chicago, and has lots of family / coworker drama. Very well acted and well done.