What TV SHOWS are you watching?

hotseatgames wrote: Finished season 2 of Yellowjackets. Overall this season was a far step down from the fantastic season 1. The bright point was the addition of Elijah Wood, who is great in it.

I will stick with the show because I want to see where it all goes, but you really have to accept some large plot holes.

Agreed. It felt a lot sloppier and all over the place this season. Really feels like maybe it should have been a limited series.

charlest wrote: Agreed. It felt a lot sloppier and all over the place this season. Really feels like maybe it should have been a limited series.

This seems to happen a LOT in our brave new world of streaming everything. I would love to know how creators approach writing content. Because it seems like many have a really great idea for 6 episodes or 12 episodes, because they are never given the ultimate OK that they will be paid/greenlit for more than one season. Then, when the show does well enough, they are expected to crank out another 6 or 12, and it's at this point where it feels like the creators themselves compromise the story, because it was never meant to go meaningfully beyond the initial outlay. It feels like they are forced to write a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure where the 5-page version is amazing, but the 10-page version also has to be amazing, and... just in case... the 20-page version has to be equally amazing. Which is next to impossible.

Thus why so many series are really great for their first run, then without warning drop off precipitously.

Streaming delivers on a LOT more metrics, they know EXACTLY where folks stop watching, so they can tell the writers all the things to do or not do to minimize tune out.

But these heavily serialized shows will always suffer from inconsistency. In "the old days" of episodic ensemble shows the trick was to figure out the intercharacter dynamics and maximize the actor performances, the actual plot of each episode was largely superfluous. So these shows could churn on and on because it wasn't the story that really mattered (can ANYONE give me a season by season synopsis of Married...with Children, The X-files, Cheers, Stargate SG1?) but rather the enjoyment of just watching these actors play off each other or the intermittent (because it was hard to binge them back to back to back) thrill of "ahhh hell, they just pissed of Werewolf again, here comes that same transformation scene and somebodys getting eaten!".

For strong narrative content the streamers need to follow the brit model more (which they do because they are budget limited and have just a few channels) of very short, widely spaced, series designed for maximum punch.

Of course this can't fill the bellies of streamers, plus the ridonculously high production values means TV has a long pipeline more like film, so its either rushed scripted shows or more "reality" tv nonsense.

I get to use this line out of Stranger in a Strange Land a lot: "<blank> pisses in it, then he likes the flavor better." "Sure, we've had some of the best shows on television ever, in the history of the medium. But I think we need to pivot away from that and show more Ice Road Truckers."

And as for shows, we just finished Longmire. And they all lived happily ever after. Except for maybe Nighthorse, but he's still alive and that's a plus.

We're starting Prehistoric Planet 2. Awesome CGI. There's a lot of extrapolation from present-day animals back to dinosaurs. "Well, if it was a bird was the size of a car, with a 50-lb knob on it's tail, it'd act like that." Yeah, whatever. But like I said, the CGI is great. Lots of, "Okay, that's cool."

Starting a couple of weeks before the official change from HBO Max to Max, I have had some annoying technical issues with that channel. They made it harder to binge watch a show, by dumping the viewer into the main menu after watching one or two episodes of a show. They sometimes lost track of which episodes I had watched, and took me to the first episode of the series the next time I signed in. Since the rebranding, they accidentally took some of the shows out of my queue, so I had to search for them and re-add them to my watch list. And I can't prove this is Max's fault, but my main menu for my Roku device has become glitchy in recent days, sometimes ignoring when I press a button and sometimes overreacting.

Have been watching Friends again lately, now early in season 4. I have stepped up my dating activity lately, and I feel that watching an episode of Friends from time to time helps me stay down to earth on a first date.

I'm confident that somebody else has had this idea before, but I have determined all on my own that Phoebe's twin sister Ursula doesn't really exist except as a separate personality from a mulitple personality disorder.

Evidence?

1. Phoebe met her real mom, and her mom (also named Phoebe) kept apologizing for abandoning Phoebe, instead of, "you and your sister."

2. It's very rare for a woman to name her daughter after herself, even though it's very common for men to name a son after themselves. If a woman had twins, I doubt that she would decide to give one of the twins her name because it would be such a slight against the other twin, unless maybe that other twin was male.

3. IIRC, no other character on the show (even the minor characters and guest stars) have seen Phoebe and Ursula together.

4. Phoebe has a lot of weird ideas.

My girlfriend got a new Iphone which came with three months of Apple TV, so we sat down to watch Ted Lasso, which has been all the rage and which I was particularly interested in, being a lifelong fan of Liverpool. And... I don't get it. We watched the first four episodes and I didn't laugh once. I chuckled a couple times at obvious moments, but I can't say I recognized anything that would have made it an award-winning series. Is it because I don't regard any of the little cultural mysteries that Sudeikis makes so much of as anything novel? Yes, English people call cleats and car trunks "boots". Is there a joke there? Is this show popular in England because it's actually funny to anyone? I mean, it's cute, at times, but there's nothing particularly smart about it and Sudeikis' down home homilies and lessons can occasionally be charming, but none of it is especially funny and none of the characters are particularly interesting, either. I'm just not picking up whatever it is that makes this so captivating for so many people.

I enjoyed the first season of Ted Lasso (although I bailed during season two). I just don't think there's too much on offer that is as hopeful and optimistic as this show. Most everything is bleak. Watch The Boys or Maid and then Ted Lasso back to back.

Shrinking is a very funny show on AppleTV. Excellent actors, and if you like Bill Lawrence shows it's quite funny. It's amazing when someone motivates Harrison Ford to bring his A game with good material, he's not just washed up Han Solo or whatever but a talented actor.

On another board, someone suggested that part of the secret to its success was how hopeful and optimistic it was during a very bleak period (beginning of the COVID lockdown) so I can see that. I just usually need more of a hook than that and I'm not disturbed at all by bleak settings, as long as the story is good (this is the guy who will watch post-apoc anything.)

On a recommendation I watched the first episode of From on Amazon Prime. The star is a dude who was in Oz, Matrix III, 28 Weeks Later, etc. Anyway, the premise is there is a town that is somehow haunted. No one can leave, and at night the ghosts come, and if you are out, you are fucked.

A family traveling in an RV somehow winds up in the town, as well as another two dudes in a different car. Hijinx ensue.

This seems like the kind of show that will not stick the landing, but I am definitely going to watch more, at least until I figure out WTF is going on.

Shellhead wrote: Have been watching Friends again lately … I have determined all on my own that Phoebe's twin sister Ursula doesn't really exist except as a separate personality from a mulitple personality disorder.

There is a wonderful, but also somewhat awful, fan theory that everything in the show is a fabrication in Phoebe’s mind; a crazy homeless lady looking through the window of Central Perk and making up stories where a bunch of strangers are her imaginary friends.

I also remembered that Ursula appeared as a walk-on character in another sitcom preceding friends (google says it was ‘Mad About You’) and was the direct basis for Phoebe. Phoebe/Ursula are in effect the same character with a name change so I guess the smoking gun is there for your theory ☺️

Yeah, I watched S1 of Ted Lasso just because I wanted full context for the darts scene after seeing it on instagram or whereever. Pretty good, but just wasn't meaty enough for me to go on to S2

A couple of eps deep into FUBAR and yeah, it ain't great but it hits home just enough for me to keep watching. This should have been Arnie 10-15 years ago when he still had some energy and the script would have made more sense. But a 70+ yo spy pining for his lost love and trying to connect with 20-something yo kids (well, the daughter anyway, the son is virtually wallpaper at this point) is just kinda cringe. I can tell where the showrunners joy is, whenever the dopey but charming side-spies are on screen the show comes alive. As a counter point to Citadel it's kinda fascinating as there is waaaaaay less budget but a ton more heart.

I really need S2 of Reacher, some more Jack Carr universe or whatever they are doing with The Terminal List and the swan song for Jack Ryan 'cause those are way more my kinda show. Warrior S3 as well, if thats still in the works.

I will continue to go to bat for the first season of Ted Lasso but having just seen the first episode of the third, it has become what its critics accused it of being, straight Pollyanna drivel. Good wins just because. There’s no struggle. It’s Paw Patrol plotting and morality.

The first season worked because everyone resisted Ted’s way, and he had to work at it. But now being good is immediately and thoroughly rewarded. He’s not walking through the Dead Marshes. He’s taking the eagles to Mordor, and it’s uninteresting.