What TV SHOWS are you watching?

The Bear season 4 continued the unfortunate trend of the prior season of focusing more on dysfunction, stunt casting, and posturing for industry awards than focus on the actual cooking/restaurant behind the scenes which was why and others I suspect first started watching the show. While there were some good parts ( like bringing back expediting extraordinaire Jess played by Sarah Ramos ) I found myself fast forwarding thru chunks of the season, like the most of one episode devoted to a side quest by Sydbey or most of the annual family dysfunction episode . As one friend put it, the show is basically anxiety porn with a side helping of food.

Finished Duster. A good show, and I hope it gets another season.

Watched the first two episodes of Dune: Prophecy. Eh. It's much like the novel, in that the world-building is impressive but the actual writing is middle-of-the-road. They're trying to establish a complex political plot akin to Game of Thrones, but the problem is that almost none of the characters are strong enough to carry that kind of story. The only exception is good ol' Ragnar Lodbrok from Vikings (Travis Fimmel.) And, even in his case, despite his obvious charisma, all of his lines are predictable and his character is one note. I was kind of annoying my girlfriend by finishing his sentences for half of the second episode because they were so obvious ("I can do beautiful things... Terrible things.") Unlike GoT, where most of the major players were already in the game and, therefore, talking knowledgably about how it was played and their respective roles in it, all of these people are constantly getting blindsided by everything that's happening, even the Sisters who are supposed to be half-predicting all of it. That makes most of what they're doing just one step away from performative exposition. They have no agency and, consequently, no personality. There's no Cersei here; no Tyrion; no Jaime; no Arya; no Littlefinger; no Robert; no Hound; no one who you point to and say: "I want to see that person on the screen again."

And, once again, despite their presence as the very reason the Imperium exists and the purest manifestation of the spice, we see nothing of Guild or Navigators. The only really positive thing about Lynch's film was showing a Navigator and acknowledging their involvement in the plot. Here? Again, nothing. I'll give it another episode, but I'm not sure it can get past the lack of decent characters who aren't simply servicing the plot.

I stopped at two episodes and felt underwhelmed.

I’ve read that it gets better, so I may return to it later.

I do think it gets better as the show finds its legs so to speak. While I hate the narrative cop out of tons of flashbacks, I found the younger Harkonnen sister characters more interesting than the older/"current day" versions.

Good call out of Travis Fimmel channeling his inner Ragnar , LOL. VIKINGS really lost something once his character died off IMO. I tried to watch the VALHALLA sequel/spin off but the characters were lame and I gave up after a handful of episodes.

I finally stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons in the early '00s, but there were a couple of good ones even then. I always wanted to see more of Jackie Chan Adventures, but the dvd options were initially terrible, like paying $20 for just a few episodes. Recently, I spotted the entire series for about $100, which probably still sounds too high, but I was willing to take my chances based on the quality of the episodes I saw back in the day.

Now I have nearly finished season one, and it is great. I originally wasn't interested because Chan was specifically famous for doing his own stunts, which is irrelevant in a cartoon, but the choreography of the action scenes is good. The writing is very good, and occasionally witty in the same way that all the best all-ages cartoons are, like the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. The occasional humor is enough to get me to laugh out loud an average of at least once per episode, which is better than my reaction to the average modern comedy movie. The plot twists are occasionally surprising, and the stories are episodic segments that fit smoothly into season-long story arcs. The animation is good enough, but not amazing like high-end anime. The only jarring note is the '90s pop end credits music, but at least it isn't long. The voice acting is very good, and includes Julian Sands playing a sinister villain. Chan himself doesn't voice any characters, but appears in brief live segments at the end of each episode to answer a fan question. His character in the show uses the same kind of fighting style that Chan uses in his movies: very acrobatic, defensive, and resourceful.

Dexter Resurrection is 3 episodes in and I must say it's better than I expected it to be. A bit "fan service" but I admit it's fun to see Dexter back at it.

Was feeling burned out last month after watching so many seasons of Star Trek shows for the last two years, all for the sake of my Trek trivia team that usually scores in the lower half of the standings each month. I have long heard great things about The Sopranos, but I was concerned that it might be one of those things that is overrated because it did something first, like Dungeons & Dragons for rpgs or Magic: the Gathering for ccgs. Or in this case, The Sopranos doing long-form storytelling with a tv show. Also, though I am only 1/4 Italian, I look pretty Italian, so I am not delighted by certain stereotypes about Italian-Americans. But I knew about the psychiatrist angle, so I thought that might be an interesting approach to deconstructing the Mafia tropes.

One month later, I have finished watching all 6 seasons of the Sopranos. I enjoyed it while watching, at least up until season 6, but I doubt that I will ever watch it again. Yes, certain Mafia tropes got deconstructed, but primarily by showing them more fully in the context of well-developed characters. However, I did not generally enjoy most the scenes with the psychiatrist, as Lorraine Braccio played the character fairly flat. Or maybe she was doing the best she could with limited dialogue, as the writers clearly had more enthusiasm for the gangster stuff. Perhaps her conduct was normal for the sessions, but she often seemed dry in her occasional scenes away from work.

The storylines were often predictable, but the character development and the acting was impressive, at least with most of the core cast members. After a while, the plot lines got somewhat repetitious. Somebody is "breaking" some other character's "balls," and goes too far, triggering resentment and eventual revenge. The demise of a character was often preceded by that same character doing something unusually horrible, in the same way that horror movie characters often get killed after they dare to have sex.

The Sopranos falters during the long final season, because everybody is depressed, or old, or sick, or resentful. The theme song could have been changed to Everybody Hurts, by R.E.M. Carmela even goes on vacation in Paris with her best friend, and still ends up crying. The ending of the series wasn't bad, but it wasn't as amazing as I had heard, either. I would easily put the Sopranos in my top 20, but definitely not my top 5.

The Sopranos - I think watching it 25 years later (TV and cinema have changed massively in this period) won't have had the same affect as watching it in 2000, the story-telling (as well as violence and R-rated stuff) was a hurricane of fresh air back then. Probably similar to people of 2000 watching M*A*S*H or Hill Street Blues (struggling to think of TV series from the 70s) for the first time.

I've recently bought the Deadwood DVD set because that was a pretty astounding TV series from the early 2000s, will be interesting to see what I think of it in a re-watch next year. Also bought the 12 Monkeys set, it was a good watch 10 years but it got very jumpy in the plot in the last season and a half while watching it as weekly episodes so hoping that the full story hits me watching all of it over a few months this time around.
Oh - I'm buying box sets because I like having them to watch whenever I want (I'm just finishing my second re-watch of Battlestar Galactica) and because streaming options aren't as diverse/available in the UK and I refuse to have subscriptions to multiple providers.

southernman wrote: Oh - I'm buying box sets because I like having them to watch whenever I want (I'm just finishing my second re-watch of Battlestar Galactica) and because streaming options aren't as diverse/available in the UK and I refuse to have subscriptions to multiple providers.

Same. I just don't want to have to depend on more corporations for access to things I want to see and do and I also don't want to keep paying even more subscriptions that I may or may not be getting real value out of. This especially came to the fore when I discovered that, despite "owning" things on Amazon, if they lose the rights, you lose the rights. I had wanted to watch Gandhi a few years back and the only option online was to buy it from Amazon. It was only like $8, which is about what it would cost to rent it, so I bought it and I "owned" it for a few years... until one day I went in to Amazon and discovered that it was no longer there, because they had lost the rights. From that point on, I started buying Blu-rays and DVDs so that I genuinely own what I own. I have a ridiculous pile of them here now and they'll be coming with me when we move across the pond next year.

I'm showing my girlfriend The Shield, and it's been super fun to watch her reactions to the insane shit that happens in this show. It's my second-favorite cop show after The Wire. The Wire is the best cop show ever made, maybe even the best show ever made, but The Shield is more exciting.

Finally getting around to The Leftovers. Not sure why we didn't try it before since I heard so many good things about it. We're four episodes in and I think it's brilliant and the first season is probably the least-regarded of the three of them.

Jackwraith wrote: Finally getting around to The Leftovers. Not sure why we didn't try it before since I heard so many good things about it. We're four episodes in and I think it's brilliant and the first season is probably the least-regarded of the three of them.

Well if you're loving it after four episodes it will be a great watch for you, as I found the opening few episodes a slowburn but hung in and appreciated the whole three seasons.
My only warning, especially as one of the creators did Lost, is enjoy the story they are telling - it was really an incredible watch the first time through, the second time just good as I knew what was coming.

Ha. Wow. Total faceplant on The Leftovers season 2. We went from a studied look at people dealing with the psychological trauma of an event they don't understand to a fantasist's dream (often literally) of supposed miracles in the sweetest lil' town in Texas. How did all of these real humans become monodimensional plot elements (Lori, Tommy, Jill) or complete caricatures? Meg goes from being a confused but determined-to-be-right person to a cartoon super-villain. And never mind the plot holes that they were papering over with complete non sequiturs by some characters. Was this a one-off that they never expected to get renewed so that they told an almost-complete story in season 1 and then had to patch their way into something (and write a lot faster to their detriment; see season 2 of True Detective as a prime example of that) later? Like how The Matrix was a complete and finished story and then they had to tack on a bunch of shit to make two more movies? Woof. I spent the last three episodes of season 2 basically waiting for them to end. I kinda knew we were (ahem) lost as soon as episode 8 went full dream sequence (Hello, Bobby Ewing!) And, of course, episode 10 is capped off with the perfect Hollywood ending. I know they took some heat for the grim tone of season 1 but this was NOT the direction to go, IMO. I mean, certainly a lot of people liked it, so there you go. Maybe I'm the one who's completely out of tune, but this was not my kind of thing at all. Way too staged. Way too paint-by-number emotional progressions. Nothing felt real anymore.

The Leftovers - yeah, I think you got it right, horses for courses and it sounds like it changed to something not in your wheelhouse. Season 2 and that episode got pretty high ratings at IMDB, I have to admit I enjoy the story (and acting) more in series/films like that so likely missed what you noticed.
But, as per Lost, all the different storylines are interesting/weird but at the end they (well, all but one) are not what the series is actually about so probably best you skip S3 - I enjoyed it but, after seeing an interview with the writers, understood what they wanted to make.