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TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Better Call Saul's final season premiered last night. It's been a long two year wait, but so worth it. Kind of crazy how the spin-off now has more seasons than Breaking Bad. It's really come into its own and it's the only current show I really follow.
I’ve been watching A Black Lady Sketch Show. I never watched the first season but I did watch a lot of the sketches on YouTube back in 2019. It’s hilarious. Highly recommend it. Robin Thede’s knack for physical comedy is unmatched in the modern world of television.
New season of Taskmaster premiered last week so that was fun.
It really was. It's one of my all-time favorite shows, so I'm very happy it's back.
IMO the new cast is off to a bit of shaky start so far though, and I am surprised by how unfunny I found Ardal O'Hanlon to be, even though I loved him in Father Ted. I suspect that's all just due to first episode nerves, so hopefully the cast loosens up and gels a bit more as the series goes on. But, thankfully, Judy Love and Sophie Duker more than made up for it, as they were both hilarious right from the jump.
p.s. s13e01 links from /r/panelshows (for those who want to watch it)
The only one I was familiar with was Bridget Christie going in (and Judy Love since she was on the Big Fat Quiz of the year) I thought it was a strong cast personally.
I do miss the pandemic seasons. It felt more like people just shooting the shit rather than trying to put on a performance. There was a certain charm to it that I’ll miss.
Just gonna go ahead and double comment because why not. Russian Doll Season 2 has been disappointing. Retreading a lot of the same old themes, one of the main characters has been pushed aside. It’s not as funny or as inventive or as emotional as the first season was.
The first season was lightning in a bottle and a second season always seemed a little odd. But the direction they decided to go to was not it. The big cliffhanger from Season 1 isn’t addressed at all. This feels like a separate story from that.
Does the second season get better as it goes on? I started watching it and the first two episodes felt really lackluster. I just don't care about the time travel/gold krugerrands plot with the mother. It feels emotionally hollow and not nearly as compelling a mystery as in the first season.
I stopped watching when there were two episodes left. It doesn’t get better. It actually gets slightly more boring in parts, the Krugerrands takes up even more focus, and then we get stuff with the grandma.
I read what happens in the last two episodes, and it sounds like there are some interesting visuals but I was just like “that’s it?” So I decided just to not waste my time with it anymore.
Ah, that sucks. Knowing that, I will likely stop watching now too, since I would probably be happier just pretending it ended after season 1.
Watched Spy x Family over on Crunchyroll and oh my god, it's one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. The basic premise is that it's the cold war in an alternate world and the top spy needs a cover family for his latest mission. From there, things spin out of control, but I'm not going to spoil anything.
There are some shows that take some getting into and only get good around season 2 or 3. This is not one of those shows, it's fucking amazing from the start. There are only 2 episodes so far and I can't think of a show I've seen ever that has had a stronger opening. If the rest of it is as good as what I've seen so far, people are going to be talking about this show in 20 years
I finally started watching Better Things. I knew I would like it but just never got around to it. God I love Pamela Adlon in everything she does. They way her character handles her children and life in general is so refreshing and real to me. Not flawless at all but realistic in so many ways and the conversations are just good.
Here's a very late review for Ridley Scott's The Martian.
I was under the impression that this movie was a somewhat grounded take on space exploration, but it really isn't. It kinda starts like that, but gets progressively nonsensical. But even with all scientific nonsense, what really bothered me was other stuff, mainly:
Regardless, it's great entertainment, as long as you abandon any misguided notion that The Martian is hard sci-fi.
I'm a bit surprised it was nominated for the Oscars, though. I stopped following the Academy Awards more than a decade ago, things have clearly changed.
* I understand that the movie takes place in 2035, but such radical shifts in such a short time should have at least be briefly explained
The way I view The Martian is as being relatively scientifically accurate, but political fantasy. However:
Bill Nelson (NASA's current administrator) is pretty damn Presidential, which isn't surprising considering he served in the Senate for 18 years, and 12 years in the House before that. And almost all the most recent NASA admins before him have been ranking US armed forces Officers. It's only once you go back to the 80s that you start seeing more civilian scientists than Officers in the role. So I think your first point of contention is actually far more accurate to real life than you might think.
Well, I stand corrected. But only partially, because I doubt very much there's anyone on Earth more commanding than Jeff Daniels. Including actual presidents!
Hah, that I will agree with. And IMO the only other actors that have come close to being as naturally commanding and Presidential are Harrison Ford (in Air Force One), Martin Sheen (in The West Wing), and Dennis Haysbert (in 24).
I love all of those. I do have a soft spot for Daniels just because I loved The Newsroom so much.
I wasn’t following the race super close at the time. But it was a well reviewed (80 on Metacritic) box office hit with some prestige surrounding it (Ridley Scott, Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain). The Golden Globes helped it a lot by awarding it Comedy or Musical.
It was also a notoriously weak year for a lot of typical Oscar contenders.
A funny thing about that year is that Warner Bros. thought that their main contender was going to be Black Mass (the Whitey Bulgar biopic starring Johnny Depp) but when that flopped they realized that their main contender was Mad Max: Fury Road. So it was a very atypical Oscar year, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was nominated for Film Editing as an example for how atypical those nominations were.
That being said I’ve seen interviews with Andy Weir who wrote the original book. He’s an Engineer turned writer. He wrote The Martian originally on his blog chapter by chapter and he would change a lot of stuff based on reader feedback. He said he knew some stuff was not scientifically accurate but he wrote them anyways because of dramatic liberty.
Yeah I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but maybe it was a bit overestimated at the time.
You might enjoy this https://lumon-industries.com/ -- feel the numbers and draw a box around them.
Severance was pretty good! I thought it had issues with its pace mid season but that finale was incredibly tense. I hope they follow a different formula for the next season though, in that...
Spoilers
...they don't show certain innies spend a lot of time _self-actualizing_. It was obviously necessary in the first season for world and character building, but I'd like to not go over it again. I'm hopeful they won't take that direction though, because the characters managed to tip off quite a bit of non-severed people before Lumon got a hold of things, and I guess "reset" them?