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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.
Made For Love season 2 is on, fucking amazing. I loved the first season. I thought it was so well written, and Cristin Milloti gives such a powerhouse of a performance and I love Ray Romano. Billy Magnussen who was in Game Night, and also had a small role in Aladdin and most recently No Time To Die, is brilliant. He has impeccable comedic timing.
For those of you who haven’t seen or heard of it, here’s the teaser for the first season. It’s on HBOMax. It’s got some really cool science fiction elements in it.
Spoilers for Watchmen (HBO, 2019)
I finished Watchmen. It's a mixed bag. Before that, Damon Lindelof helped create Lost and was the main responsible for The Leftovers, a strong candidate for the best show ever. He clearly prefers cerebral storylines and slow burns and is very competent at it. One technique that he uses repeatedly is to foreshadow uncontextualized elements that become relevant later on. That's a great way to entice the audience to generate hypotheses, creating a sense of anticipation, culminating in a gestalt where everything comes together in a cohesive way.
However, for these narratives to work, the source of the mystery must be sufficiently fascinating -- puzzling, yet achievable, always shifting and redirecting our expectations in interesting ways. That is what happens in The Leftovers, but, in Watchmen, the procedure falls flat. The delayed exposition, as well as the many cryptic and strange scenes, feels like a cheap trick that strains our imaginations instead of feeding it. And when the curtain is pulled, what we find behind is quite pedestrian.
This show made me fall in love with Regina King, which I knew from Leftovers but didn't appreciate as much as I should. The scene when she starts falling in love with Dr. Manhattan is so beautiful and charming and true. I have a thing for this specific kind of scene, scenes where people fall in love. That's such a precious moment, so hard to capture in a genuine fashion. For another beautiful example, watch the scene in which Lady Gaga first sings to Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born (2018).
So is this a bad show? No, absolutely not. But it definitely falls short of the expectations set by the first episodes and is a far cry from Damon Lindelof's previous work.
if you like King and also cop shows, you should check out Southland. Its pretty good.
I saw quite a bit of Southland, but I din't remember seeing her in it. I'll have to check it out!
I enjoyed Watchmen so I figured I'd try selling it, though by now I might be too far removed from when I saw it/read the comics to make a good case for why.
Spoilers
A lot of the show was very intentionally crafted. There were elements like the cover art being a spoiler for the series resolution or the meta information from Dale "Lube Man" Petey. Veidt's horse being named Bucephalus to match his Gordian Knot company hints at his outrage about his stolen genes or bromance with the Game Warden. The Game Warden who was an Adam analogue conspicuously missing an Eve.
I definitely get how things can be made cryptic, surreal, or laden with symbolism as bait with no payoff, but when I see a show that is trying to do something it makes me want to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. Watchmen definitely had some clumsy bits to it, but I think it tried to do something hard and did a decent job at it.
Dr. Manhattan--removed from time and a pseudo deity-- is hard to write and I'd argue he's the core of the show and basically in control from beginning to end. The show touches on something in the neighbor of theodicy through cycles of violence. It does other things, like fleshing out the character of Ozy, anonymity, etc., but I'm going to skip that.
The comics ended with a bit of a question mark. Ozymandias was portrayed as some evolved form of consequentialist who was not just better than any other human at predicting outcomes, but who also claimed that he had intentionally empathized with all the suffering that he was causing. In a moment of uncertainty he asks Manhattan if he did the right thing in the end, to which Manhattan replies "nothing ever ends".
The reader gets to see that Rorschach is going to expose what Ozy did, so the superficial interpretation is that that's what the reply is about. The HBO series rejects that, saying Rorschach was considered to be a deranged conspiracist and had no real impact.
The show's take is that Manhattan is constrained. He didn't just become completely detached and inhuman after his accident. He doesn't answer blue phone booth prayers because despite being close to omniscient/omnipotent there are things he can't do, at least without consequences. When he tried to intervene he may have stopped a war but he ended up getting the parents of the woman he loved killed. When he tried to create paradise through some missing spark he made servants whose frozen corpses are used to spell out an S.O.S.
He became inactive because he had endless options to improve things but as far as he could see none of them would last or be harmless. He became detached because he couldn't interact without it being a type of manipulation/grooming.
Simone Weil wrote about force as something that uses and hollows those who think they wield it. The strong take what they want from the weak, and at the point the weak become the strong (e.g., French revolution) the same abuse by force occurs. The Tulsa massacre, Vietnam war, Squidmageddon, or cop killing all set up various characters to continue next cycle of violence. The brutal roundup of the trailer park(?) by the cops implied to be another, planned by that KKK group.
Weil's solution was Christianity--and this show obviously has tons of Christian imagery-- but I think it's answer was... inclusion? Family? Whatever it is that stops Angela's grandpa and the mirror guy from using their past to justify more violence.
Angela isn't a saint, but she draws people under the same roof. She adopts kids of another race. She adopts the Cal she hates, giving him a last name. On that, there's a scene where Laurie pulls out a huge blue sex toy named "Excalibur" modeled after her ex, Cal Abar. The sword that determines who should rule.
Manhattan was never really in danger. I only watched the show once so I might be missing something critical, but it seemed like there were several tells that Manhattan could have stopped any of the plots.
Manhattan didn't want to exist. He didn't want to die alone, and he wanted to possibly find someone he trusted more than himself to inherit what he'd gotten by accident. Through his regrets he came to understand he wasn't the right person, and the other parties trying to steal his power or influence him definitely weren't.
In A God Walks Into Abar he tells Angela, "I would never pass on my abilities to others without their consent." How can he get informed consent to a human? How can he explain his conscious experience and burdens that make him want to not exist? The closest he can get is his relationship with Angela. Years spent with him as a man to try to let her grok his experience of time, to infer from how he warped when he returned to being Manhattan. Seeing that he loved her but still chose to die.
Absolutely, the show contains an intricate menagerie of engaging references and callbacks both internal and external. This makes for an universe that feels alive and cohesive, and render itself very well to comparisons and commentary to the actual world. I don't think it works quite well as a narrative, but I certainly didn't feel that I wasted my time. Some narrative just work more strongly conceptually than, well, actually. The Leftovers achieved both conceptual sophistication and sublime narration, so to me Watchmen fell short in that respect.
Gonna comment again. Decided to finally give Moon Knight another chance. The first three episodes I was very eh on. I thought it was kind of boring. The end of episode 4 though, is when it gets a lot more interesting. Episode 5 is also great, and Episode 6, the series finale, was able to sustain my interest enough.
The last three episodes really delve deep into the psyche of the main character, and that was more interesting than any of the bland stuff we were getting before.
My patience with the MCU is really waning with these TV shows, to be honest. And it's mostly my husband's fault because he keeps watching these episode-by-episode breakdowns, but the thing that gets me is that all of them end after finishing the story arc and leave a bunch of dangling plot devices. I'm still waiting for someone to tell me where Vision has been all of this time.
I found the initial exposition flawed and unengaging, so I dropped it. Maybe I'll try again.
I just finished watching the final season of Peaky Blinders. It's was an okay conclusion to the series, but definitely felt as if it had been severely hamstrung by COVID restrictions and the death of Helen McCrory. A bit like the penultimate season of The Expanse, the main characters felt physically (and plot-wise) isolated from each other, many previously established side characters were almost entirely absent, and the plot was much more constrained overall. The story also felt very very rushed, with lots of unresolved plot-lines, and some of the writers' decisions didn't make any sense to me either. E.g.
Spoilers
Introducing Duke half-way through the season, giving him very little development time before having him oust Finn, and then essentially having him get crowned as heir apparent at the end, was baffling and incredibly unsatisfying. Especially when Finn's decision to attempt to shoot his own family rather than kill the traitor felt like it came out of nowhere, and made absolutely no sense. And speaking of Finn, introducing his new wife in one scene, making a big deal of it and the family's disdain for her, but then never seeing her again was also really bizarre too.
Still... at least we got a conclusion to the story, and all the previous seasons were absolutely top notch, so I guess I can't complain too much.
The Offer has been out and its pretty good. Its all about the production of The Godfather.
I'm pretty much watching that, Atlanta, Better Call Saul, Undone, Julia, a few others, and Picard, which I am totally done with.
With Brave New Worlds, I really hope they go back to the old Star Trek style. This new approach sucks. I really don't like Discovery either. They're incoherent and fall flat when they try to be all emotional. I'm not sure Kurtzman watched any Trek before doing the movie and this new stuff.
Undone is such a cool series. The level of detail is really amazing. In the last episode I watched, they were walking by a store window and somebody had tagged the back of a mannequin. Its such a nothing detail, but the little stuff adds so much character to the world.