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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.
I've been in a mostly foul mood over the past two weeks and that may have coloured my impressions. (I was in hospital for a few days, and I was a corridor patient for one of those days and it SUCKED).
I'm watching The Offer, a drama about the making of The Godfather. It's way too long. They just lose their way. It feels bloated and self-indulgent. The characters are fine, the look and feel are fine. If you get drawn in I guess it's okay but I kept thinking "dear God I'm on ep4 and I've got another 6 left?"
I watched The English. I really wanted to like this, and I ended up not enjoying it. It's grim dark in the way all westerns are now and some of it is just over the top gruesome. Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt are great, most of the acting is pretty good. But the show is problematic for me.
SAS Rogue Heroes is a drama about the creation of the English Special Air Service regiment. It's fine, lots of violence and explosions. But they keep committing war crimes and that's not explored, and it's worth exploring because that shift (from "gentlemen having a war" to "do what needs to be done to win") led to things like Dresden and Hiroshima. We get a couple of throwaway lines from Churchill and some characters saying, before firing on Nazi soldiers, "oh, they're unarmed". I'm not sure I'm explaining this well, but it feels a bit like copaganda. The war crime aspects are just hand-waved away as oh well, what a shame, but never mind.
The Peripheral is fantastic. I'm watching this slowly and when I have attention because it's so good.
I stopped The English and SAS Rogue Heroes. The English has some bad pacing issues. Shots were dragging out for too long, etc. I really like Chaske Spencer, though. He was great on Banshee, too.
SAS wanted to be a cool series... but it just didn't have it. Again, the pacing was just off. Cutting from an exterior in the middle of no where to an interior with the same character in new clothes (or something along these lines) was jarring.
Now... The Peripheral was great. I also liked The Offer, but since its based on Ruddy's book, you need to take everything with a kilo of salt.
I completely agree with you about both The English and SASetc, they wanted to be more than they were.
I haven't beard of Banshee and I'll give that a look, thank you!
I think with all these series that are based on real life I just substitute in "sort-of kind-of based on real life in some places" and treat it as fiction. Which is wild! They just make tv shows and say what they like! Out there just saying almost anything so long as it's not too blatantly defamatory.
Banshee is awesome. It's got Anthony Starr (Homelander) and its pretty fun.
I hope to god my life isn't ever made into a mediocre series. Mind you, if my life were made into a series, mediocre would require a lot of embellishment.
Unrelated to all of this, STRIKE BACK is probably the best TV series of all time when it comes to pointless plot, lots of shoot 'em ups, etc. If you do it, start at S02 when Cinemax took over. Its such a fun series.
The Pale Horse
Just finished watching the BBC miniseries The Pale Horse from 2020. I'm not one for trying to solve whodunnits as they unfold, especially ones crafted by Agatha Christie, but I couldn't help myself with this one.
Wasn't particularly looking to invest in major screen time this evening, but here we are two hours and three episodes (thank you Swedish television?) later, and I couldn't take my eyes off the main lead Rufus Sewell.