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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 am here once again to talk about GameChangers on Dropout.tv. A new episode dropped last night and it was incredibly good; they turned the green room for the game into an escape room. It looked like a pretty great escape room, and the way that the contestants went about solving things was... unorthodox, to someone that has done many escape rooms. I enjoyed it a lot.
I started watching 11.22.63 which I hadn't realized was just available on PrimeVideo. I'm in the first episode; so far it's okay. A fair bit was actually filmed quite close to where I live, I really enjoy Stephen King, and 11.22.63 is one of the King books that I like a lot, so I'm not quite sure why I hadn't watched it yet.
I'm rewatching The Wire and my God it's even better than I remembered. I'm reassessing my top 5 and I have to say, The Wire comes out on top of Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or any other prestige TV that I watched. With the exception of The Leftovers, with which I'd say The Wire is now tied in first place.
I can only compare it to other crime drama masterpieces like Heat, Godfather, and Chinatown. It's that good. I'll have more to say next week, right now I just wanna say: WOW.
Making a Top # list of shows and placing them in ranked order has always been insanely difficult for me, but I absolutely agree with you that The Wire is better than Sopranos... except the last season of The Wire, which was a bit meh, IMO. Though Breaking Bad (and Better Call Saul) tops both of those for me personally. I've never seen The Leftovers, but it looks interesting so will have to check that out now!
My all time favorite shows aren't "Prestige TV" though, but all older, slightly cheesy, scifi stuff; Star Trek, Stargate, Farscape, Firefly, X-Files, etc. But here are a bunch of other "Prestige TV" shows that I greatly enjoyed, that you may not have watched yet, and also might enjoy:
Oz, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Rome, Hannibal, The Unit, Justified, Fringe, Penny Dreadful, Entourage, Californication, Nip/Tuck
Having lived through the 90s, I'd argue that the only reason The X-Files was not considered prestige TV for much of its run was because, to my knowledge, that was not a well known expression back then. In fact, shows like X-Files[1] and Twin Peaks essentially gave rise to what we now call "prestige TV".
I remember distinctly thinking, while watching X-Files, "this episode was better than a lot of movies". That was very unique back then.
[1] Which had Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan as one of the writers...
Yeah, if it came out a few years later it probably would have been considered one too, except for the fact that it's more episodic in nature. BTW, if you also love X-Files like I do, you will probably love Fringe too. They have similar feels, and starting premises, but go in totally different directions from there. Fringe is definitely more Prestige TV in nature though, since it has longer season-spanning story archs.
And dude, Leftovers is totally not the kind show I like. It's cryptic, slow, absurd, and cerebral. It is also brilliant, insightful, unique, deep (but not pretentious), beautiful, and exhilarating. The best kind of slow burn. Don't read anything about, just watch. Trust me, you won't regret it.
So I’ve been watching Shrinking. It’s from the same producer as Ted Lasso and this has a similar vibe to it. I was actually more interested in this because of Harrison Ford’s involvement.
I’m actually kind of really annoyed by it. This is what critics of Ted Lasso think Ted Lasso is. TL works, I think, because its folksy wisdom is applied to less serious problems. And in this show we’re dealing with a dead wife, and addiction, and PTSD, and Parkinson’s, and fraught relationships between parent and child. But it’s still presented in the same quirky tone as Ted Lasso. On top of all of that, the music bugs the hell out of me. It’s a bunch of 2010s style indie songs. I don’t know, something about that adds to the wanna-be quirky aesthetic and it annoys me deeply. Also, most of the characters are just not very interesting. And the performances (with the exception of Ford and Segal) are to the grade of a multi-cam sitcom, something Ted Lasso avoids.
We Need to Talk About Cosby (2022)
This was a valuable but difficult watch. It grapples with two different Cosbys. One was “America’s Dad”, a much beloved character actor and comedian who was responsible for significant social uplift for black Americans. The other is the one that repeatedly drugged and raped women across decades.
Of course, they aren’t actually two different people at all. They’re one and the same — something that so many people, including many of the interview subjects, have a hard time reconciling.
I hadn’t followed the news enough to know that he had so many accusers, nor that they spanned so many years. The documentary shows a timeline with portraits, and it’s horrifying how many women were on it and how long it went on. And these, of course, are only the ones who were willing to come forward. There were no doubt many more women who stayed silent.
Throughout the four episodes, several women tell their stories. These are very hard to listen to. The documentary also airs a lot of hard truths. For example, some of the male interview subjects talk about not wanting to believe the accusations, because they were so used to wider white society trying to take down black men that they assumed this was yet another instance of that.
I’d only recommend watching it if the subject is something you’re willing to visit, but if you are, it’s definitely worth your time.