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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 have, slightly reluctantly but on the advice of someone I generally trust about TV, been watching Mrs Davis. It's.... OK. It's pacy and exciting and the dialogue is snappy and funny and cool. The casting is great and the various situations they end up in are entertaining.
The problem is that it is the work of Damon Lindelof. I am worried that, going on his past track record of what I can only assume is a deliberate avoidance of the principles of Chekov's gun and his general Calvinball approach to world building, I am going to be disappointed when it turns out there is no explanation for half the stuff that happens. I'm not saying I need stories to wrap ever single thing up tidily, because life isn't like that. But Lindelof tends to throw everything in and then ignore things he's made deliberate reference to as being Important earlier. For example, in the second episode a character makes reference to the number 2536 (or something like that) being explicitly important and while I could trust other writers to follow through on this, Lindelof's track record suggests he probably won't.
It's a pretty light show and it's pretty fun, even laugh out loud funny in parts, so again I'm not expecting Lord of the Rings sort of lore or anything. But I am watching it prepared to finish feeling somewhat let down by a lack of depth where some was promised (or at least heavily implied).
It's for that reason that I'm not prepared to recommend it to anyone until I've watched it all. I am currently halfway through.
Update: finished this last night and without getting too much into spoilers, Lindelof almost totally sticks the landing. Enough is explained and tied up that the remaining, mostly minor, dangling plot threads don't matter. It also managed to do it in a way that I didn't entirely expect.
As such I am upgrading this show from "Cautious Watch" to "Definitely Recommended"
The show is kind of all over the place initially and even a bit goofy. Great overall though by the end. Not necessarily too deep to me though as it's a little too self-aware - time spent being meta is time not spent being sincere. It's very timely though with how it tackles AI and I liked its perspective on an algorithm as a fresh take.
The opening scene of a show is important though, as graphic violence/nudity/whatever is meant to tell the viewer "Hey, this is the kind of show we're doing, filter yourself out now if you aren't into that." My partner did not like the violence and got filtered out before the later reveals.
Chimp Empire on Netflix has incredibly fascinating footage of chimpanzees. I imagine the narration by Mahershala Ali is a bit contrived or forced, but I didn't minds. He might get the details wrong or be a little presumptuous, but we nevertheless do know that they have these very complex emotional and social lives.
I'm glad you're enjoying it.
I really wanted to like this show, the chimpanzees are awesome and the images are fantastic. But everything is so heavily edited and narrated that I don't feel I'm watching a documentary anymore. The overproduction makes it hard for me to believe they're telling a story instead of creating one. I can't connect.
Short of being able to properly communicate with chimps, we'll always have to infer. So while the specific story or details may be an imposed narrative and not something to put in a research paper, the gist is the story is plausible, and that flavors or variations of it occur. Chimps go to war. They have complex social hierarchies. They have individual personalities and complex emotional lives, etc. We may not know the particular reason for the drama that occurs, but we do know the drama exists and is playing out.
I completely understand that this narrative must be guided, I just think that the way they chose to guide it was not very engaging to me.
When I started watching The Sopranos months ago, I was thinking "This is an HBO classic. This is deep and serious". That was a terrible idea. Sure, it's a sophisticated show that deserves all the praise and awards it received. But, when it first came out, people were not reading it like Dostoyevsky. They were enjoying the ride.
At some point in the fifth or sixth season (possibly earlier), a lot of Sopranos became more and more fan service, or "mafia fanfic". Realism be dammed, we're here to have fun! So I took off the monocle and gave the show the attitude under which it shines stronger: sometimes, The Sopranos is a playground for great actors to do their best impressions of a mobster. And that is delightful.
Early in the show, even the highly praised performance by James Gandolfini starts to get old, I couldn't take it anymore -- does he need to perform every single action as a depressive Gorilla with a heart condition? Does every scene require the full intensity of his method acting? Absolutely not. However, if you assume that it's all in good fun, suddenly it makes sense. This is a matter of choice, not necessity.
As a comparison, shows like The Wire and The Leftovers are very serious and "adult" all the way through.
It pays dividends to approach The Sopranos with a lighthearted mindset.