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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 finished Shōgun recently and enjoyed it quite a bit. It has a surprising amount of humor, action, and subtlety, and avoids the "white savior" plot that often happens when you put a western character in another culture. It's interesting that most of the dialog is Japanese. I watched with subtitles, but I found out later there is also a dubbed version (I prefer subtitles anyway).
There is one thing that is slightly confusing: When characters would speak Japanese, they actually speak Japanese. When they would be speaking Portuguese or Dutch, the actors speak English. So one of the main characters is from England, but his character is supposed to be communicating in Portuguese (usually) or Dutch (sometimes) when he speaks English.
After watching each episode I read the recap on Vulture which was entertaining and explained some of the background.
I've tried a few times to watch The White Lotus. I know this show is pretty popular and has won a lot of awards but I just can't get into it. To be fair, I've only watched the first episode, but there just isn't anything there that I found interesting. Maybe it gets better? If the show is sort of like Succession (where terrible rich people are bad to each other) I may eventually enjoy it.
White Lotus definitely builds over time, but I'm not sure you'll get into it if you aren't into the style early on. Part of the appeal is how they make the mundane watchable, like you're hanging out with everyone at the resort. I'd say it's short enough and moves quickly enough for you to get a better feel for it after an extra episode or two (unlike The Wire or GoT which need a minimum of 5 episodes). There are various themes across each season, but one thing that is consistent is the exploration of rich people problems vs working people problems. It's not as harsh as Succession, but it will scratch that itch, especially in season one.
FWIW, I think it is right up there with Succession and Better Call Saul as the best shows of the past 10 years.
Well I agree that Succession and Better Call Saul are in the top shows. I would put Andor up there too. I remember that I did not like The Wire for a few episodes so I should give White Lotus another try.
I still need to check Andor out. I'm usually opposed to Star Wars expansion shows but everyone says it's amazing.
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli by Mark Seal is great, if you want to go deeper with the making of this epic. If you want more Matthew Goode, he's leading up Dept. Q right now, which is fantastic.
I recently watched the whole series of Veronica Mars. I am not sure how I even started it. I figured it was an OC, One Tree Hill knock off. It was far better than I could have imagined. Well done for the time for a CW style series.
Mobland - 6.5/10
Weirdest name for a serious show. Sounds like a sitcom or something.
Started off as a ~8.5/10 show but it had a real drop in quality towards the middle third/second half. Some non sequiturs because plot/story went odd places. Weird writing at too many points. Very entertaining overall though, somewhat that highly sought after competency genre, watching Tom Hardy do his work so deliciously well
Dept. Q - DNF
Just bad. Stopped watching after episode 4. Main character is supposed to be this detective savant role but it failed miserably. Clearly they were going for something like McNulty in The Wire or Gary Oldman in Dark Horses. Morck was just an total asshole in every scene, neither likeable nor witty nor smart or anything. Every other character does the actual work and connects the dots, especially Akram. Just not fun to watch, and seemed like tired cliches of murder mystery/crime drama genre. I don't get the praise.
i want Akram to have his own series.
i like this, though. it’s their attempt to get a Slow Horses, which it absolutely isn’t. I don’t care about the woman in the tube so much, which is kind of the story… but i like the other stuff enough.
oh! i also don’t give two shits about the kid… or any kid on tv. kill them off or whatever… i won’t blink twice. they’re always unnecessary drama and serve no other purpose beyond. just have a normal kid for once.
I have rewatched Midnight Mass by Mike Flanagan. Of the four full series - this one, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher - I think this might be the best. I love that Flanagan has a group of players for whom he knows their strengths, and he crafts roles for them that they completely inhabit.
What I enjoyed about this one on a rewatch was something that I originally judged negatively on my first watch, which is that in many ways, this story is structured like and unfolds like a grand play, not a mini-series. By this I mean that movies and mini-series are often governed by a "show don't tell" rule, while plays are more typically "tell us what you want us to know". Midnight Mass spends time with each character and gives almost all of them an opportunity to tell us something. Each of the key characters, crafted with love and respect from Flanagan, get what is almost a soliloquy - a lengthy bit of exposition where they get to share who they are. My favourite is Rahul Kohli's - he takes some time to talk about what it is like being brown in New York immediately after 9/11, and it is beautifully almost completely tangential to the show. It's 5 minutes of an exquisitely painful look at some terrible moments into this character's life and it doesn't really move the story forward at all, it's just a moment that gets to exist for the sake of existing.
Except... they kind of do hold the whole thing together. At first, Midnight Mass is a pretty by-the-book "vampire comes to a small town" story. But it unfolds into this lengthy stage play that allows for the actors to really make the characters come to life, and talks about deeper things; the horror and self loathing of having accidentally killed someone while driving drunk, the despair of a loved one having cancer, the fear one has while living with dementia, dealing with religious zealotry, being "the other", the existential dread of coming home as a failure, the realization that you are what you hate but that redemption is possible.
Overall, 10/10. In a discussion about TV shows a while back, I listed the Flanagan-verse as one of my favourites, and this is probably my favourite of all of Flanagan's series.
I also loved Midnight mass. I think different viewers may take very different things from it. As a person who grew up up in the Catholic Church, I really enjoyed how it focused on the really weird teachings if the church.
Oh yeah, I didn't touch on weird Catholicism at all, but there is a fair bit of it. Hamish Linklater really shines as The Priest and Samantha Sloyan as The Evil Karen is frighteningly familiar; I feel like we've all met a Bev Keane / Evil Karen, and Sloyan is a wildly convincing mean church lady.
It's slop season over here at my house and the gold standard for dumbass reality TV is anything on peacock. Right now, it's Love Island. I'm partial to USA, but UK is pretty "good" as well. Unfortunately, it was a devastating week for LIUSA, as the Islanders continue to make insane choices on who they send home. I recognize how ridiculous these shows are, but after being forced to watch them for 5 years while my gf holds me at gunpoint, I'm starting to get into it. Part of the appeal of this show is suspending your disbelief and playing armchair quarterback/relationship therapist then going online and seeing people with a completely different take. Anyway, Jeremiah got robbed.
The Bear is back and it should be good yada yada yada.
Has anybody watched Smoke from Dennis Lehane? Lehane pretty much retired from novels, or at least thats what I read last. I haven't started yet, but its got a strong cast. I'm concerned about John Leguizamo. That dude is a shit magnet.
Anyway, Lehane is one of my favorite writers and I have high hopes for this.