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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.
Definitely looking forward to the second series of Hidden, starting tonight on BBC One Wales. Going to copypaste my comment from Reddit here, I can't describe it well so go watch the trailers and see for yourself. If you like detective / crime related dramas you don't want to miss this, and if you liked White House Farm on ITV you'll like this too
Upvote for Hidden. It's far better than I could ever describe so here's the trailer on Twitter / YouTube
And a recap of series 1 - the full series is also back on iPlayer now
Tonight 9pm on BBC 1 Wales
And this Saturday on BBC Four
I'm doing two episodes of 'essential' Babylon 5 episodes per night... and I really don't like this series. It's not the worst, but I just don't care about anybody in it. It's nice to see Rousseau from LOST in something.
From a distribution standpoint, this series is a mess. The original airing was 4:3 and all of the CGI was made for that. I think it was Australia who wanted to air it widescreen -- so instead of rerendering everything, they simply scaled the CGI. It looks really bad... The lighting is off with almost every model.
It's unfortunate to see such a popular series stuck with such a horrible transfer. Even if we had the original 4:3 available, it'd be better.
Homeland is back! I love Homeland. It's one of the few series that seems to pay attention to the audience while not shying away from trying new things. What? Nobody likes this character.. no problem! axed.
Kidding (2018) is back for a second season. Jim Carrey is great in this -- and really, the entire cast is perfect. If you're familiar with Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine), this series has a similar aesthetic for the titles and some scenes. When I started it, I wasn't expecting much -- but it finds it's rhythm quickly and sticks with it.
The Pale Horse (2019) started this week. It's an Agatha Christie novel, so it should be fun.
McMillions is a new documentary about an old McDonalds Monopoly scam from years ago. I've been looking forward to this for a while, but I'm going to wait until the series wraps. I don't think it'll be mind-blowing, but I anticipate some sort of mob scam... but we'll see.
Curb has been completely CRUSHING it this season. It feels like the series has gone back to it's early-but-not-too-early days where the script and performances were so tight. For new seasons, this is my favorite right now.
High Maintenance is back! This is a series of stories all connected by 'The Guy', who is a weed dealer who delivers... and the series is great. It lost its focus a little last season, but it was still great. The series has a 'cool' feel, while not totally cashing in on it like How to Make it in America.
The New Pope wrapped up for some folks, and I can't give enough praise for this series. S01 was killer, and S02 took it a step further. John Malkovich gives a fantastic, beautiful performance with a few meta moments. I really hope they continue this series --- its got a lot of truly beautiful moments that we don't often see in a TV series. I love the way they worked with the opening and closing credits, too. Each episode feels complete -- if you know what I mean.
Not specific show related, but still something I wouldn't mind discussing:
Since I absolutely hate having to wait week by week for individual episodes of shows to come out, I tend to instead wait for seasons of shows to completely finish first (or even the entire show to finish), and then binge watch them all in one go. However this often leads to me not watching TV for months at time (or even an entire year) while I wait, and because of that, if I don't track my viewing history I tend to forget what shows I have previously watched, which I am waiting for new seasons to be released for, where I last left off in them, and also what new shows I have been waiting to start watching.
For the last few years I have been using Trakt.tv, and it's been pretty great IMO. It took quite a bit of effort to set up at first (esp flagging everything I have ever previously watched), and also requires a small amount of constant effort to keep all my lists up to date and accurate, but it's been totally worth it for me.
I have several lists on it which help me keep everything organized:
So that is my personal process, but I am curious if other people do similar, and if so, how they track their TV viewing history... and if not, what their viewing habits are.