8
votes
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’ll say it: I LIKE the new Twilight Zone. A lot. I’m at the middle of the first season. Criticisms are highly contradictory, they both scold it for not being just like the Rod Serling classic and for not being more current and mind-bending like Black Mirror. Well, pick a side!
The first Twilight Zone might have been a novelty for an audience unused to speculative fiction on TV, but many decades have passed. You can’t possibly expect Jordan Peele’s show to surprise you like when you were a kid watching reruns late at night. It just won’t happen.
You also cannot expect Twilight Zone to always be a pungent criticism of current affairs. For every “serious” episode Serling wrote a bunch of silly, wonderful nonsense. It’s most frequently amusing, not disruptive.
In that respect this show is extremely faithful to the original. There’s a history here that deserves homage and respect. On the occasions it actually attempts social and political criticism, it succeeds in every count — not by revealing entire new worlds of technological nightmare like Black Mirror made some expect, but by retelling our inquietations in an amusing and entertaining fashion.
Eventually, it has some great twists. It’s not perfect, but unlike many reviewers I don’t think Serling craped gold. There’s quite a few duds in the original.
I think Jordan Peele is doing a great job. Just enjoy it for what it is.
I've made a couple reviews of the latest Twilight Zone series here on Tildes. While I admit that there are a lot of similarities with the prior incarnation, I did have my qualms with the first season of the reboot due to its heavy-handedness with social/political issues. I think the second season does a good deal of improvement over the first, and makes it as generally enjoyable as the original series.
I really don’t mind the heavy handedness. There is a place for subtlety and sophistication, but that is not a requirement at all. Especially for a show like The Twilight Zone. My opinion is that that’s a misplaced expectation.
Edit: I mean, the show has an actual presenter and ends with a frequently on the nose moral of the story (at least in Serling’s era). That doesn’t scream “subtlety” to me.
I think it's less about subtlety, and more about succinctness. The remake has twice the runtime as the original, and rather than explore nuance with the extra time, the latest incarnation just keeps hitting your head over with the same clichés it established at the beginning of the episode. Without spoiling anything, there is an episode that seems to acknowledge this as intentional, so perhaps there's some merit to it. That being said, some episodes were laborious to get through, and I didn't feel that at all with the second season (and the duds of the original were over quickly enough).
Yes I agree the runtime is an issue and something like 24 to 30 minutes would be ideal.
I think that’s an issue of many contemporary anthology shows, Twilight Zone is actually on the short end. Black Mirror is totally out of control in that respect as well. Electric Dreams (based on Philip K Dick short stories) stretches things and has a tendency towards melodrama (nothing against melodrama, that’s just not what PKD is about).
i finished Raised By Wolves and it was definitely not the series I thought it would be while I was walking into it. It's still sci-fi, and a little dark (which I tend to like), but it didn't end up as philosophical as I had hoped. To be fair, it's certainly no Lost or Westworld, which can get a little full of themselves, but I should have known when the first two episodes were directed/produced by Ridley Scott that this would eventually turn into a different version of Alien. It reminds me a lot of Prometheus, which had similar ideals of existential exposition, but ultimately became a monster film. I don't actually know if Raised By Wolves will go down this path completely, but I enjoyed it enough to want to see a second season. This was a sleeper hit from HBO, which got overshadowed by Lovecraft Country's marketing.
Speaking of which, saw the finale of Lovecraft Country, it was...disappointing, yet unsurprising. This show just couldn't keep itself together. The strange pacing, the convoluted storylines...the only thing I can say that I liked was the production value. I wanted this show to be much more than it was, which could be part of the letdown, but there's rumors of a second season, and I'd just rather not. The real shame, though, was that the pilot was actually pretty good.
I came across Corporate recently and I have immediately fallen in love. It's a mix of Silicon Valley, Workaholics, and Mad Men. Its dark humor is right up my alley, but the subdued delivery is what I like most. I don't know if it's due to me working in a corporate environment, or longing for the office due to covid, but this series is only two years old and I regret missing out on it before it got cancelled. I'm binging it anyways, though, and it's got three seasons to boot.