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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.
Me and my girlfriend are really enjoying The Leftovers on HBO. We're at half of season 2. She loves drama and I love supernatural/fantasy so a supernatural drama pleases us both. This must be one of the better approaches to mystery I have ever seen, every time we get an answer a new interesting question take its place. The rythm is slower, but we are always engaged, never bored. There's some degree of narrative sophistication so you better pay attention. Kinda reminds me of Lost, but better and it makes sense.
The Sopranos S01E07, what can I say? It's excellent every step of the way. James Gandolfini has to be one of the best actors ever
Fear City, Netflix docuseries about the major investigation and trial that took down NYC mafia bosses. Cool doc, but I only recommend if you have an interest in American Mafia.
World's Most Wanted, Netlifx docuseries. One criminal per episode. Some are more interesting than others. The British woman terrorist leader was the best for me. Highly unusual. Pretty cool show.
That's because both were produced and written by Damon Lindelof, if I'm not mistaken.
Cool. I saw a few episodes of Lost I caught on TV from different seasons, but would you believe me if I told you that I soon realized there was no good way to end something like that? I got the feeling they where writing whatever they had to keep tensions high, creating a highly intrincated mystery regardless of consistency. I felt cheated instead of challenged, so I stopped watching it. When series finale came it was like a prophecy coming true to me.
I finished The Leftovers. It feels like a step forward from that. He clearly embraced absurdism, so explanations are not that important anymore. The supernatural elements serve the purpose of enacting the characters inner conflicts. There were some explanations, but that's not really the point and I'm fine with it.
I just wished they had two more episodes in the last season. Some things would be way cooler acted than told.
Yep, pretty much. I think Film Critics Hulk's HULK FINALLY READY TO POINT ON THE DOLL AND SHOW WHERE THE LOST FINALE TOUCHED HULK does a really good job of explaining why it was such a terrible finale.
I'm glad to hear The Leftovers ended well. I've given up almost completely on anything Lindelof is involved in. I heard a radio interview with him years ago, just after Lost ended, and he talked about how, when he was a kid, his father gave him a bunch of Encyclopedia Brown mystery novels. These were arranged so that there were multiple stories in a book, and the ending where he "solves the mystery" of each story was in a separate section at the back of the book. You were intended to read a story, then write down what you thought the solution was, then read the author's ending and see if you got it right.
Apparently, his father also got sick of him spending so much time reading, that he ended up cutting out the solutions from the books leaving young Damon unable to answer any of the mysteries brought up in the stories. Instead of taking the social cue to reduce his reading and also making him realize that his father was a prick, he adopted that as his philosophy for writing. That sometimes it's better to not know what happens. (Consequently, J.J. Abrams, who directed Lost, tells a similar story about how when he was a kid, he bought a magic set that had a "mystery box" which contained an unknown magic trick, and how he never opened it because not knowing what was in it was so much more fun than whatever the trick ended up being. So both stories are probably false.)
To me, it just defeats the point of telling a story if you're not going to tell me how it ends or why it happened. (I mean there can be exceptions, but in general, I don't find it to be a useful story-telling tool.)
I'd say open ended stories can absolutely work as long as you create the correct expectations. No one complains about the lack of traditional endings in the works of Buñuel, Samuel Beckett, or David Lynch. Besides, an ending might not be completely obscure, some things may have a more complete resolution while others don't. Leftovers is a psychological thriller with a strong emphasis on the psychological. Everything orbits the question: "how is grieving even possible? Can someone really move forward from profound trauma"? This is the real "mystery" that guides the show and must be solved, everything else is accessory.
We started watching White Lotus. It's about a high-end resort in Hawaii where rich people vacation. The guests are all entitled assholes, and the staff are overworked and have their own problems all while trying to smile and maintain a veil of calmness. You see where it's going to end in the first 5 minutes, and the rest is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. My spouse and I are finding it very funny. I don't normally notice such things, but the opening credits are incredible. First, the music is just phenomenal. Second, the graphics subtly but directly reference several things that happen over the episodes, and it's really cool. The first time I saw them, I thought they were well done. But watching them by the 4th episode, I was like, "Holy crap! I never noticed that before!" I can't recommend this enough. There are 2 more episodes to drop in the next 2 weeks or so.
We also continued watching Physical. I think the season finale is this week. Sheila got caught cooking the books for her husband's campaign, but she convinced Tyler, Bunny, and her friend from her kid's school to figure out who's been selling their tapes, and they took the remaining bootlegs and the money he made off of them, so they're all square now. And Danny now now knows about her side project. That was the last shot, so it will be interesting to see his reaction.
Jeopardy is so good right now. Matt Amodio is KILLING it. David Faber is an excellent host, too, and not just because LeVar Burton tanked.
If you're not watching Jeopardy, there's no better time to start --- at least for Matt's run.
I started Halston tonight, which seems pretty great so far. Obiwan is typically great in everything he does.