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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 finally was able to get HBOMax again and have been watching Succession Season 3. It’s great, obviously.
I saw the first two episodes of Doom Patrol Season 3, I don’t know if I’ll continue watching it. Doesn’t have anything to do with the show itself but I tend to lose interest in TV shows all the time really.
Ghosts Season 3 (a lot of season 3s coming out) is also really good. I watched like ten minutes of the American version and it did not look good at all.
I’ve been re-watching episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, which is my favorite show of all time. It’s a really light fun way to spend twenty five minutes.
I have gone on a huge TV show Reaction channel binge over the last few weeks. I know Reaction channels are massively hated on (especially on reddit), but they're a guilty pleasure of mine. And with the TV show ones, I like that they allow me to rapidly rewatch shows I have already seen, since they typically edit out everything but the highlights; I can passively watch them in the background while I do other things; And I also get the added benefit of seeing how other people react/feel about the shows, which I also enjoy.
The specific TV show reactions I watched this week were:
(in playlist form, in case anyone else is similarly interested in watching them)
Imon_Snow - Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Peaky Blinders
YaBoyRoshi - Squid Game, Avatar: The Last Airbender (episodes in reverse order)
YaBoyRockLee - Invincible, Squid Game
And yes, I am currently obsessed with watching Squid Game reactions. There are about 20 other channels, not listed above, which I have also watched their SG reactions to, too. I think watching all the episodes repeatedly like that somehow helps me process the emotional trauma that show inflicted on me. :P
Yeah, Legal Eagle is great, and one of my favorite Reaction channels too... Though for different reasons than the straight "watch-along" style ones I mentioned above; He's much more analytical and informative than most other Reaction channels.
p.s. There are also a few Doctor Reaction channels (similar to Legal Eagle) that you might also enjoy. E.g.
Dr Hope's Sick Notes (emergency medicine)
Doctor Mike (family medicine)
Dr Elliott Carthy (psychiatry)
I watched the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time, and was... underwhelmed, surprised, and even shocked at some of their decisions on the show. They're breaking up important sequences of events and completely rewriting characters' origins in many ways. The feel is mostly right, but the story feels off, so I'm not entirely sure where I sit with it. I enjoy the casting, but it feels like the show is inspired by the books, rather than adapted from them. It also seems anymore that adaptations are typically little more than "inspirations" anymore anyway, so I'm at least hoping it keeps getting better as sort of its own show. It started to feel better by episode 3, but that character development felt really forced, despite Robert Jordan doing a great job of fleshing out these human, if boringly average village folks whose lives get upended by prophecy.
I thought it was pretty good. It's been a few years since I read the books, so my memory is rough around details. I also have only ever read them once, and as an adult. So it's missing that extra sprinkling of nostalgia for me that comes with having read them as a YA.
The casting choices I think have been pretty spot on so far I think. There where some very obvious story changes that I'm uncertain about, but I'm waiting to see how they play out before I judge if they were a mistake. Overall I'm going in with an attitude of expecting things to have changed while being adapted to both a new medium and a new era (30 years after publication).
I rewatched season 1 of The Great in anticipation of season 2. It's probably my favorite show in years. The decadence, the stupidity, the absurdity! It's basically The Favorite but with more scope and detail (if you like either, you should watch the other!).
I'm also giving Midnight Mass on Netflix a try. It's a horror show about a new priest arriving on a small island community. It's made by the guy who did The Haunting of Hill House which I consider to be the best horror (in any medium) since Midsommar. I'm only halfway through and am loving it so far. The premise is maybe a bit more original but it happily borrows some very classic horror tropes, I don't mind.
I watched Arcane on Netflix this week. I was initially very skeptical, because video game adaptations don't have a great track record (The Witcher is a fine exception however). A friend convinced to me to watch it, and I have to say.... wow. I played League of Legends a small handfull of times when it first came out over a decade ago and haven't paid attention to it since. So the lore is totally new to me, but it clearly has depth to it. The stylized art of it is well done and works really well I think. The animation itself is incredibly fluid and beautiful to watch.
As for the story...... it's pretty good. And then the end of episode 3 happens. And then it becomes really fucking good. Whoever wrote/directed it should win some awards.
I thought they were insane to try to adapt LoL and Dota into TV shows, but credit to the creators, they've managed to win critical acclaim for both.
I've never played either game but have heard such good things about Arcane that I'm tempted to try it.
It may help that The Witcher draws upon a number of short stories from The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny, the two Witcher short-story collections by Andrej Szapkowski, rather than being a straight-up video game adaptation.
The best episode of the first season imo was also the one that stuck closest to its short story: Episode 5 "Bottled Appetites".
(Although speaking more generally, I think tv adaptations work best when they don't force themselves stick to the narrative of their source material (whether that's a video game, book, short story, whatever) and instead try to recreate the same feeling using the unique strengths of the television medium).