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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.
My wife and I recently started The Expanse. We started maybe a week ago, and are already halfway through season 3. I've heard good things, but never got around to watching until now.
I'm sorry that I waited so long. It started off a little slow, but I'm fully invested in it now. I honestly can't believe how good it is, especially considering that it started on SyFy.
I still feel an inner rage whenever I see the "ys" in "SyFy". Everything good they ever made is actual, proper "Sci-Fi" yet they stuff their channel with reality tv garbage that gets cancelled after one season.
I really wish I could keep watching this show, it has a lot that I like, but after a few seasons I couldn't get over the fact that I found the dialogue and acting pretty bad.
The first three episodes of Peacemaker are fantastic. James Gunn is such a great writer. It’s basically more of The Suicide Squad, so if you liked that movie you’ll really like this show.
I also finally watched Squid Games. I usually only watch shows after people stop talking about it. Right before I watched it I checked the reviews and realized they weren’t all that good. 69 on Metacritic. The way people were talking about it and how much of an awards presence it’s having I thought it would have a score closer to Parasite’s 96. Or at the very least in the 80s like Mare of Easttown’s 81.
I understand why the show is popular. It is wildly entertaining and also cuts out a the perfect time in order to keep you watching (including in the middle of the game). This is coupled with the review thing, but I thought it would feel more prestigious. But it has sort of a trashy, b-movie, sense to it. So I went in thinking it was going to be more high brow than it ended up being is my point basically. It’s also pretty close to something like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale. Except with a lot more monologues outright explaining the themes.
Overall, good. I liked it.
I finished Gomorrah -- and I couldn't be happier with how it wrapped up. What a show!
For new shows, I started Smiling Friends, which is fun and weird.
With those out of the way, I really think that The Book of Boba Fett is a perfect addition to the Star Wars universe. I really hope the rest of the series will be 75% flashback. I appreciate that they're digging in deep into what were typically background characters, like the Tusken raiders.
From a Certain Point of View is a series (two so far, I believe) of short stories that follows ANH and ESB through the eyes of the background characters. I would say that most stories are kind of lame, but the odd one is interesting.
That being said, we don't need a series based on Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.
Finished Dexter's latest season. The show was generally okay if you don't think about it but it had so many plot holes which took away the enjoyment for me. I don't think I can recommend it. I found the last few episodes pretty frustrating to watch.
Well, at least they stayed true to the original run.
It's weird because some parts I considered 10/10. The winter theme was so nice. Maybe I was a bit harsh in my earlier comment. They did a lot right considering how the other one ended. But some characters had such a short memory, some plot threads disappeared out of thin air. Some were just red herrings and led nowhere. It did have it's moments but the way the season worked as a whole was so weird.
Tried to not spoil but maybe this comment makes no sense.
Cheer is a Netflix docuseries about competitive cheerleading. It's always great to see the grit and perfectionism required by top level sport. At the same time, when it comes to college athletes, I wonder how much are these kids really learning while training as much as some Olympic athletes and managing social media and endorsements. Do they ever go to class? Do they have any time to study?
To make things worse, there's no such thing as pro cheerleading league. After college, they're career is pretty much done (cheerleading in professional sports doesn't seem like something they aspire to, it's more sexy dancing than acrobatics and AFAIK entirely female).
And they have to do all that knowing that a permanent injury means losing the scholarship. It's quite unfair.
Edit: One thing I find interesting is that college cheerleading seems to have little to do with cheering nowadays, performing at the sidelines of a game is almost a nuisance to them. It's all about beating other cheerleading teams in dedicated competitions in what I'd describe as a high performance mix of dancing, circus, and Olympic gymnastics.