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.
BBC has just put out a 4 part "factual drama" based on Jimmy Savile. It is available here. Steve Coogan plays Savile. Here is the IMDB page for it.
For those who don't know, Jimmy Savile was a live dj, a radio dj, and a tv presenter. He played local dance halls, and then moved to Radio Caroline in 1958 when he was 32, and he moved to BBC TV in 1964 when he was 38. There were allegations made against him right from the start of his dj career, and as time went on these became more and more known among the public, but organisations failed to deal with them and failed to hold him to account. When he died hundreds of people came forward. After extensive police investigations police concluded he was a prolific sex offender, and probably the UK's most prolific sex offender. Wikipedia article about savile, and wikipedia article about the abuse scandal.
Coogan is a great, he's clearly a talented actor and he does pretty well here. The show heavily features a dramatic representation of Savile's biographer, Dan Davies.
The show covers Savile's entire career. It shows changing public perceptions of him, it shows him testing boundaries and getting away with minor rule breaking, it shows the manipulations of power he used to get access to girls.
But there are problems here. There are many complicated reasons why people don't report sexual abuse, and this show fails to do anything but pay minor lip service to those. Biggest for me is the focus entirely on Savile, and not the systems that enabled his abuse. Clearly he is the only person responsible for the abuse, but how did he get away with it so long, why didn't anyone stop him, why did organisations let him continue? There's a mealy-mouthed attempt to explain this, but that's a few lines of dialogue at most. This is important! The question of "How do we stop abusers?" needs a robust, evidence based, approach that doesn't stop at a shrug of the shoulders and "we dunno, he was a master manipulator". He absolutely wasn't, he was just brutally uncaring and wealthy. You come away from this show thinking that organisations were well meaning but a bit clueless, but that wasn't the case. Society just did not care about abuse enough to prevent it from happening, and we need to examine why we allowed it to happen.
Each episode starts by interview survivors, and it's good that their voice is prominent.
The TV drama Three Girls about the Rochdale Grooming scandal is better - it focuses on victims and how they were let down by the system. Or you could watch The Red Riding Trilogy one, two, and three - this is fiction, but features investigations into the Yorkshire Ripper case.
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.
The one-off series 'Good Omens' from 2019 is getting a follow-up!
Here's the trailer for Season 2, which is being released on Amazon Prime later this month.
I only know this as a one-off novel, and a series based on that novel. I didn't expect any form of follow-up.
However, Neil Gaiman, who is listed as an executive producer and the show-runner for this new season, has supposedly said in the past that he and Terry Pratchett discussed a possible sequel to the novel (although Pratchett gave up on the idea when Gaiman moved to the USA). Maybe Gaiman is going to use ideas from that unwritten sequel for this second series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recently I've been rewatching GIRLS for the umpteenth time. When the series finale originally aired, it was a mini “Game of Thrones finale” situation. Fans were largely disappointed by the final episode, many disliking season 6 in general. It's one of my favorite shows, but usually when I rewatch it I either skip the very last episode, or I skip the entire final season, instead pretending that the season 5 finale was the ending of the show.
The finale of GIRLS hit a lot of marks for controversial finales. A few beloved characters were largely missing from the final episode/season or didn't get closure that people expected. The ending for the main character seemed to come out of nowhere (magically landing a dream job after struggling with employment the whole show,) and her overall arch didn't seem to align with her personality or anything that had happened up to that point. No one really got a happy ending, and the overall message or theme of the show seemed unclear, since many of the characters experienced very little growth over the course of the show, or they did actually experience some growth that was ignored when their conclusions were written.
I thought it might be fun to see if any of you have similar thoughts about any TV shows that didn't end the way you expected, or what you imagine would happen in fantastic shows that never even got an ending due to being canceled early. A few examples that come to mind:
I intended to write about how I would want my example show to have ended, but honestly I'm stumped. Writing is hard! Especially if you don't have the luxury of planning the ending ahead of time, which I imagine was the issue for the writers of many of the classic "controversial finales." I'll probably add a comment about it after I come up with something.
Spoilers for Ahsoka Season 1, Episodes 1-4; but also Star Wars Rebels & Clone Wars, or really any Star Wars (including Mando/Book of Boba) is fair game.
I kept the title vague but I really want to discuss the World Between Worlds.
For those unfamiliar that is where Ahsoka found herself at the end of episode 4. For those familiar (again, Rebels spoilers) it is a special Force place that can view and, in at least one instance, interact with the past. By all accounts it also has some echos of the future.
It's not technically "time travel" but it will potentially be viewed as such and have a similarly long lasting affect on the Star Wars universe.
Do you think the World Between Worlds is a good idea? What story do you want to see told? What story do you think will be told?
I really enjoy Tales of Ba Sing Se. It's really nice just watching them live their lives in the big city. It's somewhat a filler episode, but unlike the filler in Naruto or something, the plot still incrementally moves along and doesn't linger too long on any one character.
Episode title: Rage against the Vaccine
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.
This thread may contain spoilers.
I thought it was pretty good! Better than the last episode, we were pleasantly surprised here at house Godzilla. We actually watched the older episode where Kif gets pregnant the night before, so we were very curious to see how Amy would handle everything. Feels were had.
What were your thoughts? Let your voice be heard!