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.

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.

The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.

Previous:

• S01E01+2
• S01E03
• S01E04

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.

Apple has spent a lot of money on The Morning Show for its new tv service. It has a bunch of actors that I love. In particular I'm excited to see Anniston, Duplas, Carell, and Crudup in this.

Metacritic gives it only 60. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-morning-show Sometimes a single terrible review can drag that number down, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. There are a few bad reviews, and lots of mixed reviews.

I don't know much about critique or how reviewing works, so I'm curious: is The Morning Show bad, or are critics terrible at reviewing, or is something else going on?

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.

So I've been putting in topics for each episode of The Good Place for a couple weeks, and it's been a little slow but reasonable amounts of activity. But for week to week shows in the future, would it be more appropriate to have one big thread made for the season premiere and bump that on a weekly basis and enforce marking posts when a particular episode happened, so we can better track discussion and continue threads of discussion across weeks, or would that just kinda be a mess?

Josha Stradowski is Rand al'Thor

Barney Harris is Mat Cauthon

Marcus Rutherford is Perrin Aybara

Zoë Robins is Nynaeve al'Meara

Madeleine Madden is Egwene al'Vere

There's a fair amount of excitement and discussion around the choices on Reddit.

Previously, Rosamund Pike was announced as Moiraine Damodred.

I really enjoyed Peele's new Twilight Zone. It's a bit hit and miss - but most anthology shows have this. Some episodes are great, most are good enough, a couple are forgettable.

The critic reviews (based on the first four episodes) are all over the place, with scoring ranging from 100 to 10. The user reviews are the usual tyre-fire of awfulness. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-twilight-zone-2019

I found Replay to be genuinely upsetting and it was the episode that stayed with me longest. I get the impression that this episode split the audience and a bunch of people dislike the social commentary. (Or something, I dunno, I can't understand the mindset that criticises a show for something like this).

So I'm interested in your opinions. Have you watched it? Did you enjoy it?

I'm (re)watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and after a few episodes I started to tune out every time they detail how some specific solution is possible. There's little care with consistency, everything is bent to fit the story. "Oh, I get it, if I reverse the trusters and focus the beams using a microwaved non-Euclidian logarithmic abstraction, we can get the shields back and fix the time distillation!".

I know Star Trek is soft sci-fi, but come on! If it's all meaningless, at least keep it to a minimum. Focus on the interesting bits: the politics, the culture, the philosophical exploration, the juicy paradoxes.

I still love Star Trek and I definitely don't want it to become hard sci-fi, but sometimes it feels like /r/VXJunkies/...

Spoilers for all seasons of both The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery.

The Orville isn't bad, but it's not the worthy successor to pre-Abrams Star Trek that a lot of people on /r/startrek—and increasingly on /r/DaystromInstitute—make it out to be, and honestly I struggle to understand how people are even reaching that conclusion.

I should start, I suppose, with what I like about this show. First, I like the characters—with two exceptions, I'll get to that later. Dr. Finn, in particular, is a delight: Penny Johnson Jerald is a very talented actress and it's really great to see her in a role where the rest of the cast draws on her character's wisdom. She plays it well. The rest of the bridge crew is great, too: Gordon, LaMarr, and Bortas are all lots of fun, and Jessica Szohr is a great addition for season 2: Halston Sage didn't quite have the skill to pull her character off.

The show looks great. Union vessels are distinct from Federation vessels and they're not just ISO Human Standard Spaceships either, which is commendable. Kaylon spheres are neat play on Borg cubes, and my only real complaint in this regard is that Moclan and Krill vessels look oddly similar. The engine effects, the depiction of celestial objects, the overall Union aesthetic, it's all very pleasing to the eye.

The worldbuilding is great. This is the one place that I think I would even go as far to say The Orville has a clear edge over Star Trek. Trek has built up loads of cruft over the years and sometimes struggles to keep it all together. For example, The Orville has swept away the inconsistent depiction of enlisted personnel that Trek fouls up seemingly very chance it gets by just depicting officers, which makes sense for a highly automated vessel. I fundamentally "buy" the Planetary Union as a human-centric interstellar polity in the same way I buy the UFP. (My one complaint in this department is that there does not appear to be any bureaucratic distinction between the Union government and the Union fleet, i.e. it lacks the distinction between The Federation and Starfleet. That seems like an oddity I hope they correct in season 3.) McFarlane is a nerd, he's fastidious about detail, and you just know he's has to have pages upon pages of worldbuilding details which helps him keep it consistent. It shows.

But the show falls flat on its face in two key ways which, unfortunately, appear to be baked into the concept.

Shortfall one: I just can't seem to warm up to either Mercer or Grayson, which for obvious reasons is a huge problem, because the show is now on record as indicating that their romantic relationship is The Key To Saving The Galaxy™. The Orville is an episodic throwback, but if it has a "main arc," that main arc is Ed & Kelly's relationship, and it just feels awkward and out of place.

I don't really dislike Grayson, but I can't find anything to really like about her either. She's just kinda there, and her story never diverges from Mercer's. Which brings me to Mercer... which... just... ugh. Never in my life have I seen a more egregious case of a show creator playing out his fantasy on camera. I cannot tell you the number of times I've seen someone make a statement which boils down to "I don't like Discovery because Burnham is a Mary Sue, and that's why I prefer The Orville" as if Mercer is not the most blatant case of a Marty Stu to ever grace network television and get renewed for a second season. I mean, come on. He's the perfect captain, he always makes the right call, yet for some reason the show keeps trying to sell us on the notion that he's damaged goods and out-of-favor with the Admiralty. It's not believable, and it irks me endlessly that anyone would lob this criticism at Discovery when The Orville is an order of magnitude more guilty of this conceit.

And that brings me to the elephant in the room: the direct Star Trek comparison. I seem to recall Season 1 having a novel episode here and there, even if they were snoozefests. Season 1 also bothered to draw from other sources of inspiration, even if those sources were Trek-adjacent shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. But on the other hand, some episodes from season 1 were straight rips from old Trek. "If the Stars Should Appear"? Straight remake of "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." "Mad Idolatry"? Straight remake of "Blink of an Eye."

And Season 2? Season 2 doubled down on the Trek remake approach. No other sources, no novel concepts: almost every episode is a remake of a previous episode of Star Trek. Sometimes The Orville at least bothered to remix a pair of episodes, and sometimes a lot of the details got changed, but with one exception, every episode was a Trek episode remake.

The degree to which a given The Orville episode is a remake of the Trek episode I've listed varies. "Home" is only similar if you look at the broad strokes: the officer on loan from the scientifically advanced Earth ally goes home where her family disparages her for spending all that time with humans. The home invasion plot from that episode was original, but it was also kinda weird and contrived. The flipside of this constant borrowing from Trek is that when The Orville does go off the beaten path, it's inevitably flat out boring. "Ja'loja" was an utterly forgettable episode because it largely focused on Ed & Kelly relationship drama.

And even if we look at "Ja'loja," there's a bit of "Amok Time" in there with the whole "returning to the desert homeworld" for the Moclan urination ceremony. Sometimes it's bits and pieces into a blender, but other times it's a basically a straight rip, like it is with "All the World Is Birthday Cake" and "Blood of Patriots." Perhaps the most blatant "homage" was introducing a surgically altered Klingon Krill to infiltrate the hero ship, right down to the name and rank of the infiltrator!

I know, everything's a remix, and I know, it's a fine line between "ripoff" and "homage," but the problem with this level of "borrowing" is that when you've seen every episode of Star Trek as many times as I have, each episode of The Orville just becomes an exercise in "I wonder which Star Trek episode this will be," and once you figure it out, it just saps all the urgency and tension out of the viewing experience. It gets boring.

I didn't get bored with Discovery. I mean, sure, Discovery has its problems. In many ways its problems are the inverse of The Orville's strengths: I struggle to care all that much about any of the characters, the show is rife with dark sets and quick shots which just isn't that visually appealing, and the worldbuilding is at times really difficult to reconcile with established Trek lore. (The Spore drive is classified? That's why we never see it again? Ummm... OK, then.) And the story, while chaotic and poorly paced & planned due to constant showrunner turmoil, is at the very least interesting and novel.

The perfect Star Trek would be a synthesis of these two shows, but apart, each show pretty much breaks even when you take the strengths and weaknesses on the merits. Which brings me to my title: I cannot for the life of me get into the mindset of the fans who see this as the True Trek of our time. It's just remakes of old Trek, and while the visuals have been updated for 2019, the stories have not.

The bottom line is that while it's great that we have two Trek-style shows on the air at the same time for the first time since the 90's, neither show is great, or even good. They're both just OK, and the huge disparity between how they've been received doesn't make much sense to me.

We've had a few threads recently criticising the direction of various shows cough Game of Thrones cough and @Amarok suggested a thread celebrating the good stuff on TV instead. Personally, television is by far my favourite means of visual storytelling, a good TV show can go into the kind of depth and complexity that the more time-limited format of movies just can't touch.

A few of my favourite shows then, in no particular order:

House MD - recently rewatched this and it definitely stands the test of time. Sure, there are a few weak episodes here and there but on balance it's solid. Hugh Laurie absolutely nails the role of Sherlock Holmes Greg House and the supporting cast are excellent too. It has one of my all-time favourite endings of all television shows, even knowing what was coming I still ended up a little moist of eye by the end. Also they grade the colour with increasing desaturation throughout season 8, almost to the point of it being monochrome - until the final scene is in glorious, bright colour and I love little touches like that. TV shouldn't just be actors reading lines, there is a whole medium to tell stories with (Game of Thrones also did this kind of thing well).

Detectorists - BBC show about two metal detectorists. Gloriously paced, slow and gentle but insistent in telling it's tale, with really strong characters. Finishes beautifully, at just the right time. A gem of a show, it's very well written and nearly flawless throughout. Mackenzie Crook (writer, director) was offered more seasons but he declined because the show was finished and that takes guts to do but I love that he did. Also features Diana Rigg (Olenna Tyrell) who is never not brilliant.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer - I mean what can you even say about Buffy. Might have been the last show where my friends would meet up for a watch party every week, hanging out for hours discussing it and enjoying herbal cigarettes for the evening. Streaming is great and so convenient but in some ways I do miss TV being an event. There was someone very special about getting everyone together once a week to share in that world, and especially with Buffy because the characters were so close in age to me (I'm slightly younger than Alyson Hannigan and I had such a crush on Willow). Sure, it had it's wobbles (the entire Adam story arc, for example) but also some of the best TV moments of the 90s/early 2000s. Once More With Feeling and Hush are fan favourites for a reason.

Hannibal - Produced by Bryan Fuller, who is always good, but absolutely outdoes himself here, and Mads Mikkelson is terrifying in the titular role. Visually it's stunning, the plot is engaging and deeply disturbing, the characters well drawn and believable (Hannibal particularly so, which is all the more horrifying) and the sound design is absolutely astonishing. I bought a whole new sound system literally just for this show and it was totally worth it. Sound design is one of those things which you only notice when it's particularly bad or particularly good and Hannibal is definitely the latter. It's such a well-rounded piece of television, it uses colour and light and sound and all the tools in the TV maker's box. the ending is a little on the weak side but they got axed early - Bryan Fuller had five seasons planned but they only got three.

I could go on, but I won't because I'll go on for ages! Please add a couple of your favourite shows and maybe we can all find a few new things to watch.

The series is done! Let's have a bit of fun with it now that it's over.

Choose characters from the show and assign them a popular song based on their story arc, characteristics, or whatever else you feel like highlighting.

Example:

• Daenerys gets Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" because she's grappling with the fact that Jon gives love a bad name (namely, Targaryen). Oh, and she's also shot through the heart.

Be serious or be cheeky--whatever floats your boat as we sail to find out what's west of Westeros.

I have watched the first season, and started the second season. I have been told a few times, it gets better once they get more into the AI aspect behind "the machine". So far the episodes are pretty formulaic, so I am wondering if there is a specific episode or season where these little plot bits about this machine everyone is trying to find come to fruition and the series pivots to more of a sci-fi sub-plot.

Also, how come nobody calls him out for talking to himself all the time?
I do like the dog, good addition to the second season.

EDIT: I am now on season 2 episode 10, and yeah its starting to get a lot better. It seems to be a slow transition but they are getting my attention with all this hacker history talk.

I've seen every episode of The Good Place up to this point and still can't decide if I like it or not. It's a very strange situation. The premise, while novel, doesn't work well (in my opinion) on a TV show budget or schedule and I find myself wondering why I'm watching it.

Reviews of the show are generally very positive, but it feels like the writers are constantly scrambling for new ideas when the concept just doesn't lend itself to that much TV.

I love Michael Schur's work generally and like Kristen Bell as an actress, but I still can't decide if I like this or not. Thoughts?

Personally, I really enjoyed Bandersnatch as a one-off. Having the ability to choose what happens and trying to piece together the story by watching multiple endings.

But honestly, the story fell quite flat and it wouldn't have been a very entertaining episode had it not been for the gimmick. But what do you guys think?

So I've just finished watching the new season. I had low expectations going in, given how the writers had to cut out their main character at the eleventh hour, but I still can't help but feel disappointed.

Soo many plot threads left open. No repercussions for any of the shit that went down over the last 5 years. The good journalist ends up dead, Claire Underwood commits murder literally in the oval office while secret service is right outside the door and then... nothing. That's it. That's what we get for series a finale. I mean, what?

I've also been quite pissed off how they tried to turn Claire into a feminist icon. Claire is a monster. She is at least as bad as Frank. She wanted to literally start a nuclear war to deflect attention away from herself.

Don't get me wrong, having a feminist message is ok. It's good. It's even timely. But not with Claire fucking Underwood for fucks sake! In the first episode where that female soldier asks her if she even has a plan so that more soldiers won't end up dead, Claire snarks at her with "you wouldn't ask me that if I was a man". Really? This fresh recruit, this soldier who you will be sending to her death is asking you - someone who never held any public office before - whether you have a plan and your response is fuck patriarchy?

How about that scene where she fires her entire cabinet and fills it with an all-female cast? Forget about real life, it's not even realistic in the show's world. Remember how hard Frank had to fight, how many people he had to cross, bribe and even murder just to replace a single seat in earlier seasons? Where was the senate? Did everyone else just roll over; how come nobody fought her on this? It felt like the writers really, really wanted to play out their deepest, guilty-pleasure Hillary 2016 fantasies out on the show and the script suffered for it.

If they just left things at the last season's finale where Claire looked into the camera with "my turn!" it would have been a much more powerful moment, certainly better than this disorganized, directionless mess we got.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. How about you?

Has anyone else seen this show? It came out last October. I just saw it about a month ago, probably a little less. It has got to be one of the best thing I've seen all year. Top 3.

I love the entire theme, the atmosphere, how everything is done. The direction is incredible. And the actors are ridiculously good.

In the show the two main characters will narrate their thoughts as they are happening in the moment. There is brilliant joke where Alyssa is narrating her thoughts and she thinks something along the lines of, "If This were a movie we would probably be American." Because the show is set in Britain and she is thinking to herself, what if this is all a movie.

The show is a dark comedy. And it's just got this incredible motif for lack of a better word. Has anyone else seen it? What are your thoughts? I really like Alyssa's character. Just how she is so empathetic, and she thinks far enough into everything to weigh both sides in a way not a lot of people would do. She basically givea the benefit of the doubt and weighs both sides more than she should.

Needless to say I'm very excited and would definitely talk about it if others want to. That being said, r/BojackHorseman is still going strong so another thread over here may be redundant. Let's vote on this.

No spoilers, just a vague example.

A long time ago, I watched TRON: Uprising (2012). It's a really good Disney kids show that was unfortunately cancelled after one season or 19 episodes. It carries a rating of TV-Y7.

One thing that always really struck me about this show was that it's actually quite violent, but censored. We see gladiator fights where "people" are just smashed into little cubes signifying their death.

This is not at all a new concept, and I'm not saying we need absolute realism, but is there an imbalance to the amount of violence we show without "real" consequence? And in doing so, glorifying the action of violence itself?

We don't want to traumatize kids, but maybe we should, just a little. And for those saying that the age range for some shows are too young for them to understand, these shows have really adult concepts to begin with. In Voltron, for example, we're talking about galactic war, genocide, torture and misuse of good technologies turning them to weapons.

And though I posted in ~tv, in games especially when there's a violent action executed by the gamer. Games are rated a bit differently, and I'm not as familiar with children games, so hopefully another Tilderino will have more to add here.

From start to finish I found the show totally engrossing, tense, and mysterious. It was excellently shot and written, and the twists in episodes 7 and 8 were hard hitting, even if you had an idea that they were possible as early as episode 4 or 5. Plus, those post creditn scenes were haunting. What did you guys think?

I'm currently reading the book so please, no spoilers for the novel! TV show discussion only

I'll go first.

I'm currently rewatching Veronica Mars right now and find myself really admiring many of her traits. She is witty, sarcastic, intelligent, and capable. I think what sets her apart from many other female protagonists is that she is not a martyr. If someone wrongs her, she will stand up for herself and in most cases get even. Her need to "get even" probably isn't actually a great personality trait, but I find it kind of refreshing.

Does anyone else wish they were more like a certain character on tv?

I don't have a long write up for this or anything, mostly because I'm just confused...

I have to admit, watching season 7, I don't remember Adam if he was ever brought in before, and his part was so short and seemingly inconsequential, I honestly have no strong feelings for it. Shiro is all about burying his feelings and putting the needs of others above his own, so it's not at all out of character for his personal life to basically never show up. Still, we're finally getting more of his backstory, and I can't help but feel it's lacking.

So, I guess my question is - why? Why bring in a character they're not going to develop and kill off screen? Would it be better just to have a random mention of Shiro being gay and just moving on, which I guess is pretty much all that happened anyways? Guess they could have done it as part of his backstory with Keith. Does this count as queer-baiting?

Thoughts?

Correction: guess he didn't die off screen. I just didn't recognize the random pilot as Adam...

For most stories, when you have an evil or otherwise irredeemable character, death is the only form of satisfactory redemption. Anything less is simply not convincing for most audiences.

I'm sure a lot of people can write novels on Spike's character arcs, but I just wanted to discuss a little bit of his redemption arc.

Interestingly, his sacrifice at the end of Buffy season 7, is the beginning of his actual character. Sure, he's helped out Buffy before that, but he was far from "the greater good" until then. So death, and boom - character redeemed.

So how's the redemption arc when he's brought back in Angel. It's harder now because now he's up and walking and possibility doing things that negate his redemption. He now has to live the life he supposedly wanted to when he made his sacrifice.

Not saying that's what happened, but I think the writers went out of their way to show this.

(Going off memory now, so please feel free to correct me, if I get any details wrong...)

Not long after he's ghost-Spike, he starts feeling like he's pulled to "Hell", and develops a friendship with Fred, who ultimately saves him from that fate. This establishes his "goodness" for the rest of Angel.

Thoughts? Other characters that share something similar you want to talk about? How would Spike feel without this episode? Anyone just want to gush about Spike in general?

I like Bar Rescue. There's some ridiculous tv dramatization, a smidge of education (how service businesses work), and I can google what happens a year after the show airs (they all seem to close). Plus when I go to bars I feel like I can point out what they're doing wrong.

Edit: The rewatch announcement and schedule can be found here.

I think Black Mirror is an important show tackling a lot of tough, and often overlooked subjects with technology, and I think that there should be an audience for it on Tildes.

With that said, is there any interest in doing a rewatch and discussion on it? A discussion thread for each episode would be posted every few days, I’m thinking every 3, to give people enough time to watch the (sometimes quite long) episodes, as well as to not spam ~tv with too many threads.

I think this could be fun and start some good discussion, but there would have to be a good amount of people participating. If you’re interested, please leave a vote/comment with any feedback. Thanks!

IMDb YouTube Teaser

So far I haven't been able to see anything except what's visible on YouTube. Like all of his content, the show has SBC put people into bizarre situations. But it seems to me this show is more about the bizarre world we're already living in than it is how strange SBC can act.

I just finished watching The OA. Wow, that was a really unexpected and interesting show. Coming of age / Sci-Fi-ish / Magical Realism, what an amazing show. The ending got this grown ass man emotional. Has anyone else watched this? Thoughts? Anything else like this out there?