I want to talk about Person of Interest. A CBS series created by Jonathan Nolan, more famously known for his work on Westworld (and brother of "that" Christopher Nolan, talent runs in the family). This is a spoiler-free post.

Premise: An ex-military badass is hired by a rich ex-usgov genius who built an AI that is plugged into the NSA's spying supernetwork, and can predict crime based on all the datapoints.

Strong similarities with: Westworld, Mr. Robot.

Person of Interest is a series that really took me by surprise. I didn't really care for Season 1, which I left running in the background after it was apparent to me that this was a very run-of-the-mill CBS police procedural. I gave it a chance based on a friend's recommendation, and because IT/sec references were accurate and didn't make me cringe. It also had an interesting premise which was written pre-snowden and raised some interesting philosophical questions on privacy and crime prevention.

Then towards the Season 1 finale, the music got pretty good, the scenes were very action-packed and the series started feeling like it was getting very entertaining. So I kept watching.

Without spoiling: throughout Season 2, the series actually completely shifts genre almost unnoticeably, from "generic police procedural" to "long-arc Westworld-style tech scifi".

I was stunned by how smooth the genre transition was. Of all the series I watched, it's something truly unique to that one, which is one of the reasons I rate it as one of the best TV series in my catalogue. It's also, from what I heard, Nolan's strategy from the get-go in order to get a very unique show greenlit on a "safe" network like CBS.

By the end of the series, Person of Interest had inspired me. Made me extremely interested in AI and data. It affected my work and the way I think about the world. POI really toes the scifi line by taking concepts which are possible, but not there yet and explores the possibilities (again, Westworld); unlike most other Sci-Fi shows which take abstract ideas of what we may want to see in the future, regardless of how possible/reasonable they are.

POI does require some suspension of disbelief. You have to accept the trope of a "supergenius" who can build an AI like this all on his own, for example. I think that's fine, and I found that the show was very rigorous at taking only practical shortcuts with very little fridge logic.

I keep mentioning Westworld and that's no accident. POI predates WW and it feels that WW was a continuation of Nolan's ideas about the implications of AI, in a much higher budget setting. (And as an aside, if you haven't watched Westworld, you should)

Tag spoilers in comments :)

My previous recommendations:

• Person of Interest
• Psych

So, I just finished binging all five seasons, and I think I can safely recommend this series to an audience that enjoys adult humor and series that juggle between the very funny and very serious.

BoJack Horseman is a series that starts slow and doesn't really seem to truly find itself until Season 3. I personally didn't enjoy the first half of Season 1 at all (got very bored). The second half of Season 1 got me to keep watching purely on the humor and the gags, which pretty consistently increase in quality as the show continues.

I especially got drawn in on all the "animal" gags. The series at some point early on becomes very comfortable going all out on visual&storytelling gags based on the animal playing them (BJH is an otherwise-normal universe where a significant part of the population is half-animal half-human). The humor is pretty high quality, I would easily compare it to the humor in Arrested Development (early seasons).
It is a series that makes fun of itself, without relying too much on gimmicks or breaking the fourth wall too much. With that said, Seasons 3 and 4 introduce more experimental episodes (including an entirely mute one, similar to the excellent Hush from Buffy, as well as another that only consists of a beautiful entire 22 minute monologue). None of them bored me. I was always extremely impressed with the execution and the quality.

What really gets me to recommend this series is its later seasons. Seasons 3 and 4 are of exceptionally high quality and the show becomes… very dark. But not without losing its humor. BoJack Horseman made me cry three times. I'm not talking about tearing up, I'm talking about the full waterworks like I've done only a couple of times in my entire adult life.
It's a show that punches you in the gut not by having grand romantic storylines; not by having heroic moments with epic music; not sympathetically by having manly characters tear up; not even by killing off beloved characters like Game of Thrones. It's a show that hits you because it's too fucking real.

In many ways, I would say that I enjoyed BJH for similar reasons that I enjoyed early GoT: It's unforgiving to its characters. But I don't want this to put anyone off from watching; it's a unique series to which I have a very hard time finding parallels. Its humor sits between Arrested Development, Futurama and Rick & Morty and is very much its own thing. Very reminiscent of Adult Swim.

BoJack Horseman is available on Netflix. Come for the gags, stay for your own reasons.

• Wikipedia
• IMDb
• TVMaze

Supernatural is one of those TV shows that had some fantastic early seasons. I really miss them.
As a show I feel it kinda turned way too much into fan service in its later seasons. It stayed decent (good, even), but lost a lot of its quality.
Every season there's a bigger, badder fish and things get more and more absurd. One of the things that kind of annoyed me the most about it is that characters dying has zero impact, as they come back into the show whenever convenient using whatever silly way the writers deem worthy. (That series is the polar opposite of Game of Thrones in that regard…)

Season 5 introduced the Four Horsemen. I remember Death's intro as being possibly the most memorable moment of the entire show. Re-watching them now, the introductions of all four were seriously chilling. Thought I'd share them here.

• War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I4nFgMuciU
• Famine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQSnVPzV4_k
• Pestilence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E2aQKYEsUw&t=33s
• And best of all, Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EcsBgxXDqc

I'll recommend Supernatural if you like a good mix of horror-comedy without too much comedy. You may like it if you liked: Psych, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel.

Holy shit. Now that is what I call cinema. Somebody give Jonah Hill an Oscar already. The amount of times I felt a deep connection to his character is reaching uncomfortable. The only thing that felt like “too much” was Snorri, but luckily that didn't last long. Emma Stone was so human in this. Rome Kanda and Justin Theroux have amazing comedic moments.

Fucking 10/10. Absolute recommendation.

Previous recommendation on Tildes: Person of Interest

Light spoilers: Psych - S01E01 - Pilot

It's hard to convey how much I love Psych. It's one of those series that, like The Office, P&R, Community, Arrested Development etc develops its own community, through a very vivid style of comedy.

Psych goes back and forth across the series between light-hearted fun and serious episodes. The series follows Shawn, son of a retired police officer, who was taught by his father to be hyper-perceptive, and his best friend Gus. Shawn finds himself having to fake "Psychic powers" to justify his perceptiveness and ends up working for the police.

What makes the series so good is the top-notch chemistry between Shawn and Gus. Psych is one of my top "comfort" series because of this. It got me through my hardest times and it's my second-favourite full-rewatch series (first being The IT Crowd).

It's also littered with references poking fun at The Mentalist, another great TV series with a much more serious tone and a similar plot line (Fake psychic helps police force).

Psych's main flaw I would say is that it suffers from Flanderization. Over time, both Shawn and Gus become exaggerations of themselves. But as much as I wish they'd be more subtle about it sometimes, it doesn't detract from the overall quality of the series.

All in all, Psych is, in my opinion, USA Network's best work and the embodiment of their slogan "Characters welcome", with strong similarities to Monk, Suits and White Collar.

The Psych Movie, which follows the end of the series, is excellent as well. I recommend watching the series before, however. I also generally recommend watching the series starting from the beginning. My first encounter with Psych was with a Season 2 episode and turned me off for a while. There's a second movie currently being filmed. Hopefully it's good!

Needing a down weekend, the spouse and I settled in to watch TV, and discovered that Starz' series, Counterpart - spoiler warning, is one of the better series we've seen in quite a while, let alone among science fiction stories. Though The Expanse wins for sheer SFX pyrotechnics and breadth of technical scope, it's wonderful to sit in for a deep, thoughtful drama like Counterpart. The series focuses on character, story, world-building, plausible plotting, and avoidance of the usual alternate universe cliches. Counterpart is a genuine Cold War Noir spy thriller which happens to occur in a science-fictional setting, and the writers have managed to avoid or refresh the tropes of both genres in ways that ask interesting philosophical questions. It's quiet, slow, and meticulous in a way that most current television writing seems to have abandoned. There's tense action, but no primary colored-supersuits, no scary aliens, no gaudy laser beams, just... a split of history that leaves two distorted mirrors, reflecting each other.

J.K. Simmons' performances in the roles of Howard (Prime) and Howard (Alpha) are mesmerizing in a way that outmatches Tatiana Mazlany's Orphan Black characters. There's a slow unveiling of the respective parallel worlds' history, with continuing evolution and interplay of characters and relationships, which brings to mind the best of series like The Wire or The Americans.

To the extent that Counterpart borrows from literary canon, the most significant underlying influences are John LeCarre's find-the-mole games in the Smiley series, China Mieville's The City and the City, and Philip K. Dick (particularly, The Adjustment Team).

The really guilty pleasure, and the lightweight pressure relief from the grimdark of Peaky Blinders or Counterpart, was a spit-and-giggles Canadian production called Letterkenny. I didn't have high hopes, but the 22-minute episodes are exactly what my brain needed to get over the daily doses of blah.

The opening credits of each episode refer to the fictional rural Ontario town of Letterkenny as follows:

There are 5,000 people in Letterkenny. These are their problems.

The plots are barely coat-hangers, with most of the comic tension spent on interactions among the Hicks (farm people), Skids (creative-but-disaffected Internet subculture wannabes), hockey players and Christians - a/k/a small-town tribes recognizable anywhere in North America. The portrayals are caricaturized enough to be both humorously offensive and humorously sympathetic simultaneously. [Could be some toxic racial/gender meta, but mostly, the treatment of women and minorities is in keeping with the setting.]

The banter, and the utter Spock-like deadpan of Wayne (the toughest guy in Letterkenny)'s Hick character are the stars of the show. Some people have complained that the rapid-fire use of heavy dialect in the dialogue is impenetrable; that actually helps with comic timing. When your brain catches up to what was actually said, it's like receiving a two-by-four between the eyes of funny. I've got a bit of home-team advantage in the midwestern North American dialects area, and usually get it on the first run, but it's good enough to re-watch happily if the spouse needs a do-over. Transcripts are available, but watch the show before looking.

We now have a new battery of in-jokes and gag lines to add to our secret spousal language - "Hard no.", "That's what I appreciates about ya", "...and he was never the same after that."

There's really nothing quite like Letterkenny, and it's exactly smart/dumb enough to make fantastic comedy. Two seven-episode seasons are currently available on Hulu.

The premise is like Survivor: don't get eliminated. The thirteen contestants vie for immunity and each week's loser gets axed. The games are mostly board game-style gambling -- from straightforward poker derivatives to deckbuilding.

The show is completely unscripted and the cast is a mixture of minor celebrities, professional game players, and -- in seasons three and four -- ordinary folks from the general public.

The show's marketing material describes the show as an investigation of what genius is. There's a case to be made for this -- the games are diverse, well-designed, and the gameplay onscreen is always interesting. You'll be constantly saying to yourself "I didn't think of that," even the second or third time you watch the show. There's often more than one way to win each game.

What the show does well is presenting mundane reality TV dilemmas psychologically. The show takes place in a kind of liminal space where it isn't clear who's going to become the monster and how. There's lighter stuff and camaderie -- on-camera shtick like hugging and bowing and begging, eating delicious food. Sometimes, there's a little bit of sexism.

It ends in something continually getting worse, and nobody's ever sure exactly what. It usually takes more than one episode for someone to pinpoint what it is. A lot of the tension comes from how the first time something strange happens, it's OK or you excuse it as a coincidence -- and the second or third time it happens, your fear of confirmation bias makes it so you're still not entirely sure if it's a pattern. The show spends a lot of time on this precipice.

The people on The Genius are abnormal. Some of them play the games weird and some are weird themselves -- some of them have learned to hide their biggest character flaws and some of them haven't. At the most extreme it's like sitting next to someone on the bus who snores loud, but not loud enough to make you give up your seat, and then he shoves his hand down your throat.

You can view the first season here, subtitled in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpwIgWPfNvc . Most of the fans consider Episode 2 a very strong episode, so you should watch at least until that, or skip to it if you're impatient.

If all the psychodrama stuff I mentioned sounds appealing to you, skip to season 2, the darkest season. Unfortunately, the later seasons aren't on YouTube, but you can find them in a lot of places: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGenius/comments/5s7eh9/the_genius_s2_s3_and_society_game_file_links/

I've been rabidly evangelizing this show to all my real life friends for years. Please ask any questions that will lead to you watching it! (PS: To those who've seen it, please don't post spoilers in this thread!)

I don't watch a ton of TV, but one show I've binged lately has been Pose.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7562112/

The show is set in the ballroom scene of 80s NYC, and deals with a lot of hard topics like the HIV epidemic, gay and trans POC and their acceptance in the "straight" world, and what makes a family. It can be tough to watch in parts, and the first season's storyline was a bit too cliched in places. But overall it's a well acted, well scripted show that highlights a very unique part of history.

Has anyone else been watching? What did you think?