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What TV are you watching and how would you rate it? [Revive from FRDB]

Under the Dome 8/10

Yet another Stephen King adaption. A mystical invisible barrier/sphere one day pops up around a small town and surrounds it completely. The show is about how people react to it. All the standard King characters. So lots of people being over-the-top insane, yet believable. I don´t know how he does it, but it works every time. I love how they don´t bother trying to justify it scientifically. It´s just there. Good acting.

My only issue is disaster fatigue. They just can´t get a break. Always some extremely perilous situation that isn´t quite believable. But other than that, good solid show.
 
Ascension


A mini series from 2014 that apparently aired on the SyFy channel. It is on Netflix streaming.


Premise is that 51 years ago, a secret ship was launched on a multi-generational mission to Proxima Centauri. The 600 people on board the ship (the size of the Empire State building) are halfway through their journey, and are (at least socially) stuck in 1963. With a staff of stewardesses, square-jawed Air Force types in charge, and an apparently endless supply of martinis, but it is all thrown into chaos by a murder...something the crew has never experienced and don't have the resources to handle.


Of course, all is not what it seems.


The show is SyFy, so the production values are middling, but the plot twists are handled well, and the story - at first seemingly filled with good looking heroes - unfolds like an onion being peeled away. The best part? It is only six episodes long. The worst part? It doesn't appear to be coming back for more.
Thanks to this review, I downloaded Ascension.

8/10

The premise is great, and it doesn't try to hide it's affection for the 50s and 60s science fiction novels from Heinlein, Bester, Asimov, and whoever else. However, I do think that the execution tried to overreach a bit with some of the technology and character motivations being either unbelievable or unncessarily complex. Spoilers ahead.

I'm so tired of stupid government conspiracies. The premise of the fake generation starship to run a social and/or genetic experiment is itself exciting enough that the added layer of there being a secret government conspiracy to hide it from the world and someone trying to blow the whistle is completely unnecessary, and her character comes off as a condescending asshole. Also, I wish that the writers had really dwelled deeper into the various details what it takes to fake the whole thing, and how they would have had to mislead the crew from finding out that they are not really in space, and how the various cameras and other gadgets are hidden. It's just lazy to assume that nobody in the ship can figure out that their computers are controlled from the outside and that the physics of the Orion drive make no sense, while at the same time they were supposed to have perfected the brain scanning via MRI and invented flat screen displays on their own.

An example of the sloppy writing: the project is top secret, why the hell would they carve the names of the people who died on the ship on a memorial in the front yard??



All in all, it's an excellent scifi romp with at least some thought put into it and I hope I could see more shows like this. Better than 99% of the crap produced by Syfy.
 
Homeland - 9/10

Watched the first three seasons. It's quite good. The premise is that a CIA agent (played by Claire Daines who's excellent in this) gets a tip from one of her informants that a US POW has been turned by Al Quaida. Soon after that, an army raid against an Al Quaida facility finds a Marine who's been held in captivity for eight years. He's paraded around America with everyone seeing him as a hero except for Daines who's sure that he's a terrorist and about to launch an attack against the US. It's very well written with a lot of deep and dynamic characters and interesting plot twists. It also delves into a lot of issues such as PTSD and mental illness and goes through a lot of trouble to flesh out the motivations of terrorists and doesn't simply present them as generically evil for the sake of evil.

Highly recommended.
 
Reign, 5/10: A drama about the life of Mary Queen of Scots. Starts off with her life under the protection of the French King and life in his court. I'm about six episodes in and hanging in there but it's only so-so. I think it's a show aimed at the Twilight audience, it's all very twee.
 
Death In Paradise
A somewhat uptight and neurotic British police detective is put in charge of a small Carribean island police station
And it's a solid enough show, the actors are all likeable and play thier parts well
Sometimes the show is a bit predicatble but it is a decent crime drama/comedy
 
Season 2 of Knights of Sidonia is now available on Netflix.

It's still an obvious and cheap attempt to cash in on the popularity of Attack on Titan.
 
Ascension


A mini series from 2014 that apparently aired on the SyFy channel. It is on Netflix streaming.


Premise is that 51 years ago, a secret ship was launched on a multi-generational mission to Proxima Centauri. The 600 people on board the ship (the size of the Empire State building) are halfway through their journey, and are (at least socially) stuck in 1963. With a staff of stewardesses, square-jawed Air Force types in charge, and an apparently endless supply of martinis, but it is all thrown into chaos by a murder...something the crew has never experienced and don't have the resources to handle.


Of course, all is not what it seems.


The show is SyFy, so the production values are middling, but the plot twists are handled well, and the story - at first seemingly filled with good looking heroes - unfolds like an onion being peeled away. The best part? It is only six episodes long. The worst part? It doesn't appear to be coming back for more.
Thanks to this review, I downloaded Ascension.

8/10

The premise is great, and it doesn't try to hide it's affection for the 50s and 60s science fiction novels from Heinlein, Bester, Asimov, and whoever else. However, I do think that the execution tried to overreach a bit with some of the technology and character motivations being either unbelievable or unncessarily complex. Spoilers ahead.

I'm so tired of stupid government conspiracies. The premise of the fake generation starship to run a social and/or genetic experiment is itself exciting enough that the added layer of there being a secret government conspiracy to hide it from the world and someone trying to blow the whistle is completely unnecessary, and her character comes off as a condescending asshole. Also, I wish that the writers had really dwelled deeper into the various details what it takes to fake the whole thing, and how they would have had to mislead the crew from finding out that they are not really in space, and how the various cameras and other gadgets are hidden. It's just lazy to assume that nobody in the ship can figure out that their computers are controlled from the outside and that the physics of the Orion drive make no sense, while at the same time they were supposed to have perfected the brain scanning via MRI and invented flat screen displays on their own.

An example of the sloppy writing: the project is top secret, why the hell would they carve the names of the people who died on the ship on a memorial in the front yard??



All in all, it's an excellent scifi romp with at least some thought put into it and I hope I could see more shows like this. Better than 99% of the crap produced by Syfy.

One of my few issues with it is it ended on a cliffhanger, and no more episodes of it are likely to be produced.
 
Outlander - 7/10

At the end of WWII, a nurse and her husband are vacationing in Scotland. She visits a Stonehedge-type place and gets accidentally sent back in time to 1740 (don't you hate it when that happens?). She ends up in a job as a healer for a highland clan and gets caught up in an impending war between the English army and the Scots which she knows will end in the complete slaughter of the Scottish clan she's hanging around with (her history professor husband who's also an army superspy that can ninja the shit out of all the bad guys in town - I'm guessing he's Jason Bourne's grandfather or something - conveniently told her about this the day before she went back) and continuously needs to avoid getting raped by the English officer who's her husband's ancestor - whom she can't kill or else her husband will never have been born.

She hears a bard sing a song about a woman who time travelled through the Stonehedge place and then came back, so she's always trying to escape and run off to it so that her next leap can be the leap home, but an endless string of getting captured, almost raped and rescued at the last minute prevents her from getting there. The first season ends with her getting captured when almost at the Stonehedge place, almost raped by her husband's ancestor and then rescued by a good-looking Scotsman at the last minute - so it's kind of like the other episodes in the season.

It's a bit of a silly show, but somehow it all comes together into something that's really entertaining and enjoyable.
 
Last Tango in Halifax - 8/10

I was watching this show out in CA. Granted, I was stoned most of the time so most anything was good, but it started up here on the local PBS in the land of the straight, narrow, and poorly funded. I don't catch all the subtleties like I used to of course, but it's still good. The story was somewhat chaotic in past seasons (not my fault) but has evened out now. The characters are very personable. It's hard to dislike any one of them.
They committed a major bummer in the last episode though. They offed the black person. Seriously? That's so nineteen nineties. We don't do that anymore. She was kinda hot too which made it extra bogus. Oh well. Gotta catch up with the curve BBC.
 
Do you mean the partner of the headmistress character? I thought I had seen all the episodes and she was alive last I looked.

That actress is much in demand and if she was bumped off it was likely because she got another job.

Really? She dies?
 
Outlander - 7/10

At the end of WWII, a nurse and her husband are vacationing in Scotland. She visits a Stonehedge-type place and gets accidentally sent back in time to 1740 (don't you hate it when that happens?). She ends up in a job as a healer for a highland clan and gets caught up in an impending war between the English army and the Scots which she knows will end in the complete slaughter of the Scottish clan she's hanging around with (her history professor husband who's also an army superspy that can ninja the shit out of all the bad guys in town - I'm guessing he's Jason Bourne's grandfather or something - conveniently told her about this the day before she went back) and continuously needs to avoid getting raped by the English officer who's her husband's ancestor - whom she can't kill or else her husband will never have been born.

She hears a bard sing a song about a woman who time travelled through the Stonehedge place and then came back, so she's always trying to escape and run off to it so that her next leap can be the leap home, but an endless string of getting captured, almost raped and rescued at the last minute prevents her from getting there. The first season ends with her getting captured when almost at the Stonehedge place, almost raped by her husband's ancestor and then rescued by a good-looking Scotsman at the last minute - so it's kind of like the other episodes in the season.

It's a bit of a silly show, but somehow it all comes together into something that's really entertaining and enjoyable.

It's based on a best selling bodice ripper book series. She's much more intelligent in the book than the TV series.
 
HUMANS: 6/10, tentatively maybe a 7.

this is a BBC show, being broadcast in the US by AMC for some inexplicable reason.
it's a fairly by-the-numbers setup: humanoid androids called Synths have become a common household item, but some of them might be going and getting all AI up in our shit.
a lot of the beats are incredibly familiar and predictable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of sci-fi literature and movies, but the show is well written and well acted enough that it makes the journey pleasant even if the scenery is a cliche and the destination is one you've been to a dozen times already.
 
HUMANS: 6/10, tentatively maybe a 7.

this is a BBC show, being broadcast in the US by AMC for some inexplicable reason.
it's a fairly by-the-numbers setup: humanoid androids called Synths have become a common household item, but some of them might be going and getting all AI up in our shit.
a lot of the beats are incredibly familiar and predictable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of sci-fi literature and movies, but the show is well written and well acted enough that it makes the journey pleasant even if the scenery is a cliche and the destination is one you've been to a dozen times already.

I recommend watching the Swedish original. It's awesome
 
Tut 4/10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3214310/

This is about king Tut's life, who we don't actually know much about, so the creators had plenty of creative freedom. But they made him into a warrior king who fought side-by-side with his troops. That goes against everything we know about ancient royalty. Also, he had a limp and a cleft pallet. We know that from the genetic evidence. But I'll let that slide. It is minor grievances. I'm a history nerd. I care about such stuff in historical dramas. I've had a long love affair with ancient Egypt.

The sets are gorgeous. I have no complaints about the production values. Ben Kingsley as Ay (grand vizier) is a perfect match. They could not have found a better actor for it. Nonso Anozie plays general Horemheb, who was, apparently was a giant of a man in every regard. Egypts most feared and respected man. He plays that role perfectly. But that's where the positives end.

Tut himself is not an interesting character. It's boring to see a super-hero of a king with almost no internal struggles to overcome. Sure, it was a little bit about him trying to assert himself as a man after his advisors had ruled in his name when he was a boy. That could have been great. But he did all this in the space of ten mintes in a six hour mini-series that should have been about nothing else IMHO. That's the "meat" of this story any viewer will be able to relate to. Also... the actor playing Tut... crap. Avan Jogia. The worst possible pick for Tut. He never hit the mark in any scene IMHO. He under- or overplayed whatever he did. But he wasn't the worst actor. Alexander Siddig (Dr Bashir in ST DS9) played the high priest of Amun. He made it look like amateur night. So embarrassingly sucky acting. Didn't the director see it happening as they were filming!?! I felt embarrassed while watching him do it.

We do know that the conspiracies at court were a mess at the time and they did fight a stale-mate of a war with the Mittani empire. Both which are excellent material for any script writer. But I didn't think they used it well. They overplayed the drama and made it cartoonish. The young king slipping out at night and developing a romance with a woman from an enemy empire is just too silly. It just becomes ridiculous. Those scenes, when we get to see Egyptian commoners life, is not believable. It looks and feels like people LARPing. The effect is comedic. They did use the thing where Tut was married to his own sister. But they didn't really play it out well. They do feel like brother and sister, which was good, but they didn't really do much else with it.

I was disappointed how they cut out the Amarna period completely for this film. Tut's father had created a massive social shift in society and caused great havoc. All the nobles and priests were nervous about this for when Tut became an adult. This was the reason for all the court intrigue. This wasn't even mentioned once. I understand that a film has limited time and resources and things need to be omitted. But I wanted it!

To sum up, they had all the pieces there and the money to do a good job, it just fell apart in the end. It doesn't really matter how good actors Kingsley or Anozie are if they are playing off a crappy actor they won't be able to save it. I desperately wanted to love it, but I didn't.
 
Tut 4/10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3214310/

This is about king Tut's life, who we don't actually know much about, so the creators had plenty of creative freedom. But they made him into a warrior king who fought side-by-side with his troops. That goes against everything we know about ancient royalty. Also, he had a limp and a cleft pallet. We know that from the genetic evidence. But I'll let that slide. It is minor grievances. I'm a history nerd. I care about such stuff in historical dramas. I've had a long love affair with ancient Egypt.

The sets are gorgeous. I have no complaints about the production values. Ben Kingsley as Ay (grand vizier) is a perfect match. They could not have found a better actor for it. Nonso Anozie plays general Horemheb, who was, apparently was a giant of a man in every regard. Egypts most feared and respected man. He plays that role perfectly. But that's where the positives end.

Tut himself is not an interesting character. It's boring to see a super-hero of a king with almost no internal struggles to overcome. Sure, it was a little bit about him trying to assert himself as a man after his advisors had ruled in his name when he was a boy. That could have been great. But he did all this in the space of ten mintes in a six hour mini-series that should have been about nothing else IMHO. That's the "meat" of this story any viewer will be able to relate to. Also... the actor playing Tut... crap. Avan Jogia. The worst possible pick for Tut. He never hit the mark in any scene IMHO. He under- or overplayed whatever he did. But he wasn't the worst actor. Alexander Siddig (Dr Bashir in ST DS9) played the high priest of Amun. He made it look like amateur night. So embarrassingly sucky acting. Didn't the director see it happening as they were filming!?! I felt embarrassed while watching him do it.

We do know that the conspiracies at court were a mess at the time and they did fight a stale-mate of a war with the Mittani empire. Both which are excellent material for any script writer. But I didn't think they used it well. They overplayed the drama and made it cartoonish. The young king slipping out at night and developing a romance with a woman from an enemy empire is just too silly. It just becomes ridiculous. Those scenes, when we get to see Egyptian commoners life, is not believable. It looks and feels like people LARPing. The effect is comedic. They did use the thing where Tut was married to his own sister. But they didn't really play it out well. They do feel like brother and sister, which was good, but they didn't really do much else with it.

I was disappointed how they cut out the Amarna period completely for this film. Tut's father had created a massive social shift in society and caused great havoc. All the nobles and priests were nervous about this for when Tut became an adult. This was the reason for all the court intrigue. This wasn't even mentioned once. I understand that a film has limited time and resources and things need to be omitted. But I wanted it!

To sum up, they had all the pieces there and the money to do a good job, it just fell apart in the end. It doesn't really matter how good actors Kingsley or Anozie are if they are playing off a crappy actor they won't be able to save it. I desperately wanted to love it, but I didn't.

The minute I saw a trailer for the series, AFTER I saw a documentary about Tut that depicts him with woman-ish hips, a belly, sunken chest, an overbite and a club foot that all his medical exams indicate he had, the series looked laughable.

Yeah, Tut warrior king. The poor guy had a collection of canes to walk with.

Shame that our series nowadays can't depict a historical male figure as hero unless he's a warrior or macho man because they assume people won't find the historical figure as he really was interesting.

Guess that means the PBS/BBC series I, Claudius will never be remade.
 
The minute I saw a trailer for the series, AFTER I saw a documentary about Tut that depicts him with woman-ish hips, a belly, sunken chest, an overbite and a club foot that all his medical exams indicate he had, the series looked laughable.

Yeah, Tut warrior king. The poor guy had a collection of canes to walk with.

Shame that our series nowadays can't depict a historical male figure as hero unless he's a warrior or macho man because they assume people won't find the historical figure as he really was interesting.

Guess that means the PBS/BBC series I, Claudius will never be remade.

Why remake perfection? This remake trend going on now is often just idiotic. Since I wrote this review I've been dusting off my old knowledge about Tut and his family (the Amonhoteps). It's chock full with drama and intrigue... not to mention INCEST. The reality of that family has got everything for the juiciest of TV-shows. I don't get it why they don't just play it straight? They can have sexy hot guys and gals taking off their clothes. The excellent series Marco Polo has got barrels and naked flesh yet resisted making Kublai Khan a buff hunk. If they can do it somebody should be able to make Tutankhamun work.
 
Game of Thrones - Season 5
9 / 10

Probably a review is useless becuase everyone's watched it anyway. Some of the best TV right now, only downside is that there is too little of it and it does tend to drag on a bit. And they keep killing everyone's favourite characters! Spoilers: there are still a couple left, so there is going to be season 6.

I do have one quesiton though for those who've read the books and such...

The witch tells Cersei that she'll have three kids and her husband will have two. I always assumed that Joffry was from the incestuous relationship between Cersei and Jamie. But they talk about the whatshername and whatshisname as being also Jamie's children. Are they or aren't they?

 
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