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

Angry Floof said:
Big Bang Theory is a terrible show. I would give it more like 3 or 4 out of 10, and those few points are only for the occasional cool science joke and for the Aspergers character. The rest is just another obnoxious tween Disney sitcom.
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I enjoyed BBT in the first few seasons, because it was different, and there were several science/geek jokes and shout-outs. But for the last few years, it's devolved into a mean-spirited version of Friends. If my friends insulted me as much as these guys do, I'd find new friends, and for the life of me I can't see what the women see in their respective men, Bernadette especially. Name one redeeming feature of Howard, I dare ya.

On the other hand, I've been pleasantly surprised with Young Sheldon. Completely different story-telling style (no stupid studio audience laughing at Every. Single. Line.) and Annie Potts is a hoot. I wish my 'MeeMaw' was as savvy and cool as she is.
 
Angry Floof said:
Big Bang Theory is a terrible show. I would give it more like 3 or 4 out of 10, and those few points are only for the occasional cool science joke and for the Aspergers character. The rest is just another obnoxious tween Disney sitcom.
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Bah. That's all I have to say to that.

Bah.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
Big Bang Theory - 9/10

Show about four science nerds who work at a university. They're all a bit off in their own way and their interactions and views about the world are hilarious. Well worth seeing.

The Flash - 7/10

This show is about the Flash. If you hear the sentence "This show is about the Flash", then you understand 99% of the show because it's pretty much exactly what one would expect a show about the Flash to be. There's a villain of the week whom Flash uses the powers of friendship and perseverance to defeat and then locks them up for the rest of their lives without a trial in a secret high tech prison which is run by a private corporation because the main point of the show is apparently that gaining super powers makes you an uber human who is not subject to the laws or protections of society.

Aside from the fascist context underpinning the show, it's quite enjoyable.
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At least Flash was better than the horrible disappointment of Arrow. Flash gets just the right amount of adorkable for the main character, but Arrow gets Ollie all wrong.

Arrow started out with a vengeance-crazed violent man, and I thought "Oooh, it should be fun to see how they transform this guy into the swashbuckling social justice warrior guy we know from the comic books!" What did they do instead? Turned Ollie into Batman-but-with-a-bow. They even took stories from Batman comic books and repurposed the main character from Batman into Green Arrow.

I don't mind people taking liberties with a story in order to translate to a new medium, but this is absurd. If they just wanted to have a character like Batman and tell Batman stories, why not make a Batman TV show in the first place? Why even involve Ollie? Bah.
 
Maybe the production rights for Batman were too expensive. That’s also why his villains are Clownman and The Guy-Who-Poses-Puzzling-Questions.
 
Just watched the next-to-last episode of season 1 of Gifted.

The show is still teasing us with "will they or won't they" questions about whether the Strucker children will remain heroic or become villainous or monstrous. Further, now they are teasing us with "hero or villain" questions about Lorna, whose powers are growing and she's about to find out who her biological father is.

As if all of that isn't enough, they introduced an interesting version of the Stepford sisters (telepathic sisters with a gestalt mind whose powers are stronger if they are in close proximity to one another [interestingly only 3 are shown]), and they've introduced a new version of the Hellfire Club, which is apparently rebuilding from their last conflict with the X-Men (in this universe, the X-Men have gone missing and no one knows why).

Trask Industries without Bolvar Trask is coming completely unmoored from moral considerations in their endless pursuit of power. They're becoming an interesting villain in their own right. Agent Turner is becoming morally conflicted about what Trask Industries is up to (which is saying a lot considering what a fanatic Turner can be).

All in all, I'm enjoying this series a lot more than when I started watching it. It still does not rank up there with Legion, but it's definitely better than other Marvel TV shows such as, say, Agents of SHIELD.

Was Blink a Morlock in the comic books?
 
Doctor Who, Season 1-4

★★★☆

Never seen it before and decided to binge-watch it on Netflix. Very good when it stuck to self-contained single-episode stories, but woeful when it tried to be epic.

The end of Season 4 was painful--it tried far too hard to go out with a big finish...

...including a bunch of pointless cameos of people I don't know from other TV shows, and the Time War storyline that is impossible to follow due to terrible writing.



Season 5 was a non-starter--I stopped watching after S05E02. The show's got a new showrunner for the 13th Doctor, so I might give that a try when it's out.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
The Flash - 7/10

This show is about the Flash. If you hear the sentence "This show is about the Flash", then you understand 99% of the show because it's pretty much exactly what one would expect a show about the Flash to be. There's a villain of the week whom Flash uses the powers of friendship and perseverance to defeat and then locks them up for the rest of their lives without a trial in a secret high tech prison which is run by a private corporation because the main point of the show is apparently that gaining super powers makes you an uber human who is not subject to the laws or protections of society.

Aside from the fascist context underpinning the show, it's quite enjoyable.
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The problem with super powered criminals is figuring out what to do with them when you catch them. Flash won't kill them unless there is no other way to stop them, and even then, he would prefer to sacrifice himself first. If you put them through any kind of normal criminal justice system, they will just use their super powers to escape. In the Flash comics, they through them in Iron Heights, a maximum security prison made just for supes, and they are running a storyline currently in which the villains take over the prison. It seems that with the TV show they want to go in a more light-hearted direction, so they just shove the bad guys out of the picture, at least until they want to use them again, so they allow them to escape. If you want a show that actually deals with the injustice that results from having to imprison those with super powers, then you should give The Gifted a try. The entire show revolves around that theme.
 
Underseer said:
Tom Sawyer said:
Big Bang Theory - 9/10

Show about four science nerds who work at a university. They're all a bit off in their own way and their interactions and views about the world are hilarious. Well worth seeing.

The Flash - 7/10

This show is about the Flash. If you hear the sentence "This show is about the Flash", then you understand 99% of the show because it's pretty much exactly what one would expect a show about the Flash to be. There's a villain of the week whom Flash uses the powers of friendship and perseverance to defeat and then locks them up for the rest of their lives without a trial in a secret high tech prison which is run by a private corporation because the main point of the show is apparently that gaining super powers makes you an uber human who is not subject to the laws or protections of society.

Aside from the fascist context underpinning the show, it's quite enjoyable.
Click to expand...

At least Flash was better than the horrible disappointment of Arrow. Flash gets just the right amount of adorkable for the main character, but Arrow gets Ollie all wrong.

Arrow started out with a vengeance-crazed violent man, and I thought "Oooh, it should be fun to see how they transform this guy into the swashbuckling social justice warrior guy we know from the comic books!" What did they do instead? Turned Ollie into Batman-but-with-a-bow. They even took stories from Batman comic books and repurposed the main character from Batman into Green Arrow.

I don't mind people taking liberties with a story in order to translate to a new medium, but this is absurd. If they just wanted to have a character like Batman and tell Batman stories, why not make a Batman TV show in the first place? Why even involve Ollie? Bah.
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Arrow certainly has it's issues with tone, but without it we wouldn't have the other Arrowverse shows, and Supergirl would likely have only lasted one season. It is the weakest of those series, but I don't hate it. I never read much Green Arrow to begin with, so that probably allows me to cut it a bit more slack than a fan of the character would. As far as why they didn't just make a Batman TV show, that is probably because Fox offered up more money to do that with Gotham, despite it being more of a Batman prequel. And, of course, Gotham is pretty damn good, despite treading all over the comic adaptations with hardly a care. It is a batshit crazy Batman connected show, and it is that craziness that makes it so good to watch.
 
Underseer said:
It still does not rank up there with Legion
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i honestly can't think of very much that does, and that's within the scope of the whole of television as a medium.

Was Blink a Morlock in the comic books?
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no. she appeared very briefly in the x-men event "phalanx" which was the last major thing that happened with them prior to the age of apocalypse - in the phalanx story she was introduced and was then killed a couple issues later.
the character was reused in the AoA storyline and became pretty popular, so years later they comic-logic brought her back to the mainstream universe.
 
Underseer said:
Tom Sawyer said:
Big Bang Theory - 9/10

Show about four science nerds who work at a university. They're all a bit off in their own way and their interactions and views about the world are hilarious. Well worth seeing.

The Flash - 7/10

This show is about the Flash. If you hear the sentence "This show is about the Flash", then you understand 99% of the show because it's pretty much exactly what one would expect a show about the Flash to be. There's a villain of the week whom Flash uses the powers of friendship and perseverance to defeat and then locks them up for the rest of their lives without a trial in a secret high tech prison which is run by a private corporation because the main point of the show is apparently that gaining super powers makes you an uber human who is not subject to the laws or protections of society.

Aside from the fascist context underpinning the show, it's quite enjoyable.
Click to expand...

At least Flash was better than the horrible disappointment of Arrow. Flash gets just the right amount of adorkable for the main character, but Arrow gets Ollie all wrong.

Arrow started out with a vengeance-crazed violent man, and I thought "Oooh, it should be fun to see how they transform this guy into the swashbuckling social justice warrior guy we know from the comic books!" What did they do instead? Turned Ollie into Batman-but-with-a-bow.
Click to expand...

And then it turned into "Felicity and Friends" which is when I stopped watching.
 
The Night Manager : 10/10 Not going to spoil it for anyone, but watch and enjoy.
 
Over the last couple days I've been re-watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Kinda hard to believe it has been a decade since it was on TV.

My gods it was so dark. And so good. It got wonky at the end, but in the middle of season 3 where I am, it still holds up as the best series on television.
 
Ride Upon the Storm from the people who brought you Borgen. If anything, better, and I would have said that was difficult.

About a family which has provided Denmark with generations of priests. Full of moral failings and dilemmas but doesn't feel soapy.


Also Chance, which is shaping to be the descent of a good man into evil action.

Both absorbing.
 
prideandfall said:
Underseer said:
It still does not rank up there with Legion
Click to expand...
i honestly can't think of very much that does, and that's within the scope of the whole of television as a medium.

Was Blink a Morlock in the comic books?
Click to expand...
no. she appeared very briefly in the x-men event "phalanx" which was the last major thing that happened with them prior to the age of apocalypse - in the phalanx story she was introduced and was then killed a couple issues later.
the character was reused in the AoA storyline and became pretty popular, so years later they comic-logic brought her back to the mainstream universe.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the Blink update. She came after I stopped collecting comic books.

As for Legion, I'm just shocked that mainstream audiences went for it. If you told me in the 1980s that there would some day be a Legion TV show that critics and mainstream audiences both enjoyed, I would have thought you were nuts. It takes the "unreliable narrator" storytelling device to a ludicrous extreme, and I was sure mainstream audiences would never go for something that inherently strange.


And I would have been certain that any attempt to bring the Shadow King to live action would be stupid as hell. He's as much an abstract concept as a person, and characters like that are almost always stupid/cheesy on the big or small screen. Kudos to the director, writers, and actors for producing what is easily the most terrifying version of the Shadow King ever.

 
Ford said:
Over the last couple days I've been re-watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Kinda hard to believe it has been a decade since it was on TV.

My gods it was so dark. And so good. It got wonky at the end, but in the middle of season 3 where I am, it still holds up as the best series on television.
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I somehow managed to miss the very end of the last episode of Season 2, saw most of the episode, just somehow not the ending... and was absolutely confused at the start of Season 3 wondering... when the hell did that happen?!
 
Death Note. Highly dramatized cartoon version of Sherlock versus Moriarty, only with death gods and Japanese people. Meh. I don't get the hype from the fans. Some of it is so irrational even when considering it is a cartoon in the way they develop the investigations and such that it's kinda boring now. But I'm only on episode 7 or so and there's a couple dozen left so I'll give it a few more.
 
Spiral 6. 9.5/10. UK BBC4
Engaging, fast, gritty/grimacing, psychological, sometimes difficult to watch but can't stop watching French cop series.
Has lost little of the rawness of earlier series.
 
DolphinDynasty said:
Death Note. Highly dramatized cartoon version of Sherlock versus Moriarty, only with death gods and Japanese people. Meh. I don't get the hype from the fans. Some of it is so irrational even when considering it is a cartoon in the way they develop the investigations and such that it's kinda boring now. But I'm only on episode 7 or so and there's a couple dozen left so I'll give it a few more.
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Saw the movie version recently. Very odd, seemed it was meant for people who knew the material, asked too much in accepting a lot of backstory that was flimsily told. Too hard to buy into it.
 
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