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

[Opoponax]

Occupied

This is a Norwegian show about Norway inventing a new source of power, but then being shut down by the EU and Russia. Russia essentially occupies Norway to see to it that the Norwegians bring their oil and gas production back up to pre-new power source levels. Also, somehow the U.S. has become energy self-sufficient (ha!) and thus has no dog in this fight.

At times it's really good, but it often suffers serious pacing issues, and at other times it can get pretty dull. Still, the political intrigue aspect is solid. Also, it covers the situation pretty realistically, as opposed to an American style production with the same subject matter. That is, put the same situation in America and there wouldn't be enough body bags to hold the dead. Here, rather than mega-violence, the Norwegian PM has to make the decision between committing political suicide or saving his nation from certain destruction. Here, he makes the right decision, which is good for realism, but not so great for excitement.

All in all, it's worth watching and an interesting departure from how this subject matter would be treated.

6.5/10

 

[Ford]

I read the Shannara books when I was a kid. The original trilogy and maybe the first sequel or two after that.

A few years ago I watched the SyFy adaptation of the series. I was not impressed. They took a classic fantasy story and turned it into a Twilight wannabe, with attractive young adult actors and a barely recognizable dumbed down version of the story.

I'm about 1/2 of the way through the first episode of season 2. It sucks so bad I had to take a break and write this comment before I threw something at my screen. I'm half inclined to go back and dig out my old dog-eared copies of the original trilogy and re-read them to see if maybe I'm just wrong and they were always that bad, but I don't think I need to do that.

Seriously, this makes the CW superhero shows look like fucking Shakespeare.

 

[bleubird]

Lost in Space
8/10
Good .

 

[Underseer]

I read the Shannara books when I was a kid. The original trilogy and maybe the first sequel or two after that.

A few years ago I watched the SyFy adaptation of the series. I was not impressed. They took a classic fantasy story and turned it into a Twilight wannabe, with attractive young adult actors and a barely recognizable dumbed down version of the story.

I'm about 1/2 of the way through the first episode of season 2. It sucks so bad I had to take a break and write this comment before I threw something at my screen. I'm half inclined to go back and dig out my old dog-eared copies of the original trilogy and re-read them to see if maybe I'm just wrong and they were always that bad, but I don't think I need to do that.

Seriously, this makes the CW superhero shows look like fucking Shakespeare.

Dumbed down?

Dumbed sideways, maybe. The source material isn't exactly great literature.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I read the Shannara books when I was a kid. The original trilogy and maybe the first sequel or two after that.

A few years ago I watched the SyFy adaptation of the series. I was not impressed. They took a classic fantasy story and turned it into a Twilight wannabe, with attractive young adult actors and a barely recognizable dumbed down version of the story.

I'm about 1/2 of the way through the first episode of season 2. It sucks so bad I had to take a break and write this comment before I threw something at my screen. I'm half inclined to go back and dig out my old dog-eared copies of the original trilogy and re-read them to see if maybe I'm just wrong and they were always that bad, but I don't think I need to do that.

Seriously, this makes the CW superhero shows look like fucking Shakespeare.

Dumbed down?

Dumbed sideways, maybe. The source material isn't exactly great literature.

Very true. I watched the show and felt it didn't hold up to what I remembered of the books. I hadn't read them in decades, however, so I picked them up again and was somewhat underwhelmed by the quality of the writing. They worked better as half-recalled memories from my youth.

 

[Goodchild]

Lost in Space

Only 1 episode in, but that one ignited my interest despite some silly science aspects (the quick freezing water and the MMO-like shift from frozen wasteland to forest). Those were easy to pass off as quirks in the interest of driving the plot. Looking forward to watching the rest of the show. 8/10.

 

[Ford]

Lost in Space

Only 1 episode in, but that one ignited my interest despite some silly science aspects (the quick freezing water and the MMO-like shift from frozen wasteland to forest). Those were easy to pass off as quirks in the interest of driving the plot. Looking forward to watching the rest of the show. 8/10.

Two episodes in. I like how they used the music from the last season of the original.

 

[Jayjay]

Billions
9/10

Awesome show about rich-as-fuck hedge fund manager squaring off with a federal prosecutor. What makes it extraordinary is that it actually gets the technical parts right, and it has an interesting twist that the villain of the story is all-around likeable and decent fellow, while the hero is a bit of an asshole.

 

[Opoponax]

The Office (American version)

I hadn't watched it in years and had forgotten most of it. Damn, what a great show.

 

[Harry Bosch]

The Expanse! Season one is pretty good; Season two is 10/10!

 

[Patooka]

Archer: Danger Island 0.5/10

Man, this show has gone tragically downhill. Getting rid of Krieger and replacing him with a parrot is just fucking stupid. None of the characters bounce off one another anymore and even the "oh wait, I had something for this" is depressingly stale. I wouldn't be surprised if Adam Reed wrote this season as a sort of fuck you to get out of his contract (like what David Bowie did to get out of his arrangement with Tony Defries)

Pacific Heat is now funnier than Archer. That's pretty damning.

 

[prideandfall]

legion: 10/10

i loved the shit out of the first season and this second season has ramped up every aspect of the show that appeals to me.

this is hands down the best thing on television, not only right now but it's going into my list of best shows of all time.

 

[Underseer]

legion: 10/10

i loved the shit out of the first season and this second season has ramped up every aspect of the show that appeals to me.

this is hands down the best thing on television, not only right now but it's going into my list of best shows of all time.

I've only seen episode 1 of season 2 so far.

It really blows me away, and not just because it's spectacularly good television.

I never in a million years dreamed I would ever see something like this. I enjoyed the David Haller/Legion character for the comic books, but always assumed it was just too weird for live action and mainstream (non-comic book nerd) audiences. Most of the time I'm watching I have no idea what's going on and love it for that. It still shocks me that non-nerds can enjoy that at all.

Oh, and this is the most terrifying incarnation of

Show

the Shadow King ever. I put this in HIDE tags because it's a minor spoiler for season 1 that he's even part of the series.

Shadow King is exactly the kind of thing I would have assumed was too "comic book-y" for live action. He's really more of a concept than a person, and I assumed it would be impossible to make him scary rather than silly or obtuse/convoluted in live action.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Pretty Little Liars - 2/10

Wifey and I were looking for a new Netflix show to watch and we stumbled upon this. It's kind of a standard teeny-bopper drama centered around this group of friends who had a friend of theirs murdered and now somebody is sending them texts containing things which only she knew and they swing back and forth between trying to find out clues and completely ignoring the fact that a killer is stalking them. It's almost interesting, but they deal with plot holes by simply making the main characters SO fucking dumb that it's just unbelievable. It makes it difficult to accept the premise of this killer manipulating events because it would require his plan to include the fact that these girls will go and do the dumbest things possible in every conceivable situation. The killer is also a tech genius ninja with the superpower of invisibly being everywhere at once. I have no doubt that when they finally reveal who he is, they will completely fail to explain how he managed to do 90% of the magic shit he does in order to annoy some teenaged girls who lose interest in him as soon as the next dance or midterm comes along.

The weirdest thing about the show, though, is that one of the main characters is a 16 year old girl who's having sex with her English teacher. The fact that he's a teacher having sex with one of his underage students is not presented as a negative in the show. They're passing that off as the negative reaction to that as one of the relationship challenges they need to deal with in order to express their true love as opposed to someone committing statutory rape. I really don't know how this got past the network censors and it took me five or six episodes before I realized that Professor Rapey is a protagonist in the show and not one of the bad guys.

I'm continuing to watch it, not so much out of enjoyment but more because it's kind of fun to watch it ironically.

Well, we just finished watching this entire series. We honestly had more fun hate-watching it and yelling at the screen about how stupid everyone is than we've had watching decent shows. It went on for seven seasons and spawned a couple of spin offs, so it clearly has a fan base for some reason and I want to find out who they are so I can go over to their houses and punch them in the face for being idiots.

I was right about them not explaining how the bad guy did 90% of the magic shit she did. They tossed off a couple of half-sentences about some of them and then moved on. In order to hide who the bad guys were, they went the route of giving pretty much every character entirely new personalities halfway through one of the seasons and then rolled that back a couple of shows later to show that they were just tricking the viewers about them being evil and they were actually misunderstood good guys all along. They also did that for the main bad guy where they exposed her as evil, re-exposed her as not evil and then re-re-exposed her as actually having been evil all along despite that not making any sense. They literally gave her a Scooby Doo ending where they pulled off her mask and yelled "Ha! It was her all along" and then turned off the video camera where they were watching her confess all her crimes and they left and called the police to have her arrested. This was halfway through the season and then they killed off the main bad guy the next episode and introduced a new main bad guy who was mad that the original main bad guy had died and so she did all the same things to the main characters. This new main bad guy was a character they didn't introduce into the show until the second last episode where they revealed that she was actually the evil twin of one of the main characters, which was funny because my wife and I had just been saying to each other how they'd used every stupid cliché in this show except for someone having an evil twin. She was exposed because a blind girl used her super-smell to ferret her out.

They also recycled the same plot lines over and over again and nobody ever learned anything from the previous times they'd been in the exact same situation because they were all painfully stupid. Most oddly, the writing staff seemed to have some self-awareness about the product they were putting out because every now and again, the main characters would try to get a side character to do something and the guy would say "No, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm not doing that" and then he'd wander off without doing it. There was also a time when they escaped a bad guy who was trying to kill them because the bad guy tripped and accidentally cut his own head off with his axe (no, I am not exaggerating to make a point). The effect of that was kind of lost, however, because it happened while everyone was busy trying to escape the blind lady who was chasing them with a gun (that doesn't make more sense if you understand the context).

Also, Professor McRapey was actually a real love interest. He was evil for a couple episodes in the middle, just like everyone else was, but then turned out to be good all along and the teenager's teacher parents were surprisingly OK with his having sex with their young daughter while she was in his class, despite one of them being a teacher at that same school. They were a bit huffy about it for a few episodes but then decided that this sort of thing didn't matter too much because reasons.

It was an extraordinarily dumb show, but dumb in a way that you could enjoy it for being so dumb.

 

[Goodchild]

Gutted at the news that Lucifer has been cancelled Me and my wife loved watching that show.

 

[Opoponax]

legion: 10/10

i loved the shit out of the first season and this second season has ramped up every aspect of the show that appeals to me.

this is hands down the best thing on television, not only right now but it's going into my list of best shows of all time.

Okay, dude. With that review, I'm gonna start watching that show tonight. If it sucks, I'm gonna... well, stop watching it.

 

[Underseer]

legion: 10/10

i loved the shit out of the first season and this second season has ramped up every aspect of the show that appeals to me.

this is hands down the best thing on television, not only right now but it's going into my list of best shows of all time.

Okay, dude. With that review, I'm gonna start watching that show tonight. If it sucks, I'm gonna... well, stop watching it.

Fair warning: do not expect to understand what's going on.

What's fun about Legion is that the stories take the "unreliable narrator" device to a ridiculous extreme.

We are seeing things from the perspective of someone who is probably at least a little crazy (or a lot crazy).

Worse, he has so many superpowers that reality itself is not reliable.

Then on top of all that, one of his powers is telepathy, so a lot of what you watch is actually in someone's head, or in someone's jumbled memories where everything becomes even more distorted and unreliable.

If you're a fan of the original comic, they've changed almost everything, but they left in place the most glorious part: the confusion. David still does more harm than good because of his superpowers and his madness. He is still surrounded by people who seek to use him and his power (nothing good ever comes of that regardless of whether the person trying to use him is good or evil). And there is still

Show

a classic X-Men villain who is editing minds and memories in order to gain control, which makes the unreliable narrator thing even more confusing. Good luck telling your own asshole from a hole in the wall.

 

[prideandfall]

Fair warning: do not expect to understand what's going on.

i gotta admit that i've seen you say this about Legion several times now and i just don't agree with you.
i've always found the show very straight-forward and very easy to follow, with the only sense of confusion being when it's specifically part of the narrative of the episode because of how information is being doled out, and that's just a device used in TV and movies so is to be expected.

granted, season 2 is quite a bit more obtuse and even i'll confess that last week's episode was a bit of a mind-fuck, but the show isn't like some kind of david lynch wet dream IMO... it's just dense and layered, and you have to pay attention.

 

[Opoponax]

legion: 10/10

i loved the shit out of the first season and this second season has ramped up every aspect of the show that appeals to me.

this is hands down the best thing on television, not only right now but it's going into my list of best shows of all time.

Okay, dude. With that review, I'm gonna start watching that show tonight. If it sucks, I'm gonna... well, stop watching it.

Fair warning: do not expect to understand what's going on.

What's fun about Legion is that the stories take the "unreliable narrator" device to a ridiculous extreme.

We are seeing things from the perspective of someone who is probably at least a little crazy (or a lot crazy).

Worse, he has so many superpowers that reality itself is not reliable.

Then on top of all that, one of his powers is telepathy, so a lot of what you watch is actually in someone's head, or in someone's jumbled memories where everything becomes even more distorted and unreliable.

If you're a fan of the original comic, they've changed almost everything, but they left in place the most glorious part: the confusion. David still does more harm than good because of his superpowers and his madness. He is still surrounded by people who seek to use him and his power (nothing good ever comes of that regardless of whether the person trying to use him is good or evil). And there is still

Show

a classic X-Men villain who is editing minds and memories in order to gain control, which makes the unreliable narrator thing even more confusing. Good luck telling your own asshole from a hole in the wall.

Watched it. Diggin' it.

It does get confusing at times, but the structure of the show is such that you learn pretty quickly that it flashes back frequently, and that you'll be caught up eventually. Lots of fun, very artsy too. Oh, and character development is pretty much as good as it gets in the TV medium--truly superior.

Burned through half of season one in one night, so I'm going to spread out the rest over a few weeks.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Prison Break - 7/10

Netflix did a new season of this old show about a guy who's really good at breaking out of prisons. It was nice how they did it with a fully contained, one season story with a tight plotline that wrapped everything up at the end. Lots of good action and twists and an enjoyable return to a fondly remembered show.