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

bilby said:
James Brown said:
It's tricky. If they match the UK shows shot-for-shot, they get criticized for being unoriginal. If they change anything, they get criticized for tampering with the original.
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Well I guess they could just come up with some ideas of their own; or is that too much to ask?

If UK shows are good, then buy them and broadcast them. If they are not good enough, then come up with something else.
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^^^ Picked it!



In other news, enjoying The Code and considering slashing my wrists because Borgen finished 3 episodes after I found it.
 
bilby said:
James Brown said:
It's tricky. If they match the UK shows shot-for-shot, they get criticized for being unoriginal. If they change anything, they get criticized for tampering with the original.
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Well I guess they could just come up with some ideas of their own; or is that too much to ask?

If UK shows are good, then buy them and broadcast them. If they are not good enough, then come up with something else.
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Still tricky. Those who come up with ideas of their own which don't please audiences get fired. Those who imitate others' ideas which are proven to please audiences keep their jobs.

And Downton Abbey notwithstanding, it's my belief that American audiences would rather watch British shows with American actors and settings over British shows with British actors and settings. If true, then it's silly to blame American TV companies for this.
 
credoconsolans said:
Just watched episode 1 of "Gracepoint" on Fox, which is the US version of UK's "Broachchurch". I've already seen "Broadchurch" but decided to watch "Gracepoint" as the UK star of "Broadchurch" David Tennant is ALSO playing the same role in the American version as an American.

The producers of the American series said they 'changed some things' for the American version including the end, which dismayed me because the ending of "Broadchurch" is the best part of the whole series. I hope they are not going to Hollywood-ize the ending.
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Episode 2 is still paralleling the original series. But the female actor who plays the emotive, small town police detective Ellie Miller is 50 times prettier than her British counterpart and so comes across as more 'resentful apologetic' than 'resentful confrontational'. More nippy poodle than bulldog. So she's more irritating than the British version. And they're more direct with detective Alec Hardy's issues than the British version was.
 
At least they didn't replace David Tennant with Matt Smith like the UK version...

Recently, I watched Terriers on netflix. It's a brilliant drama or comedy about a couple of scruffy private detectives that got undeservedly cancelled after 13 episodes

Less recently, finally caught up the last season of Prison Break. What a blast from the past, and a breath of fresh air among modern shows that just drag on and on without nothing happening. Prison break had more cliffhangers and action between commercial breaks than some HBO shows do on entire season. Sure the overall plot makes absolutely no fucking sense if you think about it but it's excellent popcorn fun.

Case in point, new season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I can appreciate what they are trying to do but like the first season, the story starts rolling so slowly that it leaves me wondering if I could spend my time better watching paint dry. I would hate this show to get cancelled due to poor ratings (like Terriers) so Joss Whdeon and Walt Disney's reanimated corpse: You better pick up the pace!
 
Now I'm watching the Swedish TV-series Real Humans. Best android series ever made. It's got everything from women leaving their husbands for robots, to teenage boys falling in love with robots. It's got robot prostitutes. It's nicely devoid of moralism. The robots are so fucking well played. They're not portrayed as psycho killers of humans. They're given personalities that give them a wonderfully warped moral compass. One robot is designed as a nanny and hates homosexuality. Because any human not wanting to have kids it thinks is a threat.

Just a very clever take on it. There's a subtitled English version. It doesn't suck btw. Pretty much everything else ever produced for TV by Swedish media has sucked balls. This is the first ever one that doesn't

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
 
DrZoidberg said:
Now I'm watching the Swedish TV-series Real Humans. Best android series ever made. It's got everything from women leaving their husbands for robots, to teenage boys falling in love with robots. It's got robot prostitutes. It's nicely devoid of moralism. The robots are so fucking well played. They're not portrayed as psycho killers of humans. They're given personalities that give them a wonderfully warped moral compass. One robot is designed as a nanny and hates homosexuality. Because any human not wanting to have kids it thinks is a threat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
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As a threat to what?

Do the robots have just as stupid reasons for hating gays as real humans?
 
credoconsolans said:
DrZoidberg said:
Now I'm watching the Swedish TV-series Real Humans. Best android series ever made. It's got everything from women leaving their husbands for robots, to teenage boys falling in love with robots. It's got robot prostitutes. It's nicely devoid of moralism. The robots are so fucking well played. They're not portrayed as psycho killers of humans. They're given personalities that give them a wonderfully warped moral compass. One robot is designed as a nanny and hates homosexuality. Because any human not wanting to have kids it thinks is a threat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
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As a threat to what?

Do the robots have just as stupid reasons for hating gays as real humans?
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I don't think that robot can answer that. Their morals are simplistic, a bit warped and weird. There's a logic to them. But it often ends up taking them to weird (and amusing) conclusions. Usually in science fiction robots are superintelligent nice servile slaves. Or psychos hellbent on destroying mankind. These are mostly nice. They just get it wrong now and again. They're really smart in some regards and really stupid in others. It's done really well.

Worth noting is that many humans have animosity against gays for the same reason. In our case we hate gays because there's something wrong with our moral compass. . Robots are programmed by us and always programmed to be nice. So it's different.

edit: Maybe my example didn't really work because I'm Swedish. We have pretty much zero political resistance to gay marriage, gay adoption and all of that. It's very rare that anybody in Sweden has issues about homosexuality. Politicians from all political parties are typically falling over themselves to be a pro-gay as possible.

Back in the 80'ies when we had our gay marriage debate and people argued along the lines of that homosexuality is wrong all the standard unnatural arguments came up. So we all know them. But we also think they're retarded.

Anyhoo... coming from the mouth of a robot is twice the humour since there's few things as unnatural as a robot.

The script is just packed with brilliance and hilarity.
 
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DrZoidberg said:
Now I'm watching the Swedish TV-series Real Humans. Best android series ever made. It's got everything from women leaving their husbands for robots, to teenage boys falling in love with robots. It's got robot prostitutes. It's nicely devoid of moralism. The robots are so fucking well played. They're not portrayed as psycho killers of humans. They're given personalities that give them a wonderfully warped moral compass. One robot is designed as a nanny and hates homosexuality. Because any human not wanting to have kids it thinks is a threat.

Just a very clever take on it. There's a subtitled English version. It doesn't suck btw. Pretty much everything else ever produced for TV by Swedish media has sucked balls. This is the first ever one that doesn't

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
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I loved this, too, but only found it about half way through, so I missed the setup and basic premise. If you're only half way through, without spoiling too much, it remains good to the end but developes one plotline that I found disappointing.


I tape a lot for later viewing and last night I watched a lot of people repeat each other in remembering Gough. The Power and the Passion was amongst it.

It probably wasn't Guy Fawkes. Gough Whitlam may have been the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.
 
spikepipsqueak said:
DrZoidberg said:
Now I'm watching the Swedish TV-series Real Humans. Best android series ever made. It's got everything from women leaving their husbands for robots, to teenage boys falling in love with robots. It's got robot prostitutes. It's nicely devoid of moralism. The robots are so fucking well played. They're not portrayed as psycho killers of humans. They're given personalities that give them a wonderfully warped moral compass. One robot is designed as a nanny and hates homosexuality. Because any human not wanting to have kids it thinks is a threat.

Just a very clever take on it. There's a subtitled English version. It doesn't suck btw. Pretty much everything else ever produced for TV by Swedish media has sucked balls. This is the first ever one that doesn't

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans
Click to expand...

I loved this, too, but only found it about half way through, so I missed the setup and basic premise. If you're only half way through, without spoiling too much, it remains good to the end but developes one plotline that I found disappointing.
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Have you seen both seasons? There's two. And now they're working on a third. I've only got two episodes of the second season left. I'd say the second season is stronger. They're taking more chances. Exploring more themes. More soap opera. Which I like. I like that they're using a format that is typically non-sci fi.

Watching this it's struck me many times what low hanging fruit this theme is. It's basically Blade Runner, the soap opera. The most amazing thing about it is that nobody has done it before. Blade Runner was 1982. Nearly everything since has been pretty crappy. Cherry 2000 was near it a couple of times. But most of that film is trying to be a Mad Max rip-off. Everything Real Humans are doing is classic sci-fi in a classic soap opera setting. In the second season they did away with the annoying David Eicher flashbacks. Which may have added some drama. But for no well motivated reason (I can think of).

I stopped watching TV sometimes in the 90'ies. Since then I've always just downloaded everything. Still pay for it by a subscription to Netflix. But I don't use it. Not at all. Can't be bothered. Just downloading off pirate sites is too convenient. I only use Netflix because I want to pay for the media I'm watching. The upside of it is that I never have your problem of taping shows, missing to tape them or coming in late to a show. Never having to worry about Netflix removing shows and so on. I recommend doing that as well. Makes life so much easier. If enough people do it the business models will have to be adapted a lot faster than they are now. It feels like the world of TV is still very much thinking like it's still 1980'ies.
 
I think I probably came in about the end of season 1. I was using the flashbacks to reconstruct the back story I'd missed. I will think about downloading the first eps, but free to air gives me enough good TV to fill the allotted time. (And I'm not really set up for video downloads. Small screen, pauses. Annoying)

I think that Real Humans pushes the moral/ethical envelope in the way that good sci-fi does and soaps, by definition, don't. I'm going to be pissed off if I don't notice the 3rd season until half way through its airing.

Did you see/like the US series Dark Angel? Related themes, but not identical. And I'm assuming that Jessica Alba would not be considered a downside. :)
 
Gotham

7/10

Nice fantasy-like buddy cop police procedural that feeds on Batman mythos. I like two main characters so far, and the overall feel of the show, but Bruce Wayne seems oddly unrealistic and the Penguin is too over-the-top and totally unbelievable, even in this setting. The key to having good Batman villains is that you need to be able to sell the absurdity despite the obvious silliness, and in case of the Penguin the writers are failing miserably. The villains of the week are more interesting.
 
spikepipsqueak said:
Did you see/like the US series Dark Angel? Related themes, but not identical. And I'm assuming that Jessica Alba would not be considered a downside. :)
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Like most Cameron projects, I've loved and hated it. Great ideas and visuals wasted by unimaginative scenarios and paper-thin characterization.

The basic themes and setting, bio/cyber-punk near future, great.
The first season plot(s), a bit too adolescent for my taste, a contrived excuse to avoid the heroine using guns, but that goes with being a fantastic/sf serie at the time, I can live with that. Some episodes were weak, the pseudoscience was jarring, but some were good, all in all, it had its moments enough to keep me watching as long as I remembered to keep the scientist in me quiet.
The second season :mad:

Completely killed the basic plot, the exploration of what is human or not, by going back to a monster of the week formula. A contrived plot device to maintain sexual tension (not that contrived at first, but the way they use it!). And, after having completely killed the story, because "the stakes must be higher!", they try to raise them by introducting another level of conspiracy within the conspiracy, and even more dangerous mutants, and all this supernatural bullshit and save the world thing (note to sci-fi scenarists: if you want to introduce supernatural powers or world desctruction in a way that doesn't make a sceptic cringe too much, learn from BSG-RDM or Firefly, not from this, please)...


There was so much left to explore from the first season, in terms of politics, racism, humanity, evolution of friendships, loyalty, secondary characters. Jessica Alba's character had been established as not invincible, so there was no such pressing need to raise the stakes if they hadn't watered down the setting.

Someone in Hollywood, please force James Cameron to work with good scenarists! (imagine what Avatar could have been with a good scenario)
 
The Wire (Seasons 1/2/3) - David Simon created both Homicide and The Wire. While the gritty on the street feel is about the same, the two shows definitely take into different directions. In general, Homicide was about cases that took differing amounts of time (an episode to a season) to solve (or not solve) and focused heavily on the Detectives and The Box, where the Detectives would go to work and let the criminal fall into their arms through pure intellectual manipulation. The criminals, for the most part, were outside the premise of the program.

The Wire balances between the protagonists and antagonists. One remark I made earlier was about how really flawed everyone appears to be on the show. There are virtually no straight characters. What the show is brilliant at is making you care about the people you don't want to care about. It allows the viewer to emphasize with characters they wouldn't easily emphasize with. Come Season Three, I think they just start to fuck with the viewer. But in a coherent and acceptable way.

The Wire is typically touted as being one of the best, and I think, that along side with its cousin, Homicide - Life on the Streets, it really does stand in the top 1% echelon of television programming. Well acting, but more importantly well written stuff.

4 of 4
 
Hannibal, Season 2.

I normally avoid excessive violence in the entertainment I consume :D, but for some reason I want to watch this show.

Although I must admit the "deep" and "philosophical" dialogue got to be a bit much.

I'll watch season 3 when it comes out on Netflix.

8/10
 
So going through 2 series at the moment

The most recent is Orphan Black (Season 1)
Now I think it started a bit on the slow side but once it picks up it is pretty good
And kudos to Tatiana Maslany who does an absolutely fantastic job playing so many different characters
Interesting characters, interesting plots and overall slick performances have really drawn me in for this one
Also

I just LOVE Vaas from Farcry 3 in there (Michael Mando)
When that guy showed up I was just like "holy F*&%" :D



And for something lighter I have begun watching Fawlty Towers (Currently on series 2)
And it's........ok
Enjoyable but not the best I have ever seen
 
I'm just starting to catch up on Arrow, the CW Network's take on the DC Comics hero Green Arrow.

Compared to the mega-franchises like The Avengers and The Dark Knight films it seems almost quaint, but compared to what I grew up watching (Batman, Ultraman, and Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot) it is pretty damned good.
 
Finished Fawlty Towers which is a much shorter series then I thought it would be
And it was entertaining overall (Mostly just "good not great")

Decided to try another old series and so I am now trying 'Allo 'Allo
And so far it is pretty good
 
Daioh said:
Finished Fawlty Towers which is a much shorter series then I thought it would be
And it was entertaining overall (Mostly just "good not great")

Decided to try another old series and so I am now trying 'Allo 'Allo
And so far it is pretty good
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I've watched the first season and got completely tired of Manuel by the first episode of the second season.
 
If you're blase about Fawlty Towers you're tired of living.


I've just finished watching the nostalgia fest that is the Countdown 40th birthday. I was in Form 6 when it hit the air. Oddly enough, this knowledge hasn't made me feel old, watching it has made me 16 again.
 
I just finished the first season of Bojack Horseman, a cartoon on Netflix.

In style it's similar to the old 'Duckman' cartoon, with anthropomorphic animals and humans interacting with eachother seamlessly. And like Duckman, there's plenty of raunchy humor.

Bojack is a near-alcoholic self-centered has-been actor (and a horse) who hasn't worked in years. He's careless and still famous enough to be hounded by the paparazzi.
The show isn't as funny as Duckman; but the second half of the season takes on a surprisingly philosophical bent, which for me made it more entertaining.
 
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