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

A bit of background...

I've long since cut the cord. Haven't had cable or satellite for years. Awhile back, I got a Roku for my living room TV, and an Amazon Fire stick for my bedroom TV. The Roku wipes the floor with the Fire Stick. Amazon pushes you towards Prime (which I have) but is kinda lacking in other choices. Roku has more options. Pluto TV is nice (it's like it's own cable network) and there's also some cable channels that let you watch some of their content. One of those is Cartoon Network. Specifically Adult Swim - their "adult" animated offering.

I'm not really all that much into animation, but I heard that the kids nowadays like this "Rick and Morty" show. So I watched an episode. Then 3 seasons. Whoa. This is the subversive show that the Simpsons used to be. Family Guy before it got cancelled the first time. Rick is Morty's mad scientist grandfather who is the smartest man in the multiverse, and also a mean drunk. Morty is a hopelessly awkward teenager who goes along with Rick on adventures across multiple realities. It's crude, funny, and occasionally does that thing where Rick let's on that he really loves his family, but not often. I like it.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKppSogjXvM[/YOUTUBE]
 
Rick and Morty seems like a show I should like but I have never been able to get through an episode. I see it referenced all over, I have learned about Pickle Rick if only to be culturally aware. But I just can't get past that I find the voices too grating.

Roku was better until Amazon settled with Google and now offers YoutubeTV. Otherwise, Firestick has better functionality for most apps.
 
Ford said:
I'm not really all that much into animation, but I heard that the kids nowadays like this "Rick and Morty" show. So I watched an episode. Then 3 seasons. Whoa. This is the subversive show that the Simpsons used to be. Family Guy before it got cancelled the first time. Rick is Morty's mad scientist grandfather who is the smartest man in the multiverse, and also a mean drunk. Morty is a hopelessly awkward teenager who goes along with Rick on adventures across multiple realities. It's crude, funny, and occasionally does that thing where Rick let's on that he really loves his family, but not often. I like it.
Click to expand...

Love Rick & Morty, it is a totally fucked up show.

Might like this, the guy who does the voices calls into televangelist Joel Osteen's church's prayer line, in his Rick voice. Has fun when the woman on the line starts speaking in tongues.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/0cLxCjjJbnY[/YOUTUBE]
 
marc said:
Ford said:
I'm not really all that much into animation, but I heard that the kids nowadays like this "Rick and Morty" show. So I watched an episode. Then 3 seasons. Whoa. This is the subversive show that the Simpsons used to be. Family Guy before it got cancelled the first time. Rick is Morty's mad scientist grandfather who is the smartest man in the multiverse, and also a mean drunk. Morty is a hopelessly awkward teenager who goes along with Rick on adventures across multiple realities. It's crude, funny, and occasionally does that thing where Rick let's on that he really loves his family, but not often. I like it.
Click to expand...

Love Rick & Morty, it is a totally fucked up show.

Might like this, the guy who does the voices calls into televangelist Joel Osteen's church's prayer line, in his Rick voice. Has fun when the woman on the line starts speaking in tongues.
Click to expand...

Fortunately, I have a wireless keyboard and was able to move it out of the way before I spit out my drink on it.

That was awesome. Thank you.
 
Ford said:
marc said:
Ford said:
I'm not really all that much into animation, but I heard that the kids nowadays like this "Rick and Morty" show. So I watched an episode. Then 3 seasons. Whoa. This is the subversive show that the Simpsons used to be. Family Guy before it got cancelled the first time. Rick is Morty's mad scientist grandfather who is the smartest man in the multiverse, and also a mean drunk. Morty is a hopelessly awkward teenager who goes along with Rick on adventures across multiple realities. It's crude, funny, and occasionally does that thing where Rick let's on that he really loves his family, but not often. I like it.
Click to expand...

Love Rick & Morty, it is a totally fucked up show.

Might like this, the guy who does the voices calls into televangelist Joel Osteen's church's prayer line, in his Rick voice. Has fun when the woman on the line starts speaking in tongues.
Click to expand...

Fortunately, I have a wireless keyboard and was able to move it out of the way before I spit out my drink on it.

That was awesome. Thank you.
Click to expand...

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/nPZGJHNxqMk[/YOUTUBE]
 
Watching the Crown....not bad, still waiting for Princess Margaret to hatch a dragon egg...
 
Finished "The Man in the High Castle" today.

I have mixed feelings.

Overall, I liked the series. The first season was very well done if a bit slow. The second season was great. It sort of lost it's way in season three, but came back around for season 4. The characters - particularly the "bad guys" - came to the conclusion that they'd painted themselves into a corner and had to figure a way out. The titular main character - Julianna Crane - fell by the wayside and became far less interesting than John Smith (the Nazi) and Kido (the Japanese heavy).

But the show was clearly building up to some grand conclusion. The events near the end of the last season pointed to a sea change for this world where the Nazis won WWII, and how was it going to play out?


It was frankly kinda lame. Anti-climatic. Julianna becoming a commando hunting down Smith through the forest was ridiculous. She suddenly became a ruthless soldier? That didn't work. Smith's death was entirely unsatisfying. I thought he'd somehow go through the portal and step into the alt John Smith life. Smith's second calling off the airstrike against San Francisco? Ridiculous. The ending itself was a head-scratcher. Who are all these people coming through the portal, again? The only thing that had a satisfying end was Childan's story. He wound up a bit like Klinger at the end of MASH. He spent his entire life secretly hating the Japanese, but at the end it's all he can to do travel to Japan and be with the woman he loves.

 
Revisiting the first season of "Heroes" on IMDB TV.

Jeez this show was so good at first. A concept that's been done to death (there's mutants among us who might be superheroes or supervillains) but it was really well done. The casting was great, the story was well-built, and that first season really drew you in.

Subsequent seasons didn't live up to the promise and the "reboot" was disappointing, but that first season was magical.
 
Ford said:
Subsequent seasons didn't live up to the promise and the "reboot" was disappointing, but that first season was magical.
Click to expand...
it's funny how much the popular culture has forgotten this, but the big writer's strike in the early 2000s happened between seasons 1 and 2 and is pretty much solely responsible for that show going to shit - the s1 writer crew was on strike, the s2 writing crew were ringers brought in to keep the show going.
same thing happened to battlestar galactica.
the strike also killed pushing daisies and almost killed breaking bad.
 
The CW has an ongoing tradition of crossovers for its DC Comics shows. This month they did the first three parts of their version of Crisis On Infinite Earths. The villain is destroying not just the universe, but every alternate universe. As part of this, the shows have been bringing in guest cameos galore from various DC shows.

So far they had:
Burt Ward as Dick Grayson from the 60's Batman series
Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox from the '89 Batman movie
Tom Welling as Clark Kent from the series Smallville
Brandon Routh, who is a regular in these shows as Dr. Palmer (The Atom) but also appears as his Superman (from Superman Returns 2006) who now looks like Superman from the Kingdom Come story
Kevin Conroy, voice of Batman from the animated series appears as a bitter old Bruce Wayne
Ashley Scott as Huntress from the '02 series Birds of Prey
Tom Ellis makes a quick cameo as Lucifer
and John Wesley Shipp reprising his role as The Flash from the 90's tv series.

A nice touch is they played the theme music from those films/series when the cameos start.

Will have to wait a month for the final two parts of the crossover. Not sure if there will be more cameos as the multiverse is pretty much toast, but they might find a way to fit in a few more faces.
 
prideandfall said:
Ford said:
Subsequent seasons didn't live up to the promise and the "reboot" was disappointing, but that first season was magical.
Click to expand...
it's funny how much the popular culture has forgotten this, but the big writer's strike in the early 2000s happened between seasons 1 and 2 and is pretty much solely responsible for that show going to shit - the s1 writer crew was on strike, the s2 writing crew were ringers brought in to keep the show going.
same thing happened to battlestar galactica.
the strike also killed pushing daisies and almost killed breaking bad.
Click to expand...
Interesting. I never watch shows live any more, so I caught Heroes after it came out. Didn't realize that was the underlying issue. Season Two was definitely awful. Amnesia should never be introduced as a Season Two plot line for one major player, forget two of them. Origin stories also seem to be easier to create than established super hero stories.

There is always the other issue of just not having enough compelling material. 24 had an incredible first season, a good second season, and it generally declined from there.
 
Tars Tarkus said:
The Expanse season 4 on Amazon Prime.
Click to expand...

I do like the changes they made from the books. At least Ashford isn't a Major Burns/Arnold Rimmer stereotype anymore. Here's hoping Jared Harris comes back to the show. The show did Mars better than the books as well.

Harry Bosch said:
Tars Tarkus said:
The Expanse season 4 on Amazon Prime.
Click to expand...

The best show on TV! I'm into the 7th episode of season 3. Great show.
Click to expand...

If no one has told you (or if it isn't too late) skip the opening credits of the episode.
 
Last night I re-watched the "Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too" episode from the most recent season of Black Mirror.

That's the one with Miley Cyrus. Say what you will about her musical outings, but this episode showed that she has some decent acting chops. And in a way, she was the perfect choice for this role. A teen pop sensation that's desperate to break away from the machine controlling her life. The side plot about the two kids (Rachel and Jack) and their life with their widower dad who was developing a humane pest control system was necessary to the plot, but kinda meh.

Yet as a commentary on the music business? Granted, we're not at the point where pop songs can be extracted from the comatose mind of a songwriter, but the machine is real. It reminds me of an artist I met maybe 10 years ago. She was actually the sister of a guy I used to work with. Nice woman. Amazing voice. If Jennifer Aniston was a farm gilr from Iowa and could sing her ass off...that was her. The lyrics of the last song on her last album before she quit the business stand out for me:

I live on a hill, overlooking the skyline
With a breathtaking view of the big city bright lights
Head full of stars and a heart full of dreams
Led me down this road that's never what it seems.

Here I'm just another face
Just another voice
Just a wannabe that's gonna be
If I have the choice

The woman I am ain't the one that I was
They say I've clung to my roots long enough

But I won't run from the past
That's given me wings
If I had to choose between this
And what's left of me
Then I choose me

Those last few lines are particularly devastating. There's more to the song, but she basically looked at what she'd sacrificed so far, what she had to sacrifice to "make it," and said - in her lyrics - that maybe it isn't worth it.

We take these people who are good looking and talented and maybe a little naive and turn them into a product. In the episode, Ashley (Cyrus' character) was literally turned into a robot doll, with the positive aspects of her personality, designed to be sold to someone like the hapless Rachel, telling her that she could realize her dreams if she just believed in herself. But that's far from the truth.

Bonus points for them using Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole" throughout the show.

"I'd rather die, than give you control."
 
My boyfriend is obsessed with baby Yoda and the Mandalorian. I have been coerced in to watching each episode of this show 3 times. Its not bad, but its major appeal really is just the cute muppet.
 
The Almighty Johnsons - 8/10

A New Zealand based show (love their accents) show about Norse Gods inhabiting the bodies of New Zealanders, and losing the bulk of their powers. Centered on four brothers making their way through life, struggling with the gods within them, etc. Pretty charming show.
 
The Witcher: 1/10

so, this is a viable television production in the sense that there are locations, people shoved into costumes, with cameras pointed at them, and they're reciting lines.
and that's pretty much where it ends in terms of being recognizable television as we understand the term to mean, and is also the only reason it even gets a 1 rating, for managing the media equivalent of tying their shoes and holding their jaw shut.

took me 3 tries to get through the first episode, and my TV buddy outright fell asleep. by the 2nd episode we decided to do literally anything else.
now, i know this is an adaptation of a book series and that the show is evidently trying to adapt a couple different stories from a couple different books at once, but as an outsider not familiar with the source material not a single thing happening on screen for 3 episodes made any god damn sense whatever.
there is zero world building, zero explanation for anything going on, zero setup or character introductions or narrative framing for anything happening on the screen at any point.

from what i've been reading on other forums and such, the show is pretty good and a fun adaptation IF you've read the books and already know who everyone is and the connections between characters and nations, but the show doesn't establish any of that in any way, it's just "here's some shit on the screen. now there's a huge battle. why? fuck you that's why. now henry cavil is having softcore porn with someone he met on screen literally 8 seconds ago. here, have some tits"

i've read numerous comparisons between this and game of thrones, or how this is nothing like game of thrones and comparing them is stupid, just a lot of of on and on about the two shows.
the first 2 episodes are like if someone took whoever wrote season 8 of GoT and then beat them vigorously over the head with a mallet for an hour and then made them write a season of a fantasy show (any season of any fantasy show, whatever) while still beating them over the head with mallets, and then just a name insert with characters from the witcher series.

it was astonishingly, shockingly, offensively horrible.
 
Lost In Space: Season 2

I'm only a couple episodes in, but sweet non-existent Jesus they've stepped up their game. The first season was slow in places (to put it kindly) but so far this is an edge-of-your-seat action thrill ride. Parts of it are a little over the top and ridiculous, but nowhere near the absurdity of the original or the disappointment of the movie version. This one is fun.
 
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