What TV shows are you watching?

[Skalpadda]

S2 revealed there’s even less to it than we might have thought with S1.

I rather liked S1, but that was mainly because it was more Western and less Star Wars.

Yeah, I’m absolutely on board with the frontier stuff and I’d enjoy more digging into Mandalorian culture. I struggle to care or get excited at all about the Jedi/Empire plot. My hope would be that a future season would focus more on the actual Mandalorians but now they’ve set up the blood experiments (M-count! You bastards.) and there’s probably going to be some super-sith plot or, god forbid, Palpatine cloning going on.

All this talk of Mandalorians is giving me a massive urge to go play the KotOR games for like the 6th time…

As for Bill Burr, he’s a pretty acerbic comedian, you may have come across him years ago as that and still have a bad vibe from it.

Yeah, that might be it. I don’t think he did a bad job with the part or anything it’s just something about him that annoys me.

I’ve also watched Chernobyl and I must admit, that show has left quite a mark on me. I’ve since then done some research and bought a few books on this topic to determine what was accurate and what was not faithful and/or exaggerated (keeping in mind that this was a drama rather than a documentary) because I must admit I did not really know as much as perhaps I should have regarding this catastrophe.

They played fast and loose with a lot of things, and many events were hightened for drama, but to their credit they had that little coda at the end where they explained their decision to merge characters and such. The only thing that really bothered me was the depiction of radiation sickness and the girlfriend of one of the fire fighters getting sick from being in the same room at the hospital. That was a bit dumb and seems like the writers just swallowed an urban tale without fact-checking, but it’s fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

[Hanimalle]

They played fast and loose with a lot of things, and many events were hightened for drama, but to their credit they had that little coda at the end where they explained their decision to merge characters and such. The only thing that really bothered me was the depiction of radiation sickness and the girlfriend of one of the fire fighters getting sick from being in the same room at the hospital. That was a bit dumb and seems like the writers just swallowed an urban tale without fact-checking, but it’s fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

Indeed, that’s pretty much what I’ve found out from the research I’ve made. There was a video from an Ukrainian medical responder that was particularly interesting to watch on Youtube. It seems that what they’ve showed in the series regarding radiation sickness reflects what people believed back then and not how radiation actually worked.

The doctor in the video mentions that as a result of this false belief, many of the children that were evacuated to Moscow suffered from rejection because people believed they were contaminated.

As for the girlfriend losing her baby shortly after it was born and what was indeed not just implied but said by one of the characters, from what I’ve gathered I think that’s what the girlfriend actually believed so they went with her version of the events.

Apparently Russia will do their own show, with their version of the events, including the suggestion of a CIA plot if leaks are to be believed, I’ll definitely be interested to watch it and see which of the two is more faithful to the actual events…

[LexW]

Apparently Russia will do their own show, with their version of the events, including the suggestion of a CIA plot if leaks are to be believed, I’ll definitely be interested to watch it and see which of the two is more faithful to the actual events…

I don’t think that Putin-era Russia would be capable of telling the truth about basically anything at this point. It’s like, even the truth was perfect for their purposes, they’d feel the need to dolly it up to make it even better, so I would expect an actual Soviet disaster to be presented in a way that’s complete bollocks, with everything ratcheted up for maximum nationalist propaganda effect in a way that makes something like 24 look like a serious and unbiased documentary. I particularly doubt the science will be any better.

I’ve just finished watching The Wilds, which is a Prime original, which presents basically as “Lost but with a small group of 17/18-year-old girls” - basically a very similar scenario - plane crash, everyone inexplicably alive on the beach of a mysterious pacific-looking island. And it even has a flashback-heavy structure, as we see a lot about their lives before this. To say much more would be spoilers, but it’s actually not quite what it seems, and I’d say it has actually quite a lot more social commentary of various kinds than Lost did (which was more of a weird-ass character study). I think it’s one that it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re going to like from the first episode or two - bear in mind for the first few episodes at least each episode focuses largely on a single girl but that happens less as things go on. It’s a bit Young Adult (I hear it’s actually now called “New Adult” if it’s more aimed at the 18-26 sort of age range like this), but not to an excessive or trope-y degree. Also unlike Lost, is definitely not a mystery box - i.e. clearly they have mapped out fully what’s going on and the basic outline rapidly becomes clear to the audience - thank god, I’m pretty done with “mystery boxes” like Lost was (the term in the TV context is used in two ways - to describe shows where the characters and audience have no idea what’s going on, but also where sometimes the writers have no idea what’s going on, which was enragingly the case with Lost).

One minor thing I found fascinating, but this is a solid spoiler so watch an episode or two before reading if you’re going to: the people running the experiment are not omni-competent, and don’t have unlimited resources or corporate hit squads or the like - in fact they’re at most semi-competent and have serious money and personnel issues. For some reason I found this really made me like the show a lot more.

[Hanimalle]

I don’t think that Putin-era Russia would be capable of telling the truth about basically anything at this point. It’s like, even the truth was perfect for their purposes, they’d feel the need to dolly it up to make it even better, so I would expect an actual Soviet disaster to be presented in a way that’s complete bollocks, with everything ratcheted up for maximum nationalist propaganda effect in a way that makes something like 24 look like a serious and unbiased documentary. I particularly doubt the science will be any better.

It does seem very unlikely that they will tell the truth but I’m nevertheless intrigued by what they will come up with and whether or not it will be believable or not.

[LexW]

Wandavision E7 - quite bit more movement. This week the sitcom to be mimicked is, as everyone and their dog predicted (and indeed a trailer yesterday or the day before confirmed), Modern Family. Also there’s mid-credits bit that’s kind of important so probably look out for that - they never did one before but did this time.

Pretty fucking huge spoilers to watch it before you click on this. Soooo what about that? Agatha Harkness was much predicted and signposted, and yeah, good, not a red herring, but she’s evil? In the comics, she is very much a good guy, in the long tradition of misunderstood Salem witches (though I’m pretty sure she’s also the inspiration for the main leader character in Motherland, but that’s beside the point). Here she’s so evil she even makes a point in her musical introduction that she killed the cat… well in this case the dog. The whole introduction is both hilarious and clearly edited for a degree of uncertainty, like, did she summon Quicksilver, or merely mind-control him? However, this pretty much confirms this isn’t all Wanda being a jerk, this is Wanda under the influence, which is simultaneously less interesting and has more potential to allow Wanda to survive as a character. Plus Monica Rambeau, i.e. Captain Marvel to people my age (when I grew up she was the Captain Marvel in the comics I read, before being “replaced” by some blonde - actually the original Captain Marvel but still fuck that), aka Photon, finally started getting her powers and refusing to be fucked around. And then at the end we yo’ boy Quicksilver basically doing a jumpscare with “Snoopers gon’s snoop”, which is a vague-ass thing to say, but at least he’s still in it. The kids are pretty fun this episode, then mysteriously disappear! Dun dun duuuuuuuuun! So that’s all pretty exciting. I hear that book is normally in Dr Strange’s possession, and possibly it has turned Agatha evil - delightfully evil, one might note. Also given Rambeau’s eyes flash purple in the “snoopers” scene, presumably Vision is the last one not controlled by Agatha. One presumes he’ll do the usual Robot Jesus bullshit (which Vision has pulled like, so many times - even in the comics he’s Robot Jesus), and will have to die for our sins once more, somehow breaking the Hex despite knowing it means his death. Ugh. It would be nice if they could avert that and save him somehow, because he’s pretty great, and he’s died enough times!

Overall this episode started really slow, didn’t seem like it was going anywhere, then drastically got interesting and fun.

Still only 30 minutes or so of episode, debunking rumours that the total show length was 6 hours, potentially, unless both the two remaining episodes are over an hour each - seems unlikely.

[Aitrus]

I’d agree that it’s not amazing or anything. Gen Z types and very young Millennials seem very impressed by it, and it’s like, wow, never seen TV try anything clever before huh kids? (Glad to be on a board full of old people where I won’t start a riot by saying that lol!)

Am I this forum’s only representative of Young People? I’m too old for that job at 26. Where you at, zoomers? But yeah, WandaVision just plain sucks. Some of it is sort of interesting - the production side in how they do the sets, the costumes, the image look, etc. And I’m mildly invested in Wanda and Vision’s story, despite Marvel Studios not trying very hard with these characters up till now. I like them, and I like Vision’s perspective in all this, his slow realization of what’s going on and his build-up of defiance. The end credits theme is a jam, some of the only standout music I’ve heard in Marvel so far.

But everything else is generic Marvel garbage - the stock characters Marcy, Jimmy, Monica, and Bad Military Man, the soft-sci-fi near-future technology, the cold blue color grading (and boring set design) in the Sword camp, a lot of is the same old stuff they’re pulling out of the MCU tool bag. I wish the MCU in general didn’t lean so hard into these military institutions like S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D. and whatever else. Everything is about governments and technology. Was Spiderman with control of thousands of murder-drones in space really a story anyone wanted to actually tell or hear?

[LexW]

Was Spiderman with control of thousands of murder-drones in space really a story anyone wanted to actually tell or hear?

Having watched that movie definitely it was not yeah.

I think a lot of this comes from two problems:

1. The first big “MCU” hero was a not-very-moral arms manufacturer, who they spent a lot of time saying how great he was, which was hard to make compatible with all the, y’know, arms manufacturing.

2. Agents of SHIELD was initially all “ooooh we’re morally ambiguous!” “Are we goodies or baddies?” and was frankly spewing a ton of fascist shit, and then near the end of S1 they seemed to realize they’d gone too far and it was basically just Agents of Actual Fascism, and so they desperately backpedaled but ended up sort of retroactively justifying a lot of the fascism and there’s a lot of fascist/authoritarian stuff to what they do (much like the Men In Black, only at least that’s kind of silly). They tried to do the whole “Oh the fascism was just HYDRA lol!” but it didn’t really work, because they still did fascist stuff post-HYDRA, just nowhere near as much.

And you can see the reverberations of all this through the MCU. They have to keep big-up-ing Iron Man, and then the recent Spider-Man MCU movies are basically even more pro-military-industrial bullshit than the Iron Man ones were, because of Tony being his “mentor”. Like, Vulture has a legit grievance and the idea that what he’s doing is a huge problem is sketchy and requires them to make some really contrived stuff happen. Iron Man giving his googles to a dumb kid who nearly murders people with them is played for laughs, but it’s fucking horrifying, and again, the villain has a legit concern, they absolutely shouldn’t be in Peter’s hands - if anything they should be destroyed and the satellites with them. But we have to keep saying shit like “Tony did the right thing” and it’s like, no he fucking didn’t.

And SHIELD and now SWORD have to portrayed as good guys because HYDRA is gone and they can’t use that excuse again. In comics, they often aren’t - SWORD particularly not. But even SHIELD often isn’t, especially post-'80s.

I think a lot of it is because the X-Men are absent from the MCU.

The X-Men are Marvel’s “counter-culture” as it were. They represent all the people left on the margins, the victims of genuine oppression, the adversaries of a lot of these paramilitary/fascist organisations. The ones who show what’s going wrong, what’s bad, why it’s not all roses and sunshine to have massively powerful military tech kicking around - because it’ll be used to try to annihilate mutantkind and so on.

But the MCU has been flying without them, without the counter-culture, only having the more conservative heroes around - and they’ve resisted it a bit - the Avengers were less-fascist than they sometimes are in the comics, they did Civil War and put Cap on the correct side (but it was sooooooooooooo boring), they brought in Dr Strange and made him big (and he’s just not involved with any of the fascism) and so on, but it still shows.

They need the X-Men to fix this, to counterbalance this, I think. They also need to dial back the love of SHIELD etc. as you were saying.

[Sarfrin]

Am I this forum’s only representative of Young People? I’m too old for that job at 26. Where you at, zoomers?

I’m Gen X and I’ve got to say the burden of responding to that shouldn’t fall on you.

[Det.Bullock]

Millenial here, though I’m on the older end being 35.

I’ve been watching Zeta Gundam and I have the impression that being a dick must be a requirement to be a child prodigy Gundam pilot, the series is still nice enough military sci-fi even if it ramps up the presence of force sensitives newtypes compared to Mobile Suit Gundam.

[BillButNotBen]

Never seen Modern Family, so that one is probably going to fall a bit flat for me.

---

I have another series for the ‘Stuff I probably would never normally watch, but hey it’s 2020/2021!’ pile:

I don’t even remember why I started on it, but I watched Chasing Life, which is an ABC show (i think) about a journalist in her 20s how finds out she has serious cancer.
It’s very ‘american drama’, in that everyone is very good looking, well dressed and charming, and everyone seems to have a good job and good healthcare. If it had been a British drama everything would have been much more downbeat and grungy and there’d have been a lot more medical screw ups.

I think the last year has made me a sucker for this kind of interpersonal drama stuff (one might even say soap opera ). That and I’ve always had a bit of a weakpoint for secrets that people don’t want to reveal. (secret relationship, secret cancer, etc…)
So I got well hooked on the first season and burned through it pretty quickly, to the extent that it pushed out things like WandaVision, The Mandalorian and The Watch that, on paper, would me much more my kind of jam.

It did a pretty good job with the serious moments. It did have the problem that a lot of secret-based shows have - once the secret is revealed and the fallout has happened, where do you go next.
As such, season 2 became a much more generic ‘young people have relationships’ show, that just occasionally veered into ‘oh shit, cancer!’ moments. There’s also only so many times you can do the ‘it’s the end of the season! Serious cancer!!’ thing. As such, it got cancelled on kind of an unfinished note.
Some parts were really nicely written, but other parts were a bit too Lifetime Drama, especially later on.

Despite my joking about it above, the main plot relating to cancer was mostly well done. The side plots started well, but ended up getting a bit too unrealistic.
It also had a generic Twilight main character has to choose between two hunky guys thing going on. I may be wrong, but I get the distinct impression that they were forced to change tack on that one because the one the writers liked wasn’t the one the fans liked.

Not sure what to watch next. There are a couple of shows I’ve been meaning to watch but they’re all a bit dark and I haven’t been in the mood for that recently. Maybe I should try The Vampire Diaries.
Kidding.

[LexW]

Never seen Modern Family, so that one is probably going to fall a bit flat for me.

It’s just The Office’s format used for a family sitcom basically, only in Modern Family it’s never explained who they’re talking to, unlike The Office. I suspect the only thing you’ll miss is that Wanda is basically doing an impression of the mum from Modern Family (which is weird because she wasn’t doing an impression of Samantha from Bewitched or the like before)

Not sure what to watch next. There are a couple of shows I’ve been meaning to watch but they’re all a bit dark and I haven’t been in the mood for that recently. Maybe I should try The Vampire Diaries.

Kidding.

It’s actually surprisingly fucking great. I won’t hear a word against Vampire Diaries S1-4. My super-trustworthy friend recommended it to me years ago, my wife and I were like “What fuck man?” and he was like “Trust me!”. We did, and we were right to. Based on what you like I think you might well like it. It’s not nearly as soppy or Twilight-like as one might fear (it does have the two hot guys thing but the hilarious spanners that keep getting thrown into that are great - also one of the guys is just really amusing).

[Det.Bullock]

Personal Wandavision speculation: Agatha Harkness isn’t a villain and the theme song we see is the warped way Wanda sees her rather than a reflection of her real intentions. At least for the moment what she did seems more aimed at creating cracks in the illusion to try and ease Wanda out of it. Admittedly her purpose might still be villainous but at the moment I fail to see what her play is if she’s a villain, probably something convoluted.

[Sarfrin]

I’ve started watching Lupin, (ETA on Netflix) which is a kind of French reverse Sherlock Holmes. It’s based on an old series of novels about a gentleman criminal but updated to be a guy avenging his dad’s framing in contemporary France. It started off seeming relatively lightweight but it’s getting darker as the series goes along. Enjoying it so far.

[LexW]

Possible - I suspect she may be controlled myself, possibly by the Darkhold (the magic book shown, an extremely important item in the Dr Strange comics) or Nightmare, because she’s a straight-up good guy in the comics.

I just finished watching SS-GB on Netflix, a mini-series of 5 1-hour episodes, which is an adaption of a noir/alt-history novel set in a 1941 where Britain lost the battle of Britain and the Nazis invaded successfully(-ish - they don’t have the whole country under control). I was kind of suspicious of it at the time it came out (2017) so skipped it, but… actually it was great!

Apparently film noir and occupied Britain (probably any occupied nation) go really well together. The Nazis are very human (moreso than Man in the High Castle, for example), and somehow this makes them even worse, even more vile and venal and pathetic and grasping. It feels more true-to-life, because colonial-type occupying powers are always like that, and we know the Nazis basically stole everything that wasn’t nailed down from the countries they invaded (and the Nazi backstabbing is also rather true-to-life).

The plot is convoluted (of course), I suspect moreso in the book, but it remains very much noir the whole way, and that’s definitely a good thing. Lot of good actors and strong performances, and the writing is largely good, with some good back and forth. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who likes noir, or just stylish thrillers in general. If the book had a sequel, I’m sure there’d have been another series.

[mrpier]

Would be a nice tie-in to the Dr. Strange movie as well, where Nightmare is rumored as the villain.

[Wheelz]

I’ve finished watching Person of Interest. This really was a fantastic series overall and I know I’m going to miss seeing all these amazing characters interact and the obvious chemistry some of them had. I’m genuinely impressed by the fact that this show succeeded in making me care for each and every one of its major character, despite or perhaps because of how deeply flawed they are as human beings.

Hell, even the main antagonists were really well done because their motivations were at the very least understandable, no moustache twirling vilain in sight. I definitely will come back to this in a couple of years, this was undeniably one of the best things I’ve seen in a while.

Person of Interest is great. If anything, I think it holds up stronger in light of the direction our technical overloads [Facebook, Amazon, etc] are taking us.

You’re right about the chemistry, basically all of the main cast were great and got along great.

[MiniMatt]

This thread is big on post apocalyptica, so Tribes of Europa (netflix)

Got some of the same… crew? money? as Dark (which was fantastic) and shares a visual - Bavarian(?) forests, those deep, dark, wet arborial landscapes of central europe are every bit as iconic as the windswept scandi steppes of your nordic noir.

So, love the cinematography, the landscape. The rest… it’s a bit 90s euro-jank. I’m sorry, it has promise (this “review” after episode one and done) but not for me. The “baddies” you can tell on account of their OTT eye shadow and affection for black leather, the goodies are simple honest tree folk and yeah, nah. Really violent. Actually probably not any more violent than a 15 ratiing should suggest, but a bit more violent than my delicate sensibilities can stand (we’re quite queasy) - but yeah, a guy’s gonna get castrated on telly and you’re gonna watch it happen.

So we’re calling it a day after episode one, but it’s post apocalyptica and it doesn’t appear to be terrible. You might like it.

[Aitrus]

https://deadline.com/2021/02/avatar-the-last-airbender-franchise-expansion-launch-nickelodeons-avatar-studios-animated-theatrical-film-1234699594/

Nickelodeon is launching Avatar Studios, a division designed to create original content spanning animated series and movies based on the franchise’s world. The original creators and executive producers Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko will run the studio as co-chief creative officers. The first project is an animated theatrical film that is set to start production later this year.

Not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, yay! more animated Avatar stories. Avatar belongs in animation, so this sounds much more interesting than the live-action show Netflix is doing. On the other hand, so much of the extra-show c o n t e n t (I hate that word) has already been pretty poorly made. I’ve read five comics in the Avatar universe (one of which was written by Michael Dante DiMartino) and they were all in the “slightly ok to pretty bad” range. Korra itself was a mixed effort (looking at you, Book 2. You know what you did) and I say this having loved the show. Point being - more is not always better, and having the original creators working on a project doesn’t mean it’s going to be good.

I guess my biggest hope for this would be that they never do more stories with Aang or Korra. We know who those people were and we know what the world looked like when they were alive. Let’s only go to new places, either far in the past or in the post-Korra future.

[BillButNotBen]

Finally got around to Wandavision Ep7. (Spoilers for Ep7!)
It’s nice that it’s finally getting moving. I still don’t think it’s especially great, but some elements are good.

They’re having to thread the usual needle of making something that appeals both to those of us who haven’t read all the comics and so therefore don’t know who people like Agatha Harkness are, and also appealing to people who have read all the comics and know all this stuff. (*)
Since someone who read the comics already guessed the Agatha thing, it wasn’t a bit plot twist for me, despite never having heard of her. I’m not invested enough in the show that it would have been a big shock or anything anyway, and at least the reveal was fun.
The reveal was too quickly cut together for me to be sure without going back and rewatching it, but I got the impression what she did with Quicksilver was change him to the X-men one.

Maybe comic readers will know, but are they turning Monica into Captain Marvel, or does she have the comic book thing of having a dozen other identities? As soon as they started talking about her dna getting re-written I couldn’t help but think ‘here we go with Captain Marvel 2.0!’, which was depressing as I like the Brie Larson one and it would be waay too soon.

The weird thing is that they are now setting up Monica as basically the show’s main hero/protagonist. But I can’t think of any other shows that have introduced their hero so slowly and indirectly. I mean, she effectively wasn’t in the first 3 episodes, and has only briefly been in episodes 4-6. As such, I don’t really give a crap about her so far and I can’t tell if the actress is any good or not. We barely know anything about her except she won’t give up.

(*) They seem to have largely done a good job of this over the many years and movies. I feel like the main time it suffered was with the Captain Marvel movie twist, which worked well for me, but didn’t seem to surprise anyone who was familiar with the comics - robbing the movie of it’s main impact.

And Frasier too is hard to re-watch because the father is just such a cunt with such horrible attitudes (despite being excellently played). But yeah, it’s decent, even great sometimes.

New Frasier incoming…

[Det.Bullock]

Zeta Gundam goes way too overboard with the force sensitives newtypes in its last stretch, I almost expected Camille to shout “for the honor of Greyskull” or have some of the disenbodied voices say “use the Force, Camille!” which is a very odd contrast with the rest of the anime which is otherwise military sci-fi.
I wouldn’t have minded if they kept it more lowkey like in Mobile Suit Gundam but here newtypes can apparently generate force fields impervious to conventional weapons.
I’ll probably just watch Char’s Counterattack and leave it there.