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Random TV Show Thoughts

Just finished Mindhunter, aka, “Blue Balls: The Procedural”.

@bionicbob your Seaquest assessment sounds about right to me. As myself a boy genius ;) I identified hard with Jonathan Brandis (RIP) and loved that first season. I remember there being scheduling delays and time changes which made it hard to catch the 2nd season, but when I did, my reaction was something like "wtf is this?" I moved on to something else. X-Files, maybe? (Never did give that 3rd season a shot...more cast changes if I remember...in my head, this was a follow-up to both ST:TNG and 21 Jump Street, both coming to a close. They lost me on both counts.)
 
"Love" - sitcom for premium TV co-created by Judd Apatow.
Season 1 was 10 episodes of me hating the main guy (co-creator Paul Rust) and watching almost purely because I'm in love with Gillian Jacobs.
Season 2 was me then hating her character for almost the entire season as they tried to make Rust's character more sympathetic by making her a jerk.
Season 3 had me finally just rooting for another couple to get together since they were both so much more pleasant and heartfelt.
It was an interesting series that nailed down what "mumblecore" is for me, but the balance of Truth vs Enjoyment is skewed far in one direction. The relationship fights felt so much more real than the couple being together and working things out.
This series does have Claudia O’Doherty co-starring though, and she ends up nearly stealing the thing. She's a damn treasure.
I'd say this is one that if you have a partner into rom-coms, you could do worse than watch this together, but otherwise it's too full of cameos and supporting cast that are actually just the unfunny friends of Apatow who haven't broken big yet. Lots of cringe humor and unfunny jokes from Paul Rust don't warrant the time sunk in for the few heartwarming relationship bits. Just watch Knocked Up instead.
 
Plowed through the recent season (#5) of Cobra Kai in just a couple days. The show has been slightly diminishing returns each season, with last one marking the point at which I'd stop calling it "freakin' excellent". I think the challenge is for it to not spend too much time on the relationship drama, and to not take itself too seriously. As the characters and subplots have expanded, it has a tendency to veer into feeling too bloated and insubstantial and melodramatic.

That said, it's still great fun, and they continue to up the martial arts each season. Much of the cast has gotten continually better, and you can see them doing much of their own fighting in the frame...no doubles or tricks. There are still plenty of great character moments and comedy, and it continues to build on what was great about the original films, and redeem elements that weren't as great. I'm hoping they wrap it up with a final 6th season, and ideally bring in Hilary Swank for a cameo.
 
Finally finished Community, the show started by Dan Harmon before Rick & Morty. Another of these shows that was perpetually on the verge of cancellation and being rescued throughout its run. I'd actually say to just stop at the end of Season 4, which has a great series finale. The last two rebooted seasons are like a zombified version of the show that spend half the time commenting on how it is a show and is trying to find a way to keep justifying its existence. Season 5 and 6 alternate between moments of creativity and pretentious, petulant artistry, like a horrible car crash involving all the New Hollywood filmmakers and John Hughes.
 
i've started watching the Expanse for the first time and it seems interesting. i am on the third episode
 
drvrjon said:
i've started watching the Expanse for the first time and it seems interesting. i am on the third episode
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Absolutely love this series! Season one is a bit of slow burn as it has lots of heavy world building to do, but if you stick with it, it becomes one of the best SciFi shows in the last decade or two. 👍
 
bionicbob said:
Absolutely love this series! Season one is a bit of slow burn as it has lots of heavy world building to do, but if you stick with it, it becomes one of the best SciFi shows in the last decade or two. 👍
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I keep meaning to give this another shot. I made it halfway through the first season. I didn’t consciously stop watching; I just forgot to keep watching.
 
I finally finished seasons 2 and 3 of Legion. God I love that show.

It's so crazy and creative.
 
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QUANTUM LEAP ( NBC 2022)

Watched the pilot last night.

The show name drops “Sam Beckett”, so the series is a continuation of the original. But besides that, the first episode is bland and predictable. Rather than adhering to the successful formula of the original, this new show copies the modern exhausted network tv trope of our hero being supported (over shadowed) by a large team of cliche experts spouting endless exposition, while dealing with a star crossed romance and an ongoing B-plot mystery/conspiracy.

The righting of history wrongs is still present but feels almost like an after thought in this opener with nearly half the episode wasted on the Home Team.

Also, for a pilot, I was surprised at how cheap it looked. The historical period production elements were unremarkable and the green screen FX work was awful.
I honestly don't know if I like lead actor Raymond Lee or not as the pilot is so clunky and awkward.

But because I am big fan of the original, I will give it a few more eps as I read the Network ordered changes to the show after the third episode. And many shows I love had weak pilots and/or bad first seasons.

But first impressions: Dull, charmless and completely missing the heart of the original.
 
I was really excited for this until I saw the trailer a few weeks ago. I agree, it looks super cheap. I'm also a bit worried that the crew back in the present is going to make this feel a lot like NBC's Timeless, which I watched 1½ seasons of before I got bored and stopped watching. I'll still give this show a shot, but it wasn't worth me staying up late to watch last night, so I'll have to find it on Peacock this weekend.
 
summerz said:
Bit late to it but started watching Game of Thrones recently. On the last season now.
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addiesin said:
I finally finished seasons 2 and 3 of Legion.
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UGH for both of those... AMAZING beginnings betrayed by jumping the shark towards the endings. Both literally sell you the concept of something and hit it hard for the first half of the show, then decide to abruptly throw away all the careful groundwork in a flurry of bad writing and gaslight you about the reasons why.

I don't think there's honestly a good stopping point for GOT, though there's a fanedit on here that might save the final 2 seasons for some people.

Legion works fantastically if you just stop 90 seconds before the end of the first season. The stinger is random and unnecessary and there's already a complete story right there.

On that note, episodes 1-3 of Andor essentially tell a whole chapter of a story, kind of a glimpse into what Solo could/should have been as a prequel. It👏is👏fantastic.👏
 
mnkykungfu said:
UGH for both of those... AMAZING beginnings betrayed by jumping the shark towards the endings. Both literally sell you the concept of something and hit it hard for the first half of the show, then decide to abruptly throw away all the careful groundwork in a flurry of bad writing and gaslight you about the reasons why.

I don't think there's honestly a good stopping point for GOT, though there's a fanedit on here that might save the final 2 seasons for some people.

Legion works fantastically if you just stop 90 seconds before the end of the first season. The stinger is random and unnecessary and there's already a complete story right there.
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Can't disagree. I love Legion for its style and presentation. But season one was all the story it needed, and the direction it veers after took me a few years to get past, literally. I watched some of season 2 and stopped and tried to come back a few times unsuccessfully before this last push to finally finish it. Glad I did, but it's not for everyone, and even those it's for must admit it's imperfect.

As for Game of Thrones, while the mid point marked a decline in quality, it was still "pretty good", as in its problems were mostly forgivable or overlookable. Until the final season. Then it went sour, quick. The word sudden comes to mind.
 
Just mainlined all of Undone Season 2. Hmmmrrrh. :unsure:
Season 1 is an absolute masterpiece, the best show nobody's talking about. You can watch it all on its own and stop right there.
However, I was very happy to hear they finally made a follow-up, nearly 3 years later. Like the first season, it is 8 short episodes of very bingeable TV on Amazon Prime.
That is almost all it has in common.
I don't know if it costs more or less money to make the show look more photoreal and less animated, but I don't like it. The rotoscoping has changed from the first season, where it served the amazing purpose of making it difficult to tell what was real and what was schizophrenia or mysticism. In Season 2, quite often people just look filmed, with squiggly lines put in for wrinkles or with badly-animated wigs. They are clearly acting against Zoom background photos at points, and the surreal animated day-mares are few and far between.

The story, while also wonderfully deep and mature, is much simpler than Season 1. And they did that thing I HATE when successful shows do (Dexter springs to mind) which is to say "Oh, you really liked the main character(s) of that season? Okay, next season we're going to drastically focus on several of the supporting cast instead then!" Not every character/actor has the potential to be as compelling to the audience, and coming up with excuses why they should be featured with the main character (e.g., they get "powers" too!) often seems contrived.

Finally, if you loved Undone Season 1 and are left meditating on the ending...is it all real or not?... then Season 2 answers that. But the longer that answer goes on, the more it becomes far less interesting than leaving it up for debate. Worse yet, the ending of S2 tries to backpedal and be ambiguous again, but does it less artfully and so ends up just contradicting its own logic.

Fans of adult animation could still find Undone S2 worthwhile...there's not a lot else like it out there. But for me it was a big step down from S1, and I almost just wish I had stopped there. That first season is such a wonderful examination of identity and parental relationships and generational trauma and mental health and disability... the second season comes up with a much more simplistic take on all of that that may be preferred by some people, but felt like a limp epilogue to me.
 
Watched the first batch of the "I Am Groot" shorts on Disney+ that connect the two GotG films. I'd like a bit more narrative to them, as they primarily work like old short silent films, but they're supposedly making a 2nd round of these to be released soon. The animation is pretty solid and that Baby Groot is charming af. Worth 20 minutes of your time.
 
Random tv trope observation.... the fake interior driving in the car scene with fake background. This has always looked dodgy, even back in the rear projection days. But why in this HD digital greenscreen age does it seem to look even more unrealistic in so many modern network shows???
 
bionicbob said:
Random tv trope observation.... the fake interior driving in the car scene with fake background. This has always looked dodgy, even back in the rear projection days. But why in this HD digital greenscreen age does it seem to look even more unrealistic in so many modern network shows???
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True! I am always wondering that, when I see a TV Series or a movie with driving scenes. It is weird... :LOL:

Also, do you remember in the old movies when the driver was moving the wheel like a crazy man? 😂
 
The Boys (Season 3)
First of all, this show cynically envisioning 'our real world but with superheroes' is all the things Marvel and DC try to or wish they could be... and yet so often fail at. It has complicated heroes and villains who are all varying levels of Flawed but without just turning every good guy into a snarky joke machine, every female into an "empowered" bossy ass-kicker, every villain so sympathetic and "right" that they might as well be a hero. The Big Two companies so often fail at delivering nuance because they're too busy playing to the back of the room...

Season 3 of The Boys follows up on the defeat of a literal Nazi superhero by delving into demagoguery for our modern era. How do public figures leverage social media "engagement" and "followers" to sway the conversation, to empower themselves and frame what people even perceive as issues? Truly, this is a show for our modern, political, post-Trump-presidency era. SO much sex, SO much violence, this is an incredibly brutal show that almost revels in depravity, not for the faint of heart. Personally, I love it.

That said, S3 dropped the ball a bit at the end for me. We're following a team of normal people who believe that no one should be so powerful that they become above the law. That means fighting superheroes, sure, but also mega-corporations, politicians, and the Status Quo. They do this by being more clever, more prepared, and more dedicated than those more powerful. So to see the finale of this where many main characters do a bunch of things that are not clever, not well-prepared, and sway from their whole raison d'etre was disappointing. Sure, it might be complicated to actually WIN against the Big Bad of the show, but it's more inexplicable to have characters turn goody-two-shoes and give up that chance. The truth is that there's always a guy behind the guy, and defeating who you think you're fighting just opens another door. The Boys is getting stuck at the same door, and the characters should know it.

A flawed season that marks the first time I haven't thought the show was just getting better and better. I'm hoping it's just a temporary blip on the way to Season 4, because so far The Boys is not only better than any of Marvel's Disney+ efforts or any of the DC TV... it blows most of their feature films out of the water, too.
 
The Midnight Club

I'm a huge Heather Langenkamp fan. Are You Afraid of the Dark?, one of my favourite shows from childhood, also was apparently a strong influence on this show. For those reasons I watched this first season. It certainly tugs on the heartstrings. The narrative also gets progressively sloppy before becoming an unfocused mess which fizzles out at the end. I've noticed those two currents running throughout all of Mike Flanagan's television work, though the latter's particularly oppressive here. It also bugs me that these supposedly terminally ill kids don't look or act it. Still, my Heather itch was adequately scratched. If a second season's forthcoming, I'll be back if she is.

7/10
 
The Americans (2013-2018)
Simply one of the best TV series for grown-ups ever. The show begins right at the start of the '80s with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Our protagonists are deep cover spies for the USSR, who have been living for years as a typical American couple, and even have two kids now. Their under-the-radar spying is now put at risk when an FBI agent moves in across the street from them. Caught in the dilemma of how to handle this, they decide "better to keep your enemies close, eh?" and try to befriend their new neighbor and his family. The show then becomes a dance of who is going to find out about who while both countries ask them to perpetuate a cold war on each other, one which often seems to do more-harm-than-good to the average citizens of each country.

Co-developed by former CIA analyst Joe Weisberg, this inside-look at US/Russian policy and practice during the '80s is often a restrained, slow-burn look at the intricacies of spycraft. Fans of films like Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and the mini-series The Spy will find a lot to like here. But I found that the meat in the middle of the show was a beautifully-nuanced portrayal of a marriage. "Phillip" and "Elizabeth", the two alter-egos used by our protagonists, were placed into their marriage by arrangement, and it's only as the show is starting that they find something real there. Increasingly, their opposing approaches to the cold war become clear over the course of the show, and that's reflected in how they want to raise their kids as well. These strains reflect differing approaches to how countries might conduct foreign policy, long or short sighted, more assertive or defensive, negotiating by the olive branch or the sword. The cold war within their family makes the philosophical issues of the cold war as-a-whole more relatable for those who aren't into politics.

Driven by masterful lead performances, full of insightful, subtle writing, with frequently poetic and graceful directing, the series has plenty of episodes and moments that are just as memorable as their multi-million dollar premium TV competitors like Game of Thrones or even The Walking Dead. But unlike those shows, The Americans is much more restrained about the violence and sex and extremity...this is a show about the constant threat of war, of deaths of innocents, both of our protagonists and of their children. The kids don't know anything, so it is a driving force for us as viewers to sympathize with the plight of the spies...they want to help their country, but not at the cost of their children. Balancing that risk carries through the show, all the way up to the end, capped off with a very satisfying finale that I just finished.

If you don't need some shocking reveal every week, and don't mind needing a couple of episodes for a story element to pay off, The Americans is a series I feel like is a Must Watch. Any other fans out there?
 
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