TV news and views

[Potato]

Chances are the characters were originally written male and gender swapped. Although, there are female equivalents of all those names...Georgia, Maxine, Samantha, Alexandra etc

[benji]

George is Georgia and I think it's mostly because it's shorter to say. Probably about half of the characters use the full name.

[DavidCroquet]

Any ya’ll heard of this thing called “anime”?

Anyway I just finished Revolutionary Girl Utena. In terms of classic anime power levels, I put it above Evangelion (overrated anyway) but below 1997 Berserk.

It’s good! Lot’s of pretentious thematic and symbolic shit to chew on. The ending was one of those inexplicable, rule breaking possibly-entirely-metaphorical anime endings that they all do, but I think they justified and executed it well here.

[filler]

[simiansmarts]

Welcome to Derry had a solid first season, much better than the second movie and story goes in a pretty interesting place despite being a prequel. Bill Skarsgard just chews the scenery as Pennywise, I'm glad they got him back.

[Polident]

Stranger Things s5 and a half

First episode back and this show is spinning its wheels so hard there’s another long scene with Uma Thurman and Will talking about being gay.

[Nintex]

is every netflix show now: and actually they were gay

or?

[Polident]

It’s less that he’s gay and more that they’re plotting to fight an interdimensional monster and every episode this 30-year-old teenager goes “gee wiz uma thurman I get the tingles looking at man dick what does this mean?” before another character interrupts with the plot. 

tbf it’s annoying with Dustin too. They repeat the same beats. Maybe they don’t have enough plot this season that it’s all padding.

[benji]

Whites (sometimes called Chef's Whites certain places now) was one of the first shows Hulu did, along with the BBC, back in 2010 and I almost watched it then. Anyway, it was pretty enjoyable. I liked the Kitchen Confidential show because despite the advertising (and pilot) it was less "kitchens are so wacky!" and played it a bit more straight in line with Bourdain's book just being stuff that happens in restaurants and this is a lower key version that's more British. Looking at the Wikipedia page was amusing because:

The BBC had elected to cancel the series as it cost £3 million ($4.8 million) for one series.

Which is hilarious because after the first three episodes they pretty much stop doing exteriors and it's all obvious green screens. So they must have blown the budget by then.  

The eggless omlette video comes from it, and the best character (also the steak scene is one of the obvious green screens, you can even tell at this 15 year old potato resolution):


Leverage: Redemption is more Leverage but with the lead guy gone because he was accused of rape as a teenager back when we were doing that to end people's careers and because the Black guy is too big of star now he's only around sometime and we get his younger sister who because we're checking boxes also is a lesbian (and maybe asexual? Has the flag on her lapchop) and is infinitely more annoying (because she's written exactly as you expect) while somehow more capable than he was. And Noah Wyle hangs out mostly so the other characters can exposition at him or so he can explain the law to them since Nate is gone. In the last season he's around less and randomly has a beard because of his other show. This version of the show is notably more preachy with it being very questionable that some of the "villains" are even bad guys rather than people the Leverage team decides to just do crimes to. The CGI and green screens are as bad as the original was. But overall it's still enjoyable and mostly tongue in cheek about a lot of the tropes and references like Wyle pretending to be a doctor then explaining that it was some stuff he heard on a TV show. Like the original series it never makes a big deal of those as much as just drops those in so many could miss it and still plays everything as if it's natural that the characters are superhuman.

Started The Outlaws from Stephen Merchant with Christopher Walken. Main thing I want to comment on after a couple episodes is the hilarious awful ADR on a line just because the original line apparently didn't have the correct amount of the cost of corona lockdowns so they had the actor just dub in "400 billion pounds" in a flat cadence. This only drew attention to it and instead made me wonder how much the original line was off versus not even noticing had the character just been underestimating or whatever. 

[Snoopy]

Outlaws is average at best. If you want some decent BBC comedy watch the Detectorists or Motherland

[filler]

[Snoopy]

But don't watch the 1st season of Motherland. Graham Linehan wrote a lot of it so it's riddled with fascism,  bigotry and transphobia.

[Besticus Maximus]

don't know about comedy but we binged all those 'a christmas ghost story' episodes by the league of gentlemen lads and it was great

[Polident]

Stranger Things season 5, on the whole, was boring and unnecessary. The ending was decent but also like, why wasn’t this the whole season?

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

7 1/2 episodes were a repeat of the season 4 finale. Then the epilogue is graduation, moving on from adolescence, moving away from friends and family, the 1990s peaking in. It’d make sense to weave that into the supernatural shit.

[Alpacx]

I watched Heated Rivalry. Very horny softcore porn for straight women but somehow a decent show.

[Potato]

Man, these Stranger Things writers really thought they were making high art. Really struggling through the second last episode. Fuck this is tedious bullshit. This show would have been infinitely better if Will just died.

Also, what the fuck with Nancy just gunning people down without remorse?

[Polident]

What annoyed me more than it should was a scene where a character is very visibly afraid. The actor was selling that he’s terrified. Even the most autist of autists could tell. Yet they have another character look into the camera and announce “he’s scared”. 

I saw a rumor about Netflix having these “explain what’s happening and what to think” lines because they have very low opinions of audience literacy. Fair is fair. But this show used to be better at letting the cheesy emotional beats play out.

[Potato]

The problem is compounded by having so many moments of "what the fuck is going on" interspersed between the "he's scared" moments in so many streaming shows. 

I think it's because some writers are approaching it as if expecting the audience to binge the whole lot in one or two sessions and others are written with a week to week schedule in mind.

Who knows?

[filler]

lame ending lol

[benji]

I really liked The Outlaws, it's not amazing or anything but was enjoyable and plus it's short so it didn't wear out its welcome. I'm glad some characters weren't rewarded for being lame when they easily could have given everyone rewards.

As for Hannibal, I'm shocked this has such acclaim when it's boring as shit. The dialogue is impossible to take seriously with half of it being poetic sounding nonsense and the rest incoherent psychobabble nonsense, the pacing is atrocious with endless meaningless padding, the acting mostly lousy (except Eddie Izzard who you'd never know is a woman playing a man), the plotting generally nonsensical, the shocks and twists all obvious, the central conceit beyond absurd and leaves all the characters as complete idiots even if their adversary is incapable of making a mistake of any kind and seems to have superhuman powers. And that's when the episodes actually have things happening. The show spends three seasons trying to lecture us about how great the two leads are as they spend all that time being unappealing creeps, one of whom is obviously untrustworthy yet they all inexplicably decide to over trust including the guy whose one talent is "too much empathy" even as he's continuously betrayed. The biggest sin is the soundtrack which doesn't come close to creating tension or suspense compared to being just overly loud and annoying. At least you can't hear the shitty dialogue as clearly! On the positive side, all the fight scenes are cool. Also it was really impressive that the second Mason actor could sound almost exactly like the first.

Anyway, I'll watch Sledge Hammer! next since I'm surprised it was actually added to a streaming service.

edit: Fuck, it's the version with the laugh track albeit quieted quite a bit.

edit edit: Oh thank god it's only the pilot.

[benji]

[Potato]

Been trying to articulate why I haven't cared much for Stranger Things seasons 4 and 5 and this says it pretty well. It's also applicable to so many television shows and films in the modern era. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2026/01/15/stranger-things-how-vecna-ruined-netflix-hit/

The Stranger Things Feature Creep

But with great success comes feature creep. The simple story had to be expanded, because the Duffer Brothers needed another season and then another season, and Netflix loved the attention and success of this surprise hit. The cast ballooned, adding more kids and more teens and more adults, some of whom were great characters like Max and Billy and Murray, but the cast kept piling up like bodies for a Mind Flayer. And other than one heroic guest star bucket-kicking per season, nobody else died (and the show’s best death, Jim Hopper’s heroic season 3 sacrifice, was a fake-out).

As the cast grew, so did the scope of the series – and its problems. All this expansion led to cracks in the foundation. Now we didn’t just have one terrifying monster lurking in the shadows, we had demodogs, which were less frightening but more plentiful. The scariness of the first season began to leak out around the edges. Then demo bats for poor Eddie. (Though all these minor monsters were mysteriously missing for the big Mind Flayer/Vecna showdown in Season 5).

The Mind Flayer was certainly a fascinating monster, and Season 3 did a lot of neat things with it, but the story just kept getting bigger and more complicated as it shifted away from its premise – scary monster from another dimension capturing a young boy – and became something more epic in scope and messier in execution. That scary monster was just a minor bad guy, we later learned, in service of an even bigger and more deadly master.

Of course, Season 3 was also not the end of the show, so in order to keep going, the Duffer Brothers had to create an even bigger, scarier and more diabolical villain in Season 4. This is when the show truly went off the rails. Perhaps Stranger Things should have ended after Season 1, which was perfect, but if it had to continue, the creative choices in Season 4 led directly to the creative bankruptcy of Season 5. And the show just kept runnin’ up that hill until it ran out of anything even remotely resembling a good idea, let alone a finished script.


How Vecna Ruined ‘Stranger Things’

The character who bears the most responsibility for the decline of Stranger Things is, of course, Vecna / aka #001 /aka Henry Creel. Creel fundamentally changed everything about the story we thought we knew, and none of it for the better. Now, all the bad things that happened because of the Hawkins Lab experiments were actually Henry’s doing. Indeed, Eleven and the children, we discover, were merely byproducts of Henry’s blood transfusions. In Season 5, we learn that his blood is itself the byproduct of a space rock that he finds in a mine, in a briefcase belonging to some random guy he ends up killing.

To make all of this work, the show’s writers had to change the very nature of Eleven, the Upside Down and the Hawkins Labs. Eleven didn’t actually open the rift to the Upside Down at all. Dr. Brenner was behind that, and he created the Upside Down as a wormhole to connect to another planet that our heroes dub “The Abyss.” Will, meanwhile, wasn’t captured by a scary monster that snuck into our world from a place nightmarish and inexplicable. He was chosen by Vecna because he was “weak” and Vecna needed kids to, um, power the Mind Flayer to crash-land The Abyss through the Upside Down into Earth . . . .

As you can see, at this point the elegance and simplicity of Season 1 have been erased entirely and replaced by a convoluted and goofy plot that goes in a million directions at once, made much worse by the fact that our cast of heroes has expanded into an impossible logistical disaster. The unwieldiness of the story is only matched by the unwieldiness of its burgeoning cast. Even with increasingly long episodes, few of the remaining characters are given a chance to really grow or shine, with Season 5 sidelining even characters like Eleven – while Holly, of all people, becomes one of Season 5’s core protagonists

This is the very definition of feature creep, or scope creep. Worldbuilding gone wild. This is what happens when you take a great story and instead of letting it end organically, you churn out more content for content’s sake. Bigger content. Just not better content. Vecna changed the arc of Stranger Things, but also the vibe. What was once a story about mysterious horrors from beyond became something more personal, a Dark Lord’s vendetta, but they had to retcon past seasons to make it work.

Vecna was not planned as the series Big Bad from the beginning. There is no whiff of him in Season 1, and Season 5’s CGI-laden bits, with a de-aged Will being dragged by the demogorgon to Vecna, just cheapen the events of Season 1.

[Snoopy]

A Thousand Blows. I thought this was some lame Peaky Blinders clone but then I saw Stephen Graham was in it. It's really good. Well worth watching. Although I expect you Americans will need subtitles

[benji]

Boiling Point has a poor name because not only is it the name of the movie that the series spun-off from but it's also the name of the very first Gordon Ramsay series ever. The movie serves as a pilot and so combined with the series there's about six episodes of content. The movie is different because it's shot in a single take and the series has multiple locations. But I slightly preferred the series because it didn't have to try to fit all the plot and setup of things into events happening during a single service. The movie has people randomly bringing up background info unnaturally in conversation. Every episode has over the top DRAMATIC EVENT, but I guess people prefer that compared to the subdued ways of something like the aforementioned Whites. (Which because I watched is probably why this was recommended to me.)

Sprung is from the guy who did My Name Is Earl and references suggest is set in the same universe. Actors mostly come from Raising Hope which was the same. I liked this though it was a bit weird how the episode lengths vary so wildly, from 32 minutes to well over an hour. I guess there's no reason that streaming shows have to be any length, but it does make for an odd watch because of what we're so used to. Yeah, that episode felt like half as long because it really was! The COVID aspects were probably the biggest source of humor but I was glad that like Earl the characters were as clueless about pretty much everything while thinking they knew what they were talking about. For example, they don't intend to shoot bleach because Trump said it but because it's just so obvious to them that would work considering the other things they are shown to believe about how things work. They believe Trump is truly telling them shooting bleach works because they derive all their knowledge from barely paying attention to equally awful sources and extrapolating from there including ignoring the same source telling them otherwise about a topic. As such, they don't attach to Ivermectin like I think a less clever show would have also done because that would require a level of commitment and investigation these characters could never have. They similarly ignore all the valid advice from the Trump pressers and officials because they don't truly listen to any of it, they take up bleach because it was the one time the one character was actually paying attention for an entire 20 seconds. Other plot relevant stuff comes from the same methods, such as assumptions about how computers work or whatever.

[DavidCroquet]

is no one watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?

It's weird. I think I like it...but also why is it a season of 6 30-minute episodes?

[Potato]

I'm watching. I like the more humorous tone as that was one of the main aspects I liked about Tyrion and Bron in GoT.

The series is based on a novella, so 6x30 is about right. I think the worst case scenario would have been trying to add filler like they did in The Hobbit movies to extend a short story. 

I'm looking forward to the third episode.

[benji]

I came to really like Get Shorty. Yeah, it's not the movie. Yeah, it's kind of cliche. Yeah, there's gang-related violence. (This is a complaint imdb's reviews a bunch.) BUT I'm a fan anyway. I like the two side characters of Louis the Mormon and Ray Romano, the latter of whom shows he's good at this kind of dramedy again after Men of a Certain Age. The main character is sort of hit and miss and while I didn't ENJOY it I intellectually liked that they kept him from changing and learning his lesson about the life of violence. I liked that the women characters weren't one-note but all four were shown to have varying levels of tolerance of the different aspects of the worlds they didn't understand or like. Usually shows only do that for whoever the male main characters happen to be in relationships with at the time. 

Also three of the main character women all get naked and that was kind of hot even when it could have been cringe. Was something I didn't expect, until after the first one, only because I just assume that cutting up dudes while they're alive is fine but showing some tits is a no-no even on "unrated" cable or whatever this used to be on. Then I was kind of like "oh, just this one chick is gonna get naked" and they surprise me twice again. The last show I remember actually doing that was Boss where you thought the one actress was only on the show because she agreed to get naked every other episode and then the more famous one must have felt like she had to show everybody she could too. Unlike Boss, this show doesn't get cringe about it and keep setting up situations for the women to take their tops off. (Although Boss also has the best plot relevant fake out about using this trope maybe ever.) I was surprised none of the imdb reviews seemed to mention this considering how much they complained about the violence, also because the episode warnings don't even mention it. I'm probably overawed because the women are actually good actors too. Anyway, I came to like this more for the movie industry stuff than the gang stuff, but I thought the show actually got better about the latter as it went on.

I've still got more Flack to watch but this is lame. No idea why it has praise except that media people love watching other media people in shows. The side characters are all the good characters, with Anna Paquin's character seeming more like some kind of psychopath who could probably take Super Hannibal. But don't worry, she shows her secret good side when she betrays a possible pedophile because that's just a line too far. Eve and the intern might be the best characters, the boss is written exactly as you would expect. In fact, the bulk of show is entirely written that way and is clearly trying to show how edgy everything is at all moments in all ways except for the episode about how bad transphobia is. (Ironically starring the trans voice actor for Hogwart's Legacy and the Harry Potter audiobooks.) If a character can have casual sex and do drugs while drinking they definitely will. And if they can say some snarky thing about anything that someone could have any kind of moral or ethical concerns about they will definitely lecture you. How about some kind of speech about how hard it is to act human? Maybe some poorly setup conflict between their job and life or maybe lying and one of these? 

It could change as it finishes but I think the show is kind of hilarious with the way it handles lying, like its doing this thing where it's trying to play with how lying is considered essential by the characters even though it almost always goes bad for the main characters (and only works for the guest actors) but the show seems to only understand how to extend conflicts by having no one be receptive to the truth ever. The character who is supposed to be our sympathetic outsider lectures the others about how they should never lie to HER, then upon learning the truth about a situation kept from her seems to upend her life and refuse to allow forgiveness of any kind for others being truthful with her. The boss character is supposed to be this blunt truth-telling harsh taskmasker, but it never applies to the main characters because she can't actually punish them but the scenes are written as if nobody realizes this.

Also, I'm getting exhausted from standing to clap at all the GIRL BOSS MIC DROP moments.

[Potato]

Episode 3 of Dunk and Egg was great. The kid playing Egg is a fantastic little actor.