Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jan 11, 2020 14:34:46 GMT -8
Have you all realized that we've been excluding the apostrophe from "watchin'" in the title for four successive years of threads now? I will now carry out reparations for this crime against punctuation.
''''
But you know the drill by now - this is the generic "thoughts about TV" thread.
I'll start with something I'm looking forward to in 2020 - I was surprised how much I liked Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist. It decidedly is not filling the Rebecca Bloom-shaped hole in my heart, and I was kind of shocked just how obvious the emotional beats it was going for were - and yet, it worked, in my opinion. I'm mostly amused, however, that when it returns on Sundays this February, I will be watching it and Better Call Saul in immediate succession.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 23, 2020 18:13:48 GMT -8
I watched the Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist premiere. On the upside, it has a likable cast, good music and dance numbers, and the emotional beats (though utterly predictable) land pretty well. On the downside, the comedy isn't all that funny - the show's tone wavers between dramatic and twee, which can make the humor come off as a bit forced. But it's enjoyable enough for me to stick around and see where it goes. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had an uneven pilot as well, and eventually blossomed into one of TV's most enjoyable shows. Speaking of which: It's a new decade, so I'm going to let this one slide, but try to be more careful in the future.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jan 26, 2020 9:27:27 GMT -8
It's a new decade, so I'm going to let this one slide, but try to be more careful in the future. If it makes you feel better, I've called every Rachel I know in real life Rebecca at least once (and vice versa), well before I watched Crazy Ex. I suspect Rhoda Bloom was riffing on that confusion when she named her character Rozonda Bunch. On an unrelated note, I started watching Fargo, and gee, I can't get a handle on it. Individual scenes are low-key funny, and the imagery is compelling, but it's leaving me cold so far. I think the emphasis on the whodunit is a bit of the problem, since we already know whodidit, so the story feels like a Columbo episode stretched out to ten hours. But also Malvo and Lester get so much screentime for characters that are well-acted but mostly static. And there's a sense of tweeness about everything. So right now it's leaving me cold, but that could change.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 28, 2020 19:35:25 GMT -8
Fargo took me a little time to get into, but I adjusted to its wavelength eventually. The characters aren't particularly deep, but they're so well-cast - and their intersecting arcs so compelling - that I don't mind. And the show is masterful at building momentum across a 10-episode season (something that many streaming dramas could learn from).
If you stick with it, I think you'll find more to enjoy, particularly in Season Two.
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Post by Jay on Feb 7, 2020 13:21:45 GMT -8
I witched The Watcher, I mean, watched The Witcher. It's all right. I wasn't wild about it but I haven't played the games and had more of a reference point on Slavic mythology than anything else.
Two points of interest moving forward would be:
1) The whole first season flips back and forth between events that are out of chronological sync. Like, okay, Geralt and Yennefer both have abnormally long lifespans, but the irritating thing is that there are no hints. You don't get dates dropped in front of you, you're just expected to pick it up for yourself, and that in fact is a larger problem with season one. There's a lot of insider fantasy babble and people making references back and forth to stuff that probably makes sense in the stories but lacks context as a TV show. I'm still not 100% about a timeline here other than I think Yennefer's starts first (despite starting in the second episode) and isn't in sync with Geralt's at all until they meet, and then they all get into continuity with Ciri, the latest timeline, at the end of the final episode. They try to make thematic unities within the episode around stories but it's still sloppy if you can't do entry-level guideposting to the audience, and a chunk of the drama is lost when you're aware of specific outcomes in the "present" but are still dawdling around in the past.
2) Yenny. Oh my goodness is she kind of a "love / hate" character who you're rooting for, since she made good of a bad lot, sometimes and on the other times are like "you've lived multiple lifetimes in scattered court employment but don't seem to have thought much about yourself?" I'd also say that her main character beat and what drives a lot of her behaviour midseason is a bland note that any dude could have come up with (and indeed any dude did). She also spitefully rejects an opportunity to do one of the main things she claims she wants because, I don't know, reasons?
But hey, even as it is middling in moments, you get to hear Henry Cavill say "aw fuck" in a raspy, Batman-esque voice several times and episode six has Xena: Warrior Princess tier CGI for some reason.
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Post by Jay on Feb 8, 2020 11:34:58 GMT -8
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Feb 13, 2020 9:14:38 GMT -8
Fargo took me a little time to get into, but I adjusted to its wavelength eventually. The characters aren't particularly deep, but they're so well-cast - and their intersecting arcs so compelling - that I don't mind. And the show is masterful at building momentum across a 10-episode season (something that many streaming dramas could learn from). If you stick with it, I think you'll find more to enjoy, particularly in Season Two. I stuck with it... for about two more episodes before realizing I absolutely hated it - I don't know if the show was trying to distract from the overwhelming goriness with bouts of irritating tweeness, or to distract from the irritating tweeness with splashes of gratuitous gore, but I just got sick of trawling through a very slow and boring show I had no emotional or intellectual attraction to for the occasional vivid image. It reminded me a lot of Twin Peaks, in the sense that I often struggled to stay awake during some episodes of Twin Peaks. So I'm now watching the show most possibly removed from Fargo - for whatever reason we can stream all of Bunheads for free so I've been watching that. It's fun! I like these precocious teenage ballerinas, and this funny set of dance sequences. Curiously, I think Sutton Foster might be the worst part of the show? Or maybe she just gets the lion's share of the Shermanpalladinisms.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 14, 2020 12:04:42 GMT -8
I'm... kind of amazed that Freeform still has its "free TV streaming" system going. I assumed all of that was finished after ABC's version (the ABCD platform) fizzled a few years ago. (That was not long after Yahoo Screen closed up, and around the time Hulu switched to subscription-only. It's getting tough to find legally free TV online these days...)
Anyhow, Sutton Foster is a pretty good actress. Lauren Graham is still the champion when it comes to Palladino dialogue, but Foster and Rachel Brosnahan have acquitted themselves nicely.
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Post by Jay on Mar 5, 2020 12:05:32 GMT -8
I watched the new BBC miniseries on Dracula (2020) in an attempt to reclaim vampire / horror content on this forum. Bad choice.
This new effort was helmed by Steven Moffat. I have seen six episodes of Sherlock so I basically know what Moffat views like. There are two smart and witty characters who banter at each other and everyone else has the depth of a tea saucer and their best hope of leaving an impact is to die memorably. Such is the relationship of Dracula and a gender-bended Agatha van Helsing, who is charming at times. Moffat appears to have taken the internet-driven mandate to "be gay and do crimes" and applied it to his lead, played by Claes Bang who looks suspiciously Balkan for a Danish dude. As for Draccy himself, Moffat has a joke that he likes which is that Dracula sometimes says "I don't drink.... wine" or makes cheeky remarks about how he just murdered someone but no one else realizes it yet. I enjoy bad puns, find adaptations interesting, and thought that the gender/sexual dynamic was an interesting if predictable twist. But I don't like Moffat terribly and was reminded of why.
Episode one is two-thirds a no-stakes flashback told by Jonathan Harker where he talks about meeting the man and getting lost in the castle. It pulls itself out of tedium with a climax that is astonishingly violent and gory by BBC standards. Episode two is mostly a bottle episode taking place on the Demeter with a cast of travelers whose main purpose is to get killed by Dracula that he might absorb their knowledge. It plays out like a murder mystery where you know exactly who the killer is and are supposed to identify with him. Episode three throws much of that out and has Drac waking up in modern day England and now pursuing fairly ordinary party girl Lucy Westenra, played by a girl of African descent!, but oh no then she gets killed too, so that trope lives on. Also Van Helsing's identical great-great grand niece shows up to solve the case. Episode three gives us the big reveal of Dracula's weakness and is mostly a trash fire.
Moffat's strengths and failings are on display here. Basically, he's okay at writing dialogue, but only has two clearly defined types of characters, a smartypants and a shemp, and you know which one Moffat identifies with. He initially comes up with some interesting ideas that update the themes, such as Dracula gaining knowledge and memories from the blood he consumes, but he's unable to make good on his promises, hints at questions he doesn't bother answering, and leaves gaping plot holes and internal contradictions, which completely sink episode three in that the pseudo "rules" created to explain Dracula are one by one contradicted by Lucy and his ultimate weakness is laughably stupid. The only reason Moffat skates by is that he has his banter and his linear plotting is obscured by his willingness to throw in every possible Macguffin as a shiny bauble to distract you. It's adult entertainment that works if you approach it with the psychology of a child and don't ask what any of this means or if these seem like actual characters.
But hey, if you have four and a half hours to kill...
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Post by guttersnipe on Mar 9, 2020 10:10:46 GMT -8
That's a a shame, because Dracula broadcast here across three nights in New Year's week and it went down something of a storm in my little circle, myself included. The Stoker novel holds the dubious accolade of being the first novel I ever gave up on (I had a bit of a reputation for reading above my age bracket as a child), but read in full about twenty years later, still finding it somewhat hidebound and oscillating in terms of interesting material. But I too am a big fan of adaptation, and the amount of times he and Sherlock Holmes have appeared in other media attest to the durability and mutability of the central character.
Whilst I agree that the series is on the talky side, the conceit that makes or breaks a Dracula is the extent to which the Count persuades the audience to root for his proto-fascist sociopath, and I found Bang's take enormously compelling, even when he barely tries to mask his true tendencies (in an accommodating documentary, Mark Gatiss agreed that whilst iconic, there was no sexiness to Lugosi's fustilarian heavy). As such, I was never bothered about the shallowness of most of the victims, as I figured that were expected to side with Dracula in treating them as so much cattle, particularly in the second episode. On a visual level, I honestly didn't even think the era of #MeToo would permit a scene as visceral as his naked showdown at the convent gates - scenes like this were practically saturated with the red red kroovy, and when they aimed for sinister, I was far from disappointed with how the camera stalked and snaked around the sepia-tinted castle. I thought the guys made an impressive use of the three-part structure to arrive at a distinct-yet-unified trilogy of films in terms of focus and topic, and I though Gatiss himself made probably the best (and slimiest) impact of any Renfield outside of Tom Waits.
Incidentally, said documentary revealed that they chose Orava Castle for Drac's abode, specifically because it had been used nearly a century ago for Nosferatu - I like how these adaptations have taken on their own sly mythology.
In other television news, I'm coming to the end of the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and is anyone else finding this pretty hard work?
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 9, 2020 12:19:14 GMT -8
I thought Discovery's pilot was relatively promising, but the show that follows is a complete and utter mess, and a textbook example of how not to write a serialized sci-fi show. DS9 still understood the importance of the Trek ethos even as it challenged it--that's why it produced episodes like Past Tense and Far Beyond the Stars as well as In the Pale Moonlight and Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges. And even then, it doesn't even come close to being sophisticated. It just feels like it's trying desperately hard to achieve relevance--its creators have ensured that it will never do that. There's no reason to watch it when The Expanse is sitting there on Amazon Prime, and it's better written, better plotted, contains more interesting characters, and has actual narrative direction. In contrast to The Expanse, I doubt there'd be a #SaveStarTrekDiscovery campaign if it was cancelled.
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Post by Jay on Mar 9, 2020 13:15:21 GMT -8
The fashy read on Dracula is really quite interesting! I hadn't considered that, I read him more as an autocrat or ruthless upper-class sort. I guess where I'd point to as particular areas of disagreement there is that I often view fascism as something happening closer to what's in the U.S. right now where state and corporation are merging and so there are a number of conflicting interests that arise where the people making the rules and arbitrating the cases are those that most stand to benefit from them and thus regulation starts going out the window (our swamp grows ever swampier). Drac has a posh apartment and is living it up, but has no business interests as such, not even the ones from the Burns-as-Dracula "Treehouse of Horror" parody on The Simpsons where he had bought out a blood bank. Neither is he involved in politics or giving lip-service to it even. I think that the closest we got to political commentary was when he broke into the house in episode three and was discussing how there were more marvels there made mundane than would have ever been dreamed of in a noble court centuries ago. The other push I'd make against the fascist reading is that there's usually some drive for purity within that, of class or bloodline. Drac talks a huge game there, particular with his self-selecting of the passengers on The Demeter, but in practice I think that he's less discerning than he likes to pretend he is and has no problem noshing on a crew member or a lower-class person for fun in between the more planned and rehearsed feeding. I think that syncs with the autocrat / upper-class reading because he's got his and yet generally wants more, good and bad (and if you want to do across the pond readings, our local autocrat can afford to eat quite well but instead subsists on fast-food and cooks his steaks well-done and consumes them with ketchup).
As for other across the pond stuff, you're highlighting some of the stuff I fear I gave the short shrift to. I felt the first two-thirds of the first episode were meandering (sometimes intentionally!), but the bit at the convent was quite good and produced a lot of tension and gross-outs (I was thinking as I was watching that it wouldn't land with an American audience in the same way, but the level of sex and violence from a BBC program would be astonishing in the UK). I also really liked the castle as a visual set piece and the confrontation between Dracula and Harker atop it. The best visuals might be in the first episode, but again that's relative for me because I'm not sure that I have enough of a frame to work with modern London and Dracula being there in the party scene. The Demeter was fun too in its way as a bottle episode, and was probably the one I enjoyed the most even as I yelled at a few characters for doing this or that. The main point of it I think was to get him interacting with a larger cast than he had been afforded before, I just bristled at the false positives and feints littered throughout that didn't amount to much, even as I appreciated the more relaxed approach to developing non-canonical characters.
The take on Renfield was interesting too. I was remarking to a friend afterward about missing the Waits Renfield, or even the Peter MacNicol one in the Mel Brooks / Leslie Nielsen vehicle (I'll watch anything with Peter MacNicol in it). But I think that this version wasn't so much on the overt crazy-making as keeping everything in-bounds legally even knowing that it was wrong, maintaining the veneer of sanity in a fundamentally insane situation, and that's a great spin on it. I kind of wish that there were more of him in that capacity, but their commitments were directed elsewhere and not I think to the greater good of the plot. I don't know about your side, but I think the American consensus as I understood it was "the ending is trite and we hate it."
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 10, 2020 20:19:08 GMT -8
Is there a pattern in the way the UK has produced a lot of Dracula-based TV these last few years? There was that short-lived show on NBC a few years ago, then Penny Dreadful, now this. All initially developed for British telly.
Obviously, my knowledge of modern Dracula is chiefly confined to the Hotel Transylvania films, but I just find the UK connection interesting (though perhaps not unexpected, since Bram Stoker lived much of his life in London).
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Mar 12, 2020 12:33:57 GMT -8
I was surprised how much I liked Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist. Spoke too soon on this one, guys. The musical numbers are mostly really bad/pedestrian and don't offer insight into the characters. (You'll never guess what song the guy who's wondering whether to stay or go sings!) Also, weirdly, the show seems completely disinterested in the ethical conundrums that come with having access to people's innermost thoughts, which is odd given that 50% of the show is set at a second-tier big data company. Big Brother loves you - and he sings, too.
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Post by otherscott on Mar 13, 2020 6:10:26 GMT -8
Agreed. I'm still watching because there's not actually all that much else on at the moment, but after the first couple of weeks the quality of the musical numbers have decreased dramatically and the plots are mostly very cliched. There's interesting things to be done with this premise, the show just doesn't seem that interested in doing them.
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