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Topic: TV we've been watching lately  (Read 146087 times)

auaurorau

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TV we've been watching lately #435
I've been watching Furuhata Ninzaburō and it's a real riot. Satisfies the columbo need inside me.

Macho Masc Sangy Savage

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TV we've been watching lately #436
Watching the Sasquatch Hulu documentary and this first episode has spent more air time on cannabis then it has on bigfoot

EDIT: it's been about two episodes since they mentioned Sasquatch - its actually about this murder at a cannabis farm at Spy Rock and the war on drugs CAMP operations. Not an unwelcome change and a hell of a way to trick Hulu into funding your doc, but I'm curious to see if, when, and how Sasquatch comes back into this

EDIT 2: Ooooooh it's doc about a cannabis operation owner/kingpin with the nickname of bigfoot Gary. Truly the perfect doc to watch my first time being high lol
« Last Edit: July 24, 2021, 02:24:47 pm by Guy Ferrari »

Great Joe

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TV we've been watching lately #437
Ya know what, Columbo is pretty dang good.
Macho Masc Sangy Savage chai tea latte RoeCocoa auaurorau lazzer grardaion? Eider Duck Immoral Filth Salubrious Rex

chai tea latte

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TV we've been watching lately #438
do you remember like a year ago when Apple said oh we're going to film an adaptation of Asimov's Foundation novels in Ireland, the famously completely unfilmable thing? Well, they filmed it, and the first two episodes are out, and they are very good.

The cast is enormous, the directors appear to want to take things slow (in an article I skimmed, one of them said something about having pitched an eight season 'show bible' of 10 eps per season), and the footage is beautiful and alien. Lane from Mad Men plays the doctor Hari Seldon, and spanish actress Lou Llobell plays a modern version of the books' original viewpoint character, Gaal Dornick.

This is where I have to take a moment. In the original novels, Gaal Dornick is a white man. Salvor Hardin, the Warden of Terminus, was also written as a white man. Both were conceived of and written 75 years ago, when the audience for science fiction was even more white, male, and hostile to nonwhite and nonmale fans than it is now. I saw and skimmed an advance review of the first two episodes which essentially argued that the adaptation suffers for including more women and people of colour. I think this is nonsense.

Director David A Goyer says this:
[Asimov] wasn't writing about the distant future. He was writing a post-World War Two environment. He was talking about Nazi Germany. He was talking about being a Jew who had emigrated from Russia. He was talking about the old empires of Europe collapsing and the ascendancy of America. The first thing I said to the Asimov Estate is that Asimov crafted Foundation to be a mirror so I need to write about what's happening now. I need to write about Brexit, MeToo, the ascent of nationalism again. I need to write about climate change.

I believe that the stuff described in this quote has been sensibly inserted into the stories that Goyer is trying to tell. There is a major new element not from the original novels which occupies centre stage; the Galactic Empire's ruler. In the books, the last strong ruler is Cleon II, a clear homage to Emperor Justinian in character. In the show, Cleon I made a decision to institute something called the "Genetic Empire", where three clones of Cleon I, "decanted in different decades", represent the eternal Galactic Empire in an eternal ruler. When they are born, Cleons in the show are referred to as Dawn. They mature into an adult Day, and a wise elderly Dusk. The idea of geriatric rulers terrified that they can never, must never be replaced by anyone different is a mature theme handled well in the TV show, and I am excited to watch Cleons XI, XII, and XIII fall.


Less ably handled is the treatment of climate change, which gets a throwaway line justifying a character's fierceness and unwillingness to compromise. This is good but suffers from being slightly jarring, because it comes right after, or before, I forget which, a long paraphrase from the novels themselves, written by Asimov's more able hand.

Lastly, the most important question you may still have: is it still all just one character talking to a second character for a while? thank God, yes it mostly still is. There are some set pieces, in particular a TRULY incredible one 75% of the way through the first episode, which I think are more illustrative of the scale and decadence of the Empire than dialogue could convey. So far I am VERY into this and will be considering it appointment viewing in my household.

Macho Masc Sangy Savage Frank West Dr. Buttplug
« Last Edit: October 13, 2021, 10:14:08 pm by chai tea latte »

chai tea latte

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TV we've been watching lately #439
the third ep (out today / Fridays) is also good.

duz

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TV we've been watching lately #440
Foundation has been good so far.  I hope they can keep it up and also that they don't take a multiyear break between seasons like Westworld has been.

Victor Laszlo

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TV we've been watching lately #441
I really enjoyed Ted Lasso.  I don't usually enjoy the water cooler shows and I resisted watching for a long time but it hooked me.  Season one was better than season two but both were good.  Not as perfect as the hype would have you believe but it's very enjoyable.

chai tea latte

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TV we've been watching lately #442
do you remember like a year ago when Apple said oh we're going to film an adaptation of Asimov's Foundation novels in Ireland, the famously completely unfilmable thing? Well, they filmed it, and the first two episodes are out, and they are very good.
chai tea latte, September 29, 2021, 05:58:49 pm
Update:
E3: Also very good.
E4: Also very good.
E5: dogshit. a baby's first sketch of a religious society that hates science, without depth, nuance, or any message to impart. the takeaway of episode 5 of the show is 'if you are religious, you are stupid.'
E6: incredibly good. A mature, nuanced story about imperial religion and the double bind of Empire and faith. absolutely shocking that it came after E5; they feel like two entirely different TV shows.
« Last Edit: February 01, 2022, 07:35:13 pm by chai tea latte »

Victor Laszlo

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TV we've been watching lately #443
"In and Of Itself" is really really good and you should watch it.  Hulu has a free trial so sign up and watch it.  It's really fucking good.

chai tea latte

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TV we've been watching lately #444
The Great Pottery Throw-Down has been pitched more and more, recently, as 'the successor to Great British Bakeoff". The format is the same, but in terms of spiritual successor as a mass media phenomenon, it has not yet gotten there. This all changed with the current season (S5), which is posting absolutely record viewership numbers and is farm more popular internationally than seasons 1-4.

Instead of reviewing the show, or waxing lyrical about the fact that I also work with ceramics and am a potter, and the incredible depth and genuine challenge posed in each episode, I want to discuss seasons 1-4 comparatively so that you know which ones to care about.

S1 of the show was really good. The hosts are Kate Malone, a ceramics artist, and Keith Brymer-Jones, a production potter and one of the blokiest blokes to ever bloke on television. the kiln man / studio technician (off-camera Ceramics Guy) is Rich Miller. The TV host is Sara Cox, a famous British drivetime radio host for the BBC.

Kate, Keith, and Rich are some of the strongest hosts in Bakeoff style television. Kate is strong, Keith is delicate, and Rich is an educator for the lay TV audience. S1 is very good.

In S2, the staff remains the same. The quality of the competitors, unfortunately, drops slightly. They selected more 'hand-builders' than in S1, a form of pottery that is disconnected from the throwing, pottery wheel based methods that every challenge is based on. As a result, you can tell who the first four people to be eliminated will be; the edit makes abundantly clear that they don't even deserve to be here. An episode 2/3 hand-building challenge could have changed that; instead, the first third of the season acts as a dumb joke for any potter watching.

In S3, Sara Cox is replaced as TV Host by Mel Sykes, who succeeded well in the TV Host role on Bakeoff. Unfortunately, as I'll discuss in a second, I hate this one. The quality of the competitors is excellent, the challenges are great, and Keith is at his zenith as 'bloke who cries on television when he sees art'. In either s2 or s3 Kate is replaced as host , presumably because she was too expensive to keep booking.

(Keith is an emotional man who truly loves pottery. In recent seasons, his existing tendency to be moved - to the point of tears - when he sees ceramics he admires has become, sort of, the 'Paul Hollywood handshake', the acknowledgement for the viewing audience at home that a technical skill has been truly well presented to a technical judge. I feel that S4 was the worst for the edit room selecting every single clip where he is moved to this extent; it felt almost like self-parody to me. I'm glad to see that S5 is less obnoxious on this front.)

That said, S3 is 'the brexit season', and I hate it. The show moved from the BBC to Channel Four, and stopped casting people of colour in favour of instead casting 'european ethnics'; the show gets a LOT whiter this season and a LOT more brexit-ish, in ways that I think hinder far more than they help the thesis of the show, or the idea of pottery television.

S4 (2020) has excellent contestants. Their technical skills are solid. Mel Sykes couldn't be part of the cast and crew bubble required by COVID-19, and is replaced by Siobhán McSweeney, whom you may remember as 'Sister Michael' from TV comedy Derry Girls. S4 also sees Rich Miller promoted to Keith's foil as second judge, and replaced by a new 'kiln girl', Rose Schmits, a trans woman who does not pass as cis. In my opinion, S4's casting (Rich, who is black, becoming a host - and he's GREAT at it; Rose as "kiln girl" in a deliberate attempt to piss off transphobes) repudiates the 'brexit season' of S3.

S5, currently airing, may be the best season yet. You owe it to yourself, if you like this sort of show, to check this one out. Comedian Ellie Taylor replaces Siobhán, and she's good. Keith is there. Rich is there. Rose is there. The show finally is willing to pay for the correct hosting team, and they've found it.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2022, 12:27:23 am by chai tea latte »

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TV we've been watching lately #445
The Great Pottery Throw-Down has been pitched more and more, recently, as 'the successor to Great British Bakeoff".
chai tea latte, February 01, 2022, 07:50:59 pm
Yo, this sounds killer and I'm gonna look into it. We loved Bakeoff and I love pottery.

Tipsy Almond

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TV we've been watching lately #446
I've decided to watch the entirety of Sesame Street from the beginning. It's trippy as all hell. The early versions of Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Oscar, etc. are pretty different from their modern designs, so it feels like I'm watching an alternate universe.

thelizzerd

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TV we've been watching lately #447
I really liked our flag means death. It makes me want to make an even better pirate costume this year for halloween. I've dressed as a pirate for halloween 4 halloweens and 2 parties in the past 10 years.
Dr. Buttplug

Victor Laszlo

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TV we've been watching lately #448
Everyone who said I should watch ‘Barry’ over the last few years could have saved a lot of time and energy by just telling me Stephen Root was in it.
chai tea latte

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TV we've been watching lately #449
Shout-out again to Chai for recommending The Great Pottery Throwdown. We just finished S4 and are two episodes into S1, and it's just delightful (and continually awe-inspiring -- I did just enough ceramics work in school to realize that these challenges are hard). We'll probably keep running the series in order even if S3 has problems.
Great Joe chai tea latte