What TV series are you watching at moment?

[Rubin Farr]

Looks intriguing; a satirical take on 21st century authoritarianism, the media, incompetence and the basic ridiculous nature of modern day politics. 

 

[auxien]

man they almost had me falling for the newest episode of TD S4. but then they just went oh shit, gotta cram in 73 more plot points in the last 15 minutes....shit, how do we set this up? oh, just go back a few minutes and add some 15 second exchanges setting up the exact most ludicrous circumstances possible for the big epic shitfan.

actor playing Navarro is stellar, but really almost all of the acting is great. some nice character moments even in a lopsided episode like this. shame about the whole fucking plot and story crapfest.

i would've rated it 6 scary spiral drawings out of 10 but they just HAD  HAD   H A D  to *

Spoiler

throw in a stupid fucking jumpscare recap scene in editing because....idfk man i d k. in case you forgot all the jumpscares so far, hey, there it is ! JUMP SCARE SIZZLE REEL FOR THE JUMPSCARE FANDOM

so instead only 4 scary spirals out of 10 (would've been 3 but the exclusion of excessive scary spiral drawings/imagery in this episode felt like a goddamn vacation so i gave it an extra point)

*very mild spoilers for the episode design, not plot details.

[cruising for burgers]

Gen V - I'm surprised, it's actually quite good...

not as quite good as drukqs though...

it's basically The Teens, gender inclusiveness and drug's use too much on the nose but I can deal with that...

[Alcofribas]

On 2/10/2024 at 2:45 PM, auxien said:

man they almost had me falling for the newest episode of TD S4. but then they just went oh shit, gotta cram in 73 more plot points in the last 15 minutes....shit, how do we set this up? oh, just go back a few minutes and add some 15 second exchanges setting up the exact most ludicrous circumstances possible for the big epic shitfan.

actor playing Navarro is stellar, but really almost all of the acting is great. some nice character moments even in a lopsided episode like this. shame about the whole fucking plot and story crapfest.

i would've rated it 6 scary spiral drawings out of 10 but they just HAD  HAD   H A D  to *

  Hide contents

throw in a stupid fucking jumpscare recap scene in editing because....idfk man i d k. in case you forgot all the jumpscares so far, hey, there it is ! JUMP SCARE SIZZLE REEL FOR THE JUMPSCARE FANDOM

so instead only 4 scary spirals out of 10 (would've been 3 but the exclusion of excessive scary spiral drawings/imagery in this episode felt like a goddamn vacation so i gave it an extra point)

*very mild spoilers for the episode design, not plot details.

this shit should just be it's own show. it's lame to me that this is marketed as "true detective" when it strays so far from all of the qualities that made the first season so interesting. i guess i'd say all of the subsequent seasons have been like this but damn dude, i'm watching this new season just waiting for it to get more "true detectivey" but it's just some mid crime drama where every character has some kind of sad personal story and the dark ominous element isn't even in the backseat, that shit is locked away in the trunk. also ffs the cgi is bad lol. polar bears look like they're hovering over the ground and shit. 

needs more weirdo murder shit!!!! stop being law & order csi alaska.

[Alcofribas]

On 2/6/2024 at 1:32 AM, cwmbrancity said:

 

Try & avoid trash but knew TD season 4 wasn’t going to rock. Jump scares & screaming dead-eyed dead peeling skin knock off Walking Dead fx. Absurd.

Season 1 was quite minimal, beautiful shots of a wilted Louisiana. Limited number of characters really well cast. A sound effect landscape missing from every series since. No real plot, relationships you can’t really care for & ooooh that logo again & oooh start asking the right questions. Again.

Pre-nursery run vent agh wasting a rare spare pre work hour with crap.

dude yes. the sound and music are a big part of the first season and in the new one it's boring generic soundtrack music interspersed with very annoying song drops. 

great acting though, definitely the best part of the new season

[J3FF3R00]

Catching up on CYE with S10. Pretty, pretty good!! Took a break mid-season-9 because Larry was just a completely unhinged asshole and the story didn’t feel as strong, although the whole Fatwa thing had promise. S10 is a true return to form. Lots of great Larry-isms and definitely more “on-the-line” morality judgments that help with relating to Larry more rather than just being like “what a fucking prick” all the time. Hopefully S11 and S12 deliver the same standard. 

[zero]

On 10/3/2022 at 11:50 PM, beerwolf said:

Season 1 is pretty terrible. I also didn’t finish it and skipped to Season 2. It slowly gets better. Not sure I would recommend it because theres a lot of time involved before it really hits it stride. Which is season 4 into 5. So tricky for me to say. 

ha I finally picked up watching Bosch again. I stopped after S1 because it sucked. I recently got through season 2, which I thought was great! I just started S3 and oh no, it seems to have retreated back into the shit quality of S1. I see you say it picks up again in S4. I hope I can make it through to that.

[Rubin Farr]

Balls deep into Dave, wasn't familiar with Lil Dicky / Brain before, funny stuff. Getting off to Drake was  

[beerwolf]

13 hours ago, zero said:

ha I finally picked up watching Bosch again. I stopped after S1 because it sucked. I recently got through season 2, which I thought was great! I just started S3 and oh no, it seems to have retreated back into the shit quality of S1. I see you say it picks up again in S4. I hope I can make it through to that.

I don't think I finished all seasons. It was an okay watch, though certainly nothing special.

[beerwolf]

I'm currently in TV purgatory. I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription as I've wanged a bit of cash on my credit card for some essential fishing gear and need to clear that asap, they of course in turn then cancelled my cheap Paramount+ subscription which I got through Amazon. So Deadwood remains unfinished, which sucks, but I'll go back and finish it when I have time to wang out all 3 seasons in a month which will be hopefully soon. I've been looking for something that's free (or relatively cheap) to watch and found Americans on Channel 4 (My4) which is a couple of quid a month for advert free. So far only watched a few episodes. 

[EdamAnchorman]

Wait wait, is this a plot hole on True Detective S4?

Spoiler

We just learned that the older Prior cop was in kahoots with the mine boss lady, and apparently so is Captain Connelly.  If Connelly was in with the mine lady, why did he even appoint Danvers to police chief when the mine lady obviously wanted Prior; she even said so herself.  That doesn't make sense at all.

The only explanation is that Connelly wasn't in the mine boss's pocket when he appointed Danvers, but that seems weak because he's in her pocket now, why didn't she just get him there when she found out he was going to appoint Danvers?  Seems she would've tried harder to get an insider as chief of police of the town she was fucking poisoning.

Maybe I'm being too critical...

 

[zero]

6 hours ago, beerwolf said:

I've been looking for something that's free (or relatively cheap) to watch and found Americans on Channel 4 (My4) which is a couple of quid a month for advert free. So far only watched a few episodes. 

The Americans is pure gold. one of those modern drama shows up there with the best of them, like Breaking Bad or Sopranos. hardly a drop in quality throughout the 6 seasons. 

[decibal cooper]

3 minutes ago, zero said:

The Americans is pure gold. one of those modern drama shows up there with the best of them, like Breaking Bad or Sopranos. hardly a drop in quality throughout the 6 seasons. 

Hell yeah! One of my favorites too. I remember reading an AMA on reddit by a former CIA agent, and him and his wife left the agency to open up their own business consulting firm. He said that the Americans came the closest to representing what it is like to be a spy in comparison with all of the films and TV shows him and his wife had watched.

Keri Russell is beyond compare. Some of the best acting I have seen on the screen. The show also helped me understand Russia/US relations during the Cold War. I am sure that a lot of it is over-dramatized compared with what actually happened, but I got a sense that the writers for the show put in real effort to understand the history.

[beerwolf]

Excellent news. Looking forward to watching it. 

[Berk]

Tokyo Vice right now. Scratches that neo noir itch 

[auxien]

38 minutes ago, Berk said:

Tokyo Vice right now. Scratches that neo noir itch 

nice, will have to add that to the list

i've been watching S1 of A Black Lady Sketch Show and it's good so far. got plenty of just silly jokes, lots of good funny characters, tons of guest stars, and best of all a touch of surrealism/weirdness that the best sketch shows always pull in.

[chenGOD]

Criminal Record on Apple TV. It has Peter Capaldi in it and it started out ok  but quickly devolved to a sludgy fucking mess. And I’m pretty lenient on sloppy messes but this is just ugh. So thankful there’s only one episode left. Lol

[Rubin Farr]

Resident Alien seems to have completely lost its charm and sense of humor. The show runner must have changed, it’s plodding and bland now. 

[auxien]

i liked the final reveal of the story of True Detective S4, but the overall plot still felt very overbaked/convoluted. epilogue stuff felt unnecessary and silly.  

overall the season was just not very good imo, pushed way way too hard. some really good acting from almost everyone, i just couldn’t ever fall for the horror movie BS it kept trying to force in. a few tweaks (and ~3 more episodes worth of budgeting to allow the story to breathe) could’ve really made the season strong. as is it’s pretty middling, sadly. few redeeming qualities. 

[Hail Sagan]

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

[o00o]

49 minutes ago, Hail Sagan said:

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

So it’s completely unwatchable? Sounds like a 2/10

[Hail Sagan]

1 hour ago, o00o said:

So it’s completely unwatchable? Sounds like a 2/10

Maybe I’m in a bad mood or something. The first few episodes I would rate much higher at the time of watching them but yeah, by the end it was 2/10 territory personally. I’m grading on a curve though since it’s HBO. Can’t front, if this were Netflix and wasn’t a part of a series I really enjoyed I probably wouldn’t be so harsh on it. 

[EdamAnchorman]

3 hours ago, Hail Sagan said:

True Detective S4 was an absolute train wreck. Not sure how it happened as HBO has an outstanding track record due to their quality control and willingness to green light projects other platforms would botch, if not avoid entirely, but goddamn.  I feel bad for all the actors involved as this just came across as so bad in so many different ways. The editing with the overuse of music, and not just any music but for the most part really vapid and even flat out goofy selections (an acoustic,  austere cover of the Twist?, for real?) caught me off guard.
 

The overuse of profanity, especially the word fuck, particularly in the last episode, was mind-boggling. Seriously. Throughout the series but especially at the end everyone shared the same ape-brained dialogue you would expect from a 13 year old schoolyard bully. The show got progressively worse in all aspects but you can REALLY hear it in the dialogue as the writers rushed through it at the end. 
 

 I honestly thought the setting and the basic premise of the show on paper could have been great. The native community, the mining protests, female protagonists all could have been handled just fine but they really did have to overreach and make it disturbingly woke. The complete gender role-reversal and glaring emasculation of the men in uniform is on full display here. Men are only fit to flip pancakes or submissively mop up the crime scene while their female counterparts are performing sexual conquests on other women’s trophy husbands or partaking in 3 v 1 fistfights with the neighborhood bad boys. 
 

Lastly, it’s just fucking bad. As others have already mentioned the jump scares they go for don’t land and look straight out of the forgettable early 2000’s Japanese repurposed for American horror audiences genre, complete with stock audio cues and all. They just straight up try to shoehorn in a connection to a riveting scene in from the first season of True Detective, there are a ton of plot holes, loose ends, etc. But the worst part is that they have some damn good actors in here that tried their hardest to polish this turd. Navarro was a little iffy in a few scenes but other than that I would say everyone tried their damndest to make up for the terrible writing and made it passable enough for me to continue watching it. 
 

I will say that I gave up on TD season 2 about midway through because it was boring and was pleasantly surprised with how much I wound up enjoying season 3. This was a fucking gong show however, but I can’t imagine a scenario where S5 could be worse than what I just watched. 

Mostly agree with all of this, and furthermore I have 3 gripes about the reveals in the finale:

Spoiler

1. Why the fuck did Navarro have to "disappear"?  She presumably resolved two major points that were massively unresolved for her: solving the Annie K's murder and finding her real name from her mother.  Seems to me that after having resolved these two things, she'd be pretty happy to return to her job.  What was her motivation for "disappearing"?  I get that she had the same thing as her sister and mother, seeing and hearing the dead and all that, but I felt like the disappearance was unnecessary so soon after having resolved her two major issues.  And did she really disappear?  I find it hard to believe that she was just hanging out on Danvers's porch drinking tea, or was that her spirit visiting?  Stupid.
2. The whole plot point of the scientists needing the pollution to accelerate this dumbass microbe that could save humanity was just stupid.  First of all, just fucking isolate some area of the permafrost with containment and subject that area to pollution in order to get what you want, you don't need to subject the whole fucking town to pollution.  Do the writers know how scientific experiments work?
3. This is an extension of point 2.  The whole microbe thing was really unnecessary.  It would've been better and more believable to just have the scientists in the pocket of the mine and faking the pollution numbers because they were paid by the mine.  That shit unfortunately does happen.  By introducing this stupid supermicrobe plot point, they make the scientists the bad guys for poisoning the town in pursuit of some scientific goal.  It would've been better to have the scientists murder Annie to cover up the pollution scheme and then Clark have a personal struggle of knowing that Annie died because he was a greedy fuck, then he'd have to reexamine his morals.  Instead he still felt her death was worth it because of this dumb microbe.  Fucking stupid.  Remove the whole (somewhat confusing, convoluted, complicated) microbe idea and the plot becomes better and more compelling by subtraction.

 

Edited February 20 by EdamAnchorman

[Hail Sagan]

32 minutes ago, EdamAnchorman said:

Mostly agree with all of this, and furthermore I have 3 gripes about the reveals in the finale:

  Reveal hidden contents

1. Why the fuck did Navarro have to "disappear"?  She presumably resolved two major points that were massively unresolved for her: solving the Annie K's murder and finding her real name from her mother.  Seems to me that after having resolved these two things, she'd be pretty happy to return to her job.  What was her motivation for "disappearing"?  I get that she had the same thing as her sister and mother, seeing and hearing the dead and all that, but I felt like the disappearance was unnecessary so soon after having resolved her two major issues.  And did she really disappear?  I find it hard to believe that she was just hanging out on Danvers's porch drinking tea, or was that her spirit visiting?  Stupid.
2. The whole plot point of the scientists needing the pollution to accelerate this dumbass microbe that could save humanity was just stupid.  First of all, just fucking isolate some area of the permafrost with containment and subject that area to pollution in order to get what you want, you don't need to subject the whole fucking town to pollution.  Do the writers know how scientific experiments work?
3. This is an extension of point 2.  The whole microbe thing was really unnecessary.  It would've been better and more believable to just have the scientists in the pocket of the mine and faking the pollution numbers because they were paid by the mine.  That shit unfortunately does happen.  By introducing this stupid supermicrobe plot point, they make the scientists the bad guys for poisoning the town in pursuit of some scientific goal.  It would've been better to have the scientists murder Annie to cover up the pollution scheme and then Clark have a personal struggle of knowing that Annie died because he was a greedy fuck, then he'd have to reexamine his morals.  Instead he still felt her death was worth it because of this dumb microbe.  Fucking stupid.  Remove the whole (somewhat confusing, convoluted, complicated) microbe idea and the plot becomes better and more compelling by subtraction.

 

My brain pretty much shut down in self-defense halfway through the finale so I didn’t even bother processing your first gripe. Shit is terrible man. Fully on board with gripes 2 and 3 as well. I wish they had the director’s commentary track for the finale.

[Mattthegoone]

Yeah it got worse as it went along, had that happen in a few shows I've watched recently, I thought how are they going to tie this all up in the last episode, they didn't