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Current TV Boxset Addiction

Started by radiator, 20 November, 2012, 02:23:29 PM

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IndigoPrime

Quote from: moly on 02 May, 2018, 01:58:09 PM
Watching happy on Netflix enjoying it so far, gruesome funny and a bit nuts, might have to get the graphic novel it's based on
I'm a bit surprised there's no more love for Happy! on here. We just finished it, and it was refreshingly bonkers, like a mix of Crank and [spoiler]Toy Story[/spoiler]. Really great performances, and despite the first episode or two being a touch formulaic, it really opened up. The last three episodes in particular were some astonishingly good TV.

(As for the trade, I was thinking of grabbing it, until I realised how thin it was. Subsequently delving into things, much of the characterisation in the TV show is absent – it's much more basic in nature. One of those rare occasions, then, where the TV show properly takes the original and runs with it – almost the opposite of Lucifer.)

Elsewhere, is anyone here watching Legion? And are you getting a bit... tired of it? We loved S01, but S02 feels a bit like a show that's constantly yelling LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM. And although I love Noah Hawley's work, Legion is so horribly humourless (unlike Fargo) and knowing that it's starting to become a trudge.

Mardroid


Crom

Currently taking a brief break from Stella to watch early episodes of Casualty and Silent Witness.

Also re-watching Luke Cage season 1 and The Defenders before going into LC season two.

The Legendary Shark


Counterpart. Can't say much about the plot without spoiling this but it's a kind of Cold War spy drama with a science fiction twist. J.K. Simmons stars and is even more fabulous than usual. Very good indeed and one of the best things I've watched in ages.

Legion, Season 2. Batshit insane but in a sublime way. Well worth watching and contains a sequence based on Plato's allegory of the cave which blew me away. Fantastic!

[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Mardroid

Coincidentally, I just finished watching Legion Season 1. [spoiler]I see they seem to have departed somewhat from the comic idea of a man suffering from DID, where each personality has a separate power(s). (I confess, I haven't actually read the comics, but that's how he is described, when I googled it.) I mean, there kind of are other personalities, (two if one includes his rational 'British' self turning up to advice him, when he is trapped) but the idea is used in a different, but quite clever way, and doesn't seem to relate to his power set. [/spoiler]

One of the most surreal series I've seen, but in a good way.

Tiplodocus

I've been really enjoying NO OFFENCE; a police procedural set in Manchistoh which is saved from the more mach posturings of cop shows by having three very different,  likeable but flawed female leads and having a great fun supporting cast (but is ludicrous in all different ways). Rather than facing a super villain, the cops are unlucky in many ways which means the initial investigation gets drawn out.

Spoiled slightly as we get to episode 6 or 7 where there is a plot development/twist which takes it into super clever serial killer territory.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

TordelBack

#1881
Delving into Le Foret (The Forest) on Netflix... so far, so Dark.  In fact, the first episode shares so many parallel sequences and elements with that terrifically ambitious series that it's actually a bit weird to watch, but ensures it scores proxy goodwill by association. Maybe there are only so many ways to do small-town possible-supernatural missing-kids-in-the-woods TV? 

However, if the law enforcement efforts in Dark's Winden were... unusual, those in Montfaucon (apparently somewhere in the Ardennes) are straight out of the Inspector Closeau operating manual: urgent, earnest but bafflingly incompetent. In fact there's just a general lack of logic to everything that happens: just because something is in another language doesn't make it intelligent, as similar nonsensical guff in The Rain reminded me.  And if anyone can explain what the two lads were meant to be doing with those metal detectors in the woods I'd like to hear it. 

Still, I'll give it another episode and see if it delivers at all on its initial, borrowed, promise.

Smith

Ben 10 Ultimate Alien is actually a lot better then people gave it credit for.And the entire    animated industry missed Dwayne McDuffy.

Professor Bear

Sacred Games, a Netflix original made in India following a copper who gets a phone call from a long-missing and notorious crime kingpin who alludes to connections to the copper's dad, and a terror event happening in 25 days that will wipe Mumbai off the face of the Earth.  The Wire it is not, the dialogue is sometimes gash (in both the English dub and the Hindi-subtitled versions), and it ends halfway through the story just as things as getting good (I thought I had two episodes to go, but it turned out it was just three trailers for the show appended to the episode list - thanx, Netflix), but on balance I have to say I enjoyed it a lot thanks to the setting, the blood an guts, likable but flawed characters, and a couple of shock deaths.
If this was made in the UK, it would fetishise a lot of the elements that make it stand out, particularly the array of religious identities on display, the open corruption, the shocking poverty and deprivation of many areas - there's a bit where a character stows away on a train and travels for a full day out into the Indian heartlands and the backdrop isn't even commented upon despite looking like something Western film-makers might seek out to film a post-apocalyptic movie in and around, but here it's just where people live.
Anyway, worth a gander.

Dandontdare

Final Space on Netflix was a lot of fun - 10 part scifi cartoon, which ended up with plenty of dangling threads suggesting a second series. Is it worth watching? Tribor says, yes it is!

Professor Bear

Quote from: TordelBack on 21 July, 2018, 12:56:52 PMMaybe there are only so many ways to do small-town possible-supernatural missing-kids-in-the-woods TV?

Has The Kettering Incident been shown anywhere yet?  It won't win any awards for originality, but it commendably keeps its supernatural elements at arm's length from start to finish, and at the time I found it to be a good take on the genre you describe.

TordelBack

#1886
Sounds good!  Finished Le Foret. In the end it passed the time in an okay fashion, but ultimately avoided the fantasy elements it hinted at, so that it just ended up laughably unrealistic.  Do lawyers not exist in France? 

I almost feel they changed direction away from the supernatural at some point during production - for example, I find it hard to believe that the spiral motif carved on rocks in the Bois du Fays (possible derivation: Wood of the Fairies) and painted by lost kids and crazed woodsmen was[spoiler] originally meant to derive from a random image on a kid's t-shirt[/spoiler].  There were also elements (a whole missing girl!) that weren't resolved at all, suggesting a last-minute change of plans.  Earned a few marks back for spending half an episode dealing with the fallout from its events, rather than just ending when the case did.

Stil, I'll stick with hope for a second series of Dark, I think.

Mardroid

I'm watching Santa Clarita Diet at the moment.

It's cute, yet kinda nasty at times.* Dark, yet quirky and kinda breezy.**

And it's very funny. The three main characters are great, and likeable despite what they do...

I haven't seen it all yet, but so far it's a great ride.

*Some of that gore and explicit human flesh munching. Actually rather disturbing.

** Not quite the word I'm looking for, but if you've seen it, I think you'll get what I mean.

TordelBack

Yep, Santa Clarita Diet was superb.  Great performances from everybody, and as you say, no-one is remotely unlikeable - in so far as a show can be about [spoiler]gorily murdering and eating people, talking severed heads and ambulatory tumours[/spoiler], and still be 'gentle', this one is.  Can't wait for more.

Professor Bear

Westworld season 2 - apparently there's a season 3 to come, and no spoilers but I foresee some hurdles to that.
I dunno what everyone's complaining about, this was good stuff - fluffed some of the delivery here and there, but there are solid twists to be had and the only confusing timeline is the one this show is set in: it's already the future where robots exist when Ed Harris' character is a young man, but by the time the show catches up with itself, people should be living in space and whatnot.  Maybe they are, I dunno.
Anyway, I liked that this went over the area on the Venn diagram where solipsism and sci-fi meet as I have always been fascinated with the idea of a synthetic mind whose entire life experience is recorded and how it might differentiate between what was a memory and what was its current experience of reality - obviously it would have foreknowledge of events and judge what was past experience, but its still ripe ground for storytelling with a little license taken here and there, which the show does.
I enjoyed this.  Can't ask more of a tv show, really.