Current TV Boxset Addiction

[Apestrife]

Too Old To Die Young I more or less love everything Nicholas Winding Refn, but this wasn't for me. I'm very fascinated by the visuals, every light source is like magic neon, but I couldn't get into it.

As you can see by the trailer it has amazing visuals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0KO8My-90g

Basically about a corrupt cop in a LA infested by dark and seedy people. Made me think of a slo mo crash between Ridley Scott's The councelor and Refn's Only God Forgives. It goes for the art house dream like state of both and their ridicule of elegans, but a much much slower phase. It's probably the slowest story I've seen. Every episode reminded me of the last episode of Twin Peaks: The return, but without any of that which preceded it. It doesn't feel earned.

Will probably give it another go someday. See if I can't get into it. But right now I much rather watch The councelor (the Director's cut) or Only God Forgives.

But if someone likes Refn's later movies and/or twin peaks I think there could be a good chance Too old to die young could be worth a look. Or if someone just wants to see something complete different.

[The Legendary Shark]

Lexx. I've only ever seen a handful of episodes and fragments of episodes of this, back when it was on Old Telly. It's completely bonkers and looks like it was shot by cavemen, in a cave, to be watched in a cave by nerds captured by cavemen. Not sure if I've got the patience, or the stomach, to get through the whole thing.

[Hawkmumbler]

Finally finishing up What We Do In The Shadows and it's incredibly funny, so glad too hear a second season has already been confirmed.

BAT!

[TordelBack]

Russian Doll. Maybe a bit heavy on The Good Place accents, but more than sustained by a magnificent central performance and constant ferreting-out and discussion of of 'clues' by this particular audience.

Stranger Things 3. Lost its original mojo somewhere along the way, but this more slapstick version is still very entertaining - although mayne the go-nowhere Terminator subplot was a riff too far. Again the real value is in watching the spectacular cast - whatever casting director plucked those kids out of the lineup is a bona-fide genius, they never disappoint.

[Frank]

I'm actually really enjoying Russell T Davies' YEARS AND YEARS on iPlayer.

I didn't get on with it at first but the complex characters, wild ambition and great performances (even Tovey) have won me over.

That and dialogue like; "He's the sort of person that gets really happy when they find a big crisp!".

Just got round to it and really enjoyed it.

If I was trying to discourage members of this forum from giving it a go, I'd describe it as a little like the bits of Third World War when Eve got back to the UK, but it's a little like the bits of Third World War when Eve got back to the UK.

Or maybe a prequel to V For Vendetta. 'Complex characters' is right; there were a few times when I caught myself thinking 'but I thought I was supposed to like him', then realised that's because the drama was doing its job, rather than a mistake.

It's the boiling frog metaphor as Sunday night telly, but Mr T would have reached more of the audience that needs to see this story with an ITV series that skipped straight to white Mancs in Belsen, rather than checklist casting and middle-class drama.

But Viv Rook's a great villain and I liked it when everything it went all Cold Lazarus at the end. Inordinately pleased with myself for clocking that the house is a metaphor for England and that the family name is Lyons. There are four of them.

Watch on iPlayer

Watch on HBO

[TordelBack]

As a Star Wars fan I'm having a good chuckle at the twitter outrage over the Benioff & Weiss Netflix deal. It's nice to see the exact same childish entitlement and couch-sourced expertise brought to bear on someone other than successive iterations of Lucasfilm.

[Dark Jimbo]

Inordinately pleased with myself for clocking that the house is a metaphor for England and that the family name is Lyons. There are four of them.

D'oh! Of course...!

[radiator]

GLOW season 3.

It doesn't quite have the momentum of seasons 1 and 2, but it's still totally charming. I think we have two episodes left, and while it's a little hard to see where the story can go from here, I'm crossing my fingers that Netflix don't cancel it.

[TordelBack]

Black Summer.  Urrrrrghhh.  Lots to really like in how it depicts utter chaos through multiple viewpoints and random deaths of characters, especially in the opening episodes and spectacular finale. The feckless and very ordinary survivors are unusually believable too ([spoiler]an episode that follows a beardy nobody as he just runs away, repeatedly, is particularly good[/spoiler]) .  However, the individual plotlets that provide structure for the mayhem are almost uniformly stupid and uninspired: [spoiler]cars hunting down other cars for petrol through a suburban landscape packed to the rafters with neatly parked cars, a ridiculously convoluted heist on an improbable gang lair/club, murderous (cannibal?) kids hanging around a school for some reason, zombies that can't open or break doors or windows, multiple groups of armed survivors converging on the stadium at exactly the same time[/spoiler]... a teensy bit more thought would have better supported what at times felt original and genuinely terrifying. 

Still, well worth a watch, if you still have any residual interest in zombie apocalypses.

[Tiplodocus]

Yes, agree. Black Summer wasn't all that. Despite some good set pieces all those cries of "It's The Walking Dead, done right" seemed way off to me.

I did like the random deaths element from the earlier episodes though. Oh, here's a character... Oh, nope, they are dead.

[Hawkmumbler]

Binged Year of the Rabbit the other day and it's pretty funny, but not quiet up to Toast of London levels.

[Mardroid]

Fear the Walking Dead season 4

I've been watching this on Amazon Prime. Still some way to go, but it's all been pretty good. Kudos for structuring this in such a different way to the past series. And the new characters* are great. [spoiler]Killing off one of the main characters relatively early on gave me mixed feelings, yet it's working. And he still remains a somewhat major character considering the structure of the show jumping between 'then' and 'now'.[/spoiler] Interestingly I find myself routing for the new characters more than the old, except perhaps in the [spoiler]then[/spoiler] segment of the programme. [spoiler]The old brigade have turned into vengeful gits, in the Now segment although that's understandable considering what they've been through. But I understand that's wholly intentional.[/spoiler]

It's all very interesting, anyway. [spoiler]I do feel like there's a whole series worth of events in between series 3 and even the chronologically earlier 'stadium' part of this series, but that may not be a bad thing. We are fed a bit of what happened, in small chunks.[/spoiler]

I'm way behind in the main series, incidentally. Much as I like it, I don't feel all that driven to catch up, although I may rectify that at some point.

*New to this spin-off, anyway, since technically one of them was in the first series of The Walking Dead, I believe.

[Professor Bear]

Gotham seasons 4 and 5 - a cyclical IP showcase that never rises above the level of juvenile schlock in which all the characters act arbitrarily, switching motivations and personalities on a dime in what I think a lot of people who like this show probably defend as in keeping with some grand plan to show Gotham is a city that breeds unpredictable crazies but is in fact just lazy writing that never rises above camp melodrama.  We saw just this kind of thing for 10 seasons of Smallville, a series predicated on blue-balling its primary audience but which could never quite grasp the concept of the tease and always ended up introducing supervillains - and even superheroes - on the basis that as long as Superman never shows up it's still technically a prequel to Superman, so you have the Riddler showing up, Penguin, Ass Al the Ghoul, etc, and when Batman finally does show up, it's... actually kind of embarrassing, but also kind of makes perfect sense.
The last time any of these characters see Bruce Wayne is when he was dressed in body armor, driving around in a bulletproof black car fighting crime and using using sonar devices to attract bats to attack criminals, and on the night that he returns from years abroad studying martial arts, everyone going "who the heck could this man in body armor driving around in a bulletproof car using bats to attack criminals be?" might have the average person going ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, SHOW? but this ignores that the show's actual job is to establish that James Gordon is utterly useless in the face of these villains and can never, ever figure out that Bruce Wayne is Batman, so job done I guess.  Only took five years, but they established without a shadow of doubt that the protagonist of their show is completely shit.
Mostly it's gash, though it threatens to get good around the start of season 5 when it goes all post-apocalyptic with an adaptation of No Man's Land, but it quickly loses focus on that and goes back to the usual grind of everyone backstabbing each other and Jim Gordon never seeing it coming, even when he expressly tells other characters onscreen that someone is definately going to stab them in the back.  They could have done a parallel with what happened with Puerto Rico being left to fend for itself and thereby rehabilitate one of Batman comics' most notoriously dumb arcs, but they didn't, which is probably a paradigm for the show: could easily have been good, but wasn't.

[wedgeski]

I watched 10 minutes of one episode of Gotham, and I couldn't believe the below-amateur levels of scripting, production, and acting on display.

[Frank]

Trust me to choose a night when it's too hot to sleep without the windows wide open ...