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Current TV Boxset Addiction

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

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amines2058

Just started watching the new Hawaii Five-0 from series 1 as I missed it first time around. A few episodes in and it looks quite enjoyable. Anyone else watched / watching, and is it worth sticking with?

GrinningChimera

Starting Breaking Bad again. Classic stuff.

HdE

Friends loaned me the first series of Game Of Thrones recently, which I watched over the last few days.

Yyyyeeeaahhh... I don't think I'll bother with the rest of it.

I'm actually left with this frustrating feeling that other people are seeing something in this show that I'm not. There's a lot to admire - some great acting and scenery, genius opening sequence, credible sense of scale to the whole story, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey (le drool)... but for me, the negatives outweigh all that stuff.

What's the point of all the sex and nudity? Really? Or the seemingly mandatory once-per-episode use of the c-word (which, even as a fan of creative profanity, I find utterly vulgar and disgusting)?

I wouldn't say I thought it was 'bad'. I just didn't find it particularly edifying.
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Professor Bear

Quote from: amines2058 on 09 April, 2014, 12:53:15 PM
Just started watching the new Hawaii Five-0 from series 1 as I missed it first time around. A few episodes in and it looks quite enjoyable. Anyone else watched / watching, and is it worth sticking with?

I love Hawaii 5-0!  It's pretty great if you like your tv dumb-but-fun, though the lead male (McGarret) remains dull throughout all four seasons so far, and there's a female character introduced at one point who you think might end up being an interesting addition to the team because she isn't immediately paired-off with a male character, until it becomes clear that she's only there because the actress the producers wanted was busy on another show that may or may not have been getting cancelled, and rather than just give the current (better) actress a job, they had her keeping the other actress' seat warm for 16 episodes and she's unceremoniously written-out in something like 7 seconds when the other actress is finally freed up to become the male lead's equally-dull girlfriend.
Danno is great, though, as he's played by the utterly ludicrous Scott Caan ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC9phoBfIXo ), whose career spans acting, modelling, hip-hop production, photography, curing autism with the power of surfing, and touring Hawaiian chat shows telling the people of Hawaii that their island is a shithole - and all of this was before it even dawned on me that his dad is James Caan, which I only twigged when he turned up on H50 as a character who asked if it was okay if he could show up now and then to say how disappointed he was with how Danno was running his life, which for JC must have been a bit like when Sean Connery got paid to do movies where he played golf.  The main baddies for the first few seasons are Crying Freeman/The Crow, and Spike from Buffy being a Northern Irish terrorist with a Scottish accent, and don't even get me started on the show's hilarious approach to product placement, with characters regularly stopping the plot to set up a Microsoft Surface and use it at length, though the writers do occasionally integrate product placement seamlessly and organically into the occasional episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE
Also there is an episode about Japanese internment during WW2, which ends with - I shit you not - an elderly Japanese internee apologising to one of his racist guards for thinking he might have been involved in wrongdoing when in fact all he did was participate in the cover-up the robbery and murder of an innocent man for seventy years, which means that the guard was one of the true heroes of WW2.

Gloriously stupid television.

The Enigmatic Dr X

Quote from: HdE on 20 April, 2014, 06:54:24 PM
Friends loaned me the first series of Game Of Thrones recently, which I watched over the last few days.

Yyyyeeeaahhh... I don't think I'll bother with the rest of it.

I'm actually left with this frustrating feeling that other people are seeing something in this show that I'm not. There's a lot to admire - some great acting and scenery, genius opening sequence, credible sense of scale to the whole story, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey (le drool)... but for me, the negatives outweigh all that stuff.

What's the point of all the sex and nudity? Really? Or the seemingly mandatory once-per-episode use of the c-word (which, even as a fan of creative profanity, I find utterly vulgar and disgusting)?

I wouldn't say I thought it was 'bad'. I just didn't find it particularly edifying.


I utterly, TOTALLY, agree.

This stuff is aimed at me. I have, however, never watched the whole of the first episode. I have tried maybe six or seven times, usually when someone expresses incredulity that I don't watch it. And every time, after 30 or 40 minutes, I think: "This is rubbish."

For what it's worth, I'm Scottish and happen to think Braveheart is the worst film I've ever seen. In the cinema, I turned to the wife about an hour in and asked if she wanted to leave. "No," she said. "It's got a couple of hours left and everyone says this is great. It's got to get better."

It didn't.
Lock up your spoons!

Jim_Campbell

#545
Quote from: HdE on 20 April, 2014, 06:54:24 PM
What's the point of all the sex and nudity? Really?

Because it's very consciously trying to establish itself as a different kind of fantasy? You never have the sense in hundreds of pages of Lord of the Rings that Aragorn ever had to drop his kecks behind a bush for a shit while out in the wilds; GoT is meant to be much more grounded in an, umm, earthier pseudo-medieval setting. Otherwise, it's just one more High Fantasy Tolkein knock-off.

QuoteOr the seemingly mandatory once-per-episode use of the c-word (which, even as a fan of creative profanity, I find utterly vulgar and disgusting)?

Ahh. A several of GoT's best lines deploy the c-word to splendid effect. Minorly-spoiler-ish links, concealed to protect delicate eyes from profanity:

[spoiler]"There's no cure for being a c*nt."

"Why are the gods such vicious c*nts?"

"Lots of c*nts."[/spoiler]

Edit to add: why aren't those fucking spoiler tags working...?

That first one is one my favourite lines from any TV show, ever.

Quote from: The Enigmatic Dr X on 21 April, 2014, 03:02:52 PM
This stuff is aimed at me. I have, however, never watched the whole of the first episode. I have tried maybe six or seven times, usually when someone expresses incredulity that I don't watch it. And every time, after 30 or 40 minutes, I think: "This is rubbish."

The first episode is hard work. It throws something crazy like twenty-odd named, speaking characters and half a dozen significant locations at you and then expects you to keep all that straight in your head while it engages in some really ambitious world-building. Anyone who's ever asked me if it's worth watching has got the same answer: stick with it to the end of episode one, but if you get to the end of episode two and you don't want to watch episode three, don't bother going any further.

Cheers

Jim
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

HdE

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 21 April, 2014, 03:54:42 PM
Quote from: HdE on 20 April, 2014, 06:54:24 PM
What's the point of all the sex and nudity? Really?

Because it's very consciously trying to establish itself as a different kind of fantasy? You never have the sense in hundreds of pages of Lord of the Rings that Aragorn ever had to drop his kecks behind a bush for a shit while out in the wilds; GoT is meant to be much more grounded in an, umm, earthier pseudo-medieval setting. Otherwise, it's just one more High Fantasy Tolkein knock-off.


Now, see, this is the thing - I can see the merits of adding a measure of this sort of thing to make things feel more credible. But I personally don't like my fantasy to be too realistic. Certainly not if it means the end result is something like GoT.

My bigger beef with all the exposed flesh and grunty-groany is just that it does nothing in my view to build a world or imbue a certain atmosphere - it just feels gratuitous. Season one had at least one scene which really felt to me like the writers said "urrm... this bit's boring. Here! Let's have a naked guy dash on screen so we can wake everyone up with a little full frontal nudity!"

I don't think the show's rubbish by any stretch. But it does feel pointlessly 'adult' in the worst sense. If I could see more story relevance to the stuff I find objectionable (and, I'll admit, in a couple of cases, it's there) I'd not have such a big problem with it.

End of the day, this show just isn't for me. Not rubbish. Just not for me.
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Jim_Campbell

Quote from: HdE on 21 April, 2014, 04:41:50 PM
But I personally don't like my fantasy to be too realistic.

I totally get that. I had the same thing with Deadwood. I love Westerns, but the effort to make a more 'adult' Western seemed strained and in the process managed to eliminate whatever it is about Westerns that I love...

Cheers

Jim
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

radiator

I had no knowledge of the books and watched the first 4 or so episodes of GoT with a sense of mild amusement, considering it all to be utterly disposable trash TV.

But then around the end of episode 4 'Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things' something just clicked and I was utterly engrossed, and have been ever since. Though it should be noted, even as an avid watcher I ended season 1 still a little confused as to exactly who was who - there are a lot of grizzled men with long hair and beards to keep track of - but the more research you put in, the more you get out of it. It's the perfect example of a show to watch with a companion podcast so you can dissect it afterwards - I listen to a couple and it greatly enriches each episode.

Being deadly serious, though Jim makes a good point, I consider all the sex and nudity stuff as a red herring - it's what got the show noticed and is there primarily to ensnare the casual punter. In all honesty I rather wish they'd tone it down a little as it can often go a bit too far and distract from what makes the show fascinating - the sense of scale, the wonderful characters, the intrigue and incredible world-building.

Frank

Quote from: HdE on 21 April, 2014, 04:41:50 PM
My bigger beef with all the exposed flesh and grunty-groany is just that it does nothing in my view to build a world or imbue a certain atmosphere - it just feels gratuitous ... I don't think the show's rubbish by any stretch. But it does feel pointlessly 'adult' in the worst sense.

I just watched all of True Detective, which was fantastic, but it does offer evidence of some obvious HBO box ticking. I'm pretty sure there's a network document out there which explains to show runners that their narrative can be as decompressed and their themes can be as esoteric as they please, just as long as a pretty girl gets her tits out every ninety minutes.


TordelBack

There's no doubt that teh bewbs and gratuitous humpage are there in large part to attract and hold a certain kind of target viewer's attention, at least as much as to establish any earthy realism, hence the much-lampooned 'sexposition' that makes up much of Seasons 1 and 2.  I'd read the books before watching, and while being impressed by Season 1's enormous ambition I found the attempts at titillation quite off-putting and took my sweet time in catching up with Seasons 2 and 3, which I eventually found more to my taste - although I still tend to groan when everyone commences dropping their kecks.

Incidentally, I understand anyone who says they don't like either the books or the TV series: I honestly thought I was completely done with fantasy novels before reading Game of Thrones, and in fact struggled to get past the first few chapters, before I began to find it compelling.  I could just as easily have found myself on the other side of the fence.

HdE

Great discussion, guys.

I think what comes out of this most for me is that, sure those HBO trappings of south-of-bellybutton adventuring and potty language may grab attention, but they're also just as likely to repulse.

I'm reminded of my sole experience with the show 'Homeland', which is one that family and friends have nagged me to investigate. It's never going to happen, because the only episode I saw was the one where Damian Lewis bundled Clare Danes into the back of her car for a quickie. Utterly bloody horrible, tawdry stuff to behold, in my opinion.

Where GoT is concerned, I find myself thinking 'guys, I see what you're trying to do, but I'd rather you tried a different method, please.' It kind of says something that I felt FATIGUED by the content by the end of season one. I'm kind of curious to know where it goes, but not enough to commit hours to viewing it.

And Jim - your point about Deadwood is excellent. I never saw any of it, but I can appreciate how the execution of something that sits squarely in a certain genre could be off-putting to fans of that genre.
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The Enigmatic Dr X

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 21 April, 2014, 03:54:42 PM

Quote from: The Enigmatic Dr X on 21 April, 2014, 03:02:52 PM
This stuff is aimed at me. I have, however, never watched the whole of the first episode. I have tried maybe six or seven times, usually when someone expresses incredulity that I don't watch it. And every time, after 30 or 40 minutes, I think: "This is rubbish."

The first episode is hard work. It throws something crazy like twenty-odd named, speaking characters and half a dozen significant locations at you and then expects you to keep all that straight in your head while it engages in some really ambitious world-building. Anyone who's ever asked me if it's worth watching has got the same answer: stick with it to the end of episode one, but if you get to the end of episode two and you don't want to watch episode three, don't bother going any further.


Oh, go on then. It's downloadable on Sky so I'll stick them on my box and give it another go.
Lock up your spoons!

Dandontdare

Quote from: radiator on 21 April, 2014, 04:52:59 PM
Being deadly serious, though Jim makes a good point, I consider all the sex and nudity stuff as a red herring - it's what got the show noticed and is there primarily to ensnare the casual punter. In all honesty I rather wish they'd tone it down a little as it can often go a bit too far and distract from what makes the show fascinating - the sense of scale, the wonderful characters, the intrigue and incredible world-building.

Fair play to Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), who threatened to quit if they didn't tone down her gratuitous nude scenes - they did.

Theblazeuk

Deadwood was amazing. It was the Wire of the West. Everything was so dirty in that town and a showdown at noon rarely solved anything.

Too much sexposition in GoT I agree but sadly I think that is part of its appeal to a wider audience.