Carnival Row wasn't as great as the first episode lead me to believe. Still a worthwhile and pretty unique show. Some impressive worldbuilding and things in there. New episodes of Better Call Saul are coming out, I think I'm gonna let them congeal into a full season before I watch anything. Season 2 of Altered Carbon just dropped in its entirety. I've been waiting for this one. I'm thinking about rewatching the excellent first season to refresh my memory.
Altered Carbon is good then? I`ve seen it making the rounds and been thinking about giving it a shot but just haven`t gotten to it yet. I went to finally start on The Good Place but Hulu only had the last season for some reason. Ended up scrolling through Hulus catalog, still kinda lost tv wise. I ended up starting an older show I missed despite it having two great actors (IMO) Boston Legal. James Spader and William Shatner ...a great pairing. James Spader is always great and his Alan Shore is fun to watch and even more fun to try and figure out. Partly a good man a crusader even but so in love with mischief and deceit. A self corrupting force. Before this, I was watching Hulu`s High Fidelity. Somehow I missed the movie and book, but the show is good I enjoyed it. It makes me want to check out the film and book.
I really like it, but then I'm pretty crazy about Cyberpunk. The show has great production values, and is all-around solid in terms of acting, action, tension, and plot. The setting is really quite interesting, with its core gimmick of "stacks" and "sleeves" and such. Definitely check it out if you can stand Sci-Fi at all. I just hope season 2 holds up...
I’m currently watching You, season two, on Netflix and I’m two episodes in. This show is like some of the few shows where you get the whole thing from the perspective of the “villain”. The only other show I’ve seen that does that is “Death Note” which is a Japanese anime and also on Netflix. I LOVED Death Note season 1. It was like “oh. my. god. THIS. IS. GENIUS!” You doesn’t really live up to that the same way, but you still find yourself thinking, “when will this ar**hole finally get caught!” Perhaps you’re on the other camp of things and actually sympathise with this villain be-cause he’s the protagonist.. and keeps getting away with it. Maybe you see him as the “fractured soul” desperately looking for “love”. I see him as an evil, conniving mastermind, just like “Light” in Death Note. And still holding on to that eventual day when justice will finally be served. Gripping.
Picard - finally got some caffeine into its system. I hope it's enough to keep it going for at least a full story arc. Everything's Gonna Be Okay - Josh Thomas is endearing in a way that can very easily slip into intensely annoying, and he manages to keep his feet on the sidewalk, but this show is basically a thematic reboot of his previous show Please Like Me, with quirky American siblings replacing his quirky Australian friends. Half the scenes take place in Nicholas' bed, exactly as Please Like Me took place so often in Josh's bed. The same theme of Josh finding improbably hot boyfriends and making them run an obstacle course to his wildly unavailable heart is in play. Josh, sweetie, hot gay boys don't run obstacle courses, okay? They don't have to. This is just like all those "slow burn" fanfiction stories I hate where it's not the slow part that gets under my skin, but the complete lack of believability as to why it's taking them so long. A comedy/tragedy of errors is fine every once in a while, but come on...
Working my way through all 5 series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet for the 127th time. Currently on series 2. What do you mean you've never heard of it?? Oh, of course, you'll not find it on Pride/Netfucks because it was made prior to 2019
I started watching AMC's Dispatches From Elsewhere. It's weird, but I like it so far. I like the scavenger hunt-esque plot progression. Peter and Simone are great. I also like how it looks like it will have the first four episodes focus on a different member of the team. I'm excited to find out more about Janice in next week's episode.
I’ve just watched the first episode of “Dracula". I like vampires (except for the glittering ones and the ones that are only creepy without doing anything else) in general and Dracula in particular, so I’m always excited when there is a new variation. This one reminded me a bit of Collin Farrell (not Dracula but at least a decent vampire) in “Fright Night”, pretty scary but also quite cool, and with a sense of humour (yes, black and a bit weird, but anyway). Also, I liked his counterpart, Sister Agatha (she’s more than just a nun but I don’t want to do the spoiler thing here). The dialogues between them are great and for me they could have gone on and on. Sadly there are only three episodes, and as the first one got a bit too scary at the end (at least for someone who tends to have nightmares which include vampires) I’ve decided to watch the second one tomorrow instead of shortly before bedtime.
Starting to watch Altered Carbon S1. Two complaints. I get the "sleeves" thing, and Kovacs is kinda maybe Polish? but did they have to instantly whitewash Takeshi into the lebensborn program? Also, 250 years and he slots in like he's been out of town for a month. We're not even 250 years off flintlocks and powdered wigs. The internet is a creature of my adult lifetime. William Gibson didn't predict smartphones. I get stateside maybe once a year and still manage to get disoriented. We'll see.
The show plays rather fast and loose with some of the story elements, particularly the nature of the Envoys. Takeshi is Japanese/Hungarian, but yeah, they slipped him into a NaPoLa sleeve right out the gate. The deal with the 250 years... yeah. Yet another reason that as much as I love the genre, engaging it as though it were predictive is a sure path to disappointment. Agreed that 250 years should be a wicked time-slip for Takeshi. Usually the issue the other way around, where Sci-Fi wants to sell an utterly different, hyper-fantastic world just 15 or 20 years away.
And Wrey, why didn't you tell me The Expanse was hard SF? Yeah, not really your fault, but I gathered that it was one of your favs, and I know we tend to differ on these things, but while I was home on leave I caught an episode and was pleasantly surprised. May push me into getting Prime.
Mmmmm..... I'm going to blame it on having been distracted by difficult-to-explain hots for GySgt Bobbie Draper. I even made fan art for a fic I wrote!
On a more serious note, because that term, “hard Science Fiction”, is one that I am reticent to use. It’s kinda’ like how there are atheists and then there are Atheists, and atheists are rather more shy to spontaneously self-identify because a) spontaneous, unsolicited self-declaration is much more a part of Atheism than atheism, and b) they just don’t want to be conflated with Atheists. There exists a certain flavor of hard Science Fiction fan who I am not and I’d rather not be seen as, so I tend not to enter conversations where that term comes into play.
Yeah, there's The Martian and then there's Star Wars, I was just pleasantly surprised to see which side The Expanse came down on after seeing some of the other things you like. That's not meant as derogatory, just our fiction Venn diagrams often don't overlap but here they seem to.
And if you dig the show, the books are better by astronomical units. They move. These guys could teach classes in narrative pace. (guys, two writers working under one pen name).
Think I`ve actually allready sung the book praises here on this thread before but I will do so again and second this. The show`s good it is but the books...they are magnificent.
Just finished watching Kingdom season 2. The first one was good, and this one was even better. Taken as a whole, Kingdom is an interesting and highly entertaining show. I was so done with zombies, but now I think they're kinda neat again. At least, as long as they're paired with some I Can't Believe It's Not Wuxia™ action scenes and just a hint of slapstick (without harming the tension or downplaying the horror aspect). The finale sets up some really intriguing implications for season 3, and I really hope we'll get to see this story play out. So go watch it. Thank you.
I'm currently binging The Sopranos. It was one of those shows that was on cable here but the company couldn't decide on the time slot, so I ended up seeing the same 5-8 episodes, from all different seasons, out of order and multiple times. However, now I've got Prime and time (ooh, poetry) so I'm ripping through it. It's very weird, however, seeing James Gandolfini in the role that brought him to prominence, within my adult lifetime, and knowing that once this series is done for me, he pretty much is as well. RIP
You get The Sopranos on Prime? Lucky bastard. I had to resort to HBO. But yeah, terrific show. I only caught it last year, I think it was. Binged the hell out of it. Loved all the weird-ass Jersey Italian, so much that I gently absorbed a few choice words into my vocabulary, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend in the Old Country. To this day we can't talk about ham without sparking an argument.
Yeah, syndication gets weird. There's no such thing as HBO here, but when the show starts, you still get the big static screen and HBO logo. All of our English-language cable channels (I've cut the cord, so info may have changed) are owned by FOX but have shows from NBC, ABC, HBO, STARZ on occasion. I've currently got Amazon Prime Japan and Netflix. Netflix is kinda cool because with a VPN you can access content that's outside of your home country. I was even able to login to my Netflix account on my friend's TV in the States. They sent me a message letting me know that there'd been a foreign login and asking if I thought my account had been hacked, but no other repercussions.
There a few good Turkish historical drama series which have been or are being translated to English (and some to Urdu and French). Watch them here!
I did a summer study at (sorry, my keyboard doesn't have a Turkish character set) Bogazici Universitesi, might have to check that out. I saw a pretty good series on Netflix recently on how the Ottomans finally conquered Constantinople. I knew some of the details, like the chain over the Golden Horn and that amazing reverse amphibious assault that defeated it, but I wasn't aware of a lot of other details. Ah, here it is, Rise of Empires: Ottoman. You seem pretty into Turkey, might not be much new for you there but if you can, I recommend watching it.