My first time on this thread. I've been enjoying watching some episodes of 'Murder, She Wrote', starring Angela Lansbury, on TV. When I researched the the TV programme on the internet, I was surprised to learn that the programme first aired in the US in 1984 and the final series was broadcast in 1996.
Watching a rerun of Young Sheldon. Anne Potts is brilliant. It helps that her part is very well written. (In this episode she is teaching Sheldon how to play poker.)
Has anyone else been tuning into series 1 of the Queen’s Gambit on Netflix? It’s really good and possibly the best TV show on chess I have ever seen! If you enjoy playing chess, you should tune into this one.
I started this show and liked it very much, but I don't know what happened. I finished the 4th episode but never went back. I'm not sure why, maybe got distracted with some other show. I just looked it up and there's only 7 episodes, so maybe I should make an effort to finish it. I do like chess very much, and Anya Taylor-Joy is quite brilliant in it.
Watched it back when it first came out, and thought it was brilliant. Well worth watching even if you don't care about chess at all, I think.
Ah, yes. Moved on from that one - and I agree - although now I’m looking forward to the release of season 2. Currently tuning in to season 1 of the Witcher, and I’m 7 episodes in.. I think. Didn’t think much of the first few, then as the storyline progressed I got more invested. To the point I want to know when the Geralt of Rivia is finally going to find his daughter. Show pretty awesome so far. I recommend. You should. Certainly. When you find the time.
If anyone disliked Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher I highly recommend the Reacher on Amazon Prime now. The actor looks much more like Reacher should, based on Lee Childs description, and has the moves and attitude necessary to present the character well. Only 8 episodes but the story is strongly based on the story The Killing Field. I am looking forward to more of this.
Following up on my previous comment about the Reacher series on Amazon Prime, I just found out it has been renewed for a second season. Due to other Prime series commitments, it may not be out until 2023. But if you like it, it's worth waiting for.
I'm looking forward to the Lord of the Rings Amazon show because it will be the first time that a cash-grubbing studio has taken an IP that I really do care about and brutally violated it. It will be interesting to see what the Lord of the Rings is like with the laziest kind of identarian virtue-signaling possible. The sex scenes will be the cherry on top...definitely what J.R.R. would have wanted. Today's entertainment marketplace is like a massive, well-funded experiment in how to be terrible at making original content. This is literally going to be Game of Thrones: Middle Earth edition. I'll be here to warm my hands over the dumpster fire, anyway. Correction: I guess they kind of already did with the Hobbit movies.
If the HBO series Euphoria depicts in any way the lives of today's high school kids, then I'm a lot older than I thought I was, and thankful for it (though there is a lot of nudity, and everybody's getting laid, a consummation devoutly to be wish'd back in the day).
When I was in high school "everyone was getting laid." I felt like such a loser that I wasn't. Felt a lot better about myself when I figured out how many of them were lying.
Rewatching Deep Space Nine for the first time since it aired way back when. Something I've been struck by already--and we're not even quite through Season 1--is the theme that Quark and Odo, despite being such opposites, are similar in the fact that they are the only ones to consistently see through everyone else's pretensions/delusions. "Only the cops and the crooks really know what the score is" is such an almost noirish sentiment. I know DS9 has a reputation as the "gritty" Star Trek, but whatever you want to call it, it works well, IMHO.
It's my favourite Trek series. I absolutely love DS9. Plenty of great characters, and character relationships, like the mentioned Quark-Odo fun duo. Garak is one of my favourites. I've rewatched this series several times in its entirety, which nowadays seems like a herculean task. 25 or 26 45-minute episodes over 7 seasons is a lot. Most of it's great though, or at least passable. I think there's got to be more turkeys in TNG overall. I did another rewatch about 2 years ago or so, but this time I consulted an online guide for which episodes are "essential viewing" for each season, and then I just watched every single episode after the Dominion stuff starts. If this is your first rewatch ever, then of course, watch every single episode! DS9 rocks.
When we went to my parents' for the holidays last year, all I had to do was mention that we were watching DS9 for my mom and brother both to start explaining to my wife why it's the best ST. Knew I could count on them. I mean I love my wife, but facts are facts. ETA: I haven't seen any of the ST shows after Enterprise, and not even all of that one. So, full disclosure. After I made that post I wondered if I should have included Garak...he's only appeared I think once so far in S1, so not a lot of data, but IIRC he's a much more liminal creature. He operates in the territory of feigned sincerity; he won't cut through your pretensions or delusions because he wants to use them for his own nebulous ends. Whereas Odo's sincerity is never feigned, and Quark doesn't even bother to convincingly feign it because he knows everyone knows he's a mercenary bastard so he just leans into being merely transactional. But that makes the both of them somehow more honest, in a weird way.
Garak's ethics fall into a grey area, whereas both Odo and Quark's motivations are quite clear. There's always an air of mystery about him, and he is skilled at being able to communicate something while saying something completely different. I'm sure I've mentioned it before somewhere in the forum that any DS9 fan must read A Stitch in Time. The book about Garak written by the actor who plays him. It's available on e-book and I enjoyed it very much. You're not missing all that much, to be honest, although the last two seasons of Enterprise are actually pretty good. I've given up on Discovery after the third season, and Lower Decks after two episodes. I'm giving the Picard show a chance since the first season was enjoyable enough. It's action-Trek though, rather than philosophical Trek, which can sometimes work, but I prefer the latter.
I made it to episode 5 of Picard (season 1) and gave up in disgust. It was sort of a human centipede of all the Star Trek ideas you remember, and for some reason Legolas was in it chopping heads like the Highlander. It was ten different movies stitched together into an atrocity. It's a shame, because the effects were cool. I thought Chabon would be a positive influence on it (I liked his Kavalier and Clay), but it wasn't to be. He did such a poor job that now I really question his writing as a whole. I was hoping the same thing with Star Trek Discovery, but they fired Walter Mosley real fast and he was probably the only one there who knew how to write. The remainders were just political playwrights, the last people you want telling you a story, and it shows. So I watch the Red Letter Media cringe reviews and laugh at that. They tell me enough and manage to repurpose the Trek corpse for good humor. I liked all the old shows, even Enterprise. Though I do remember DS9 not being as universally loved as people remember. Not at the time anyway. It has much more cred now. It aged like fine (blood)wine. My favorite characters were O'Brien and Dr. Bashir. Though Garak and Rom and Nog amuse me lots too. The best episode ever was when Jake Sisko traveled back in time to save his dad. (Well, he manipulated time.) I found that powerful. Just how he threw away his entire life and career to save his only remaining parent. He succeeds and Captain Sisko is returned back in time and realizes what his son would do for him. Surly teenagers don't always show the depth of their concern, but now he had proof of how much his kid cared. How would you even face your kid after that? The depth of emotion would be overwhelming. That was powerful Trek writing. The theme is universal.
I gave up on the whole franchise after the movie where they weaponized (and incorrectly identified as "classical" music. Words have meanings) the Beastie Boys. Watched two or three episodes of Redshirts on spec but that didn't do it for me either. Oh, I watched the new series with the female Vulcan MC until the tardigrade mysteriously absorbed water out of hard vacuum. I know it's never been about science but they can go [REDACTED] themselves right in the [REDACTED] with a broken [REDACTED]. I've got about two more episodes of the original series to re-watch on Netflix and then the whole thing is dead to me.
I saw a trailer for the upcoming season and I swear it was literally Days of Future Past, with Picard and Professor X melded into one Uber-leader (a sort of Human Centipede of alternate-franchise selves). Something about they need to go back in time and fix things in the past in order to fix the present and the future. I mega face-palmed.
I groaned very loudly in the theatre at this. Up til that point, I was into it, despite several ridiculous moments like the motocross nonsense and the magical restoration of a decades-old shipwreck. I still rewatch the first Kelvin movie from time to time, as it's just action-Trek fun with high production values. I haven't watched the trailer for Picard S02. I am going to go in without knowing anything about it or reading any reviews. I'll probably start in a couple weeks; I need to finish up a streaming service before I move over to the one that carries the show here.
That's my recollection as well. I was thinking about ST (as you may have noticed, hardly a moment goes by when I'm not thinking about ST lmao) and how it's such a huge franchise at this point, has been around for so many decades, and has such an enormous following that it's no wonder there are so many strong disagreements about it. Anything that big is bound to be pretty fractious upon closer inspection. Some people are here for the romantic adventure, Western-in-space vibes of TOS. Some people want the new-age hippy vibes of early TNG. Some people just want to see some extremely plausible ideas about future technology. Ok, maybe not so much that last one...
Prior to my above-mentioned deconversion, I found DS9 hard to get into based on the "To boldly sit in one place and wait for things to come to us" vibe. That and the Ferengi treading on dangerous old stereotypes.
I'm old. I've seen every episode of the Shatner Nimoy series, many of them more than once while it ran in syndication in the eighties. I liked the first movie, "Veejer." Search for Spock and Wrath of Kahn were pretty good too. I saw the very first episode of the Patrick Stewart version. It was really good, but by that time my TV watching had taken a back seat to other pursuits so have watched it, and all other spin offs, very sporadically since. Glad to know I haven't missed that much. As far as the Classical thing goes, yeah, i get it. What I think the writers were trying to do was to put it in a modern context, as in 'Classical' referring to the music of long ago. Considering that Bach was actually Baroque, Mozart, Classical, and Beethoven a Romanticist, it seems reasonable that a more fitting wording would have been Rock and Roll, as a catch all in a future looking back on 'music of long ago.'
