The Official Good Television Thread
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CiG
Dimension Hatröss
My brother has been making me watch that Witcher series, pretty cool so far.
Slammed
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Finished watching Mr Mercedes last night. I haven't read the books to know how part 3 actually fitted into the story but in the TV series it felt like a lot of filler to explain a very small part of the story. S1 and S2 were good, fairly fast moving, a cast that worked well together and the story held up reasonably well. But S3 felt a bit like a stand alone series, it was needed to finish the story, but the secondary story felt a bit like filler to pad out 10 episodes. Although seeing Captain Janeway as a psychopathic cockhungry wildebeest was quite funny.
Funerary_Doom
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Binged the Mandalorian with my sister and thoroughly enjoyed it. My oldest sister and brother were Star Wars fanatics and I just remember bits and pieces from their conversations and when they would watch the movies at home. However, now I'm interested in learning more about the story and watching it properly. Next show I'll marathon is The Witcher.
Vegard Pompey
ALLY TO GOOD, NIGHTMARE TO YOU
Finished The Expanse s04. The last two episodes were great but in general I thought it was the weakest season so far. And yet from what I've read it seems to be highly acclaimed so I'm not sure what I'm missing? It felt like the whole solar system was on standby while all the real drama was isolated to New Terra, and most of the conflict in that arc stemmed from a single one-dimensional villain relentlessly trying to fuck shit up.
Re: the ending,
Re: the ending,
God fucking dammit Ashford why'd you have to go after Inaros with a team of unnamed tertiary characters?? Anyone could see how that was gonna play out...
Einherjar86
Active Member
I'm wondering when the show *ahem* expands too much for its own good. Personally, I don't think it's reached that point yet, but I'm worried that it will. The fourth season pushed the boundaries, mainly for the reason you say: that it's introducing more plots than it can effectively handle. That being said, I think the point of this season was to underscore the colonial mentality of the Inners, embodied by Murty. It's the system-wide struggle between the Inners and Belters distilled into a single-colony meltdown (with some weird alien shit complicating matters).
Anyway, I can see how it might seem like killing time, but I was on board for the ride. Also, I actually thought the structure of the season was kinda brilliant, i.e. to have the shit on New Terra occupying the foreground (as it does on earthly media) while all the clandestine matters involving Inaros, Mars, and the political maneuvering on earth basically take a back seat.
Anyway, I can see how it might seem like killing time, but I was on board for the ride. Also, I actually thought the structure of the season was kinda brilliant, i.e. to have the shit on New Terra occupying the foreground (as it does on earthly media) while all the clandestine matters involving Inaros, Mars, and the political maneuvering on earth basically take a back seat.
CiG
Dimension Hatröss
Caught up on some more Mandalorian last night, will watch the final episode of the season tonight. Remakes usually suck but if they ever decided to reboot Xena: Warrior Princess...
...just saying.
...just saying.
CiG
Dimension Hatröss
Been rewatching Deadwood with my brother and it's his first time seeing it. I forgot they say "cocksucker" like 300 times in the pilot episode. 
TechnicalBarbarity
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CiG
Dimension Hatröss
Einherjar86
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Finally finished Mr. Robot. It took a while to wrap up, but it was worth the wait. I have a tough time ranking shows, but this definitely makes its way into my top three. Better than any of the AMC or FX original series. Patient, thoughtful, brooding, then slams you over the head at the right time. I also think Sam Esmail's handling is one of the most tactful and identifiable on TV today--love the juxtaposition of beautifully symmetrical architecture alongside off-center human subjects. A visually gorgeous show with a stunning narrative and remarkable actors.
Vegard Pompey
ALLY TO GOOD, NIGHTMARE TO YOU
What else would you place in your top 3, out of curiosity?
I stuck with Mr. Robot all the way to the end. I found it to be a staggeringly inventive series from start to finish (love the unique cinematography in particular) but also kind of all over the place in terms of quality. Wouldn't place it anywhere near my top 10 but I'm glad it happened.
So many characters returned in a diminished capacity, if at all, in season 4 that it made me wonder if their budget was slashed or if negotiations with actors fell through, with the effect that the world of the series felt a lot less vibrant than in previous seasons. It also felt like Dom was basically the deuteragonist for at least half the season and her plot bored the shit out of me. The big hack that finally brought down the Dark Army was executed with far less panache than hacks of smaller scope from prior seasons, and it made the outcome feel unearned.
THAT EPISODE was utterly brilliant and had one of those premises I'm sure any writer would be instantly jealous of - A narcissistic psychopath kidnaps the hero and his therapist, exploiting the latter to break down the former in 50 minutes of intensely psychological one-room hostage drama. I recall hearing that Esmail initially started writing Mr. Robot as a movie script, and the show came about when he started filling in the backstory for that movie. I'm wondering if that episode was what would've been the movie - it really felt like the heart of it all.
Something that fundamentally rubbed me wrong about the ending was that the character I found the most personally relatable was revealed to be a fabrication created by a mind damaged by sexual abuse. That hurts, man.
THAT EPISODE was utterly brilliant and had one of those premises I'm sure any writer would be instantly jealous of - A narcissistic psychopath kidnaps the hero and his therapist, exploiting the latter to break down the former in 50 minutes of intensely psychological one-room hostage drama. I recall hearing that Esmail initially started writing Mr. Robot as a movie script, and the show came about when he started filling in the backstory for that movie. I'm wondering if that episode was what would've been the movie - it really felt like the heart of it all.
Something that fundamentally rubbed me wrong about the ending was that the character I found the most personally relatable was revealed to be a fabrication created by a mind damaged by sexual abuse. That hurts, man.
TechnicalBarbarity
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Einherjar86
Active Member
I applaud it so heavily for putting front and center the issues that it did. I also thought its female characters were really strong, despite some faltering in the final season. I tend to overlook flaws if I'm enraptured by theme and concept; and although Mr. Robot definitely had some flaws, more often than not I found its formal and technical proficiency to be wonderful complements to its thematic concerns.
As far as other top favorites, right now those would be The Expanse and True Detective (season one). A few years ago it probably would have been Breaking Bad and The Americans, but a few things have happened in years since. Although the second and third seasons of TD are lackluster, subsequent viewing of season one enhance what I think is its narrative perfection. On top of that, it's a Lovecraftian horror story smuggled into mainstream television in the guise of a police procedural, and Pizzolatto even managed to magnify the epistemological anxieties that inform both genres. It's just formal perfection.
The Expanse is obviously ongoing, but I'm so impressed with what the writers have done and how they've managed to keep pace that it's ascended the ranks. I also think it's one of the most politically engaged, culturally diverse, and narratively robust (while still being accessible) shows around, and it's science fiction. Not the easiest combo to pull off. It's entirely possible that it could sink down on my list if future seasons take a shit.
I acknowledge the excellence of shows like Mad Men, Fargo, Better Call Saul, and plenty of others; but too many of these conform to what I think is, generally speaking, a middlebrow realism with flashes of absurdist surrealism (to varying degrees). Full-blown anti-realist narratives are difficult to do well onscreen, but when they succeed they tend to win me over.
There's a quote near the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, when the eponymous AI says to Case, "Personality is my medium." I think Mr. Robot was an experiment in the artificiality, fluidity, and contingency of personality. In this sense, its title was perfect: not just the name of his alter-father personality, but a comment on the technicity of cognition. The revelation that Elliot was just another personality drove this home; it's turtles all the way down, personalities built on (or alongside) personalities.
I've never been a fan of relatability as a defining quality of good narrative, and I like it when stories undermine relatability in strategic ways. So in Mr. Robot, the conceptual question is: why shouldn't an artificial personality be relatable? Why do we hunger for real, authentic personalities, especially when an artificial personality has the experience of being real? I think the final shot of the show was sheer perfection in that it displaced the purportedly "real" Elliot onto us, the viewing audience. Everything we saw on TV, in the show, were only interfaces--screens playing constructed personalities. I do think it could be argued that the conclusion privileged a return, or resurfacing, of authenticity, the final access of authenticity, or something like that; but I also think it's crucial that the show never lets us see it (additionally, it's possible to make a quasi-Luddite reading of the conclusion--that the show is saying technology only ever allows access to mediated versions of one another--but I'd push beyond this and say that we're always only ever dealing with mediated versions of each other; "personality is our medium").
I agree with some of your comments about pacing in the final season, but the anti-realist, anti-authenticity drive won me over.
I've never been a fan of relatability as a defining quality of good narrative, and I like it when stories undermine relatability in strategic ways. So in Mr. Robot, the conceptual question is: why shouldn't an artificial personality be relatable? Why do we hunger for real, authentic personalities, especially when an artificial personality has the experience of being real? I think the final shot of the show was sheer perfection in that it displaced the purportedly "real" Elliot onto us, the viewing audience. Everything we saw on TV, in the show, were only interfaces--screens playing constructed personalities. I do think it could be argued that the conclusion privileged a return, or resurfacing, of authenticity, the final access of authenticity, or something like that; but I also think it's crucial that the show never lets us see it (additionally, it's possible to make a quasi-Luddite reading of the conclusion--that the show is saying technology only ever allows access to mediated versions of one another--but I'd push beyond this and say that we're always only ever dealing with mediated versions of each other; "personality is our medium").
I agree with some of your comments about pacing in the final season, but the anti-realist, anti-authenticity drive won me over.
mutantllama
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TechnicalBarbarity
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Slammed
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TechnicalBarbarity
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