Maybe it was Stargate SG-1. All I remember was these sort of gay bald aliens, some were good, some were evil but they were always hanging around giving advice and offering help or trying to screw things up.
Maybe gay aliens are actually straight.
I saw season 1 of A Discovery of Witches a few years ago and in casting about for something to watch in the past few days, I thought I'd give season 2 a go. The first season was kind of interesting.
Season 2 is like a big WPA project for BBC actors. We have Henry Talbot from Downton Abbey as Mr. Main Vampire married to pretty witch he met in the Bodleian Library. She's an American from Harvard (no she's not, no f***ing way). They have left 21st c. Oxford for 16th century London, why? to give CGI guys and the wardrobe dept. some work, apparently. Ms. Witch can time travel, I guess. Bonus is Prince Albert from "Victoria" as some guy who is Main Vampire's friend, maybe Christopher Marlowe. Also a vampire. Queen Elizabeth is like some dried out old prune with a toffee nosed accent. And Ms. Witch is looking for teachers. She finds them and the new age crap they spew is enough to curl your hair. Who writes this drivel? I cringe at every utterance. I'm three episodes in and I just can't take any more.
I had to look that up. It does sound like a ridiculous premise for a show. The fact that it won BAFTA awards is puzzling, too. I'm not much of a reality tv show fan, so it's not really my cup of tea, so to speak. The Wikipedia entry is probably a better use of time than actually the hours spent watching it.
I assume this is the German sci-fi series and not the amazon prime comedy?
I think it is. The characters are never quite as annoying as the White Gold Wielder in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but some (most) of them are really annoying. They all act like spoiled teenagers, and wilfully do stupid things, but this idiocy is often (nearly always) the only thing that allows the story to move forward. I have only watched episode 1 (and won't watch any more until I am sure that they complete the story, which I truly don't believe that they will. GRRM has harmed me for life) but it was obvious from the start that they have modified a lot of the events to avoid upsetting modern sensitivities. I don't recall a single ugly female in the books, good or bad, and surprisingly few ugly males: very few of the baddies were ugly (qv the Children of the Light) but monsters, however, were universally baddies.
I enjoyed the books, and was pleased that the series got an ending (although it was very much an "and then the good guys won, and lived happily ever after"), but most of the characters not so much.
Aside: The author(s) worked really hard to make "strong women" characters, but they very much seem to be the male idea of what a strong woman is (either magical powers, or contrarily headstrong and often both) rather than really strong. But as a chap myself, I understand that it must be quite difficult to write a strong female without making her unpleasantly masculine or shrewish. It is an interesting trait in some recent novels that the gender (or race) of a majority of the characters is unstated, but that doesn't really work when the gender conflict is an essential part of the story like in WoT. The whole a'dam thing made my stomach turn, so I can't imagine what that would have been like for a lady to read/ watch (assuming it makes it into the TV show).
Tricky for TV, I guess.
Like in Dune where the whole series can be summarised as "we have all seen the boy that fights the evil emperor and wins, but what happens then? Does the boy then become the evil emperor and restart the cycle?", the point of the WoT books is not the people, but the cyclic nature of things: the characters are just a means to illustrate the complexities of going round in the circle (and the "magic" schema is an attempt to distance the saga from all the others that do the same). It is difficult to see how this can be made for the screen (like Dune), because on the screen the makers want the audience to care for the characters and, as you note, to identify with the characters; hence we have to have one of each ethnic group, gender and religion in every group.
GRRM's adaptation solved the problem by regularly killing folk - often while they were copulating, so people were invested in the experience without really caring about the characters - the makers' problem in that case was guessing the ending (which was doomed to fail, as there won't be one. GRRM has painted himself into a corner, and is stuck)
I think that a good series needs either a good source, or a good team of makers (or both, but I'm not sure that has ever occurred). And a defined ending*.
I think the primary problem with WoT is that it was written without real characters: most of the participants are cyphers designed to further the story in various ways. This makes bad TV.
GoT (or ASOIAF) is different: GRRM writes characters that are interesting, but it is dangerous to care about them, as he has a habit of killing them off. It makes for good TV, because they do stuff, and despite yourself you do care. Where GRRM stopped writing, the suits were clueless.
Dune 2 is way better than Dune 1, but between them they only cover the introduction to the Dune saga: In the first book (2 movies) the kid wins, but in the next book he becomes the monster: in the rest of the saga the author attempts (with limited success) to show how the "continual evil emperor cycle" is broken.
* this is the bit that rendered several potentially great shows into rubbish (Lost, Heroes, even X-Files - amongst thousands of others. Great ideas, great starts, sagging middles and no ending)
That would be my recommendation. Unfortunately I get hooked by pilots and first series that appear to be good TV, with a promising hook. But nowadays I don't start watching a series - even the pilot - until Wikipedia tells me that the show has a successful conclusion.
I was brought up in a country where syndication was unheard of, so I only ever watch things from the start*: I don't dip in and out. In the UK, throughout my childhood, TV series were usually something like six episodes. This meant they were universally one episode "set-up", four and a half episodes of "journey", and the last half of an episode was "denouement". Nowadays the UK has followed the US lead in having a full season of 6-30 episodes ending on a cliff-hanger that will only be resolved if the series is renewed, so eventually there will be an unresolved cliffhanger (that normally has nothing to do with the series original premise, because of the twists and turns of each individual season). The X-Files is a classic of the form: it had monster of the week episodes (of varying quality) with an overarching arc that hooked viewers but never got resolved. After the first season it rapidly became "Bert & Doris investigate weird things" every week, and it lost the coherence of the story arc.
It took me a long time to break the habit of expecting the "traditional" form, but even now I still demand an ending a lá "The Fugitive" to be provided, that makes sense of the overarching story. If I don't get that, I can't abide the series (no matter how "good" the hook/ stories/ production values are.
... I watch TV independently of SWMBO (she is a soap opera addict), so fortunately I am not restricted to stuff she likes.
* the first time: thereafter I am happy to watch random episodes in any order, if I liked the show enough.
It really surprised me that all y'all had versions of "Steptoe and Son" and "Till Death Us Do Part". I wouldn't have thought that they would have travelled at all, and I also assumed that "The Office" was too insular to be exported. I guess that's why I'm not a TV executive.
Thanks. I'd never heard of that, but the poor reviews cited in Wikipedia are pretty funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightsleeper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightsleeper)
I'm watching Arctic Circle. Slow Finnish series about weird murders of prostitutes who have some kind of evil virus attached to a herpes strain in their blood. Is it the work of a mad scientist? A Russian experimental bio weapon? It's plodding along. I kind of feel like watching it on 1.5 speed. I get lots of these kinds of series via our public library streaming service. Some of them are better than others. This is not bad, it's just not really good. So I don't think it really belongs in WTF, but since good stuff is being posted here, I figured, why not?
Harrison Ford was a carpenter. Is your labourer's name Harrison?
Not a carpenter.
(https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xu6k584xmh1isp6un151u/Buddy.png?rlkey=e1ga4lr46pywkfe9vd8gcq18o&raw=1)
Not a carpenter.
detective drama
I really didn't like where season 2 went with the show, so it was completely ruined for me.