Topic: TV WTF

[6pairsofshoes]

I never felt particularly inclined to see any of the Ghostbuster sequels.  The first one was fine.  Funny.  Unusual.  Any efforts to coast on that would be stale.  So I stayed away.

What's BOP?

[8ullfrog]

Birds of Prey.

Instead of spinning off Margot Robbie into her own series, they figured they'd destroy a different one.

https://themoviespoiler.com/movies/birds-of-prey/

[6pairsofshoes]

Wow.  Talk about a spinoff.  I have never heard of this, but I'm sort of out of the Batman loop.  Is it worth viewing?

I got to rambling in the SG1 thread with this and thought better of it, so I'm pasting it here:

I'm working so not up late much, hence the horrid Lena Dunham show.  I think I might watch another one tonight with a distanced eye to see what about it has had me coming back.  The parallels with Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, throws it into the genre of hip young people in New York.  Maybe that's why I watch it.

I was young and lived in NYC and haunted various places that were not yet hip, (the boundary of Little Italy/Chinatown) and these guys now inhabit the less edgy spots that were once border lands in the city.  They are the ones who move in after it's gentrified.  My friends lived on Columbus in the 80's in an apt where the drug dealers hit you up in the lobby, but all you had to do was respectfully decline and they left you alone. 

The characters on Girls are basically phonies, poseurs, totally fake.  The Sex and the City stories are more believable, because I think there are guys who would break up with you using a post-it.  And the ensuing rage is also what you'd expect.  Sarah Jessica Parker lets loose on the guy who did it and that was satisfying.  She gets mugged for her expensive shoes.  I can believe that.  She wants to go out with a good looking real estate developer who has money, because money is important when you live in such an expensive place.  I never thought I'd want Carrie Bradshaw back, just like I'd welcome Bush the lesser over the current occupant of the White House.  But there you have it.

[8ullfrog]

I liked the episode of Sopranos when they went into New York, and Little Italy was a ghost of it's former self, and the Chinese were hostile to them. Shows that the world is passing them by, and what their "life" is is eroding fast.

Like for me, I got Carne Asada fries the other day, and they came in an eco box. And man, golly an eco box. I want the old Styrofoam back already. Sometimes progress is weird, confusing, and undesired. (My town banned Styrofoam.)

[6pairsofshoes]

I got to season 6 of Girls and decided that life's too short.  It's not worth the trouble to watch the pirated version.  When it was on amazon prime, fine, easy to just go to the next episode, but to watch the women with exaggerated poitrines and navigate all those popup ads to see this drivel is a bridge too far.  Judd Apatow should be publicly shamed for holding up this pathetic excuse for a human being as someone worth watching.  Hannah Horvath should just go get a job as a waitress or something and leave the rest of us alone because we just don't care about her wasted life.

She recalls for me the R. Crumb comic, "Gail Snail."  We're all just waiting for that giant foot to come down at the end of the frames and squash her like a bug.  For those of you unfamiliar, here it is in all its misogynistic glory.  Lena Dunham is enough to turn all of us into misogynists.  http://jakemw.tripod.com/gailsnl.jpg  The point of the scratch marks in the word/thought balloons is that nothing she says has any significance.

[8ullfrog]

I passed up a complete DVD collection of the series ANGEL today, and I love that show.
I use  uBlock Origin on the Microsoft Edge browser for my streaming purposes. You're not wrong that those redirect ads are INFURIATING otherwise.

I don't understand why you watched six seasons of Girls.

[6pairsofshoes]

Yeah.  I tried to explain earlier.  Life in NYC when I was younger and adventurous makes me nostalgic for those times, but this cast is laughable in their lame desire to be transgressive and original.  They are tediously conformist in the extreme.  Just another bunch of pathetic hipsters.  Dunham exemplifies everything I loathe about the phony boho lifestyle--she fancies herself an artist, but is too lazy to get out and push her own limits.  She is given a job to go to a women's surf camp on Long Island but manipulates the staff so she won't have to try to surf.  She's a fat slob who has no desire to exercise and has an atrocious diet.  Even so, we are treated to a wardrobe change every 5 minutes and she has an inexplicably unending stream of relatively attractive men who are seemingly willing to overlook her narcissistic and inconsiderate personality in order to bed her nauseating body.  Why the producers decided that the audience would want to look at her naked flab on a regular basis is God's own mystery.  Maybe they're blind.

I can't explain why I put up with it.  At first it was kitsch, then some kind of perverse fascination, like watching a car wreck, then, I got to the point where I felt I couldn't tolerate another minute of it.  I did watch all of Earth:Final Conflict, which got worse and worse until it was over, but I stuck with it.  I finally gave up on the 100 after about 4 or 5 seasons because I got sick of the heavily made up young people beating the crap out of one another.  It was just oppressive.  God knows, I'll watch almost anything. 

[6pairsofshoes]

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.

[smokester]

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.

We managed to crawl through season 2 and I couldn't help thinking that everything that happened could have been squashed into a single episode. This may have even made it interesting.

We have just managed to get through both seasons of Outer Banks and I'm not exactly sure how I did as I spent the vast majority of it with my head in my hands. It was like Mr Bean meets One Foot in the Grave with an overtone of Benny Hill.

The writers must have sounded like a Haribo advert when brainstorming ideas.

[6pairsofshoes]

I admit that, just out of idle curiosity, I fast forwarded through the rest of the season.  If witch is so powerful, can't she cast a spell to take care of what ails Mr. Vampire husband?  What good is magic if it can't do extraordinary things.  There's holes in the plot big enough to drive/push a __________(insert large thing of your choice here) through.  This is the reason that I found Penny Dreadful's conclusion so disappointing.  Writers keep writing themselves into some kind of stupid straightjacket.

[6pairsofshoes]

Forgive the double post, but my long term rant in this thread reminded me of this.

[smokester]

I have the idea (without concrete evidence) that series writers have their stories dictated by whether a show is renewed or not. Shows that are cancelled in the first series, definitely have rushed and cobbled together endings as you get the feeling that's not what they intended in the first half or the series. I suppose that theory would apply to any season of any show if renewal was always in the offing. Only if a finite number of seasons were commissioned beforehand could writers properly map out a story.

In that tosh that was the Outer Banks:

Spoiler (hover to show)

There was no real ending but faded out with a major revelation which would be run over into season 3, only, Netflix hasn't officially renewed the show and I hope to God - even with the revelation - that they dont!

[8ullfrog]

I feel like a lot of shows are serialized and don't need to be. I honestly preferred X-files before the mono-arc.

Funny enough, most X-files fans feel the other way, which I think is dumb as hell. The Monster of the Week episodes put X-files on the map!

Same thing with the Abrams Mystery box. I'm over it. I avoid "why did mystery X happen" series like the plague now. La Brea is just missing the bless'ed sleestaks.

[6pairsofshoes]

I love the La Brea tarpits.  I kept staring at the bubbles emerging from that oily black surface.  And the fossils:  mammoth, sloth, tigers, wowee.  Who knew there was all that crazy animal diversity stalking the north American continent.

Beats the pants off the X-files any day of the week.  I think Abrams is responsible for Fringe.  I quit watching it when the imdb commercials got longer than the show. 

[6pairsofshoes]

So there is a guy on a relatively well known file sharing site who hard codes english subtitles into what are usually fine tv shows that are produced in non english speaking countries.  Many have been really good.  So I decided to give a Spanish program, "I know who you are," a go.  It's kind of like Gran Hotel in that you just don't like anybody and want it to be over.  Except this is a lawyer/cop mystery thing with the main character (a middle aged lawyer) suffering with amnesia for a particular situation that throws suspicion on his possible involvement with the disappearance a young girl (college age).  Most of the characters are super unlikeable and it just gets worse, but I kept watching, thinking, well maybe it will get better, or, after a while, it will soon be concluded and we can find out if the missing girl is dead or will show up alive.  So tonight episode 10 is over and, damn.  There is a part 2 to the series that we have to watch.  Gak.