Topic: What's your favourite TV program of the moment?

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm pretty sure I was already on a banana peel to hell before I began eating veggie burgers.

[6pairsofshoes]

Just finished The Boys.  The end of the last episode was hilarious.  I liked it more than I thought I would.

I also see that the 1st episode of Season 4 of Preacher is up.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm back to the Handmaid's Tale.  I guess I was more put off lately by the rampant gun violence in the US than in the GOP's obsession with curtailing women's rights, so I tucked into the most recent season.  It's well done and sickening all at once.  You wonder why this theocracy does not implode under the weight of its own oppression, but it continues... kind of like the GOP.  A conservative does not want the government infringing on rights except when it comes to policing what women can and can't do with their own bodies, then they're all up in that poo.  One of the women characters has a finger cut off for having the audacity to read a page from the Bible in front of a committee of male leaders.  Women are prohibited from reading, and she, despite her high status, had the audacity to suggest that children be educated so they can read scripture.  Bad move, that.

[8ullfrog]

A lot of TV shows I disliked the mere existence of are ending, but that crap got like ten years on the air

At the same time, I don't know if I want to get in to new shows. "Showrunners" have learned bad lessons from good shows, and also bad lessons from bad shows, to the point everything is a crapshoot.

then again, the same is true for movies.

[goldshirt*9]

Peaky Blinders appears soon ish

[8ullfrog]

Apparently Amazon is commissioning an Event Horizon series. I don't even get how you would do that.

For years there has been a rumor that there was an even more Effed up cut of that movie, but it was ruined in a Romanian salt mine. Also, apparently movie studios store movie cuts in ROMANIAN SALT MINES.

WTF

[6pairsofshoes]

I should try watching something else.  A Handmaid's Tale is a daily helping of rage.  Impotent rage.  And it gets worse with each episode.  You keep hoping that the enslaved women will rise up and just burn the whole place down.

I'm about halfway through the season.  Maybe I should go find a flamethrower so I can finish watching it.

[8ullfrog]

The DVD with my favorite episode of Stargate is outgassed.

What that means is the disc is damaged by sitting in a case. MGM are apparently notorious for this.

The specific episode is "Rules of Engagement"
SG1 gates into P3X-who gives a poo, and encounter a running battle between an SG team they don't recognize and Jaffa. When they attempt to render aid, they are killed in an ambush by the SG team! Cue intro credits

Miraculously, the stars of our series were not entirely dead. We kind of knew this already, because although they were shot down by conventional Americanski weapons, they were hit by energy discharges, not squibs. er, bullets.

The rest of the episode pivots between high tension, outright comedy, and a little heartstring pulling. Essentially, a perfect stargate episode.

To be fair, after scrubbing the poo out of the bottom of the disc, something I SERIOUSLY try to avoid with my media, the disc did play, but holy poo was my DVD drive angry. Full speed spin the whole time, I had to jam a paperclip between it and the front facing of my PC to avoid rattle normally associated with teenagers who shove subwoofers in their trunk but don't secure their license plates.

So, if you have any DVD's with "milky" appearance, time to replace. What sucks for me is that this is disc 2 of 5 in a box set, and that particular set has been replaced by newer, shinier versions. And that the entirety of Hollywood would like physical media to die, so they can get $9.99 a month, forever.

[dweez]

The plastic is just a cover. If it gets milky or scratched and you're able to buff it out, you should still be able to reach the data. That said, DVDs and DVD Players get flaky easy.

[8ullfrog]

I was going to say "We didn't have to put up with this poo with VCR's", and then I remembered that every VCR I ever had ate at least one tape.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm glad Preacher is back.  It's a relief from the relentless oppression of The Handmaid's Tale.  I've got 2 more episodes of that to trudge through.  It's an odd series.  The movie had a sort of optimistic ending and encapsulated an escape from one situation to freedom. 

The TV series is more of a "not without my daughter" "activist in your face" "sisterhood can be powerful or notso much" endless chain of whatever sadistic poo the scriptwriters can come up with this season.  It makes me wonder what the appeal can be.  I find it terribly sad because it so realistically depicts the current state of affairs.  It demonstrates repeatedly that the worst misogynists are women.

[6pairsofshoes]

A few observations about the perversity of casting on Handmaid's Tale.

1)  Main character, June, fighting against the oppression of a cult like takeover of the US is a real life Scientologist.
2)  One character, who is high in the male hierarchy ruling Gilead, plays a cop in Law & Order Special Victims Unit.  The irony here is that his L&O character regularly fights to put rapists and perverts behind bars.  In Handmaid's Tale, he's a serial rapist -- one that is sanctioned by the state in the interests of giving certain privileged families unfettered access to fertile females, the Handmaids of the title.

[6pairsofshoes]

Sweetbitter is reasonably entertaining for a restaurant based soap opera.

Just saw the first episode of Glow.  Starving actress finds employment in the theatrics of televised female wrestling.  Lots of '80's hair, costumes and music.  It seems sort of lame.  But I'll watch one more episode to see if it improves.

Tried SG and couldn't get past the Alien Ra reps with their oddball weapons that resembled a long flattened bellows that somehow gets power and glows before sending shock waves at people.  My sister dated a drunk guy once who gave me a hard time for suggesting that human beings may actually have constructed the Giza pyramids. 

[8ullfrog]

Staff weapon. Contained plasma blasts. Nasty way to go. One fun thing, they occasionally pull the power source out of those suckers, and they look like the old style Christmas lights... filled with tritium.  I mean, in show it's "naquadah".  But hey, if you can't get past the camp, you can't get past the camp.

Honestly, the entire first season is essentially outer limits with a budget. Season 2 is "All the planets they go to were a bad idea" and Season 3 introduces us to alternate alternate realities. (In addition to the stargate, they discover a device called a "quantum mirror" that lets you jump to alternate universes.) (The general bless'ed HATES the quantum mirror, and he's got a right to. In the first alternate reality, he's only a colonel, and in the second he is murdered horribly.)

They must have done something right, the original series made it 10 seasons, to be knocked off for the new hotness, Battlestar Galactica.

Which is doubly funny because SG-1 knocked the existing "Farscape" series out of rotation. So Farscape eventually got it's revenge.

Also, Ra died in the movie. Opening of SG-1 you're dealing with Apophis. Who looks like my Uncle's ex boyfriend.

Shame you don't like Jaffa, they get some primo moments throughout the series. Teal'c is of course, the best.

This joke comes from a not exactly funny episode, the ATF is standing off with a suicide cult.

different episode:

Sadly, I was not able to find a compilation of Bratac calling General Hammond, who commands the stargate base "Hammond of Texas". It's a sign of true respect, but always made me chuckle.

[6pairsofshoes]

I continued watching episode 1 of SG 1 last night.

Camp does not begin to describe it.  The same guy who has made a career of being an ineffective general is on the show.  The plump bald guy, you know the one.  He's in everything.  Hardest working man in show business.  His sole job as an actor is to play roles of clueless dorky guy in authority who bosses people around who must tolerate his officiousness as they all clearly know better.  Don S. Davis.  That's him.  Sadly, he died at the relatively young age of 65 in 2008.  The show must have worn him out.  He was on Twin Peaks, too.  Aptly cast there as well.  He appears to have been a real US Army Captain at one time.  I suspect he had a sense of humor.

Then there's some bizarre body invasion stuff going on with the people with X incisions on their abdomens and weird dark haired woman with the discriminating crab thing coming out and deciding that the pretty blonde wouldn't do.  So I guess they offed her?  Of course they steal beautiful wife of resident archaeologist with wire rim glasses and the young man, her son?  The fine specimen.  Of course the Yul Brynner clones are up to no good and want to steal your women and toothsome young men to have crabs invade them for nefarious purposes.

It's also comical that guys who have firearms that are clearly of zero effectiveness against the souped up plasma weapons fire them anyway.  Nice.  I did like the Kleenex transmission.  Funny.