Topic: The TV Show Thread

@Th3solution I got all the way the final seasons of the Marvel TV stuff.... and just lost interest.

I agree with @Tjuz, Legion however is the best thing they've done by far, however it is totally bonkers and you have to pay quite close attention otherwise most of it will go over your head.

I thought Titans was really good and can't wait till get to the 2nd season.

Currently watching The Umbrella Academy (which is neither DC or Marvel). I'm a bit undecieded as seems to be meandering a bit.

And if you have not seen The Boys, you absoulety have to. Best superhero tv series by a long margin.

@Th3solution I'd say the arrowverse would be hard to binge because it's not as serialised as the marvel netflix. There are overarching stories but they are normally in the background of meta of the week episodes which largely retread the same ground as the previous episodes. That being said I do love the arrowverse and I invested early on in it so it has been easier to watch over 8 years. I did manage to binge the heavily episodic smallville a few years back despite my perceived decline in its quality after season 5.

I'd largely agree with @kalofkrypton on his points (though I would be kinder to the arrowverse).

The best seasons of marvel netflix have been Jessica Jones season 1, daredevil 1 2 and 3, Luke cage 2 and punisher 1 and 2. I do love both seasons of iron fist despite all the hate for it. It has a strong supporting cast in my opinion. I think the worse season Ive watched was Jessica Jones season 2 but I still loved watching it because I love the character as played by Kristen Ritter.

I'd reccomend marvels runaways too, that is a really fun sci fi show with a great theme tune.

Also fox's legion was wicked and the gifted was pretty good, a bit like an updated early 2000s YA show like dark angel or something. Not sure what it was about it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless

@ralphdibny I second Runaways as hilarious schlocky fun. I've been way into the comics since I was a kid and seeing the characters on TV was great because they're really niche. The show got cut down right in its prime though, the last season started getting seriously good and then Disney+ meant everything else was cancelled. At least the comics were revived as a result of the show getting big and they can keep going!

@nessisonett I'm really looking forward to runaways season 3, just got to make it through cloak and dagger season 2 first as I'm sure the crossover takes place after that

@RogerRoger I only watched the first 5 or so episodes of Gotham but I didn't really rate it that much. Not sure if it was just too cheesy but played too straight for a modern show. Jada pinket Smith hammed it up loads in the episodes I saw.

Many times I've really wanted to watch it because of the cast and characters introduced like Alexander siddig (DS9) as ras Al gul and Michael cerveres (fringe) as professor pyg but every time I've seen a random episode on TV, the style and script etc has been fairly similar to the early episodes I've watched and it's put me off.

I'll probably and hopefully give it a fair shake some day when I have some more time though and there is a lull in my media consumption!

I watched Gotham pretty religiously with my brother-in-law until it ended. The show was an extremely entertaining trainwreck.

@RogerRoger fair enough, don't worry I don't think it can be over sold because I've seen bits of it already. It'll get watched one day as I do plan to watch all the DC live action shows that have been made. I think the only ones I haven't seen from beginning to end are Batman 66, wonder woman 77 (I watched an episode but I struggled with it) and the 90s flash. Oh also birds of prey, lucifer, human target and the JL TV movie.

I'd also like to watch clone wars one day because the the stuff with maul and his brother sounds really cool but likewise with Gotham, I watched that first 3 episodes as a movie thing in the cinema and thought it was rubbish at the time so I never ended up getting round to it.

Probably easy to draw the comparison of Gotham to smallville based on the title and premise of the shows but I really enjoyed early smallville. I think it was because it was basically X files but set in a school. It had the monster of the week episodes with an overarching mystery. It only became ridiculous after season 5 when it ditched that format and introduced the quasi justice League which was just a bunch of kids in hoodies and Tom welling became so big and muscly that he couldn't make any facial expressions. I know it sounds silly but he just reminded me of a big cow toward the end because he was so big and just stood there a lot. I need to go back and watch it again sometime, I have alot of nostalgia for the channel 4 double bill of enterprise and smallville in the early 2000s!

I mostly enjoyed the first two seasons of Gotham, though the first half of season 2 dragged on a bit. But as season 3 was never shown on TV in the UK (seasons 1 and 2 were shown on Channel 5 then E4 showed season 4), I never did watch anything after season 2.

Maybe one day I might get back into it.

@RogerRoger oh yeah, I haven't watched Lois and Clark and powerless too. I think the latter might be a bit of a nightmare to watch because I don't think it was aired in its entirety.

I never picked up on T4 mocking those two shows (the scumbags), I was probably too young and just wanted to get to the shows. I loved enterprise so much and it was pretty much my intro in to star trek. I eventually watched it all again and the rest of star trek shows and movies during and after uni and loved the whole thing.

I hate when people mock the product they are selling because it's just like, why are you showing the thing if you don't care about it and just going to make fun of it.

I didn't pick up on season 3 of TOS becoming a slog but maybe it was because to me it is just season 7 of star trek as a whole (well season 9 now that discovery has been inserted in there) and I was keen to get on to TAS at the time. I know people say it's not canon but it is canon to me lol.

It's funny you say that about the prequels, looking back, phantom menace is actually my favourite of the 3, I think it's just more of a classic movie. Like I think Harry potter 1 and 2 are the best of the movie series now weirdly.

@RogerRoger @ralphdibny i remember when it was just called The New Adventures of Superman, why they added the Lois and Clark to the title i still don't understand

also The Animated Series IS canon i know Gene was unhappy with it but he would De-canonize stuff he wasn't happy with all the time, such as Star Trek V and Star Trek VI (and i believe he once said most of TOS wasn't either) but after his death it was all re-canonized, hence why an alien species from it was mentioned in a episode of DS9 and it is now actually considered to be the last 2 years of Kirks 5 year mission

also i agree Harry Potter 1 and 2 are the best of the bunch, not that the others are bad but they just feel more "magical" for want of a better word

@ralphdibny @RogerRoger
Lois & Clark was as much my childhood as Red Dwarf! Had the lot all recorded on VHS with long play on 😂

@FullbringIchigo It was just The New Adventures of Superman in the UK. The 'Lois & Clark' removal was localisation - as was removal of quite a lot of pre-episode shorts of Clark using his powers.

@FullbringIchigo yeah I echo @KALofKRYPTON 's comments on it, weirdly I think the DVD releases have Lois and Clark intact on the title though.

I think star trek is almost a clear example of no one auteur being responsible for the whole. From the way leonard nimoy almost created Spock to the roddenberry vision only being enriched by the economics of DS9

@FullbringIchigo further thoughts on Harry potter.... Order of the phoenix is my favourite book because it has all the adult characters and the kid characters and it's sort of the moment you realise that your parents and role models actually went through similar stuff to what you are going through now.

I like the film but it cuts a lot out. It still has all the great actors that brought those characters to life though like Natalia tena, David thewlis, Brendan gleeson, Gary Oldman etc.

Good to see nick moran in the deathly hallows too even if it's a bit of a throwaway part.

I think growing up, I always thought that prisoner of azkaban was the best just because of how unique it is (and Gary Oldmans black and white stripey prison outfit lol). I love children of men too so I thought Alfonso cuaron had that auteury thing going for him.

However...watching them again a few years back, my preferred order puts the first two at the top. They just make me "feel" the most. Probably because they use the old timey film conventions that elicit thos feelings.

I basically feel like the first two were classics. The third was unique in its auteurism (not that the first two werent because they were obviously Chris Columbus films). The fourth was ok. The fifth was again good because of the subject matter but tried to fit as much in from the book that it was almost a direct translation (barring the story omissions). The fifth was just twilightesque and suffered for it. It's probably my least favourite book and the film is about a million times worse just because it's 2 and a half hours and I felt like I spent most of it watching Harry and Ginny look at eachother like one of them was going to start glistening in the sun or something. And again 6 and 7, just ok really. Mostly just translations of the book but I can think of more worthy books that would warrant the split film treatment (namely order of the phoenix)

@RogerRoger Lois & Clark was great!
I do - I also recall they'd squeezed Frakes in to Dean Cain's costume for a scene too 😲😂

As show it really was great. The initial 'Moonlighting' with superpowers set up was actually genius. It helped bed-in the characters before the change in direction and production team to focus on more comic/sci-fi stories.

It's also responsible for my weakness for lounge jazz, which kept me playing Hustle Kings more than the game itself! 😂

Everything was better in the 90s. It was a pretty cracking decade.

@RogerRoger also, yes - Tempus! If only for the Clark Kent is Superman 'duh!' 😂

I also have a major like of Lord Nor! I assume that they just weren't allowed to use Zod, since WB were constantly trying to develop another Superman movie throughout the series' run - but Nor was great.

@RogerRoger 😂
'Oh, c'mon Herb...'

Oh I think I'm going to have to revisit L&C. The dvds are probably pretty cheap now.

Riker, and Xanatos, and a Superman villain! Frakes can do no wrong (apart from not turning up to conventions for photo shoots! 😡😂)

I agree. The theme is a cracking piece; not quite as good as TAS, but that's not only Shirley Walker's greatest DC TV theme (which is saying something) - but easily on par with Williams' theme.

Did you ever watch Superboy?

@RogerRoger Nice! That could see me through any impending lock down 😁

As a curio, yes. I don't think it was ever officially broadcast over here. I didn't even know it was a thing until I stumbled across it being shown in German in the early days of us having cable TV.

Didn't actually watch any of it properly until years later by getting it from a peer to peer network.

It is... Awful for the most part. In pretty much every respect.
The story goes that following the poor performance of Superman III and the box office bomb of Supergirl, the infamous Salkinds sold off the Superman screen rights to Canon (and we all know how that turned out). But, always savvy enough to want to make more coin, they retained the rights to make Superboy content.

As I recall, it is a mess really. A cheap mess. For the first couple of seasons (I think), Superboy/Clark was John Hames Newton. Without doubt looked the part, and wasn't an entirely terrible actor - not that he was given anything like quality material. Imagine Smallville being made in the 80s but with the super suit and that's pretty much it.
Newton was replaced for the last two seasons with Gerard Christopher, better actor, but not as good looking - but crucially wasn't as demanding and got to switch out the TV show suit for one of Reeve's movie suits, or parts of one at least; I think they both at least had a Reeve cape.
As Christopher comes in, the show has a format change from high school to college (again, I think - it's been a while) for the 3rd season then on to Clark and Lana working for a local coastal newspaper for the fourth.
The final season feels quite like a bit of a blueprint for Lois & Clark in many ways - which is why I brought it up 😂

There are clips on YouTube. It's all pretty bad.

@RogerRoger Yeah I knew he did Thunderbirds. I didn't hate it - I mean, what else could they have done with it - other than go Gritty BAFTA? 😂

@RogerRoger did a spot of checking on the Superboy stuff. I mis-remembered a couple of things (they were in college from the start), but it's pretty much right.
Some interesting cameos that I didn't recall too.
Most interesting thing, which I'm not sure I'd ever seen before, is that the year Superboy ended ABC were starting preproduction on Lois & Clark. Gerard Christopher autitioned for and got the Clark Kent role. The production team only went with Cain after they'd discovered Christopher had played Superboy for 3 years!

@RogerRoger
I wouldn't say it's worth buying. At all!
Some of the guest stars and links with other shows make for interesting trivia, but that's about it.

I guess my biggest issue with Christopher was that just looked quite a lot older, and his massive jaw! 😂
He also came across as just a bit too pious.

I don't think it did particularly well as shows go. It was overshadowed quite a lot by Burton's Batman releasing a year after it debuted, then a year after that the similarly toned Flash TV show started. That I did watch at the time and absolutely loved!