Topic: The TV Show Thread

@colonelkilgore Its great right? I'm 2 eps in and loving it...

Great to see Lost alumni Michael Emmerson as well, always a welcome addition. Walton Goggins is immaculate as always, and the general tonality of the show is spot on IMO (somewhat reminiscent of The Boys, able to tow the line between dark humour and genuinely emotional narrative beats)

A good time, and it seems video game adaptations are certainly 'looking up'.

Surely a matter of time before Baldurs gets a small-screen transition?

Yeah I'll be starting Fallout next week. Hearing good things about it, so looking forward to it. Which is rare for me. 😂

The trailer for Dark Matter just dropped and it looks pretty good. Based on an excellent book by Blake Crouch, it's coming to Apple TV+ May 8th.

Been a while since I read the book, but this looks to follow it quite closely and I think Edgerton will pull off the duality needed for the role quite nicely.

You can see the trailer through this link (haven't figured out how to embed videos on here just yet... is there a reference somewhere for the various supported tags?)

(nudging @MightyDemon82, a fellow fan of the book )

@FuriousMachine I does indeed look great, I'm gong to have to catch up on my Netflix watch list then cancel it to watch Apple TV for a bit 😅 . Thanks for the tag!

I loved the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I thought it was a fantastic return to form. Did anyone else watch/enjoy it?

@MightyDemon82 Sounds like a good plan You've got a little under å month, but will it be enough?
(well, if you prefer the bingeing model, the season finale is slated to air at the end of June, so that gives you almost two extra months of Netflix goodness)

@FuriousMachine I might just wait then. The watch list on Netflix and Prime is pretty lengthy.

@MightyDemon82 I have the same problem, so much so that I was kind of hoping Fallout would be a dud, but no such luck, I suppose

Three episodes deep into Fallout - loving it. The problem with the Last of Us TV adaptation for me is that it was so faithful to the game, all I could think about was how the game handled each moment and I felt like the game handled almost every moment better. Likewise, it made me so aware of everything the Last of Us TV adaptation cut, and I felt like the show was always weaker for the things it lost. Don't get me wrong, the Last of Us I think is a great way to spread an excellent story / set of characters to a wider audience, but it is not the best way to experience that story at all.

Fallout avoids this issue entirely, as rather than being a direct adaptation of any of the games, it instead feels like this could have been Fallout 5. Following all the sort of beats that make a Fallout game flow, feeling like it could just be the next instalment in the franchise, even though the medium is different.

@Pizzamorg I'm 3 episodes deep also, and genuinely really loving it. I have no real framing from the games, having never played them, but have already downloaded Fallout4 for the SteamDeck... in lieu of its forthcoming update later this month!

I'm glad also that Fallout has landed so well with critics and fans alike. It is a lot of fun, with some genuinely great performances peppered throughout. I always knew Walton Goggins would be great (is he ever not?) but I think the stand-out is Ella Purnell - who plays Lucy. She does a terrific job of playing the 'straight man', and being brilliant foil for the more eccentric surface population.

All around a great time, and looking forward to starting the game once I'm done with the show

@CJD87 Seeing that Walter Goggins was in Fallout made me bump it to the top of my watchlist, and I'll be starting it either later or tomorrow. Glad it is hitting with audiences and critics.

@Black_Swordsman I’ve dabbled in Curb and found it funny, although there’s obviously a wide variation in quality from one episode to the next. Which I guess is true for Seinfeld also, or any sit-com for that matter. I’ve really only watched the first season.

But for what is ostensibly a more edgy and realistic Seinfeld, I like how Curb focuses on Larry’s self destructive tendencies. It’s like being able to follow George Castanza full time, who is the funniest character from Seinfeld imo.

I also find it humorous to see how there’s so much ad lib in the show also. It’s like watching community theater sometimes where you can pick up on the actors laughing under their breath at what the other actor says off-the-cuff and I like the fact they leave a lot of those moments in there without editing them out.

There’s a lot of seasons so I’ve just not really ever spent the time to go back and proceed through them all. You mention that the final season is a return to form, so do you feel like the middle seasons are not as good? What changes about the show as it progresses? Does it become less ‘small budget’ and become more sanitized and ‘main stream’ as it goes? I’ve always been curious. Because the first season definitely feels like it was just thrown together as a fun side project for Larry. 😅

As far as Fallout, I am really curious to try it, and feeling a little FOMO. I’ve never played a Fallout game; the only Bethesda game I’ve played is Skyrim (which I loved). I’m worried that if I watch the show then I’ll want to play the games and it will contribute to my ever growing backlog 😅. I already have Fallout 4 in my library from PS+ but it’s been relegated to the “maybe if I ever have mountains of unexpected free time” pile.

But these high quality TV shows have served their gaming source material well. Witcher 3, The Last of Us, etc have really seen large upticks in player counts after the TV show came out. It’s great advertising.

@Th3solution I just didn't find the middle-late seasons as amusing, they are ,perhaps, too reliant on their stable set-pieces of the restaurant, the golf course, Larry's House and Jeff & Susie's house, plus too many problems that only beset those who are perhaps more financially blessed than the general populace beset them, and it can get a little bit predictable, the season before this last, final, one was the worst in my opinion, they had a coffee-house-related scenario that more or less ended in slapstick, without wanting to give away any spoilers, of course.

@Th3solution if you loved Skyrim you’d love Fallout mate, it played pretty much identically only with a post-apocalyptic/50’s Americana skin. The show has me super tempted to return to the games. Currently weighing up which I’d replay out’ve 3, New Vegas and 4. There are reasons for each really 🤔

@Black_Swordsman I see. Well, I might dabble in the early season until I feel like it jumps the shark, and then maybe skip to the final season. 😄

@colonelkilgore I think what I loved about Skyrim had a lot to do with dragons and magic, rather than the Bethesda rpg formula, but I’m not sure. I see repeatedly that Fallout 3 seems to be the high point of the series. And some advocate for New Vegas. And unfortunately the fact those are locked on PS3 makes it a higher hurdle for me to engage.

The only other Bethesda/Obsidian game I tried was The Outer Worlds, which I just fell off of pretty early on. I was kind of liking it, but it’s always an uphill battle for me with first person perspective shooting. Maybe that’s why I liked Skyrim because it was kinda an FPS but the shouts were more tactical and felt like shooting precision was less important.

All done with Fallout. I'm really not a TV guy, my hobbies are exercise, gaming, sports/wrasslin' and a little bit of anime, so probably the ultimate compliment I can give Fallout was that I enjoyed it so much I banged it out over just a manner of days. It'll probably be years until another TV show grabs me like this did. This is the best videogame adaptation of all time as far as I regard, and it has set the bar so astronomically high, I dunno if this can ever be topped.

@Th3solution I get it… fantasy (sword and sorcery) has always been my thing above all others (sci-fi is a close second) but there really is something about the Mad Max-meets-Mad Men formula of Fallout… in the inimitable words of Todd Howard “It just works” 😉

Maybe this is controversial or whatever, but as much as I adored Fallout 3 in 2008 and New Vegas in 2010, those games felt pretty dated even on release, so if played some fifteen plus years later, I think it would be a really rough experience for a new person without some context of what these games meant at the time of their release, unless you have a very high tolerance for older games that feel old.

Like don't get me wrong, all the stuff underneath, the stories, the systems, the choices, the writing etc is obviously still excellent, but obviously a game is more than those things, and I think the layer of dated jank between the player and all that good stuff is just gonna be too thick to penetrate for most modern audiences who don't have any context beyond the show.

Fallout 4 coming out in 2015 is definitely a more modern looking and feeling game than the others, but it has arguably weaker stuff underneath in terms of writing, systems, choices etc. Then again I don't think you'd notice a lot of this stuff if you don't have the context of what Fallout 3 and New Vegas already achieved years earlier.

@Pizzamorg yeah they’re undoubtedly dated alright… I went back and finished off the Fallout 4 plat a couple of years back and even that felt old. I ain’t suggesting that other people start with 3 or New Vegas though, just that I personally as someone who has played a few and am inclined to revisit the series… could find legit reasons to play any of the three available on console.