Topic: The TV Show Thread

@PegasusActual93 I agree, they put out some high quality stuff that often hits my sweet spot (Silo is definitely one of them, Dark Matter is another recent example). I hate Apple, but I love Apple TV+ and it's tearing me apart

@Ravix In my experience Apple TV+ offers some of the better tv shows I've seen over the last couple of years. I've not enjoyed everything I've watched on there, but that is the same for any service.

I believe all shows are in 4K so they look better than the other services I've used. Amazon Prime i find is the worst, as most stuff is either too soft or dark. Another reason I don't like using the service or pay anything extra to remove adverts.

Andor (Disney+) - I took a few years off from streaming any of the Star Wars shows (& streaming anything, TBH) after getting burned out after watching a bunch of them (and a couple of the latter ones, like Obi-Wan & Boba Fett, started feeling a bit cheesy), but man what a show to come back to! It definitely could be a bit slow at times, but the world building was immaculate & what action it did have was exciting. It's perhaps the closest any of these Disney SW shows have come to achieving the feel of "prestige TV", and I look forward to seeing what they do next now that he's in the rebellion proper.

Ranma 1/2 (Blu-Ray) - Been collecting (& watching through) this since the spring, and I'm finally down to the last OVA episode. It's been really fun revisiting this one & I must have dropped it when I watched it online as a kid as I swear I've never seen the later episodes (past episode 70 or 80 I'd guess), so it's been a real treat. They pretty much stop introducing new recurring characters maybe 60 or so episodes in, but the cast is so fun I never really got bored.

Shogun (Disney+) - Heard a lot of good things about this one, and it was pretty excellent. One of those shows where you get really attached to some of the characters & it's pretty gutting (no pun intended) when they kill them off. Kinda disappointed that we never got to the big war, and it looks like it may be delayed further if not entirely avoided based on some late show manoeuvering, but I'm definitely interested in seeing where it goes from here.

Those About to Die (Peacock) - Didn't finish. Really only subscribed for the month to catch some Olympics stuff & decided to check this out on the side because I like sword & sandal stuff. Definitely a 6/10 type show at most, and though I was enjoying it well enough because I enjoy some gratuitous gore & nudity as much as the next dude, I wasn't going to resub for another month just to finish the last few episodes.

@RR529 Re: Shogun - Thought I'd chime in to say that they left off at the exact same point that the source material ended, so whatever comes next is not based on the original story by James Clavell... Personally, I thought it was a brilliant end to a brilliant show and I'm not particularly excited about a second season. I'll give it a chance, but I felt they should have left it as it was.

@FuriousMachine, Oh, I never read the book so I didn't know this is where it ended. TBH, I'm not even sure if they're doing a second season, I just assumed so.

I certainly wouldn't be disappointed if they left it as is.

@RR529 They are indeed working on a second season. Hiroyuki Sanada is on board, so it is assumed it will follow Toronaga. Toronaga is based on a real person, Tokugawa Ieyasu, so they do have historical records to draw from, and they have shown great competence with the first season, so it may not be all that bad. Time will tell, I guess.
If you want to learn more about the real conflict Shogun gets its inspiration from, I can recommend Age of the Samurai, a documentary series that may be available on Netflix (I think it's a Netflix production, so it should be available globally, but I'm not 100% sure)

I finished Terminator zero last night, fantastic show and I hope we get more seasons.

Forgot that PS3 was a great multimedia player, even plugged into a sh*t CRT my DVDs look a million times better than how they look on the 4K set. Had to break it in with a classic 😂

Finished watching House of the Dragon season 2. Another phenomenal GOT season! I just can't get enough of this show and season 3 is going to be absolutely amazing!

@LN78 You’ll probably know this, any decent shows neutered by crap widescreen or ‘special editions’ that I should be grabbing on DVD rather than Blu-Ray? My first thoughts were Simpsons, Friends and Star Trek but there must be a few given how widespread that nonsense was about 15 years ago.

@nessisonett "Buffy" and "Angel" are the first ones that spring to mind - the remasters are completely atrocious. I know they artificially widescreened "The Wire" as well but I'm not sure which version came out on DVD. I'll have a think and get back to you, mate.

@nessisonett
Most shows would be neutered in widescreen, the issue is not a crap job being done to convert to widescreen so much as a lot of shows just never being meant to be visible in widescreen in the first place because they were made back when 4:3 was still the norm. This applies for example to just about every American series made from the 50s-roughly mid 2000s, they all have their issues when converted to widescreen, some more than others. Like the person above me said, Buffy is borderline unwatchable in widescreen, some HBO shows like The Wire look mostly okay but most shows just don't.

@LN78 @PegasusActual93 Cheers, I actually have all of Buffy and Angel on VHS rather than DVD but I have absolutely zero way of playing it hahaha, my mum was mad daft for it back when it was on BBC Two and got the box sets. My first thought was a lot of those heavy hitters from the 90s, TNG and Twin Peaks and so on. Maybe The X Files too? Probably a bunch of the old sitcoms too.

@nessisonett
Wasn't Angel and Buffy both notoriously censored on BBC Two because the idiots in programming thought "hey it's fantasy therefore it must be for kids" so they cut out most of the violence?

@PegasusActual93 I distinctly remember my mum saying when I was younger that the Angel videos were 18 rated and much better for it 😂

After an afternoon spent banging my face against a wall trying to play anything at all off a USB stick on the PS3, I finally settled on Universal Media Server to play my stuff on the old CRT. It’s more just an experiment over the weekend, I use it for playing games but neglected it for watching actual stuff on it. Friends actually looks good on it, it’s nice to have the screen filled. I had a dig through my DVDs and found a bunch of clearly pirated DVDs (remember that?) from a great uncle who’d just turn up with some absolute roasters he’d gotten down the Barras. Like, these aren’t even good movies. We have Around The World In Eighty Days with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan. That’s the level we’re talking here.

It’s been fun actually, enjoying the weird nostalgia from the crap TV even if I wish that the CRT boom from nerds hadn’t made an actually decent set a laughably extortionate endeavour. It’s always a bit weird using those wires with the PS3 though, seems wrong somehow. They even work with the Wii U, played Breath of the Wild on a 16” telly for a laugh. For a view of how stupid chancers can ruin a fun hobby though, I’ve seen my crap telly going for over £100 starting bid on eBay. It’s a f**king Matsui. That’s the faux-Japanese ‘brand’ Currys would use on their sh*tboxes. You might as well be buying an Asda Smart Price telly.

@nessisonett Nothing like a 'good' Grundig TV back in the day!

@JohnnyShoulder I’m pretty sure we didn’t own a proper TV outright until the grandparents bought us a Sony Bravia that was HD back in about 07! Remember being amazed by it, we’d only had sets on hire purchase before that or I’d been using a small portable set that was in our room. I’m actually surprised that I managed to play any games at all on it now I’m used to the massive screens, although Lego Harry Potter was much more playable on the CRT since it was super dark on the LCD set!

@nessisonett When i moved out from my parents, I still had my iccle TV and VCR combo! Was using it right up until after I got a PS2, then I could afford a bigger place and a TV. Got a 28" Samsung chunky fella, which was a right **** whenever I moved! When I moved in with a couple of mates, that became the main TV so was back to using my VCR combo in my bedroom with my PS2. Had those two until I got a 360 and text was really tiny on the Samsung, so had to get a HD TV.

@JohnnyShoulder tiny text was a similar pain of mine. 7th gen games begun to drop CRT support around the turn of the decade. When I played dynasty warriors 8, I was really unhappy with how illegible the text was. Made me realize I’d need a widescreen asap which I did get sometime after I bought gta v (which surprisingly didn’t require it).