Topic: The TV Show Thread

Just watched the first two episodes of Shogun and I am mightily impressed. Finished the excellent book by James Clavell only a couple of weeks ago and this adaptation delivers in spades so far! If the quality subsists, I wouldn't be surprised if this will end up on the top of many "best of the year" lists come the end of the year.
Highly recommended for both fans of the book and fans of historical drama!

finishing the rest of Season 3 of Switched at Birth this weekend. show's great but I swear it drags on with the Italian father drama where he's still acting his sketchy self.

the actor that starts as the rich car wash/baseball player I swear I've seen him before in a couple of movies or something years ago. he looks familiar a little bit

So haven't posted in a minute but wanted to share (somewhere) that I finally sat down and binged The Clone Wars and Rebels over the course of many weeks just to prepare myself for Ahsoka and let me tell you, Ahsoka, so far (on E3), has really been a let down in comparison. Here I was getting caught up on these cartoons for the sole purpose of a live action show I thought would be more worthy of my time but turns out the animated series' are where it's at. Who knew.

@zupertramp I enjoyed Rebels very much, but I can't get into Clone Wars, for some odd reason. I've seen the first two seasons and it just didn't click for me, I guess. I will give season 3 a chance down the road, though.

@FuriousMachine The first couple seasons of Clone Wars are totally different to the later ones I’d say. It has a really weird structure of stories out of order and such, whereas you get some really good arcs later on. It’s worth a go but you have to kinda push through some of the less interesting stuff.

busy binge watching Real World Season 15 on Paramountplus. Landon had some gross hair back then

@nessisonett Right, I will power through season 3 as well and hopefully it will connect better with me. I've been very happy with Filoni's other work in the Star Wars sandbox, so I'm hopeful that CW will engage me more down the line.

The Boys S3. Better than S2 imo. Loved S1. Highly recommend to watch this series if haven't already, and can do so.

Vigil S2. Was OK I guess, but it is uneccessary. Should've stuck with only one season. Has the same issues as S1.

@FuriousMachine first couple seasons of Clone Wars are a slog. Ngl I skipped a few episodes here and there using some online lists. There are some entertaining arcs throughout, but mostly later on. Series could have definitely been better executed. Some stuff really supplements Revenge of the Sith imo, without saying too much, at least for me.

Edit: on kind of a side note, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka have got to be two of the most tragic figures in SW. And I love them for that.

@zupertramp Yeah, there have been a few episodes where I've been looking more at my phone than the TV. Finding it hard to motivate me to go back in, especially as there is just so much other content just clamoring for my attention. I will try to get s3 going at one point, but might be a while

A bit late to the party, but I finished season 1 of Foundation on Apple TV+ last night and I absolutely loved it! When it was first announced I asked a friend who had read the books what he thought and he said he found them to be repetitive after a while, so my excitement for the show dropped significantly and when it arrived it wasn't really a priority. Glad I decided to give it a go after all.

Today Netflix drops The 3 Body Problem, the new sci-fi show from Benioff and Weiss of GoT fame/infamy, based on the fantastic books by Cixin Liu. Read them last year and they were truly epic in scope, so I'm excited to see if they nailed it with the show or not.

@FuriousMachine The first season of Foundation is excellent. Season 2 I did not find as good (there is a certain character introduced and felt they were used too much conveniently as a plot device). I thought Lee Pace was fantastic, but took me awhile to work who he is, as I've only seen him in stuff when he is full make-up! 😂

Despite the slight dip in Season 2, I am still intrigued by what happens next in Season 3.

@JohnnyShoulder I first encountered Pace in Halt and Catch Fire, where he was brilliant also. He works particularly well as brother Day, especially as one can see the subtle differences in the first brother Day we meet and the second one (and also kudos to Terrence Mann for portraying his second brother Dusk in line with Pace's first brother Day).
Excellent show so far!

@JohnnyShoulder Watched Lee Pace years ago in Pushing Daisies which was a truly odd show that got cancelled too early. Kept seeing him pop up in stuff and yeah, he’s a bit like Doug Jones in that he disappears into roles.

@nessisonett You certainly see plenty of him in Foundation!

@JohnnyShoulder Tbh not a bad motivator to watch it 😂

Finished bingeing 3 Body Problem on Netflix last night and as I consider the books to be among the best I read last year and, in the case of book two and three, one of the most epic and interesting sci-fi stories I've read in a long time, it is reasonable to say that expectations were high.'

Series creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss (of Game of Thrones fame/infamy) and Alexander Woo (True Blood) transplanted most of the action from China to England and got rid of most of the main protagonists from the novels, opting instead to "remix" them into a group of diverse, young scientists based in London (some claim that the group seems "unrealistically" diverse and serve just to tick off the diversity box, but I disagree; the group felt natural to me)

Despite these changes, I would say they pretty much hit it out of the park as an adaptation. They manage to convey all the concepts and storylines from the book in a deeply satisfying manner, so I was very, very happy with it.

The show seems divisive, though, so your mileage may vary. If you're a fan of sci-fi you should definitely give it a go. If you're a "book purist" you may find the changes detrimental, though.

I mentioned this earlier as a side note on another thread, but I've been slowly yet surely making my way through Babylon 5. I wanted to make a post about it since the most recent episode I've seen was The Coming of Shadows, which... if you know the show, you know why that would be an episode to make someone want to talk. It didn't win that Hugo award back in the day for no reason!

I'm a big, big fan of anything sci-fi, so this was always one of those shows in the backlog I needed to get to eventually. Hearing bad things about the first season always made it go down the list as I'm not someone who likes to suffer through some bad TV to "get to the good part", but when I picked it up I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, it took a bit to get used to the 90's acting and the visual effects again, but in the end it was fantastic. I actually had a great time with the first season and while there's definitely some lesser episodes, I never felt it was actually bad TV like how many seemed to have experienced it. Maybe it's better being to binge it nowadays or maybe I'm just more forgiving to the episodic structure of it, but either way, it made me feel stupid for waiting this long!

Now that I'm in the second season though, whew. I knew this show was going to get even better, but I wasn't quite prepared for that latest episode. And that's just the start of the upwards spiral from what I know! I'm very excited to continue and learn more about the world. I've become so addicted I've started listening to podcasts discussing the episodes, which is something I've never done for any specific show or game. It's crazy how big I've gotten into this after being in a TV rut comparatively to my earlier years. Clearly all I needed was just a big, epic, sci-fi space opera to get me going and I've finally found it here. Anyone else a big fan of this show? I know there's a large subset of Star Trek truthers on this forum, so I can't imagine there's no overlap here.

@Tjuz Interesting. I watched a few episodes back when it first came out, but could never get quite into it and I more or less forgot about it. You've convinced me to give it another go, so I'm definitely tracking this down now.
Hope you'll find some other fans to discuss it with in the meantime, though, because it may take a while for me to get there

@FuriousMachine Glad to hear I've convinced you to give it another shot! I hope you'll get along better with it this time around. If you care about viewing orders and the like, the first season had a big mess in terms of continuity and production delays resulting in a viewing order far different from what was intended. I personally followed the viewing order someone created based on what's best for the first season character arcs while also keeping continuity intact. Here's the link to that if you'd like to use it. It worked well for me and possibly made my experience with the first season better than some! Also, do note that the first season was preceded by a pilot episode a year earlier called "The Gathering". It's a TV movie for than anything, which is why some streaming places might not include it in the full show or place it as the first episode. It does have some cast changes compared to the show proper and some people say it's not a particularly good episode, but I would advise starting with it as I enjoyed it myself.

Depending on how quickly you go through the show (if you get into it at all), it might not be that hard to catch up to me! The episode I mentioned is only the ninth of the second season, so about 32 episodes in overall. I'm not a fast watcher... maybe a few episodes a week on average, so if you're a true binger I'm sure that'd sound like nothing to you, haha!