• Civ7 is already available! Happy playing :).

What TV Shows are you watching? ι', a perfect I.

IIRC the early seasons were excellent and then it kinda dragged. It has been a while though.

So far, I'm 5 episodes in. Enjoying it still, especially the period dissonance with pregnant women knocking back cocktails and smoking cigarettes simutaneously.
 
Don't worry about it. Severance S2 is soon upon us. Three bloody years...! :lol:
I haven't watched it at all. So it is good?
 
"A good person will follow the rules. A great person will follow himself."
- Dr. Ricken Laszlo Hale, PhD; The You You Are

Bawdy Funk
Bouncy Swing
Buoyant Reggae

Defiant Jazz
Effusive Ska
Exalted Choral
Exciting Rap
Hootin’ Tootin’ Country
Lofty Orchestral
Maximized Rhythms
Playful Punk
Reckless Disco
Spooky Ambient
Tearful Emo
Thoughtful Grunge
Wholesome Big Band
Wistful Pipes



If you're wondering "WTH?", you're asking the right question. (These are references to season 1 of Severance.)

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Also, if you like romcoms, Nobody Wants This is great.


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And I'm on season 3 of my rewatch of The Expanse. :thumbsup:
 
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Year of the Shogun -

The 50 best TV shows of 2024: No 1 – Shōgun​

This masterpiece set in feudal Japan had the guts to confound every expectation going. The result was a tense, beautiful game of chess that was just about as perfect as television gets

We know that Hollywood loves a remake. But who could have predicted that a remake of Shōgun, of all things, would end up as the best thing to be shown on television all year? Maybe in terms of numbers it made sense. After all, it was a remake of a 1980 NBC miniseries which at the time garnered the second highest viewing figures in TV history. That, in turn, was based on a book by James Clavell that had shifted millions of copies. The popularity of Shōgun was never been in doubt.

But as a thing to remake? In 2024? Yeesh. In both previous forms, Shōgun was a story about a white saviour: Englishman John Blackthorne, who travels to Japan, “civilises” some savages, teaches them how to fight properly, repeatedly saves the life of an apparently very clumsy general and then has sex with the most beautiful woman in town. Clavell’s novel also took wild liberties with historical reality, ramping up the otherness of 1600s Japan in its attitudes to violence, sex and death. You don’t need to be told that none of this would have played well in today’s landscape.

That 2024’s Shōgun managed to sidestep all these misgivings so deftly is just one of the reasons why it stands above the rest of this year’s television. If nothing else, the decision to cast actors who speak in Japanese, with subtitles, was transformative. In 1980, this wasn’t the case – the characters were left unsubtitled, siloing their personalities and motivations so that we could concentrate more on the white guy – so being able to understand the entire cast was already a huge step up. And there were a lot of subtitles, too. The fact that FX was confident in its audience’s ability to spend much of each episode reading speaks volumes about its approach to reworking the source material.

There was also renewed interest in preserving some form of historical accuracy. When 1980’s Shōgun was shown in Japan, its crude approach made it immediately unpopular. But as soon as the current series was announced, producer and lead actor Hiroyuki Sanada went to great lengths to ensure that authenticity would be the watchword here, and sets, costumes and scripts were assembled under the watchful eyes of Japanese consultants.

To say that the effort paid off would be an enormous understatement, and it transformed Shōgun into a tense and beautiful game of chess. This time the focus was on Sanada’s Lord Toranaga, a strategist waiting in the shadows for an opportunity to definitively seize power from his enemies. The feints and machinations of his plans take up the bulk of the story, leaving Blackthorne to become something of a comic figure.

And that he was. For the most part, Cosmo Jarvis played Blackthorne with a hilariously empty bluster, as someone who was born with power and couldn’t yet understand that it had been taken from him. His delivery, at times reminiscent of Tom Hardy at his most unhinged, helped give this very serious show a lightness that the previous version wasn’t quite able to hit.


I suspect audiences realised Shōgun was a masterpiece at roughly the same time: during the penultimate episode, Crimson Sky. All throughout the series, Toranaga had mentioned “Crimson Sky” as his endgame, the moment when his plotting would come together. The assumption was that this would take the form of an all-out attack on his enemies, a visual spectacular to rival anything on Game of Thrones. The moment that we realised it was not going to be that – it would be something smaller and infinitely more heartbreaking – has to go down as one of the greatest seen on television this century. Speaking personally, it was also the moment I realised I’d been holding my breath for what felt like five minutes.

You could say the same for the finale, which swerved the expected violent climax to give us something more vague and poetic. It was a sign that Shōgun had the guts to confound every expectation going. What a show this was.

And yet it already feels like an artefact. Shōgun was commissioned in 2018, when expensive prestige television was still something people made. The fact that a second season is now in production – even though the story has already been told perfectly from start to finish – is a sign that studios favour the fat returns of a proven hit over fundamental artistry. But let’s worry about that when we need to. Shōgun has made stars of its cast. In showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, it has given us a pair of all-timers. The 10 episodes shown this year were just about as perfect as television gets. If nothing else, we still have that.
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Winner: Shōgun​

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While the race for this year’s winner was close, there is no other choice for the top slot than the impeccable, intricate and intriguing Shōgun. The show — which was originally meant to be a limited series but has since been renewed for Season 2 at FX and Hulu — is immediately gripping in its first episode, demanding the attention of the audience in ways few shows know how to do these days. We are immediately plunged into the political and religious conflict plaguing the honorable Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his loyalists. While characters like Toranaga, Blackhorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and Mariko (Anna Sawai) are quick to win our hearts, the secondary performances of Tadanobu Asano as the slippery Yabushige and Moeka Hoshi as the quietly devout Usami Fuji ensure Shōgun’s ensemble sings in every scene.

There is no down moment in the series. Even the quietest scenes scream their importance while the actors do their work. There is an authenticity to Shōgun that insists on your undivided attention. In fact, said authenticity was a stipulation of Sanada’s involvement in the series. Acting as a producer as well as actor on the show, Sanada was an integral part of the casting process and had a hand in many aspects of the series.

From bombastic explosions to sunken ships, quiet moments between conspirators and lovers, and the best use of the queen’s sacrifice play in recent history, Shōgun is undeniably the best show of 2024.

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While so many streamers sought to adapt works of fantasy to create the next Game of Thrones, its true successor brought viewers back to 17th-century Japan. Based on James Clavell’s bestselling novel of the same name, which was previously adapted into a miniseries in 1980, Shogun began with English sailor John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) inadvertently landing on the shores of Japan before becoming a valuable political pawn for Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada). From there, the series expanded its purview with the introduction of characters bound by duty and a sense of purpose—none more engrossing than Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), Blackthorne’s translator whose words cut deeper than any blade. Shogun can be appreciated on many fronts: for its political intrigue, historical detail, sweeping visuals, and dynamic battle scenes. By every measure, Shogun was a rousing success, becoming the most-viewed series in FX’s history, winning a record 18 Emmys, and scoring a surprise renewal for two more seasons. Hopefully, by pivoting from a miniseries to a three-season drama, Shogun won’t overstay its welcome. For now, though, there’s no dethroning Shogun as the best show of the year.
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1) Shōgun


Streaming on: Disney+

Showrunners: Justin Marks, Rachel Kondo
Starring: Hiroyuki Sanada, Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai

While the elevator pitch for this adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel might have been ‘Game Of Thrones in 17th century Japan’, the reality of this transportational 10-part series is nowhere near as cynical. A sonnet to Japan’s rich culture and deep beauty (despite being filmed entirely on location in Canada), Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks’ sweeping epic perfectly captures the clash of two vastly different worlds as English sailor John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is shipwrecked in Edo period Osaka and taken into the service of warlord Torunaga (a magnificent Hiroyuki Sanada). It may be a historical epic, but set against customs and culture so alien to modern eyes (an aide who misspeaks in episode one offers as penance his own life and that of his newborn son, eradicating his entire line to absolve the shame) that it almost feels like a fantasy.

And while Shōgun has no dragons, the show plays its own game of thrones with delicate subtlety, executing an intricate chess game of political manoeuvring and brinkmanship as Japan’s five regents position themselves to seize absolute power. Shōgun’s secret weapon, though, isn’t its elaborate plotting or action set-pieces, but the human drama at its core. Whether it’s Torunaga’s inscrutable manipulation, Yabushige’s (Tadanobu Asano) shameless attempts at self-advancement, the quiet tragedy of Fuji (Moeka Hoshi), or the grace, poise and unfathomable inner strength of Lady Mariko (a show-stealing Anna Sawai) the depth of human drama here is mesmerising from first episode to last. That the story will now expand beyond the source material into further seasons is testament to the show’s impact and huge appeal — all in spite of being 90% subtitled. Who says the ‘one-inch barrier’ can’t be hurdled?

1. Shōgun (Disney+)​

As a tense chess game between powerful warrior factions seeking control over a feudal realm, the comparisons with Game of Thrones are inevitable. But, boy, does Shōgun deliver on the brutal potential signposted in its opening episode – which delivers betrayals, beheadings, and even death by boiling. Inspired by real historical events from the climax of Japan’s ‘Warring States’ period (circa 1600), and otherwise based on James Clavell’s 1975 international bestselling novel (previously adapted as a mega-hit TV miniseries in 1980), Shōgun’s strength lies in its taut storytelling, rich production design, and nuanced performances from actors Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis – all of whom are Emmy-worthy. It’s a gripping, gut-churning historical drama – and probably the best thing you’ll see on television this year.

Length of binge: 9 hours 46 mins
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1 ‘Shōgun’​

Created by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks​

A revisiting of the James Clavell 1975 novel, which was first made into a 1980 miniseries, Shōgun captivated audiences with its first season, leading to second and third seasons already in development. It tells the story of two men, an English sailor and a powerful daimyo, who are both shipwrecked in Japan and meet with a skilled yet dishonered woman. Together, they navigate the tumultuous and dangerous political world.


As historical fiction, Shōgun is based on real-life characters from history, including navigator William Adams and feudal lord and once military ruler of Japan Tokugawa Ieyasu. Along with tremendous reviews, Shōgun became the first Japanese language series to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and it took home a total of 18 awards at the ceremony, setting a record for the most awarded single season of a show ever.
 
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Apple TV+ will be free internationally for three days this weekend: https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/apple-tv-plus-free-streaming-1236262179/

Apple is hoping those who don’t subscribe to Apple TV+ will ring in 2025 by binge-watching some of its original TV shows and movies — free for anyone with an Apple ID for three days.

The full Apple TV+ catalog will be free to stream to users worldwide the first weekend of the year (from Friday, Jan. 3, to Sunday, Jan. 5), on on any device where the streaming service is available. All you need is an Apple ID and password to sign in for the free two-day weekend promotional period.
 
I just started watching season 2 of Silo yesterday, alternating that with my rewatch of season 4 The Expanse. Some mild parallels between the two shows. Class struggle in a sci-fi setting. Juliette & Naomi are similar characters, spiritual daughters of Ellen Ripley.

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Apple TV+ will be free internationally for three days this weekend: https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/apple-tv-plus-free-streaming-1236262179/
I'm not sure what I would recommend, with only 3 days to do it, but I'll try anyway: Each season of Slow Horses is only 6 episodes, so you could watch whichever season you haven't seen yet in a weekend. It's a British spy show, but not grim, it has a sense of humor. In moments, you almost wonder if it's going for straight-up parody. If you like spy shows, it's one of the best.

btw, Apple TV+ is now available as an add-on to Prime Video (in the US, at any rate - as usual, if you're in a different country, these things can vary and you'll have to see for yourself). It's the same price, and you can do a 7-day free trial, and the Amazon UI is much better than the Apple TV+ UI. The Apple TV+ UI [stinks] and can [hug] my [flagpole]. I guess the only catch is that I think you have to be subscribed to Amazon Prime to use the myriad add-ons. I'm not sure you can subscribe to just one of the add-ons, without first getting the base subscription, and I don't think Apple TV+ would be worth $17 a month, by itself.
 
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I get Appletv+ free through Tmobile, but not sure if that works where you are.

There's a coupla good movies. I recommend Tetris. Silo is excellent. There is a great show with Brie Larson that you might like. Ugh forget the name
 
I get Appletv+ free through Tmobile, but not sure if that works where you are.

There's a coupla good movies. I recommend Tetris. Silo is excellent. There is a great show with Brie Larson that you might like. Ugh forget the name
Lessons in Chemistry. Yeah, that was good.

If anyone wants to actually pay for Apple TV+, or if you can get it for free, I could recommend a lot of their series. I think it's actually a must-have for fans of science fiction. For All Mankind is the only show I would recommend to someone who's already seen The Expanse and is looking for something else to fill that slot in their brain.
 
Silo season 2 reminded me of episode 508 of The Expanse, with Juliette in Silo 17 paralleling Naomi aboard the derelict Chetzemoka in some ways. Even the way they got there was similar. I love those types of survival stores, like The Martian. Also Project Hail Mary, now that I think about it, another book by Andy Weir, which is being made into a movie, with Ryan Gosling.
 
Finished up Day of the Jackal last night on Peacock. Really excellent show. IMO the ending seemed right. I hope they do more with it. Eddie Redmayne is fantastic as the Jackal. I'd seen the movie versions years ago so don't remember much, and never read the novel so not sure how close to the source it is, but that is of no mind as it is a great show regardless. (Redmayne and the show are already getting award nominations)

After finishing, I perused around Peacock casually and ran into a show I'd never heard of or seen on the service. It is listed as a Peacock Original but I suspect it is something they acquired recently, though the show is from 2020 (2 seasons). The show is called The Capture. It's a Brit show with 6 epis per season which is quite typical for Brit thrillers. It stars the beautiful...mmm...Holiday Grainger, has quite a few familiar Brit and even American faces (there's a reason). I checked the reviews on IMDB and they were excellent, so I watched a couple of epis. Really good cop..and maybe spy...thriller/conspiracy show and always great to see Holiday. (Speaking of Holiday I just noticed that the last season of CB Strike is out) I will definitely continue watching ..had to drag myself away to get to bed last night.
 
Finished up Day of the Jackal last night on Peacock. Really excellent show. IMO the ending seemed right. I hope they do more with it. Eddie Redmayne is fantastic as the Jackal. I'd seen the movie versions years ago so don't remember much, and never read the novel so not sure how close to the source it is, but that is of no mind as it is a great show regardless. (Redmayne and the show are already getting award nominations)

After finishing, I perused around Peacock casually and ran into a show I'd never heard of or seen on the service. It is listed as a Peacock Original but I suspect it is something they acquired recently, though the show is from 2020 (2 seasons). The show is called The Capture. It's a Brit show with 6 epis per season which is quite typical for Brit thrillers. It stars the beautiful...mmm...Holiday Grainger, has quite a few familiar Brit and even American faces (there's a reason). I checked the reviews on IMDB and they were excellent, so I watched a couple of epis. Really good cop..and maybe spy...thriller/conspiracy show and always great to see Holiday. (Speaking of Holiday I just noticed that the last season of CB Strike is out) I will definitely continue watching ..had to drag myself away to get to bed last night.
I note that C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart will be released in the US on January 23rd, on MAX.

 

The King of Network TV Wants Just 30 Minutes of Your Time​

For decades, Dick Wolf has dominated prime- time programming. Now, at 78, he has plans to conquer his next world: streaming.

Around 2010, Dick Wolf’s vast television empire was suddenly coming undone. First, NBC abruptly canceled his network mainstay, “Law & Order,” which had been on the air for two decades, a move that stunned Mr. Wolf’s small production company. A year later, two “Law & Order” spinoffs were unceremoniously shown the door. All that was left was “Law & Order: SVU,” a relatively slim slate for a company that prized multiple lines of revenue and that had made Mr. Wolf a very rich man. After all, Mr. Wolf has repeated a mantra for decades: “No show, no business.” “It was a little tight there for a minute,” said Peter Jankowski, Mr. Wolf’s longtime No. 2.

The TV industry was migrating away from a decades-old staple that had made Mr. Wolf a dominant figure in prime-time viewing: the close-ended “procedural.” That popular genre of programming presented a conflict and a tidy resolution — generally in a courtroom, hospital or police precinct — all within an hour’s time (including commercials). Instead, streaming outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu were beginning to take flight, prestige TV (“It’s not TV, it’s HBO”) was ascendant, and complex, quirky, serialized programming was all the rage. Farewell, “CSI” and “Law & Order”; hello, “The Crown” and “Big Little Lies.”

Well, that was then.
In recent years, as Hollywood studios have slashed budgets and bid adieu to the Peak TV era, Mr. Wolf’s style of programming is coming back into vogue. The evidence is everywhere: Year after year, repeats of years-old network standbys like “Criminal Minds,” “NCIS” or “Grey’s Anatomy” populate Nielsen’s most-watched streaming shows, even as the studios spend tens of millions on grittier, more cinematic fare. Older series like “Suits,” “Prison Break” or “Young Sheldon” became unexpected hits over the last year when they began streaming on Netflix. Vulture recently declared “Network TV Is Officially Back.”

Even Casey Bloys, the longtime head of HBO and Max, has programmed “The Pitt,” a network-style medical drama starring Noah Wyle from “ER” that debuts on Max on Thursday. One of the reasons? These shows are not expensive to make, and there are plenty of episodes to keep viewers clicking “play” — key ingredients for this new era in television and streaming. “You’re seeing a lot of people kind of rediscover what broadcast and basic cable had done so well, in terms of procedurals, cop shows, medical shows, things like that,” Mr. Bloys said late last year. Now, some 15 years after his career low point, Mr. Wolf has rebuilt his television business — and then some. At 78, he now has a staggering nine scripted shows running on several networks. NBC executives even brought “Law & Order” back to life more than a decade after the network canceled it. It is now in its 24th season.

Soon Mr. Wolf will have a 10th show, one that he believes has the potential to be a significant game changer, and could position his company well into the future: his first streaming show, a series about a police force in Long Beach, Calif., titled “On Call,” which debuts on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday.

The rest of the interesting article is here. It is quite long and paywalled.

 
Shogun bossed the Golden Globes, but Cristin Milioti (Don Sofia Falcone) snubbed (Haters!).


‘Nothing short of a spectacular blunder!’ All the shocks from the TV Golden Globes​

Sure, Shōgun deserved to win big. But there were some horrific snubs in last night’s television awards, from The Penguin to Slow Horses

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The Golden Globes are very much an awards ceremony of two halves. The movie side of things is always exciting, given that the Golden Globes function as a bellwether for the Oscars. As such, from the results of last night’s ceremony we can predict that Demi Moore and The Brutalist are likely to do very well come March. This is why 90% of the headlines you’ll read about the Golden Globes this morning will be about film.

But the Golden Globes also gives out awards to television programmes. This used to be exciting too, because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association used to be so corrupt it would just hand nominations to whoever gave its members the biggest present, as was the case when Emily in Paris landed a pair of nominations in 2021 after HFPA voters were flown to France and put up in opulent hotel rooms. In terms of recognising quality, the Golden Globes were all over the place, but at least there was plenty of room for upsets.

But now the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is no more. Last year it was replaced by an organisation called the Golden Globe Foundation, which cannot be bought or sold. As such, the Golden Globes is about one thing and one thing only: forensically discerning the greatest television shows and performances of the last year. What this means in real terms is that it’s essentially now a carbon copy of the Emmys.

Which makes things immensely difficult for me, because this is supposed to be a snubs and surprises article, and there aren’t any surprises because almost everyone who won an Emmy last year also won a Golden Globe.

As with the Emmys, Shōgun won the most awards of the night. The show itself won best drama, while Hiroyuki Sanada took home best actor, Anna Sawai won best actress and Tadanobu Asano won best supporting actor. Of these, only Asano comes as a real surprise, since he was merely nominated for an Emmy last year. Nevertheless, his win is a nice surprise, since his performance – at first repellent, then oddly lovable – became the heart of the show.

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Needless to say, it’s a good thing Shōgun won so many awards – a big, expensive, heavily subtitled historical drama like this proves that there is still room for prestigious television that isn’t designed to be background noise to a smartphone – but this article is meant to be about me being surprised about things, so it’s no good to me.

Or maybe I’m being dramatic. Look hard enough and there are still snubs to be found. For example, Asano was nominated against some amazing actors. He beat Jack Lowden, whose work on Slow Horses is miraculously able to walk the delicate line between Jack Bauer and Shaun of the Dead-era Simon Pegg. In a weaker year, Lowden would have romped home with a trophy.

Similarly, the work Harrison Ford does on Shrinking is equally revelatory. Worse still, had Ford won last night, it would have incredibly been his first major acting award for anything in his entire life. This feels like an accounting error. Hopefully the next and final season of Shrinking, where Ford’s character will further succumb to Parkinson’s disease, will rectify this historic wrong. And while we’re on this category, it’s worth pointing out that unlike the leading actor awards, the Golden Globes supporting actor categories aren’t sorted by genre. With this in mind, we can abandon the ‘Is The Bear a comedy?’ debate and recognise that Ebon Moss-Bachrach routinely gives the best performance on the show. What I’m trying to say is that everyone who was nominated for best supporting actor should have won.

That said, there was one snub last night that deserves to be singled out. did not win best actress for The Penguin. This is nothing short of a spectacular blunder. Yes, Jodie Foster – who won last night for True Detective: Night Country – turned in an excellent performance. But Cristin Milioti’s work on The Penguin carried the show like no other single performance on television over the last 12 months. Her standalone flashback episode Cent’Anni marked the moment where The Penguin went from tonally confused Sopranos cosplay to something genuinely remarkable, and almost all of that was down to the flashes of hurt and anger in Milioti’s eyes as she was subjected to humiliation after humiliation. Perhaps the best performance by anyone in anything all year, and the Golden Globes ignored her completely. Maybe the ceremony does still have the capacity to surprise after all.

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Iirc I only watched the first episode of Penguin.
I like the main actor, but wasn't interested in the show.
Seen most of Shogun I think - again lost interest due to the subject matter, but otherwise liked what I saw.
 
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