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What TV Shows Are You Watching? Series VI - Programmes of Power

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Apple TV+ has indeed added the "Up Next" queue to its web-based streaming platform. :thumbsup:

What curious timing. Maybe reality is a simulation and I'm the only person who truly exists after all.

@Sommerswerd Ozark, such a great show! I can't wait for the new season 4 eps to drop so I can binge them
 
I don't mind pre-paying for the full year for something like Netflix, a service that has more or less proved itself to me already. Their UI is also not great, but it's a lot better

What is it with streaming service UI btw? There isn't one streaming service that has good UI. It's all mediocre or bad or in the case of apple really bad. Viewing options always seem limited in some way, even if the navigation is smooth and logical. I've gotten used to it, but if it was better I would be watching more... It's like they don't want me to watch too much or something

In some cases, it's because they want to steer viewers into certain things. Of course anything the streamer itself has produced will get top priority, because they get to keep all of the money. But the myriad business deals are so Byzantine, I wouldn't be surprised if some aspects of the licensing deals are related to how many views they get. I've noticed that Amazon - which puts movies up for sale and short-term rental, in addition to the stuff you get for 'free' with a subscription to the service - will put rental movies up for a reduced price if they're due to be available soon on another streaming platform. For a movie that normally rents for $6.99, it's better to get $1.99 out of you now if the movie is going to be available on Netflix or Hulu in two weeks, I guess.

Paste Magazine, 18 August 2021 - "Amazon Prime Video’s Library Is Now Genuinely Impossible to Browse"

I think it's mostly an intentional mess.
Because if you can't find what you were looking for, you go looking around. And you might watch something else instead. So this prolongs their usefulness.
I guess that's also why there's no separate list for stuff you have already watched. Because with the watched stuff all being mixed in, you might decide to re-watch some stuff, also potentially prolonging the use of the service.

Dark patterns, in some way.
 
I, for one, am interested in any & all possible explanations of its greatness. Hopefully on one of these days it'll be revealed to me, too. Not that I'm likely to start a movement around it, anyway.
It is not the same old same old costume drama.
 
Blazing through season 2 of For All Mankind. Through ep. 208, "And Here's to You"
Spoiler :

  • I hope this doesn't turn into a USA-v-USSR action movie. *yawn* The geopolitical stuff makes a good background for the character stuff, but I'm not actually interested in the geopolitical stuff.
  • The cosmonaut burning up inside his suit was the most horrifying onscreen death I've seen lately. Yuck.
  • I like Karen a lot more this season. I love that she's a stoner now, and hangs out with Molly's husband. Her decision to sell the bar seemed abrupt, but maybe that was the point. I did like that she slept with Danny. It was a bold choice, for her and for the writers.
  • I like that the old guard are getting back into space. After the 10-year time jump, I was worried that the characters who led season 1 would be relegated to supporting roles in season 2.
  • I was liking Margo less this season than last, but I like her budding relationship with the Russian engineer. I liked that she told him about the O-rings. irl, the o-rings were the cause of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, after Florida had an unexpected cold night the night before the launch (it was a record-low temp, according to Wikipedia).
  • I noted that the guy who played Danielle's husband in season 1 was Edwin Hodge, Aldis Hodge's older brother. I thought he looked familiar.
  • The Soviet shooting-down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 was a real event, btw, not invented for the show.

EDIT: btw, I noticed they're using "deep-fake" CGI to have historical figures saying things they didn't irl. In some cases, I think they might be using actual footage of press conferences out of context, or with key details removed, but in some cases, they're clearly using CGI. In the first season, they had an actor playing a tv news anchor that I thought was meant to be Walter Cronkite, but in the 2nd season they have Tom Brokaw, c. 1983, reporting on things that never happened. I did see Linda Park, from Star Trek: Enterprise, playing a news anchor.

EDIT 2:
Spoiler :
Also, it was a little abrupt when Ellen and Pam jumped right back into it, after 9 years. Thinking back on my exes, even the ones I kept a candle burning for, I can't imagine getting back together after 9 years, nvm so easily. I thought that strained credulity a little bit.
 
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Archive 81 has been officially canned and will not get a 2nd season, which I think makes season 1 un-recommendable. On the one hand, I feel bad for anyone whose series gets the axe before they've finished telling their story, but otoh, I think anyone who creates a season's worth of episodes that isn't complete is just being foolish now. I mean, come on. If you can't tell your story with the equivalent of a trilogy of feature films, you need to have a rethink (or you need to get a contract for multiple seasons up front, but good luck with that). See also: Jupiter's Legacy.
 
John Doe comes to mind as one of those series where nothing was explained before it got axed after the first season. Farscape is much sadder case when it ended while The Peacekeeper Wars offered an excellent recovery package but it was far from a prefered ending instead of a 5th season.

On another issue - The Virginian has unexpectedly found some new life on 7th season. This is now watchable for fun instead of a task.
 
John Doe comes to mind as one of those series where nothing was explained before it got axed after the first season.
Yeah, there were a ton of those shows in the 2000s. John Doe actually preceded Lost, but you could still put it in that same pile of shows that followed Lost. There was a show I really liked in 2011, the US remake of The Killing, that ended its first season on kind of a cliffhanger. People lost their minds online. Fan forums were ablaze. People were burning the showrunners in effigy. Thankfully, the show got a 2nd season and we got the resolution of the mystery. Today, though, I feel like anybody who writes a show without an ending is just telling me not to watch it. Archive 81 and Jupiter's Legacy were written to have a 2nd season without having a 2nd season, and now nobody should watch them. It'd be like handing someone half a book. That's the writers' fault.
 
Journeyman (2007) is another show along those lines. It starred Kevin McKidd (Rome - I stopped watching Grey's Anatomy long before he joined). One of the last network shows I watched as around this time I was converting to streaming, and had pretty much given up on mainstream TV, except streaming an occasional show or two after their run...like The Good Wife. Really enjoyable show with intriguing plot centered around a news reporter play by McKidd who randomly time travels (the periods though are fairly recent like no earlier than 20th century). He starts to learn that he is meant to affect the destiny of certain individuals at that particular time. (A little like Quantum Leap but not) Unfortunately, the show suffered from low ratings - and big Network's impatience and the growing dominance of reality tv - but definitely had a passionate following. (There was even a campaign at the time where fans sent in boxes of Rice-a-Roni to the network in attempts to save the San Francisco set show). Sadly, that did not work.

Interestingly, I don't know if this show is even available to stream anywhere. It aired only 13 episodes, with certainly a lot of unanswered questions. However, it is still worth watching the 13 episodes and the final scene of the last episode is quite nice.

I think this show woulda had a much better chance if it debuted on Nefiix, who's streaming service was just in its infancy around this time, and they'd not yet started the practice of saving promising but canceled shows.
 
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Moon Knight, ep 1 is so cryptic I can't even call it a pilot episode. It's like a 45-minute trailer, albeit one for a show that looks pretty darned cool. I'm reminded of the first 2 episodes of WandaVision, where I'm kind of left thinking "This is pretty cool, man. When does the actual show start?" After 1 episode of Moon Knight, I'm still really looking forward to watching Moon Knight when it premiers next week. :lol:

Spoiler :
Typically in these amnesia/dissociative identity stories, the first version of the character we're introduced to is the one we follow as our "POV" character, and the others are, well, the others. I really hope that's not the case here. I don't see how that can work. It'll be interesting to see how they pivot away from Steven as the main character, to Marc.

Fight Club (1999) was the first thing that leaped to mind, but that also reminded me of Primal Fear (1996), where the twist at the end - that our protagonist and POV character is the one who's not real - is deliberately jarring and unsettling. I don't really want Steven to be the main character, but making that switch without it being jarring and unsettling will be an interesting challenge for the writers. You can't have the audience mad at Marc for taking over from Steven. In Primal Fear, we're not supposed to identify with or like Roy, so that sense of whiplash and disconnect was intentional.

---

Journeyman (2007) is another show along those lines. It starred Kevin McKidd (Rome - I stopped watching Grey's Anatomy long before he joined).
I remembered last night that he was also in Trainspotting (1996).
 
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Moon Knight,
I thought this was gonna be a movie! I'd only seen bits of trailers, but seems to have a great cast that I primarily associate with movies. May have fork over some dinero for D+ for a bit. I know nothing about the character, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I remembered last night that he was also in Trainspotting (1996).

Whoa...totally do not remember that, but its been a long time since I've seen Trainspotting...

I dug around some more and could not find Journeyman on the interwebs. NBC and Peacock do not have it available to stream, and even Amazon Prime does not have it available to rent. It's not even on Youtube. Just completely forgotten.
 
For All Mankind, season 2 finale was great. Looking forward to season 3.

Spoiler :
Of course I'm bummed that Gordo and Trace are both gone, but it was a grand exit. They had 'better' deaths than any of the other characters who've been killed.

It did become, briefly, an action-movie shootout on the Moon, but the way they weaved together the strands of that confrontation worked well. That the handshake in space, intended as a photo op but taken seriously by the astronauts, would be the thing that prompts cooler heads to prevail could easily have been too saccharine, and yet it worked, somehow. I was bracing myself to get drenched in cheese, but I never felt like I did.

The sub-plots were hit-and-miss:
  • I liked Kelly and the scene with her and her half-sister was nice.
  • Aleida was really getting on my nerves, and I was hoping she'd just leave the show, but her scenes with Bill towards the end redeemed the character a little.
  • Pam simply leaving Ellen at the mere suggestion that she might pursue politics was an unsatisfying end to that storyline, which I wasn't fully on board with to begin with. Oh, well. Nobody bats 1.000.
  • Is Karen leaving Ed? Her whole mid-life crisis storyline is fascinating, but I feel like every moment of it has felt very sudden: Sleeping with the kid, selling the bar, now she's talking about traveling to India and going back to school. I like that she's suddenly become so impulsive, but I feel like the show hasn't acknowledged that she's suddenly become so impulsive. And now the time-jump is just going to skip over all of that. Speaking of which...
Another huge time-jump? I'm not sure how I feel about that. I guess we'll see.

Trivia: There really was a docking and handshake moment between an Apollo and a Soyuz, irl. And Sally Ride - one of the Pathfinder crew, with Ed - was a real astronaut, the first NASA woman in space. I heard her being called "Sally", but it didn't click until the finale, when I saw her nametag on her flight suit.
 
On Moon Knight, Severance, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Bourne Identity, Fight Club, and Primal Fea - spoilers, all.

Spoiler :
Thinking more about the amnesia/multiple personalities thing, I remembered The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) in which Geena Davis plays a Bourne-style super-agent who, after getting conked on the head, suffers amnesia and begins a whole new life. In her case, it was like she had both amnesia and multiple personalities. Her new persona, after suffering the head injury, is a wildly different person from her previous persona. Shades of Phineas Gage, a 19th-Century railroad worker whose whole personality changed after suffering a traumatic brain injury in an explosion. In the case of Geena Davis' character, though, she returns to her old self as the effects of the amnesia wear off. It was as if she literally forgot who she was, as a person. But by the end of the movie, she chooses to return to her new life, sort of integrating her two personalities back into one.

In Severance (2022), all of the characters have induced amnesia, and the versions of their characters who don't remember anything appear to be different people in some fundamental ways. It's left unclear, at least so far, how different their amnesiac personalities are from their normal personalities, how much of their personality is innate and not tied to what they do and don't remember. In The Long Kiss Goodnight, the amnesia makes Geena Davis a completely different woman. Severance is playing that coy, both suggesting they're very different and not so different, that the experiences the characters can't remember have an impact on them nevertheless.

In The Bourne Identity (2002), I kind of got the feeling that the Jason Bourne we meet from the beginning is a slightly different person from the government assassin he was before, although maybe the differences aren't quite as stark as in The Long Kiss Goodnight. He was alarmed by what he could do, and even by little habits and things he noticed about himself, as in the scene with Marie in the diner. And by the end of the movie, he hasn't reconciled with his previous persona, he's put that man behind him.

In Moon Knight, the amnesia and the DID are tied together. I think this can happen irl. I think people with DID aren't always aware of their "alternates" - an alternate personality may or may not be aware of the others, and may or may not have any memory of what the other did or experienced (I think in some cases, the whole purpose of the alternate is to wall off traumatic experiences - kind of like what Mark S deliberately did to himself in Severance). In Fight Club (1999), the twist is of course that The Narrator is aware of Tyler, but he thinks he's a whole separate person that he interacts with. In Primal Fear, the whole alternate personality thing is ultimately a ruse, but the way he plays it, one of his personas was aware of the other, but not vice-versa, and the psychologist that he has to "sneak past", so to speak - Frances McDormand's character - accepts that as perfectly plausible.

The conversation Steven has with Marc in the bathroom mirror in Moon Knight reminded me of Fight Club, with the two personalities interacting with one another as though they're totally separate people.
 
For fans of Lars Von Trier's funny, spooky and chilling 90s tv-series 'The Kingdom' (Riget), he is making the third and final season - The Kingdom: Exodus - right now. It is expected to be released in the Autumn/Winter of 2022.
 
Finished Agent Carter S2, still wondering why
Spoiler :
everyone suddenly seems to forget that they've left a highly dangerous graduate of obviously-a-precursor-to-the-Black-Widow-training-program running loose.

The romantic ending was also somewhat marred by the knowledge that Peggy's going to break up with DeSousa just as soon as Steve finishes his Infinity Wars time-travelling...
While waiting for the Marvel Netflix shows to (re)appear on Disney+ as promised (I got about this —>||<— close to finishing Punisher S2 before they all got pulled from Netflix.de at the end of February), I started Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — and having watched Stumptown (last year) and re-watched Firefly (finished last week), it was a pleasant surprise to see Cobie Sm(o)ulders, and Ron Glass guesting in Ep.1 (even if they never show up again?), and Sam Jackson in Ep.2.

Also started Clone Wars S1, because why not? Obi-Wan is still a couple of months away.

I suspect I/we will also be starting Moon Knight at some point soon.
 
Finished Agent Carter S2, still wondering why
Spoiler :
everyone suddenly seems to forget that they've left a highly dangerous graduate of obviously-a-precursor-to-the-Black-Widow-training-program running loose.

The romantic ending was also somewhat marred by the knowledge that Peggy's going to break up with DeSousa just as soon as Steve finishes his Infinity Wars time-travelling...
While waiting for the Marvel Netflix shows to (re)appear on Disney+ as promised (I got about this —>||<— close to finishing Punisher S2 before they all got pulled from Netflix.de at the end of February), I started Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — and having watched Stumptown (last year) and re-watched Firefly (finished last week), it was a pleasant surprise to see Cobie Sm(o)ulders, and Ron Glass guesting in Ep.1 (even if they never show up again?), and Sam Jackson in Ep.2.

Also started Clone Wars S1, because why not? Obi-Wan is still a couple of months away.

I suspect I/we will also be starting Moon Knight at some point soon.
Don't feel too bad about Sousa. He lands on his feet. I don't know what Smulders has going on now, but after watching Stumptown, I definitely wouldn't mind seeing more of Agent Hill. I know she's going to be in Secret Invasion, but I have no idea how big her part will be. If Disney wants to throw money around, I would watch a 5-ep Agent Hill show. Get the people who did the stunt choreography for Atomic Blonde and let Smulders/Hill put mother[lovers] heads through doors.

The Falcon & The Winter Soldier spoiler:
Spoiler :
If it's up to me, I'd have Maria Hill go after Sharon Carter.

EDIT: Hawkeye spoiler:
Spoiler :
Would it be gilding the lily to have Laura Barton/Linda Cardellini come out of retirement? Probably, but I'd do it anyway, f it. :lol:
 
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For fans of Lars Von Trier's funny, spooky and chilling 90s tv-series 'The Kingdom' (Riget), he is making the third and final season - The Kingdom: Exodus - right now. It is expected to be released in the Autumn/Winter of 2022.
I haven't seen that one, but I decided I was done with von Trier a while ago. After Dogville, I think. I keep glancing at Melancholia, because I like Dunst, but then I have to tell myself, "Don't do it; you know you're just gonna get mad." :lol: Anyway, your avatar reminded me about a podcast I heard recently - and I wish I could remember which podcast it was, maybe it'll come back to me - that contrasted Dogme 95 with X Filme. I definitely prefer Tykwer's style to von Trier's. The Dogme 95 thing came across to me as artificial, which I know was the opposite of what they intended. I try to resist the urge to call any artist pretentious, but Dogme 95 struck me as people trying too hard to create a restrictive structural framework, instead of just indulging their imaginations to make cool movies.

Speaking of Tykwer, after watching Munich: The Edge of War (2022) I looked up Liv Lisa Fries and saw that a 4th season of Babylon Berlin is expected this year. I still haven't caught up with season 3, though.
 
We Crashed on Apple. Two episodes in. Pretty good so far. Anne Hathaway is glorious and Adam Neuman quite the scammer.
 
I haven't seen that one, but I decided I was done with von Trier a while ago. After Dogville, I think. I keep glancing at Melancholia, because I like Dunst, but then I have to tell myself, "Don't do it; you know you're just gonna get mad." :lol: Anyway, your avatar reminded me about a podcast I heard recently - and I wish I could remember which podcast it was, maybe it'll come back to me - that contrasted Dogme 95 with X Filme. I definitely prefer Tykwer's style to von Trier's. The Dogme 95 thing came across to me as artificial, which I know was the opposite of what they intended. I try to resist the urge to call any artist pretentious, but Dogme 95 struck me as people trying too hard to create a restrictive structural framework, instead of just indulging their imaginations to make cool movies.

Speaking of Tykwer, after watching Munich: The Edge of War (2022) I looked up Liv Lisa Fries and saw that a 4th season of Babylon Berlin is expected this year. I still haven't caught up with season 3, though.

Well, I'll take them both. :lol:

Tykwer's Lola Rennt is intense; his adaption of Perfume is - imo - a mostly ignored or obscure masterpiece. I liked the ambitious Cloud Atlas too, although it has issues.
I haven't watched the third season of BB yet either, but I've 'got' it for whenever it happens. Just finished another German series called Der Palast/The Palace.

Kirsten Dunst is pretty good in Melancholia. It's... special. If nothing else, it's one of the finest portraits of depression I've seen.
 
Malditos nerds, really a bunch of streamers who play videogames, but it's now an official (cable) TV channel and damn if it isn't funny to watch the retro gaming section where they play SEGA Genesis games.
 
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