I am currently watching television programmes

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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby MinM » Wed Jul 20, 2016 7:51 am

Novem5er » Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:31 pm wrote:Yes, Game of Thrones; the season 6 finale was probably the best finale they've made so far!

And just finished Stranger Things. Good stuff; it wrapped up the major story lines, but also left room for a second season. The show creators have more material for a second season and are absolutely ready to go, but Netflix has not officially given them the green light. It's been pretty popular online and well-reviewed so I am sure it will be given the go.

@Variety

The Duffer brothers talk how they brought season 1 of #StrangerThings to a close http://bit.ly/29TuLAw
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Do you see the government or science conspiracy angle as a long-term mystery for the show?
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Rory » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:14 am

Watched through Stranger Things, thought it was great TV. They created a very immerse world, and one where many (though not all) of the characters were complex and believable. Deffo very referential to the kind of topics that made Jeff's blog.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Novem5er » Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:33 am

MinM » Wed Jul 20, 2016 7:51 am wrote:
Novem5er » Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:31 pm wrote:Yes, Game of Thrones; the season 6 finale was probably the best finale they've made so far!

And just finished Stranger Things. Good stuff; it wrapped up the major story lines, but also left room for a second season. The show creators have more material for a second season and are absolutely ready to go, but Netflix has not officially given them the green light. It's been pretty popular online and well-reviewed so I am sure it will be given the go.

@Variety

The Duffer brothers talk how they brought season 1 of #StrangerThings to a close http://bit.ly/29TuLAw


Do you see the government or science conspiracy angle as a long-term mystery for the show?


In one of the interviews I read with the Duffer Brothers (show creators), they said they have a 30 page document with details on the Upside Down world; the how's, the why's, and what lives there. They said they basically only scratched the surface with Season One. As far as the government/science conspiracy goes, I think it depends on what happened at the end of the show with Chief Hopper. Was an uneasy alliance formed? Or will there be future antagonism between our heroes and government forces? Not sure.

And, yes, this show did touch on a lot of things from Jeff's blog, perhaps only leaving out any occult ritualism. Still, much of it was there. Missing children? Check. Shadowy government agencies? Check. Psi-experiments? Check. Extra-dimensional contact? Check.

LOL come to think about it now, I'm not sure if Jeff's Blog was just a darker twist on E.T. this whole time :)
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jul 20, 2016 8:06 pm

DrEvil » Sat Jul 16, 2016 10:37 am wrote:
I also recently finished the Italian show 'Romanzo Criminale'. Very, very good. It's about a group of small-time crooks in Rome in the late 70's. They decide to join forces and take over Rome. Along the way they bump into the Mafia, fascists and the deep state. Aldo Mori, P2 and false flags are all in there.


Yo DrEvil -- where'd you catch Romanzo Criminale? Looks worthy of binge-watching (and also a means to freshen up my semi-rusty Italian...) I'll see if I can locate it on Netflix, but I presume no...

Stranger Things looks appealing as well, as others here have already indicated.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby divideandconquer » Fri Jul 22, 2016 8:44 am

PufPuf93 » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:23 pm wrote:I recently watched the first season - 10 episodes - of Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime and enjoyed the programs.

Mr. Robot is about a socially awkward and perhaps mentally ill young programmer on the job and compulsive hacker off the job who partakes a conspiracy derivative of V for Vendetta against the global economy.

The story is PKDish in tone with introspection and rapid changes in fact and perspective ubiquitous.

Most of the characters in Mr. Robot are "catching". Note that I bought Amazon Prime to watch PKD-derived Man in the High Castle. The production values of MITHC were great but the show was boring and there was not for me a single character who was "catching".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/

http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot


I had the same experience...sort of. I tried Amazon Prime for free and started to watch Man in the High Castle but I didn't like it so I binge-watched the first season of Mr. Robot and I really liked it.

Now, I'm watching season two on USA, and I'm not so sure anymore. The veracity of the narrative is called into question as we watch the main character's madness take him prisoner, or it could be his madness takes him out of prison...the only thing that's clear is that he is mad. Or, is he? Maybe, he's reacting normally to a world gone mad. Anyway, in the second season, the unreliable narrator puts pressure on the viewer to discern and decide his or her own version of what is true and what is not within the context of the story. Sound familiar?

Mr. Robot: Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy! Synthetic emotions in the form of pills, psychological warfare in the form of advertising, mind altering chemicals in the form of food, brainwashing seminars in the form of media, controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever expanding dumpster of the human condition.

We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, a kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long.
'I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are.' — St. Catherine of Genoa
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby guruilla » Fri Jul 22, 2016 8:05 pm

This is a stunning Brazilian TV show; I'm up to about the 10th episode & it just gets better & better. You have to stick with it as it takes a while to get used to the strange Grindhouse/surrealist style.

No trailers I can find with subtitles, but here's the intro.

It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Jul 26, 2016 12:52 pm

.

The Night Of.


Like Murder One, The Wire, and Making a Murderer, The Night Of mines our obsession with the minutiae behind the presentation and discernment of data, which is always inherently political, especially in the courtroom, particularly in an age in which information travels faster than light. Only a few comparatively innocent characters, such as Naz and his parents, Salim and Safar (Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan), initially fail to understand that “truth” has nothing to do with the outcome of his trial. The verdict is decided by how Naz looks, by who he knows, by the jury's predigested feelings on Muslims, by Andrea's reputation as a promiscuous trust-fund drug addict, and by a host of other head-spinning variables.

Adapting the British series Criminal Justice, [screenwriter Richard] Price displays a characteristically peerless understanding of cops-and-thugs quotidian, capturing the nuances that inform and embody how people on both sides of the criminal fence relate to one another. His dialogue has the tangy, lived-in snap that one associates with Price's novels and prior scripts, which deftly mix genre plotting with a deep-seated understanding of the realities of bureaucracies that exist to keep everyone in their place, operating by rules that no one entirely understands. The veteran actors deliver this dialogue with relish—the pleasure they take in their showmanship barely discernable from that of their characters, who are similar, if less publicized, show-people.

...it's the textural flourishes that distinguish The Night Of from more formulaic courtroom fare, such as the continuing emphasis that Zaillian and Price place on the notion of ritual as cultural currency. We frequently see intake officers in police stations and courts, witnessing the rapport they do or don't have with repeat offenders, or with foreigners they treat with contempt for displaying understandable ignorance to deliberately disorienting protocol. We often see Box or Stone exchanging embittered in-jokes with colleagues that convey a wealth of understanding of a world that gradually wears people down into indifferent, amoral cogs of figurative machines.


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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Nordic » Fri Jul 29, 2016 12:02 am

guruilla » Fri Jul 22, 2016 7:05 pm wrote:This is a stunning Brazilian TV show; I'm up to about the 10th episode & it just gets better & better. You have to stick with it as it takes a while to get used to the strange Grindhouse/surrealist style.

No trailers I can find with subtitles, but here's the intro.




This is a really cool show. I started watching it based on your rec. it's a lot of fun. Straight-faced darkly comic period melodrama, which turns meta at times and has (maybe) an unreliable narrator. Hitchcockian psychosexual overtones. I'm really enjoying it.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 02, 2016 3:24 pm

"The Night Of" is my favorite show nobody agrees with me on; HBO has a knack for that (See: True Detective Season 2).

"Preacher" was pretty exceptional. I've read the original a few times over and they made the (admirable, ballsy) decision to discard the source material almost altogether. The result is a bit of a hot mess; I feel like they nailed everything but the man character, Jesse Custer. The actor does a great job, although his accent is more NC/TN than TX -- he really gets fucked by the script, though. Neither Seth Rogan nor Even Goldberg are capable of writing Texas, especially it's rural evangelical culture. Their version of Custer -- former bank robber wracked by doubt and unsure of his own rebellion -- is a pale shadow of the rich contradictions Garth Ennis was playing on. I don't think they had faith that such a straightforward hero protagonist could work in the era of The Dark Knight and Dexter. Fortunately, they're doing amazing work in almost every other department. The finale really made clear the fact they wrote themselves into more than a few corners. It fairly creaked under its own weight.

It's definitely better than most TV, though; I'm just haunted by how much better it could have been. Glad they're finally starting the Road Trip to Kill God, which drove the entirety of Preacher's 75 issue streak.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 02, 2016 3:50 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 02, 2016 2:24 pm wrote:Their version of Custer -- former bank robber wracked by doubt and unsure of his own rebellion -- is a pale shadow of the rich contradictions Garth Ennis was playing on. I don't think they had faith that such a straightforward hero protagonist could work in the era of The Dark Knight and Dexter.


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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby DrEvil » Tue Aug 02, 2016 4:19 pm

Just watched the first two episodes of The Night Of and liking it so far. Also finished season 1 of Preacher which was great. Really hoping they go the full distance with Jesus' descendants next season, if nothing else just to see the christian right go apeshit over it.

For some lighter fare, watch Silicon Valley:
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Rory » Fri Aug 05, 2016 1:58 am

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 02, 2016 7:24 pm wrote:"The Night Of" is my favorite show nobody agrees with me on; HBO has a knack for that (See: True Detective Season 2).

"Preacher" was pretty exceptional. I've read 4 the era of The Dark Knight and Dexter. Fortunately, they're doing amazing work in almost every other department. The finale really made clear the fact they wrote themselves into more than a few corners. It fairly creaked under its own weight.


Liking what I've seen so far. Re your comment about accents: Cassidy claims Dublin but is more Cork/Limerick - it's a bit all over the Munster map but still very entertaining

Edit - talking to a friend (more knowledgeable about this part of the island), thinks the accent is a bit all over the place, but leans more Galway/Clare than Cork, or Dublin/Leinster.

An example of a good Galway accent is Brendan Gleeson in richly dark comedy, The Guard.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Aug 05, 2016 8:23 pm

.

Yes -- addicted the The Night Of. Annoyed I need to wait an entire week for the next episode (We can thank Netflix for that).

Been meaning to catch The Preacher for some time, now I have added incentive.

Silicon Valley is excellent, agreed. Also a fan of VEEP (neither are very RI-ish and are both relatively mainstream; I don't really watch TV otherwise so it's the closest I get to the 'norm')

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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 08, 2016 1:05 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: I am currently watching television programmes

Postby guruilla » Tue Aug 09, 2016 1:11 am



Three seasons, each with 6 parts. Different storylines each season but it all ties together in the third one (I've one episode left to go) which directly involves high level organized child sexual abuse, Operation Yewtree, Masons, etc. There's even a picture of two of the suspects with Jimmy Savile in ep. 5.; Savile is referred to simply as "that celebrity."

It's not great TV but it's mostly well written and acted and highly entertaining, and as far as I know the first time these areas have been directly addressed in a TV or film drama....
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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