TV Shows What are you currently watching?

Finished Moon Knight the other day. Whilst still Marvel, it was different enough (note: "enough") to make me feel like I wasn't completely wasting the D+ subscription. A better theme and twist than the other pap that's been being churned out. Obi Wan I'm reserving judgement on until I've seen more than the first three, plus I hope the upcoming Ms Marvel also throws the established template away.

I suppose there's only so much you can do when the whole mission description is "good guy stops bad guy from world domination/destruction", which means it must come down to characterisation.

Something that might have flown under a lot of peoples' radar which we watched a couple of years back, so not sure if it's still on Netflix, is a German series called Dark. That was the screen equivalent of an unputdownable book. Thoroughly recommend.

 

Dark is amazing!!
I will add a seal of approval on that one

 

Picard season 2

I mean it was alright but predictable.

Spoiler: Story spoiler

I find time travel based stories a bit of a cop out on writing and a bit tedious.

As soon as Agnes met the Borg queen you knew exactly who was on the bridge going full tentacle.

The whole mummy complex story shouted out what happened from early on.

 

Stranger Things
Obi Wan
Hitler Circle Of Evil
Top Gear

 

Scifi tv had a big bump this month

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi
The Orville season 3
For All Mankind season 3

 

I watched The Missing about a month back on Netflix. Bloody fantastic. So I watched the second season shortly after, just as fantastic. Two weeks ago I found out about Baptiste, so watched that on NF also. Sadly season two isn't on there so I nicked it. Even more fantastic.

I now have a new hero.

 

We've only just realised that The Orville was back (no idea how we missed that one )
Also, Sandman (just watched the first episode so far, but it's keeping fairly tightly to the original storyline)
Umbrella Academy
Only Murders in the Building

We gave up with Obi Wan because of the lack of peril and the fact that we all know where the storyline ends up.

 

Sandman - Comics are alive! / 10
This is an almost perfect realization of the comic.

Next up - Star Wars: Andor (a 12-episode Rogue One prequel)


Season 3 of Star Trek: Lower Decks


and Marvel's She-Hulk.

Spoiler

Hope the "Dun Dun" stays for at least one episode!

 

Working through the latest Das Boot on Sky and will switch up to the new Westworld series when finished.

Oddly I've come to the exact opposite conclusion, every Marvel series that I've tried to watch on D+ has been dire dog do do.
If the latest NCIS & Orville series weren't on there I'd be very miffed indeed, as it is I won't be renewing.

 

As previously stated;

Barry - was a revelation
Only Murders in the Building - cheesy but some real zingers in the writing... not difficult to expect from these comedy powerhouses
Ms Marvel - watching with the daughter... fun
Stranger Things - Again... with daughter
Santa Clarita Diet - silly and funny in equal measures

Really need to finish Dexter (my sons namesake) and Westworld but started Deadwood again as only got to episode 6 due to cutting the cord on terrestrial TV/ Sky.

 

Another one that's just re-started after going quiet is "Resident Alien", based on the comic book

Alan Tudyk stars as "Harry Vanderspiegel" the doctor in a quiet Colorado town

Spoiler

He's really a crash-landed alien shapeshifter, sent to destroy humanity

 

Is that the newest season of Dexter or the original run?

 

Just started Scrubs.
Only watched random TV aired episodes here and there but now watching it start to finish.

Its still funny. Also why is the 4:3 ratio so comfy?

 

Sandman is good.

It's remarkably faithful to the comics.

However, it does call to mind the iconic phrase from media studies, "the medium is the message". The comics are so visually distinctive and stylized, such unique pieces of drawn art, and their visual flair ties so directly into the storytelling and themes, that some core ingredients of what makes Sandman Sandman is lost in translation. Live action is simply too real for dream states to ever work properly; metaphysical transitions, hallucinations and so on, don't work in live action no matter how much CGI you apply precisely because they're not grounded, not materialistic.

This problem looms over any future adaptation of Akira, for example. The art style allows objects and characters to behave and 'feel' in ways which live action + CGI cannot approach. Sin City came closest to solving this translation issue, and I count it as the most visually successful comic adaptation, but the live action properties still sacrifice a lot of the comics' essence: whatever makes the Sin City film stand out among films visually, the comics go much further, because they can.

Sandman is hamstrung by this problem. It works as a TV show but trying to explain to somebody who hasn't read the comics what is different, what is missing, is impossible. It's like trying to explain the sensation of colour to the congenitally blind. The medium has qualities of its own which don't survive transliteration into another medium. In the case of 300 or Ghost in the Shell, these qualities aren't central, and the experience comes across largely intact, but with Sandman there's so much surrealism, bizarre colour palettes, exaggerated artwork, weird framing and bo7ndary-breaking formatting used to lean into the magical realist themes of the story, and you can't do it on TV. Well, perhaps you can, but they didn't, and so it inevitably diminishes slightly from a media experience that is truly dreamlike in its structureless flow to just ordinary, good storytelling.

The encroachment of identity politics is inevitably tangible, with so many black female characters that it borders on comical if you care to keep count, as the modern hyperaware political climate has encouraged us to do. These are more noticeable because it is an adaptation, of course. But they don't encroach on the finished product at all: the casting is great and all the actors are great.

Since we cannot un-think our way backwards away from this hyperawareness of diversity casting (or lack thereof), the best we can hope for is that the casting is, in a sense, colourblind, and here it is. There is is no sycophantic compulsion to make all the bad characters white dudes and all the brave, heroic or defiant characters black women, as some writers have been encouraged to do in the past by cowering execs fearful of the online mob. Here, every character really seems to have been given to the best suited actor, and beyond the unavoidable impression of quota-targetting, there is no whiff of pandering or race-baiting.

This is more remarkable - the shows existence at all is more remarkable - given the politically exploitable nature of the story itself. In its original incarnation it is delightfully weird and old school, clearly written before political signalling extended to media. But viewed retrospectively it seems almost doomed to be wilfully misinterpreted or complained about by the bored online activist. A tall pale white male swoops across the world, controlling the minds and dreams of countless people, surveying and shaping their fears, hopes and ideas? Incendiary. They played with fire by making his right-hand man a subservient, meek black woman, and I wonder how many reactionaries got ecstatically upset at this tidbit alone before seeing the show proper.

But they dodge it. Somehow Lucien works better this way, the actress nailing the character's vibe so well that the comic's character seems comparatively weak. Ditto Rose Walker, race swapped to no great benefit or detriment and played perfectly by the chosen actress.

A key difference with Sandman (compared to other media tugged back and forth in the culture wars, like the new LotR show) is that race is so totally irrelevant to the original comic. The differences between ethnicities, nationalities and even time periods dwindle compared to the existential gulf between humans and the Endless characters, and this gulf is the proper focus of both comic and show. They dodge all crude political smears and manage to seem to pander to nobody, attract the ire of nobody, sidestepping the base and bureaucratic exercises of the modern cultural beancounters and focusing instead on the lofty, bizarre, metaphysical madness of the main story.

Dream himself is arguably the most diminished character compared to his comic equivalent. Its not their fault; the casting was perfect, better than I could've guessed. But the medium switch has robbed us. Dream's otherworldliness, his inhuman detachment and autism-like struggle to engage normally with people is part of what drove home the aforementioned gap between humans and Endless, part of what made the comic such a hit with lonely disaffected weirdo teens, and it was directly aided by the art style, wherein he has no visible eyes, is framed strangely without definite proportions and seemingly separate to the lighting and environment around him. These visual touches were not ported over, and instead the show's Dream just looks like a dude in a trenchcoat waiting for a bus. This breaks the metaphysical, metaphorical dimension of his character so severely that I found myself interested in every character except his.

Discussion of the S1 final episode follows.

Spoiler

The final episode sees the only incongruous pandering moment creep in. The casting is so good that we have forgotten about diversity quotas; the actors are so good that we have forgotten about such mundane details as race and gender, swept up in the metaphysical drama of an anthropomorphic figure battling his own creations and getting humans caught in the crossfire. But then, in the final scenes, we rejoin two characters, who coincidentally and unproblematically happen to be black women, and who happen to be two of Dream's creations who have been wilful and whose freedom and independence Dream's has curtailed. Dream sees the error of his ways and transforms one, freeing her and allowing her flourishing, then promises the other that he shall be a more benevolent and compassionate ruler from now on.

Is such a scene meant to be read as a colourblind character moment? Is the intersection of casting and dialogue and themes coincidental? Am I racist for cringing at what seems like a disingenuous scrap of meat thrown behind the wagon to keep the Twitter wolves busy?

This is how identity politics teaches us to see media, and I don't feel it's an improvement, even if the casting quotas do achieve the worthwhile goal of reducing racial prejudice in society (which I honestly think they probably do). Blade, Alien, Aliens and so on taught me to be colourblind from an early age, integrating the idea of ethnic diversity so subtly that my young brain didn't know it was happening. The ideas of a black superhero or a robust female lead were planted in my brain before Web 2.0 even existed. By contrast, modern political casting and writing has a cloying, clumsy, heavy-handed feel to it. If Blade was a cat burglar, 2022 TV and cinema is a home invasion. And the result is that audiences who have been exposed to the online fight club of social media can't discard the habit of seeing everything in these terms, second-guessing and triple guessing everything. The knowledge that everything is focus group crafted and cynically checked and balanced by execs according to some cold marketing formula for minimum friction cannot be un-learned. I hate myself for wondering, each time a character becomes gay, black or female in adaptation, whose arm was twisted to ensure it happened, whose agenda is being articulated, because it shouldn't matter, and it didn't used to matter, but now I involuntarily notice every time because the approach is so blunt.

And it's dumb, because Sandman is good, and particularly resistant to this concern, being a weird, wonderful queerfest to begin with. Whenever I watch an adaptation that race/sex/orientation-swaps half the characters I feel I've walked into a trap. If I notice it, it's because I'm a bigot. Who else would notice such things? And I must be, because I already noticed it. Checkmate.

 

New one... not sure if I'm convinced it needed another season but hey - it's not terrible. I'll get there in the end!

 

Recently finished this myself, and i have to say i actually really liked the show, episode one reeled me in, didnt ken a think about it, overall it was an easy watch, found a few of the episodes just really well done for drawing me in, especially the diner episode. Overall i thkn 7.5 / 10

 

Episode 6 is <chef's kiss>

 

Is that the one with Death? She's the highlight of the season, along with the immortal pub bloke.

 

Yup

 

NGL I cried a bit at one point in that episode. That existentialism.