Westworld season >1
While watching season 1 as it was airing a friend bright up the two time periods theory and that the the Man in Black and William are the same.
I said I didn't think it was true because It would remove the narrative anchor they had built the show around. There wouldn't be any thing to keep audiences emotionally invested in the plots that are going on.
It turns out we were both right.
Oh yeah. One of the biggest falls from grace in TV imo.
Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery. There were a lot of good ideas, but the execution wasn’t there overall.
Picard lost me the moment they had a scene where a bunch of down on their luck blue collar workers were complaining about shitty rations and being forced to work on a holiday.
WHAT PART OF POST-SCARCITY LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNIST UTOPIA DID YOU INBRED FUCKING DOGSHIT FOR BRAINS MORONS NOT GRASP?
I swear to god, Picard is a Star Trek show written by people who have apparently never watched a single episode of Star Trek in their entire lives. Unbelievably poor grasp of the basic concepts of the setting, and of Roddenberry's core thesis. And it's not like you can't make Star Trek grimy if you want to. Deep Space Nine did it frequently, playing with concepts of liberty vs security and so on. But the writers of Picard were just too lazy to engage with the core ideas of the setting and instead just wrote a bunch of generic, broadly science fiction filler and then slapped the Star Trek logo on it.
Discovery I feel more kindly towards, even though it was also terrible. It at least makes some kind of an effort to be Star Trek, which automatically puts it above Picard, but god that is such a low bar. It still has the same basic problem of being written by people who seem to be deeply embarassed about the idea of writing Star Trek. They had to go in and try to retcon in a bunch of crazy tech, rewrite huge parts of the setting, throw out everything about the Klingons and start from scratch, all out of some kind of weird hatred for the universe in which they were telling stories. Also, dear god it was just incredibly slow and dull. Some of the worse pacing I've ever seen.
Thank the lord almighty for Strange New Worlds. If you're soured on all the new Trek and skipped it because you were worried about it being more of the same, holy fucking shit go watch it now! Strange New Worlds is perfect. It's a Star Trek show written by people who absolutely adore Star Trek. It's a love letter - a love anthem - to the original series. And it manages to somehow find an unearthly balance between being one of the most campy and fun takes on Star Trek, and one of the darkest and scariest. There's a musical episode, and there's an episode that's basically "What if the plot of Aliens happened on the Enterprise?" and somehow both of them fit in the same show perfectly. Also, THE KLINGONS ARE FUN AGAIN! They're loud and boisterous and drink blood wine and yell "Qapla" while they headbutt each other and it's fucking great.
SNW is the breath of fresh air that restored my faith in the franchise.
I could have written your post word for word. That first season of Discovery with that crazy Klingon bullshit was so fucking ponderous. I never was a big fan of Klingons, and always felt they leaned a bit too heavy on them, but this was next level terrible. I forced myself through the first 2 seasons, and bailed a couple of episodes into the 3rd, and never looked back. Truly awful and boring.
I'm on the fence with Picard, but I have no desire to ever watch it again. It's not among their best, coming in somewhere below Enterprise, and above Discovery.
Strange New Worlds is the real deal. Among the best of them all, like DS9 and NG great. I even love Voyager. SNW deserves to be in their company.
STD was just garbage, too much pushing a METOoMOVEMENT, by S4, they decided that men were no longer needed in the LEAD casts. Picard definitely wouldve better if not for the low energy acting of the main characther, and the rest of the cast, plus writing too.
They both (Picard more than Discovery) used a nostalgia checkpoint to connect to previous media, rather than expanding those themes in meaningful ways.
What good ideas? There were none.
Idk what it is about modern TV but it's like it's like everything made in the Streaming Era is like this. I have trouble putting my finger on it. Even good shows coming out right now like White Lotus seem like they're a bit dumbed down compared to "prestige television" of the past. It's also like the later seasons of Game of Thrones vs. the early seasons. I know a lot of that is running out of source material and having to rely on their own (bad) creativity but I do wonder if part of it is something to do with the format of streaming or maybe even the impact social media and smart phones have had on our attention spans. It's like shows are designed with the fact that you're going to be watching with a phone in your hand scrolling Instagram and only half paying attention in mind. Even Better Call Saul vs. Breaking Bad, it's like everything is a comedy, nothing can be too serious, and everything is just a bit dumber. Idk.
Look at the number of producers. Everyone wants to give their input, which is usually the exact opposite of someone else's.
I want them to dump all the current mythology and go back to the basic concept; 500 humans and aliens on a ship designed for research and military purposes. No Vulcans, or Klingons. No six foot tall aliens with five fingers and funny ears. Aliens that look alien.
Halo. Wow, did that suck
Rings of Power.
I am going to caveat this with I know it has some fans, and if you enjoy this series more power to you, but I fucking hate it and that's also fine.
I think it just twists the lore while being badly written regardless of source material, and often looking incredibly low rent despite having a stupidly high budget, while the cast is patchy, its like they saw the Hobbit films and decided that was moving in the right direction while LotR got it totally wrong. I think its sheer stubbornness that's keeping this show running despite its return on views vs. budget at this point.
Halo.
Its completely out of character for Master Chief to face reveal and had a sex scene, neither is the worst thing with this show either. I get that actors do not like non face roles, see Pedro with Mandalorian, but it should be deal breaker for casting for such roles.
Outside the show, it's not even known whether Spartan IIs have skin below the neck, let alone genitals. Things from Halo are just shoehorned into an unrelated story, which is thought by some to have started out as an adaptation of Mass Effect. Commander Shepherd definitely has skin and genitals in the games, and isn't afraid to use them.
"I'm commander shepard, and halo is my favourite tv show on the citadel."
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if that turned out to be the case.
Halo was something that shouldn't have happened, the writers admitted they wanted their own story unrelated to Halo.
They already have enough clout to be put in charge of a decent budget tv show, so their idea must have sucked something terrible if they can't get it made without slapping a license onto it
Just make the damn thing you paid to make not your shitty show you can't get anybody else to buy.
In a slight defense of Rings of Power, I don't think the lore "problems" are really a big deal. It had to not follow the Silmarillion for legal reasons. As someone who hasn't digested that "book" the lore parts seem ok. The problem is most the writing still sucks and has many problems that are more substantial than that's not what Tolkien said in the book that can't be named. Also the weirdly cheap appearance is totally accurate. I think there's also a lot of merit to the rumors much of the writing and props were originally intended for a dragon age adaptation.
Lore is complicated as if you aren't familiar with the letters, silmarillion and appendices to an insane degree, some things that look right are wrong, and some things that look wrong are actually right depending on what you count in cannon.
I think this sums it up for me as the only bits actuallyin the lore:
The existence of characters named Galadriel, Elrond, Durin, Sauron, Isildur, Elendil, Celebrimbor, some of the others
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The existence of Numenor and Middle-Earth and some of the places in it
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The existence of rings of power
The armour just highlights what I mean with its lazy approach to just about everything.
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American Gods
Oof. Yeah, that one really hits. Great start, then creative differences collapsed the whole endeavour and it just went to shit.
And it's not like I can even recommend the book anymore given, well... y'know.
Just a fucking mountain of disappointments on disappointments.
There was a time where content wasn’t so abundant, people watch TV on the TV and marketing mattered a bit more. Back then you didn’t have 2137 sci-fi shows to choose from so you watched what you could.
Take Terra Nova. Released late 2011, Spielberg as an executive producer. Dystopian future, time travel to the prehistoric era, hint some dinosaurs. Hype. It was cancelled almost immediately after the first season due to how disappointing it was.
I didn't consider it disappointing, I considered it a decent starting point for better seasons.
I was born before we had a 5 minute tiktok attention span and if we weren't blown away by the first episode that meant everything was obviously garbage.
Watch TNG season 1, one of the worst seasons of anything ever.
Lots of good series have a terrible first season. I don’t think this one was salvageable due to how shallow everything was though. It wasn’t bad necessarily, it was extremely mediocre with most of the world building consisting of adding mysteries writers didn’t know answers to. Most were just indifferent to it in the end, which something beyond disappointment.
NUTREK ended up being worst, from s1-season whatever, almost all of them were bad more or less the same plot as each other, did you notice, how kurtzman made them all had a big bad at the end, with no resolution in the next season, just dropped it because it was such a bad plot. SNW could be better with good actors. the animated series seems to rectify this a little bit.
True Blood. There was a lot of advertising for it before it aired and at the time I thought HBO could do no wrong. It was just too goofy. Most characters were some kind of supernatural being and when it's that saturated, no character seems that special anymore.
Great intro though. That song and the intro visuals were top notch. But yeah, that show got real goofy real fast.
The Watch, Terry Pratchett "inspired" show. It disappointed me long before it even aired and made me angrily sad when it did.
It was very clear that they had no respect for the source material and just wanted to make their own show but this was the only way it was getting funded. Then to double down and insult the fan base was just beyond dumb.
Stargate Universe
everyone agreed SEASON 1 was bad, season 2 it was getting interested but it was cancelled long before the season began. apparently s3 would have much more of the mysterious aliens from the planet builders in it.
You didn't like As The Universe Turns?
First episode got me hopeful, but the series dragged on. Forcing us to watch little webclips for lore and story bothered me.
When they they first introduced the stones I thought neet callback and good way to keep them from being completely isolated. By the third time they pulled them out I was thinking not this shit again.
I only watched about three episodes before I gave up on it.
It had a bad start, but it became really good.
Maybe, if they ever repeat it, I'll give it another go.
The Netflix live-action Avatar remake.
The animated show is such a materpiece, but it's still a kids show. There was potential to flesh out some of the more adult themes (war, romance) the show touches on in a way a kids show couldn't. But other than that, they should have stuck very, very close to the original show.
Well, maybe I wasn't "highly excited", I was pretty sure they would screw it up.
But what I couldn't have expected was just how badly they would screw it up. It took less then 5 minutes of watching to realise that the show will be bad (as they open with a prime example of "tell, don't show") and it really just went downhill from there. I think I dropped it on episode 4 and it took a lot of forcing myself to even get that far.
What's really surprising is how once piece ended up being pretty good, after all the garbage adaptations.
Oda the writer of the comic had a lot of control and forced them to make changes and do reshoots.
https://screenrant.com/one-piece-netflix-show-reshoots-creator-explained/
I don't follow anime at all, but I loved the live action One Piece.
It's pretty amazing how out of touch Netflix can be
I have never been excited for a TV show, because I have never known about one before it was aired. Every show I've ever discovered was already on the air when I discovered it. I'm usually way behind the times.
the news
I got to watch the movie 'Network" go from cutting edge satire to staid docudrama in real time.
Under The Dome.
It was an epic Stephen King novel, with a great story line, and a huge cast of interesting characters, including Big Jim Rennie, one of his best villains. King's output is notoriously inconsistent, but occasionally he is really great, and this was one of those times.
I was so excited that they were bringing it out as a series, since it could never be captured in a single movie, or even a trilogy. Then they announced that Big Jim would be played by Dean Norris (Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad), which was PERFECT casting.
The show started well, with the dropping of The Dome rendered perfectly. Then it went off the rails so quickly that by the third episode, I was enormously pissed off. They i troduced weird new supernatural elements. I assume they were supernatural, because I stopped watching. The story was good enough, they didn't need some hack network writer "fixing" it.
A huge lost opportunity. I hope someone takes another swing at it someday.
castlevania nocturne, it was supposed to be continuation of the lore of the 1st series, but its pretty bad in many respects. it does try to use nostalgia, but not in the correct plot format. although the 3rd season, if there is one would be better. basically the main antagonists dint capture the audience like the 1st series, in the first 2 seasons.
heard ROP was terrible and extremely expensive, it made sense it cant capture the magic of lotr trilogy. invincible, everyone noticed the animation degraded each season, perhaps funding, and then the amount of time between seasons(mid-season) made the audience rather read the comics instead.
@Skavau SUITS LA and thank you for asking!
There is a wanna be Harvey, several wanna be Donnas, no mike, no Louis Litt and definitely no woman badass enough to give Gina Torres any competition. I am 8 episodes in and don't give a crap about any of the characters and no memorable courtroom scenes to speak of. Total Meh
The more I watch Suits LA, the more I enjoy it. Yes, a lot of the characters are just copies of the main cast, but if you can ignore that it's fun enough for a turn your brain off show.
Willow, a show so bad Disney pulled it from streaming. I felt really bad for the actors. They were all quite good, just rubbish writing. It felt like someone dusted off some terrible generic YA script and doctored it up to be "willow".
The anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s uzumaki. It’s a manga that I love and have read it many times, when I heard that there was an anime adaptation that was sticking with the art style, I was interested. When I saw the trailer and heard Colin Stetson’s bizarre music, I knew that this would be amazing. Time passed and I checked on its release every month. It was delayed again and again but I had patience, thinking that they just wanted to get it right. It finally releases and it was amazing, the first episode anyway. When episode 2 drops I can hardly contain my excitement. Yet, something is off with it, I try to ignore it. Third episode, same thing. Last episode, had some improvements but still wasn’t the same quality as the first. I go online and see that people are divided over it, with a very vocal majority saying that something is off. I felt deflated and didn’t join in on the discussions. Time passed and I forgot about it until recently when I saw an article where one of the production staff said that there was some pressure from higher ups and they chose to release what they had or it was gonna get cancelled.
Game of Thrones, but mostly because it was so good at the start. Controversially I think the series went to shit in Season 5, or even season 4, basically as soon as they started seriously deviating from the books. It's extremely clear what is original for the show and what is from GRRM because everything they came up with outside of the book material is stupid as shit and nobody's actions or motivations make any sense.
I don't think I finished season 4. It showed great promise, but I realised that in those 4 seasons nothing actually happened.
- Fireproof women walks through desert.
- Men in furs sit in snow.
- lots of people I don't really know get murdered at a wedding.
- Someone attacks a city, but fails.
season 3 of yellowjackets. meh. where’d that special thing go?
I feel the same! Season one was so good. The second I didn't really like but it was still ok. This season feels like it's gone off the rails. But I love Misty and Walter
The consultant. Started off interesting, but yeah..
