Well, pTerry died, so of course not. But altho I agree not as good as Season 1, which was a 10, that is a high hurdle. I liked S2, and thought it was great, Maybe a 8?
I binged that over the past couple of days. It was pretty good.
We are watching The Fall of the House of Usher, and we like it a lot. There are jump scares here and there, but hey it’s Halloween. Lots of fun trying to spot all the Poe references. It’s on Netflix. Six episodes, I believe.
We’re 5 episodes in, and I am enjoying the Victorian-era bits the best. Although it is stretching it to imagine the Hillinghead actor is old enough to be his daughter’s father. They almost look like they should be married, not of different generations.
We have started and given up on numerous series in the last couple of weeks. My husband is more impatient than I am. If it doesn’t grab him in the first episode he’s out. I usually will give it a couple of episodes.
Started and given up:
Homeland
The English - we’ve gone back to it a couple of times. Hubby seems to like it, I’m on the fence.
Ray Donovan
Tin Star
Boardwalk Empire - another one we watch once in a while.
I Know This Much is True
Big Little Lies
Deadwood
The Wire
After watching some of these for any length of time, it’s sometimes too much with the violence. I told my husband one day when he asked what we were going to watch, “I need to watch something not so harsh.” So we watched a Hallmark Christmas movie. My brain needed cleansing.
A few of those are really good, in the opinion of almost everyone, particularly Homeland, Big Little Lies, Deadwood and The Wire. I can understand being weary of violence and gunplay, though. Maybe try “Episodes” (comedy, very good), “Detectorists” (comedy, very good), old episodes of “Frasier” (which is laugh-out-loud funny)
Finished S3 of Lupin. Still love the characters, although some of the clever plots are so ridiculously convoluted that they rely on everyone else being an unobservant moron to work. I don’t want to spoil them for anyone but honestly, I have a lot of questions about the necessity of some of the plan parts. They seem to be driven by smugness more than anything else.
Anime report: Latest in the reincarnation line: My Unique Skill Makes Me OP, Even At Level 1. From the enjoyably complex one about the Slime we return to “please don’t think about this too much because this world makes no freaking sense” mode. In this world the only way to get food is to kill monsters, who drop vegetables, meat, money etc when they die; don’t ask me why because it’s never explained. The whole thing is pretty much just a PSA on “Don’t work yourself to death, remember that you can ask for help and help others, and make sure to recognize the hard work people do”, a message applied over and over with a metaphorical hammer the size of the enormous one the little girl character wields.
On the plus side the Perv Rating is very low: no underaged lusting, no boob jokes at all, and only one passing joke about someone selling their panties for spare cash. There is a bunny girl but she’s there as a running gag involving carrots and violence, and a few characters entertaining romantic interests in the main guy (possibly including another male character) but by anime standards it’s positively chaste.
It is very simple: many of the isekai are based on the idea of video games. It is the same reason many of them involve slimes.
And why so many revolve around “leveling up”
No, I get that. But as I said, “Kill monsters, get stuff” is fine for a game but as a basis for an economy in a narrative setting it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Unsurprisingly, slimes do feature heavily as sword fodder.
Speaking of which, I watched the first four episodes of the reboot. It’s… OK. Kelsey Grammer is as good as ever, but the supporting cast is not nearly on par with the original.
The writing ping-pongs between smart, witty dialogue and tired, predictable sitcom tropes. I’ll probably stick with it and hope it trends more to the former.
My favorite bit so far: Frasier is at the firehouse to cook dinner for his son and the other firefighters. One of them, “Moose,” is a stereotypical big meathead.
Moose: “Need any help? I’m pretty good with desserts. In fact, that’s why they call me ‘Moose.’”
Frasier: “You’re nicknamed ‘Mousse’… after the dessert?”
Moose: “Yeah!”
Frasier: “Take that, Occam’s Razor!”
A really funny and clever line, in the same episode as a ridiculously stupid “Three’s Company”-type subplot about the firefighters mistaking Frasier’s adult nephew for a starving orphan.
So… inconsistent.
I have got 7 episodes into Star Trek: Picard s2, and the only thing keeping me going now is the promise of massive improvement for s3. The first couple of episodes were actually pretty damn good, but since we have arrived on Earth 2024, the series has just got more and more boring. There is a complete charisma vacuum about the show which even John de Lancie can’t save and the plot has been stretched so thinly.
I just binged BODIES on Netflix. I usually avoid time travel stories, but I enjoyed this one.
Oh I know, some of those were very popular. We’ll probably continue with Boardwalk and at some point I’ll watch Big Little Lies on my own.
I’ve tried Episodes twice and couldn’t get into it. I loved Detectorists! We do watch old sitcoms just not in the binging style. Frasier, The Office, Raymond, Seinfeld, King of Queens, and Parks & Rec are always ones we’ll watch an episode or two when we come across them as we’re clicking around the cable channels.
Half way through Killer Coaster; a Comedy-Suspense Thriller series on Prime about carnies in a French funfair in the 1990s. Very funny with some wonderfully garish fashion choices and some humor, I suspect, based on ethnic stereotypes that mostly go over the head of this non-European. Lots of not-very-smart characters making very bad decisions.
Season 2 of Picard is some of the worst Trek I’ve ever seen. We didn’t even finish it (and didn’t need to.) Season 3 of Picard is some of the best. YMMV.
Thanks for those that suggested Balthazar, it’s a fun watch, although it shows how little French I can understand. They talk a little faster than my high school French teacher. Love the little quirk how Balthazar can speak to the dead when nobody else is around. Great chemistry beteen him and Helene Bach. I like that they aren’t shy about showing a little gore and autopsy scenes.
The Sinner (Netflix) Apparently this was a series on the USA Network 2017-2021, and garnered some award nominations…but I have absolutely no recollection of it. Bill Pullman is a police detective; in the first season he’s investigating why a woman (Jessica Biel) stabs a complete stranger to death on a public beach. It involves amnesia and repressed memories – which I personally think are mostly hogwash but I always enjoy mysteries with that particular plot device.
For some reason they made our hero a masochist, so we have occasional scenes where he visits his diner waitress friend for some physical abuse.
Just reading reviews on IMDB and apparently the first 2 seasons are good but it quickly deteriorated. I’m only mostly through season 1.
I watched Season 1 and I found it kind of hokey with all of the subconscious mumbo-jumbo. It’s one thing for Wilkie Collins to use that kind of plot device in “The Moonstone” circa 1868, but I think science has moved on since then.
Finished Billions, which basically ended on a convoluted heist note. Sporting metaphors aside, there were a certain number of inconsistent actions and behaviors by characters needed to set up the ending, but nonetheless it was sufficiently satisfying to have it all wrapped up neatly.
Granting a week before going open-spoiler. Billions ended in a poopily perfunctory manner. I’m not demanding fan service: we’ll be seeing plenty of that in the future as AI churns out scripts determined by algorithms. But the ending had a palpable “let’s pat ourselves on the back and get out of here” feel.
Succession was held in higher esteem than Billions, targeting as it did the Murdochs, also with Brian Cox bringing “King Lear” cred, Jeremy Strong establishing himself as our premier method actor, etc. But Succession’s business plots weren’t that much more sophisticated than those in standard 1990’s daytime soaps: “Starvos is leveraging a hostile takover! Luckily the full board is here tonight at this champagne and shoulder pad benefit auction.” Billions, to its credit, went a little more into the actual nitty gritty of stock-trading. But yes, the rapid fire pop-culture quips were annoying and the celebrity cameos tiresome (I kept waiting for a scene with Bobby and Wags scaling a Bat-rope and Sammy Davis Jr. opening a window).
However, like Succession, Billions relied on the cynicism of our era as a cop-out for anyone seeing any real consequences. Chuck has his “impossible to copy” (huh?) thumb drive returned, and the farmer with the sick kid who testified against Dollar Bill, and the professor with his self-healing cement still get screwed. Axe is back, and if he should ever be disappointed biting into a Hostess Ho-Ho, he’s free to destroy the manufacturer who cut corners so as to enjoy a fraction of the luxurious lifestyle Axe enjoys. Taylor finally get the freedom and resources to realize an eco-friendly/fair-trade investment shop (okay, maybe the cynicism of the age should prevail in this instance, because it’s a dead cert that their shop will have to choose between going under or becoming a greenwashing laundry for big, dirty corporations). Prince doesn’t get to literally blow up the world, so I guess that’s some limitation imposed on the investor class.
But nonetheless, Taylor and Bobby, and even Chuck perhaps are geniuses. Geniuses remain as the supposed saviors of 21st C. humanity.
On second thought, maybe Succession was by far the superior. We’re all a bunch of idiots, with the more egotistical idiots rising to the top; and our best hope is that only a minority are sex pests like Roman.