I finished What We Do in the Shadows. I thought it was a delightful season with some truly bizarre moments.
I started Only Murders in the Building Season 3. Great opening.
“She seems pretty vanilla, but we have a few minutes, let’s give her a try.”
In walks Meryl Streep.
That alone was worth it. I’m excited to see the rest of the season.
Back in October I complained that Party Down was no longer available on Hulu in the US; now you have subscribe to Starz to watch it. Well, they had a Cyber Monday deal where you could subscribe for 99 cents per month for 6 months. I wasn’t willing to pay full price for Starz just to watch one show, but I am totally fine with paying 99 cents for it. So I signed up for that promotional deal with the intent to watch Party Down and then cancel. I’ve only seen the first episode so far, but it was really smart and funny.
I watched season 1 of Invincible. I don’t know that I’ll look at 2. It just got so grim and cheerless. Am I mistaken?
Not really. It’s a pretty grim show, like The Boys. It’s not a comedy, for sure. But it’s still a good show, approached as a drama and a character driven series.
In season 2, it gets a little better, Atom Eve is a traditional caring supe, she has her own epi- with of course a dark past unknown to her.
At least the boy- Invincible wants to do good.
I have a question not worth a thread and perhaps you guys can help me out.
How close is Gen V to The Boys in style and not substance? I loved The Boys because it was wall to wall social commentary and the super powers were almost a metaphor for how our society lets athletes, political officials or movie stars act with impunity.
But I don’t need another Heroes, or The Umbrella Academy retread.
Is Gen V worth a shot for a man in his 40’s that isn’t interested in super heroes and who they’re dating?
In my view, Gen V takes on popularity in school/society, as well as how people are used by those in power. It really delves into the “marketability” of heroes, as well as how having powers can really mess you up psychologically. Whether that’s for you-I can’t say.
Definitely worth watching, although it did lose me slightly in the middle where it went a tiny bit teen drama with some dodgy acting thrown in for good measure. Overall it was good though, if not quite at The Boys’ standard. The last couple of episodes were terrific and I was left wanting more.
Slow Horses is back for season three.
I just started watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+. The cast includes Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt and is set in a world where Kaiju, like Godzilla, are real. There have been only 3 episodes so far, but I am enjoying it.
We found a couple of vintage sixties sitcomes on the Roku Channel that we wanted to get into. I remember watching both as a kid, and now we’re about halfway through the first season on each.
The Addams Family. Well. I don’t think I’ve seen anything of this one since it was currently running. But I remembered the premise, the characters, the setting, the look and feel very well. What I did not recall was anything at all about any of the stories, and I think I know why. For the most part, what there is of a story in any given episode is merely a pretext to put some uncomprehending normie in contact with the family and then have the normie get increasingly freaked out and eventually run screaming out of the house, leaving Gomez and Morticia shrugging and wondering what the problem was. I guess this explains why there were only two seasons. It’s probably impossible to keep a show going on such a thin formula, and it’s probably to the writers’ credit that they were able to come up with enough variations on the theme to keep it going that long. It surprises me to see how little screen time Pugsley and Wednesday got, at least through the episodes we’ve seen so far.
If that sounds negative, it’s not, really. Set your expectations accordingly, and it’s amusing.
Green Acres. Oh yeah. This one is a masterpiece of absurdity. Seriously. It’s a work of genius. I bought DVDs of the first three seasons whatever number of years ago (the last three weren’t yet available) and watched them. I thought that even with a decidedly substandard start, the series “found its legs” somewhere in the middle of the first season, and I hold to that opinion now.
I was just reading through the cornbread thread, and I remembered one thing that drove me crazy when I was watching the first two episodes of the new season of Fargo: Dotty doesn’t know how to make pancakes. Especially if you’re making batter with Bisquick, the key is to not over beat it. Stir it gently to barely mix the ingredients. But if you’re flailing at it like a mad woman as Dotty was, you’re for sure gonna have flat rubbery tough pancakes.
I found Gen V to be less comedic than The Boys, but it was still pretty funny in parts.
I feel like Dottie had something else on her mind.
I could not agree more. People who dismiss this as just one more of those cornpone Paul Henning sitcoms that aired on CBS in the mid-to-late 60s are completely missing the point. It takes a common sitcom trope, the “sane” central character surrounded by eccentric side characters, to its absolute extreme. Poor Oliver Wendell Douglas is constantly beset by the antics of complete lunatics, as if he’s fallen into an alternate universe in which absurdity is the norm. It’s very cleverly written, and I often wondered if the writers were on LSD or some other mind-bending concoction. Highly recommended.
That was the whole point - to show how agitated and distracted she was. The camera kept cutting to the pancake stirring to drive the point home.
I like how they picked the most unthreatening-looking actress they could find to play Dot. Bad guys will constantly underestimate her.
I’m not sure if this is really a good fit for this thread, but I just have to say, if you aren’t watching Jimmy Kimmel, you are missing some great entertainment.
He is so good hearted. He’s also very funny and quick witted. His interviews are so fun. I just watched him with Jon Hamm and then Carrie Coon and I laughed so much.
Jimmy Kimmel comes off like a regular guy who’s having fun and enjoying his job. He does the best traditional monologue among the late-night hosts and can really deliver a punchline. His people-on-the-street bits are sometimes good, sometimes not. We’ve never watched beyond his monologue, but we always make it a point to catch that.
We watch this on occasion and find ourselves laughing out loud throughout each episode. I don’t like Mr Haney and sometimes Mr Kimball irritates me but the rest of the characters are great. I find it funnier now than I did when it first came out - probably because I was a kid and a lot of the humor went right over my head.
I always wonder how he survived with what he had to eat! One of the best episodes was when Eb’s favorite dish was Hot Water Soup!