My wife and I watched four eps before bailing. I think @Darren_Garrison has it right about being a mix, but is giving it way too much gravitas to compare it to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tarantino. More like Thirty Something meets Get Smart.
The show is the ultimate “meet cute,” with two attractive people being thrown together and predictably falling in love, then negotiating their lives together. ISTM that the show runners think we’ll find the relationship part of the show as interesting as the action part, because they devote at least as much time to the talking as to the shooting.
And I might have found it so, if the action part were in the slightest bit credible. But the Smiths’ spycraft is incredibly bad. From constantly turning to stare at someone they’re supposed to be surveiling to shooting and killing the abductors of another target, without knowing if the abduction was part of their own operation. The worst was becoming friends with a couple who claimed to be another “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” after a “random” meeting in public, without any kind of verification. All of these would be disqualifying violations of protocol in any sort of compartmented secret organization.
And that brings us to the morality issue. Neither we nor the “Smiths” have any idea who they’re working for: government agency (it seems not, but if so, which government?), private organization, criminal mob, super villain? They blithely go about killing people (with no consequences for them) without asking any questions or giving any thought to why. And we’re supposed to like and identify with them anyway.
I like the lead characters, and I could see this being a better show if at last some of the spycraft and morality issues were addressed, but as it is it’s too annoyingly unrealistic to sit through.
I also watched this tonight (just 3 episodes makes it an easy one night binge, and you really want to keep watching!) on the recommendations here and Oh my God I had no idea what was coming. I had never heard anything about this case so it was all a complete surprise.
It’s on Netflix, not MAX, for those who are looking.
Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies moved to a starter town - Dumb. The title is dumb, the premise is dumb, every single character in it is dumb, the protagonist is exceptionally dumb, and the plot is dumb. Also, every single female character immediately lusts after the dumb and clueless protagonist, including the one who looks like a nine-year-old girl (she’s actually hundreds of years old but this doesn’t make it any less creepy, particularly as the other women all refer to her as “loli grandma”).
Did I mention it’s dumb? It’s dumb.
Not anime:
The Brothers Sun - Started watching this and was enjoying it, but the family complained it was too violent. Will have to wait until they’re not around to keep going, but it’s entertaining so far.
Same here, it was a shocking story, well put together in the doc. Spoiler…
the way they kept the couple apart in episode 1 and 2, with his story and then hers, and brought them together for ep3 was very simple but extremely effective
I just finished watching Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix. Superb.
It’s about a Samurai warrior in Japan who had a western father and was born with blue eyes, which makes them a hideous freak to others. They are on a mission to find their father.
There is a twist at the end of the first episode. It’s not hard to guess (she is a woman), but they get it over with quickly. Great characters with a lot of depth, along with some more surprising twists.
I agree that it was a great series which I also finished watching not that long ago. It should be noted that this series is very much for mature audiences as it not only has explicit violence, as you would expect with a samurai as the protagonist but also sex. I did not feel that any of it was particularly gratuitous; however, it is not your typical anime fare.
I’ve heard the example of a group of women coal miners in Pennsylvania. They wore men’s clothing and no one realized they werew female by just looking at them. I’ve seen a photo and it’s clear that they are women, but people in the day used different cues – probably clothing – to determine gender. That would probably would have been the case in Japan of the era.
(Note that this wouldn’t be an issue in England, since female coal miners there went topless in the mines.)
There’s apparently a 2023 Netflix documentary series on the Murdaugh family murders and other shenanigans, of which a second season seems to have recently dropped?
I think what I watched recently was the 2023 Netflix series Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal rather than the 2022 Max series Murdaugh Murders: Deadly Dynasty, but tbh I am not 100% sure of the difference.
I’ve started watching (and like) a Russian dark comedy/drama about vampires called Vampires of Midland or Central Russia’s Vampires.
The trailer doesn’t really do a good job of giving the feel for it. It isn’t as dark/gritty as the first half of the trailer makes it look. The police procedural part is similar to the standard Law and Order type show. The vampire part isn’t as zany as What We Do in the Shadows, more something like iZombie mixed with some 1980s British show about poor working class people.
There doesn’t appear to be any of the big US streaming services carrying it, and I’m not sure about the international legal status of it streaming on Plex, so I won’t link to anything and will let Google be your friend.
I’m halfway through watching the Korean series Marry My Husband on Amazon Prime. A woman ends up dead at the hands of her selfish impulsive husband and her toxic undermining best friend, only to find herself alive again 10 years earlier. She tries to make better choices the second time around, but there’s a catch: it seems the only way she can avoid the bad things that happened to her is by making them happen to someone else instead.
I wasn’t expecting too much, but it’s a decent mix of romantic comedy, thriller and sci fi/fantasy so far.
Have been seeing that 80s ABC/CBS action cop procedural T.J. Hooker (w/William Shatner in the title role, et al.) from Shout! Factory’s all-in-one DVD, and I gotta say it-- from what I’ve seen, it’s far better than I ever gave it credit for. I used to think it was a case of great opening (and end title) music, bad show, but I’ve seen the last three seasons of it, and am finishing it up with the second one, and from what I’ve seen, it’s practically (IMO) Masterpiece Theatre compared to (also IMO) that true junk that was Walker Texas Ranger (that 90s Norris abomination set in Dallas is one I wouldn’t touch with a 20-ft. pole, let alone a 10-ft. one).
Just watched the latest Grand Tour episode, Sand Job. As usual it’s full of stupid car tricks (and in Jeremy’s case, stupid human tricks). I really enjoyed seeing the trio bumble their way across the Sahara. It’s the next-to-last episode and I’ll be sad to see the series end.
We finally started on the last season of “The Blacklist”. Two episodes in, it remains watchable only because of James Spader. The rest of it is silly.
We are watching the Indian action movie ‘RRR’. It’s a hoot. Not even remotely realistic, but man the action, cinematography and production are amazing. Some of the CGI is very obvious, but the show is basically a cartoon, so who cares? Watch it for the spectacle.
More anime, but of a very different kind: Ghost Stories (English Gag Dub).
Bunch of kids battling ridiculous ghosts in a haunted school, there’s a demon cat, yadda yadda yadda, but the selling point here is that the English voice cast were basically told that they had to keep the character names and basic plot but otherwise they had free reign over the dialogue. And boy howdy, do they deliver. Since the plot stays the same it doesn’t go off the rails, but often some throwaway comment out of the blue will absolutely blindside you, often because they’re startlingly rude or bizarre. And anything an actor throws into the mix has to be kept and built on. It had me crying with laughter at certain points.
It’s on Crunchyroll; I don’t know where else it can be found.
