I’m waiting for the whole season to finish before I start it.
Isn’t it on Netflix? Don’t they usually drop the whole season at once?
They actually didn’t and I’m only just learning this. They dropped about half now and another half in 3 weeks.
I’m not for sure not watching it, but there’s other good stuff right now and Gaiman’s personal life has made it such that I will have to hear lots good about it to get past it?
We started Ballard on Prime. It’s a bit stilted, acting-wise, and seems a bit aimless. The usual cop show memes: Nasty Boss: “You’d better show some progress or you’re in big trouble.” Ballistic and DNA results while U wait. Bosch made an appearance in E2, which may give it a boost.
Finished Season 1 of Andor.
It’s good TV that is occasionally great. In particular there are some stunning monologues in the show that really get at the heart of what it means to be part of a resistance movement and it’s hard watching for that reason, especially in our current time.
It’s also a show where you don’t entirely know where it’s going, but it usually goes somewhere interesting so that is fine. I’m dying to know what happens between the Nazi security lady and the weirdo with the Jewish-coded Mom. Apparently I’m even a sucker for romance between antagonists.
It’s like watching a submissive Norman Bates getting it on with a dom Maggie Smith
Do you think they can successfully pass the torch?
Connelly seems like he’s chickening out a little bit in the book series. At first it appeared the younger, female version of Bosch was going to take center stage, but now I’m not so sure. Bosch keeps coming back for his encores, and there is also the daughter as possible protaganist. To further muddy the waters, he introduced yet another possible successor in his latest novel Nightshade, the rather forgettable detective Stillwell of Catalina Island.
As it happens, I just read the answer to this last night. In the book she bought her double-wide at Paradise Cove (described as the most expensive trailer park in the world) using both money left to her by her grandmother and the proceeds of sale of her home in Ventura.
Anybody else watching brand-new Japanese anime series The Summer Hikaru Died (Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu) on Netflix?
I am very much not a horror fan, but… hmmm. wow. Huh.
(curse you studio ghibli for permanently weakening my resistance to weird mystical beautifully visualized japanese animated stories that I do not understand at all)
(and by curse I guess I mean thank)
Netflix keeps recommending it to me, but I haven’t checked it out. I’m currently watching Black Clover which I’m enjoying well enough.
Finished my re-watch of Northern Exposure last night.
Most of it holds up. The first few seasons contained many excellent episodes, some OK ones, and a few duds.
The last couple of seasons were mostly OK, with an increasing number of duds, and very little excellence. Most of the season 6 writers had been around since season 2 or 3, but somehow by the end they had lost track of all the characters.
going through “waking the dead”. uk cold files. some of them are rather haunting.
i would like a bit more follow up on how the fall out fell out.
I decided to try it today. First I binge-read the first 22 chapters of the manga (37 are available in English) then I watched the 2 available episodes of the anime. I thought it was a pretty mediocre manga. They have tried to rework the slow pace of the manga by shuffling story elements around and moving the plot more quickly, for instance the hamster guy who shows up in the first episode didn’t appear until volume 3 of the manga. The anime could be an improvement, I can’t tell yet.
As I mentioned upthread, I’m working my way through MASH at a rather leisurely pace.
Tonight I finished season 3, which felt like a good time to check in. That last episode still packs a punch, I must admit.
All in all, it’s outstanding television - though there are definitely a few clunkers here and there, including the penultimate episode of season 3, which hopefully didn’t dissuade anyone from tuning in the following week for the classic “Abyssinia, Henry.”
With season 4 comes cast changes as well as a shift in tone. I look forward to carrying on.
As others have pointed out, Gaimen has lost his shine, and I think there’s no plans for a third.
As an ex-Gaimen fan (long before the scandals), I’d say that two is all there ever needed to be of the Sandman series, if it covers the issues 1-30(ish) (and it seemed to be about 1-15 for first season*). The comics after that were pretty medicore after that to me and beating a dead horse, making money off a hit, and it seemed clear that he’d lost interest in the format, characters and pretty much all of it. He did, he gave up writing comics after that.
(*) Actually around that, and a jump forward to Dreams of a Thousand cats which I think was around 30ish if I recall.
Did grind thru the first 6 of S2…
…and it has the same problem as S1, in that the show itself has no real life of its own. It is content to regurgitate dialogue wholesale from the original stories, but in a very perfunctory and passionless manner, in a contractually obligated way that exhales no essence of its own. Compared to other adaptations like LotR or even Harry Potter, it doesn’t attempt go beyond the dialogue and express a unique voice or perspective by utilizing the advantages of the visual medium in question (pretty as the visuals often are, but they’re just backdrops, with no real bold directorial flourishes). Just a very frustrating show to watch because it never really takes off and enthralls at all.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream was my fave story from the original series, so was severely disappointed by the perfunctory way it was handled here–the Faerie host was like 1/4th the size, crammed inside a tent, with none of the larger more grotesque creatures in tow, and Puck didn’t strike me as a malevolent hobgoblin but just some bozo with goofy facial hair. No Hamnet whose fate was a very big deal in the comic, no cuckold horns on Oberon.
I did like who played Nuala, Ann Skelly. [to my mild surprise they didn’t pronounce her name as “Noo-all-a” but with just two syllables, skipping the U sound] Her un-makeover wasn’t anywhere as shocking as in the comics where she was revealed to be this homely mousy thing (tho that was quietly dropped when other artists took over).
Lots of chatter elsewhere about how poorly they handled Wanda, a refugee from the abandoned A Game Of You arc, who felt shoehorned into the revamped plot then quickly disposed of with little character development. Thessaly was one of the most compelling characters in the entire series so her absence was also a disappointment.
E6 however was by far the best of the entire lot, since it remained focused on the core plotline and gave it room to breathe without the breathless rushes from one obligatory plot point to the next. Destruction is the best of the core Endless actors; Delerium simply wasn’t half as off-the-wall as she was in the originals-when she got mad at Morpheus she shaved her hair, but not here.
Not too enthused to watch 7-12 at this point.
In her first appearances, Ballard was homeless and slept on the beach in Venice (LA is expensive, man!) And she’d go surfing everyday, leaving her dog to watch her stuff. Basically she lived out of her van.
Later she had an apartment. I have no idea when she even had a house, let alone sold one. Unless we have pronoun trouble? It was her grandmother’s house?
eta I’m up to like ep 6 of 1965’s The F.B.I. I can’t believe the early episodes were so…weak. They seem like episodes from (oh) season 4, when you can take time to explore the characters. Why do I care in episode 2 that the young partner wants to marry the senior partner’s daughter? We barely know these people! Let the show find itself first, then vary.
That, and Alejandro Rey and Robert Blake playing Apaches, with Mexican accents.
Not clear. I assumed it was referring to Ballard’s house.
It was her grandmother’s house and she inherited. In the first book she sleeps in her tent after surfing, but also has a room she can use there.
ETA: Her granmother was still alive in the first book. I don’t remember when she kicked it.