Just finished Candy on Hulu. We’ve seen a lot of nostalgic stories about what kids were up to circa 1980, but the parents are usually cardboard cutouts and this show kind of flips that. There is a lot of not-so-subtle subtext in it that just confirms everything I’ve ever thought about my parents’ generation.
We loved it and were extremely upset that it was cancelled.
Finally finished Game of Thrones, and loved it. Now bf wants to watch Entourage. Is it good?
“Good” might not be the first descriptor that comes to mind, but it is… entertaining, for the most part. Go in with low expectations and don’t expect a lot of substance, and you may find it fun.
I enjoyed most of the run, but the last couple seasons were on fumes.
I really enjoyed watching Entourage, to the extent that I actually saw the movie in the theater. I thought of the show as the male equivalent of Sex and the City, in that it was a fantasy existence for the characters.
I watched a few minutes of season 2 of The Wilds. In season one, a group of teenage females try to survive on a deserted island after their plane crashes. In season two they discover that a group of teenage males had the same thing happen to them etc.
I just wasn’t in the mood to keep up with two sets of story lines, characters, etc.
It’s a bunch of likeable schmoes riding the coat tails of their best friend’s hollywood career, which also has it’s own ups and downs. So people living the high life without really earning it. I enjoyed it, but it’s bubblegum for the mind.
I highly recommend the Korean, Sixth Sense!
Sixth Sense has the cast members* visit three businesses and one is fake. At the end of the show, they have to correctly guess the fake to win a prize. For the current Season 3, someone in the cast or guest is a spy who is told which business is fake and they have to try an convince the others it’s real.
The general rules are that the site is completely fake, from the location (setup by the production staff) to the people working there. For example, if it’s a restaurant, the chef isn’t real areal chef and the food/recipe is created by the production staff. And a “married couple” or partners meet each other just days before the shoot. They’re also rarely ever actors, since the main member of the group, Yoo Jae Suk is The Nation’s MC and has met and knows about almost everyone in the industry.
What’s amazing is that the production staff goes to great lengths to create the fake location. Everything from the sometimes huge sign outside to the interior is created by the production staff. They even add dust to the top of the A/C to make it look like it was there a long time. And pump in smells, like old barbeque smoke for a barbeque restaurant.
In in Season 3, Episode 9, they went against the everything from scratch rule and used an abandoned restaurant with everything in it for their fake restaurant
The trying to guess the fake is fun, but like all variety shows, it’s the interactions between the cast and sometimes guests that make it really fun. You have to watch from Season 1 to get all the in-jokes, but even a random episode is funny.
Has anyone mentioned Billy the Kid yet? Episode one was a drag (in more ways than one) but it has grown on me.
I can’t quite do it. I try not to get that caught up in historical reality with historical fiction. But occasionally I can’t let it go. Mel Gibson as William Wallace having an affair with an Isabella who was actually all of three years old at the time and fathering Edward III in Braveheart bothers me. And romanticizing young Henry McCarty/William H. Bonney who was a punk thief from the word go and murderer (you can argue justifications, but it is very likely at least two of those murders were straight-up executions of prisoners), also bothers me.
I feel like this a very real self-indictment of my ability to just relax and watch a fictional show 
. But there you go - the adds are turning me off.
Just an aside: Billy the Kid is buried in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and there’s a neat little museum there. His gravestone was stolen in 1981 and recovered days later in California, so now his grave is enclosed within iron fencing. One of our first visits to the mainland, if not the very first one, back in our school days, we stopped there, and I have a good picture of the wife standing next to his grave. Impressive to her folks back in Bangkok, who all knew Billy the Kid from old Westerns.
Then you may prefer Dirty Little Billy.
Sadly, yes, this one was really hitting its stride in S2 on the longer arcs and thus the cancellation was deeply frustrating. Still worth watching to the end of what’s there, though.
It gets better; we’ve been binging our way through it and it’s still pretty good despite the clichés.
Gyrate, tell me when it gets better? I quit after 2 episodes but i see all the raves…
I actually just watched the real-life documentary about this.
I should doublecheck that we’re talking about the series with Elijah Wood and not the earlier series with Stephen Mangan (which was fine but a lot less interesting).
I don’t remember when it “gets good” but it starts out with a lot of inexplicable shit and slowly reveals what the hell is going on. Despite the absolute chaos it starts out with all is…well, I don’t know if “explained” is the right word but certainly all internally consistent and key to the overall plot arcs. Unlike, say, Lost, the weird shit is there for a reason.
Each season has its own story arc but toward the end of S2 they start to explain the larger mechanics of this universe. Which is why the cancellation is annoying.
In other news I’ve finished S2 of Russian Doll. The finale was not quite as twisty as the one for S!, but I’m still thinking about it.
The doc makers are part of the story in this series.
We watched Pieces of Her, which we liked.
We’ve started Lincoln Lawyer, which we are enjoying. There is one piece of casting that is bewildering to me and very distracting, but I’m enjoying it anyway.
Tried The Gilded Age, Julienne Fellows’ followup to Downton Abbey.
Frankly, he should have stayed in England. It’s kinda silly recreating DA in America, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s just all the little things he is getting wrong about the period. He could have very well been just as inaccurate in DA, but I don’t know enough about that period in British history to care. But, now he’s moved his attentions to this side of the shore, I’m starting to notice this.
So just finished Dirk Gently.
Good. I have to admit though that the juxtaposition of goofy with bloody violent doesn’t mesh as well here as in say Peacemaker.
Enjoyed it but honestly not too upset that they let it drop after S2. A reasonable stopping point but I doubt they had great vision for where to go from here, and some of the directions hinted at would be too eye rolly.