TV You Have Watched

[QualityChimp]

That's a show I'd really like to watch, as it sounds like my thing, but you make it sound like it's running out of steam?
Is it based on some books or is it one of those shows that got some traction and now it's got another season but there's no real aim?

[Dogg Thang]

That's a show I'd really like to watch, as it sounds like my thing, but you make it sound like it's running out of steam?
Is it based on some books or is it one of those shows that got some traction and now it's got another season but there's no real aim?

Yeah, it's the latter. Honestly, the show from the start can sometimes be a little hit or miss but the concept is wonderful and, early on, it has many more hits than misses and I do think it's worth a watch but, as it goes on, I think it loses what made it good to begin with.

[Neon Ignition]

Definitely, it would probably have been better to recast for aged characters or in some instances just write them out as some of the storylines stretch things. Each season tends to be a bit slow off the mark but then hit their stride with the struggles, the severe dangers of being on the very tip of a new frontier of tech and exploration etc until it builds to a big pay off. S4 starts nowhere and goes nowhere, given the critical response it doesn't inspire that they'll change approach. Supposedly they're hoping to run it till Season 7 which would be set in the 2030's

[Neon Ignition]

Gen V: Season 01
The spin-off of The Boys is just abotu okay. Feels like something with minimal gas in the tank as a group of teens try to work out the mysterious things going on at their campus. Main issue is that the more extreme humour elements of the main show are weighted by some heavier and darker moments. Gen V punches more mid-range with a mystery that is only a mystery to the characters, attempts to push the shock value in some ways but shy away from offending in others and by the time it ends it feels like it's pretty drawn out as they're ultimately good guys without a compelling enemy to battle. The second run will make or break the show.

[Lebowski]

Dipped into a few series On Crunchy Roll Recently

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End The premise for this is what happens when the D&D heroes defeat the Final boss and go back to their old lives. The series starts witha group of heroes returning from a 10-year quest that saw them defeat the Demon King and bring in an era of peace and prosperity. The series focuses on Frieren an elf mage who lives far longer than Humans do, she returns to visit her old party and is surprised that after 50 short years for her, her old party is ancient and in their twilight years.

The death of one of her party kicks of a journey of discovery for Frieren as she re treads and tracks down the surviving members of her party retreading the journey she took with her friends' all those years ago she discovers the legacy and legend they left behind. lots of flashback, lots of mundane side quests and some really sweet and quite sad moments but some pretty funny bits too, a really well-rounded and different take on quite an oversaturated genre, super wholesome and a real cosy watch.

Spy X Family
A spy has to go deep undercover and needs a wife and child to complete his latest mission, what you end up with is this really odd family of misfits in a comedy that has some hilarious laugh out loud moments it's comedy mixed in with a 50s style spy drama. Was hooked from episode one brilliant writing, great set up and a really fun show.

jujutsu kaisen
My daughter loves this, but I Found this to be very run-of-the-mill, seen it before type fair, falls into your typical Humans vs demon fare quite gruesome very bloody and lots of high stakes battles and drama a body count that is off the scale.

Laid Back Camp
Laid back cozycore show about camping and a group of friends that run a camping club at their school, exaclty what it says on the tin lovely calm locations no high stake drama just a sweet show about going camping.

[QualityChimp]

I was thinking the other day I'd love to watch some more anime, but nothing seems to hit like the 80s/90s stuff did.
Feels like a lot of padding and very little hand-drawn art.

We finished off Reacher S2 (Prime), which was good fun but progressively ridiculous.
Apparently, there are no police in New York if you're having a driving gun battle.

Watched 3 eps of Red Dwarf (iPlayer) with my son last night including White Hole and Dimension Jump.
I was crying at "So what is it?", but my son enjoyed the 30 minutes of cussing Rimmer in comparison to Ace in the latter.
He's getting wound up by me saying "this is a good episode"

[Lebowski]

I was thinking the other day I'd love to watch some more anime, but nothing seems to hit like the 80s/90s stuff did.
Feels like a lot of padding and very little hand-drawn art.

I'd stay away from the overhyped shows, your Demon slayers, and the My Hero Academia's as theses all feel like the same sort of show with lots of cliche's and the usual anime tropes Young underdog hero saves the world over and over.

Shows like Frieren take a lot of the tropes and turn them on their head its nickname is "side quest the series", theirs no villain of the week format or big bad guy plotting and moving his pieces in the background no underdog, just a kick ass 1000 year old Elf mage going on small adventures and leaning wholesome lessons about the fragility of life and friendships and how cruel the passage of time can be. The animation and setting is wonderful as well loads of beautiful scenery on show and really cool locations.

[Colin]

Back up to date again on Shogun, best thing on TV for me right now by a country mile, loving it.

[Neon Ignition]

Twisted Metal: Season 01
It was alright, nothing particularly amazing but considering how thin the source material is it held together respectedly well and has lined up a more faithful second run. Reminiscent of the short lived and superior Blood Drive though.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Started well then tails off and just about keeps it together till the end. It's a bold move to make 10 hours of Godzilla related content where 99% is human focused so in a way it's a success story. It's mostly dragged down by running out of story after the first tow or three episodes and resorting to the same loop of the group searching for 1 person.

[fuse]

Watched Netflix's live action One Piece adaptation a few weeks back. For context, my only other experience with the series is reading a couple of the early volumes of the manga, so I didn't have any particular expectations or chip on my shoulder to hold back any enjoyment of it. Unsurprisingly it's quite goofy, but I think it handles that side of it about as well as it possibly could, and at the same time it's fun enough and plenty enjoyable. A few friends who care more about it also seemed to be fairly positive about the adaptation too, so that's nice. The biggest problem I have recommending this is that it feels like even a second season will require some kind of divine intervention at Netflix HQ, and anyone who cares about closure has got a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting it in this medium.

Also watched through the recent-ish Scott Pilgrim Takes Off animated series. I think shifting the attention away from the character of Scott and onto some of the others was a good idea, but it still comes with the same kind of writing, humour and so on that the movie delivered - not to mention the entire bloody cast reprising their roles as voice actors, to varying degrees of success. Not awful, not brilliant, but definitely watchable, and heck, I've heard the movie called a cult classic enough times that this probably has an audience.

More recently we watched 3 Body Problem, which is this big ambitious adaptation of a series of hugely popular Chinese sci-fi novels. I liked this quite a lot, and think it does a pretty good job of keeping the science firmly in the fiction realm but still giving just enough of a whiff of rationale and plausibility to stop you asking too many questions. Aside from the fear of Netflix dropping it before seeing the series through, one other point to note is that it's under the helm of the Game of Thrones show-runners who were... not exactly held in the highest regard following how that show ended. They've also brought over a lot of actors who they worked with on that show which embarrassingly enough is quite distracting at times. You're probably also going to hear more about this quite tragic story relative to folks involved in the production of it.

[wakka]

I've been watching Ripley on Netflix, the new adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel.

I've never read the book but I did watch the 90s film a couple of years ago for the first time.

It's an eight part adaptation, and it's pretty okay overall. Andrew Scott is genuinely great as Ripley and there is some nice photography. What lets it down for me is something I've found with other Netflix adaptations, which is that they are simply far too long. The amount of plot that gets covered in a single 45 minute episode of this is paltry at times. Scenes are frequently exhaustively lengthy, without dialogue, as we watch Ripley doing stuff which could have been covered in half the time or less.

It annoys me because firstly it's boring, secondly it kind of suggests that the Ripley stories have some kind of imprimatur of profundity (which they don't as far as I can tell, they're pulpy and that's great), and thirdly because it feels like a cynical way to keep you engaged on the platform for longer.

I would add the proviso that it may have found this less annoying if I didn't already know the story. So YMMV. But really, this should have been four or five episodes tops - not eight.

[QualityChimp]

I refuse to watch Ripley as it's a load of woke nonsense.

Not only have they made her a man, but there are no xenomorphs in it.



We watched a bunch of Marvel stuff - all of Miss Marvel and She-Hulk. (Disney+)

I particularly enjoyed She-Hulk with its 4th wall-breaking and great finale episode with some clever tricks.

However, I'm not sure how that style fits in with the other MCU stuff - like Thor ended up being too silly, but still expected the viewer to care about the sad bits and believe there was any element of peril in the fights.

I also watched the last two episodes of Mr. Inbetween (D+), which was really great. Well worth a watch and fairly short episodes.

[Lebowski]

Mr. Inbetween I gave this a go, but they keep relying on old jokes and nostalgia, simon now has a ****ty yellow Fiat multipla instead of ****y yellow Fiat Hawaii, I could see it a mile off that he would get it destroyed. Will forcing them all to dress as a wizard to go to Harry Potter Studio tour for his stag do was peak Will, when they managed to take a wrong turn and drive through the middle of a pro trans rights march making them think they were anti-trans protester trying to disrupt the march was genius.

An actual thing I did watch was Channel 4s Big Mood This stars Nicola Coughlan as a person struggling with Bi polar disorder and Lydia West a bar owner struggling to keep her bar afloat, the two are best friends, but I'd say Lydia's character is more of a reck than Nicola that becomes apparent over the course of the series. It's billed as a comedy, but I'd say that it's more a drama, and a depressing one at that.

It's six episodes long and finishes with

->Open Spoiler<-

Lydia character being done with Nicola's for being too unreliable and not being there for her when she needs her (she gets pregnant too her abusive ex and schedules an abortion after they break up) he was using her for the opportunity to capitalise on her Bar and turn it into housing. Despite Nicola's character trying her best to cope with her illness and be a good friend, she completely goes off the deep end hallucinating and getting lost and alone in the middle of nowhere. Despite this she tries her best to get to her friend's appointment, walking all night and eventually getting help from a stranger only to realise she's a day late. You're left with Nicola's character banging on the bar doors trying to apologise, Lydia's character walks roudn the corner and gets into a Taxi and giving her friend the stink eye while she stands there crying her eyes out. I was just left thinking what an absolute arse! This person is clearly really ill and not reliable, and you're done with her because you expected her to suddenly get better overnight

Avoid unless you want to be super depressed, not funny not well written and just plain mean, god knows what they were thinking billing this as a comedy, if you want emotion and comedy I'd watch Channel 4s Big Boys instead as that's a master class on how you mix genually funny comedy with highs and low's while tackling issues relating to mental health.

[QualityChimp]

Mr. Inbetween I gave this a go, but they keep relying on old jokes and nostalgia, simon now has a ****ty yellow Fiat multipla instead of ****y yellow Fiat Hawaii, I could see it a mile off that he would get it destroyed. Will forcing them all to dress as a wizard to go to Harry Potter Studio tour for his stag do was peak Will, when they managed to take a wrong turn and drive through the middle of a pro trans rights march making them think they were anti-trans protester trying to disrupt the march was genius.

For clarification, Mr. Inbetween is NOT the same thing as The Inbetweeners.

[wakka]

I refuse to watch Ripley as it's a load of woke nonsense.

Not only have they made her a man, but there are no xenomorphs in it.

Tom Ripley is probably my third favourite Ripley, after Ellen Ripley, and of course Ripley's Believe It Or Not.