I've been happy to see the return of Severance and White Lotus (I'm less crazy about the latter, but it's still compelling enough). Any shows back soon or recently you're wanting to see?
Oscar season was a bit delayed (twice) and is now set a couple weeks from now. Anything jump out at you this year? I think I've seen exactly one movie with any nominations this year (and just a supporting one at that), so I might not have much to add in that regard.
What's been on your screens, big or small?
Besides the two mentioned above, Yellowjackets has also started season 3. After a rocky second season, will be interesting where it goes. I’ll probably wait until after Severence is done to watch however.
Watched first four seasons of Slow Horses while doing the bike indoors. Now on to The Silo both on Apple TV+. Slow Horses was great, we’ll see how The Silo is so far it’s kept me watching and riding.
Saw The Substance. Wow, was that out there. The ending was insane. Anora was good and apparently a front runner for best picture. Nosferatu was really good if you’re into Dracula movies.
I really enjoyed Slow Horses and plowed right through it.
For the past few years my wife and I have managed to see every nominated movie (even the shorts!) before the Oscars. For reasons, that's not happening this year. I doubt we even make it for all the Best Picture nominees before the event, but we'll see.
Nominees I've seen so far:
- Anora: Intense in many ways. I really enjoyed this one. Of the few I've seen so far, it would be my pick for best picture.
- Conclave: A very well-made movie. Before watching it seemed like a movie where the topic wouldn't be of much interest to me, but I was invested the whole time.
- Dune 2; I'm only halfway through this one, but so far have been more into it than I was the first one.
- A Real Pain: My wife and I both really like this. The nominations for Kieran Culkin for acting and Jesse Eisenberg for writing were very well-deserved. Had a lot more depth to it that I expected from seeing trailers that just made it seem like an odd couple on a trip movie.
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Exactly what you expect it to be.
Our most complete category is by far animated feature with 3 out of 5 (and Flow is now streaming on Max, so I expect we'll see that one soon, too). Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Inside Out 2 were both very good, and could win in some years, but Wild Robot is really great, and I think far and away the winner. My kids liked also all three, but also agree Wild Robot is the best of the group. Highly recommended.
Yeah, A Real Pain is the one I was referring to (I didn't realize it was up for writing too). It's not the greatest movie ever, but it's still a little great.
Wild Robot…we all enjoyed it, but having read the book, which was heartfelt and understated, beautifully simple; the movie’s slapstick and crass take on nature’s misfortunes actually rubbed me the wrong way. The book was better 🤓
I'm afraid the movie take on upcoming The Electric State is going to have the same kind of disregard of the quiet beauty of the book.
Runner daughter and I have been enjoying the newest Severence episodes a lot. Meanwhile, I'm in the middle of the second season of Slow Horses.
I'm looking forward to seeing how well Mickey 17 follows the book ("Mickey 7") when it comes out in a couple weeks.
We finally got Apple TV+ to work through out TMobile phone plan (it was complementary, but the confirmation text kept going to the phone number for the plug in in the van which.... can't get texts) so we started watching Severance and I'm digging it already after the first three episodes. After that I'll probably watch For All Mankind at the suggestion of friends.
I really enjoyed For All Mankind. Season 2 is just plain rip-snortin' fun. There's a few subplots in each of the seasons that are annoying, especially in season 3, but overall quiet enjoyable. I think Season 5 is coming out this fall.
I didn’t know For All Mankind was coming back. Glad to hear it, I’ve really enjoyed that show.
Along with a fifth season of For All Mankind, a parallel series (supposedly titled Star City) is in development and will look at the same events from the Soviet perspective.
I feel pretty confident in thinking you will enjoy Slow Horses, but I’ll also suggest Hijack (renewed for a second season), Shrinking (possibly the best non-Slow Horses show on Apple TV+), and the limited series Disclaimer.
Dido on Shrinking. The old, a bunch of friends just hang out kind of show, but definitely a nice diversion.
sooo...Golden Girls?
With Harrison Ford?
green light it!!1!
I simply couldn't handle the blatant disregard for professional ethics. For me it turned the show from fun into anxiety-inducing.
I hear complaints like this (The Bear gets a bunch of “no way can a restaurant be run this way”) and while no one is obligated to watch or an enjoy a show, I take the attitude that it’s a drama/comedy not a documentary. The setting, situations, etc are to drive the narrative not to suggest a way to conduct yourself professionally. YMMV.
Oh, I certainly get that. It's very much a me thing. As a professional with ethical obligations I personally find this specific narrative too cringe. I've never seen The Bear, but probably wouldn't have a similar reaction since that's not my world in the same way.
its like being good at bowling and trying to watch bowling scenes in tv shows.
It's like being good at the plate and watching John Goodman play Babe Ruth
I have journalist friends who hate any TV show/movie with journalism complaining no way a reporter would act that way. My response is do you think Teachers, cops, doctors, lawyers, judges, etc., act the way portrayed on screen?
If you watch Shrinking with the mindset that it's about how people deal with trauma and the impact those trauma reactions have on families and friends and not a show about a therapist who uses unorthodox and unethical practices, you might actually enjoy the show. But then again, there's enough out there to keep us all entertained.
I enjoy Shrinking despite my field.
Though I got fuming angry yesterday watching The Pit. So many good, realistic doctor/patient interaction scenes and then we get a woman accusing her husband of sexually abusing their daughter and the chief of staff goes something like, "We can't notify anyone or talk to the patient about it without proof." And his statement is never corrected throughout the show. Simply dangerous misinformation to be spreading to an audience.
I'm always impressed when a show or movie gets the physics/astronomy/space travel things right. For All Mankind, for example, does pretty well there.
For others that get things wrong, as long as the movie doesn't depend on it being realistic, it doesn't bother me. Like the space travel in Star Wars doesn't physically make sense or work at all, but who cares, that's not the point.
But if they're trying to be realistic, or the whole point is to make things look right and they screw it up, I'm out. For example: I hated Gravity, and my wife (who is also an astronomer and whose mom was an astronaut) hated it much more than I did. We just couldn't get into it at all due to all the things they got very, very wrong.
Fun fact on Gravity, it was a very rare night out for Jane and I and we went to go see that. However, we had a large dinner beforehand and she had to run out about 20 minutes into it to throw up because of the camera work.
I totally lost it when an astronaut was allowed to tool around untethered (and venting exhaust) while Hubble is open to space.
Oh man, you guys are reminding me of all the high school physics level things that annoyed me.
I don't remember the details that well. I mostly just remember my wife going "oh, come on!" every 5 minutes.
I do remember we saw it at the drive-in, because that was the best way we could get out to see movies with a 2-year-old in tow.
Duly noted!
my god.
I watched Conclave last night. I thought so but the final ten minutes was great.
I'm guessing some things but lost in translation from the book because the progression went awfully quick at the end without much explanation.
Not sure if spoiler is needed here, but to be safe:
Went to Cap'n Murica today with a couple friends. It was fine. But the end-credit scene was pathetic. And they held it until the very, very end of the credits. Don't bother. You aren't missing anything interesting or meaningful.
We finished seasons 1-2 of Reacher (body counts galore!).
Now watching season 1 of The Lincoln Lawyer. Definitely compelling, although we are getting a little tired of the drive-through-the-desert-nowhere-near-LA-so-Mickey-can-monologue schtick.
Andor returns April 22.
Disney has decided to crank up their measures against sharing. 🙁
There's always sailing the high seas to get your fix.
This season of The White Lotus definitely started off very slow, but the 2nd episode started to get things moving. I'm on the fence about how much I like this show. I don't seem to love it as much as everyone else, but it's still very well made. We'll see where this season takes us.
It's also 8 episodes this year so gives WL a little time to show it's hand. Last season had 7 episodes, first season had 6.
For the Severance fans, it looks like Stiller and Scott started a podcast going through each episode. I've listened to the first one so far and it's pretty decent. They go fairly in depth on the behind the scenes.
Regarding the most recent installment of Severance:
It's a tough act to follow last week's episode.
Setting the table for next week's barn-burner.
So...Runner daughter and I caught Mickey 17 today. I was entertained and disappointed. The book was certainly not high drama, but the movie's authority figures skipped passed campy and went to cartoonish, changing several plot items in the second half. To be fair, they were working the movie before the book had been released, but still.
We have been watching Mindhunter. It's about the emergence of criminal profiling in the FBI back in the 70's. As a fan of Criminal Minds and other such shows I do find it interesting.
Season 2 (and final) of both Andor and The Last of Us in April? Oh boy.
I recall the (game) sequel to The Last of Us was controversial. Regardless, those two are going to take up a lot of TV discussion oxygen.
Andor episode "One Way Out" was selected as one of the top 10 TV episodes (nothing scientific) as well as a Last of Us episode. LOST episode "The Constant" was also there
I'm guessing one of the episodes from The Wire Season 3 would be in there as well.
I would agree with the Andor episode and I'm pretty sure which Last of Us Episode is being referenced as well. All classic.
Realized we still had Starz for a while longer, so watched Borderlands and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, because the price was right. The first was a movie, and the second surprised me that it was a Guy Ritchie film, because that's exactly who I thought directed it based on the fact that it felt just like all his other films.
I finally figured out what was going on with my Tablo, thanks to a respondent on a Netgear community board. So I now, once again, can watch OTH TV downstairs.
My TCL Roku TV had stopped connecting with the Tablo some months ago. I tried various things, including connecting the Tablo via Ethernet to one of my Orbi satellites and connecting my TV via Ethernet directly to my UVerse router (WiFi is turned off on that router and my Orbi base station is connected via Ethernet).
I had discovered that the Tablo worked if both the TV and Tablo were directly connected to the UVerse router, implying that the problem was with my mesh setup. (But this meant no antenna, since that is in an upstairs window.) Someone suggested that I connect the TV to the Orbi base unit instead of the UVerse router. Bingo. I now have Tablo to satellite unit via Ethernet (instead of WiFi) and TV to base unit via Ethernet, and crystal-clear connections to many channels off the antenna. Yea, team!
The Tablo device (4th Gen) has 4 tuners and several hundred gig of flash memory storage for recording OTH shows. All for a reasonable price, assuming it connects to my Roku devices....
Been watching the Silo on Apple TV. It's a serviceable, watch a show while riding bike kind of show. I know the books were/are highly regarded. Anyone watch the the Silo or read the books? I'd be curious of what you thought.
I enjoyed the second season of Silo. I think the first season was better since it remained in a single location. The second season suffered from managing multiple locations and integrating the new characters. Then the final scene was very different and expanded the world a lot more.
We've been watching a couple of new shows that we really like. Paradise is a pretty decent post-apocalyptic mystery/adventure with Sterling K. Brown starring. It's been picked up for a second season and considering how the first season ended I'm looking forward to it. Even though it's five years old, Tales from the Loop, is my new favorite show. It's like Stanley Kubrick rebooted the Outer Limits as a beautifully photographed episodic series. We finished Severance and while we like it I do wish they'd do more exposition, I think the questions to answers ratio in the narrative is getting a little skewed and I want more ROI at this point. We've only watched S3E1 of White Lotus and maybe my expectations are too high but it seemed to plod a bit. I do already have a good idea which characters I would prefer as the murder victims, though.
The first episode of TWL was indeed very slow, but I'd say it starts picking up after that.
Ever since the first season of Severance, I've been worried they're going to be asking more questions than they can satisfyingly answer. I never watched it. but I wondered if Lost would be the comp. I know plenty of people that were nonplussed at how they wrapped things up.
Been watching the new 4th season of Daredevil and through 3 episodes I am very pleased with this new Disney version. The Netflix seasons are close to my favorite Marvel properties and I don't think Disney messed it up. Apparently it went through a lot of rewrites and reshoots (sounds like they at least added episode 1, episodes 2-3 were the originally the pilot), which usually ends in disaster, but I can't wait until a new episode is released each Tuesday.
I kind of lost interest in the original series. I just couldn't keep watching someone get nearly beaten to death each episode and then coming back from it alright.
I would agree that the original 3 seasons on Netflix were excellent. Season 2 was a little bit of a dip, but even then it was great. 1 and 3 were amazing. I remember 3 being some of the most intense TV I've ever seen. Which is pretty much why I haven't picked it up yet - I don't feel like I could handle that level of intensity right now. Glad to hear it's good though - I'll probably pick it up someday.
My real hope is that they someday put an end on the Luke Cage series. That one ended in an awful place, but it had so much potential - the first half of Season 1 was simply the best. Getting deprived of that 3rd act feels like a big miss.
Last night I watched the first 2 episodes of The Pitt. If you're a fan of ER from the old Must See TV days of yore, you'll like this. An instant favorite for me. Noah Wyle is back and all the classic ER tropes are back (including bowel obstructions!). Really enjoying it so far.
Also watched the first season of Paradise, which I thought was pretty good. I felt like things moved a bit quickly, but had some good solid elements working for it. Episode 7 was particularly noteworthy and has seemed to garner some well-earned attention on the interwebs.
Don't watch Slingshot. One thing I wish I could change about myself would be to have the ability to turn off a bad movie once it starts. Once I start watching any movie, I have to see it through no matter how bad it is. Casey Affleck's performance in this movie is just so bad. The premise of the movie wasn't necessarily bad, but the script was horrible. Laurence Fishburne was his typical self. The ending was weird and dumb.
A 4th season of Ted Lasso was just announced. That seems... unnecessary.
That means production hasn't started yet so it won't air until 2026 or even 2027. Long gaps between seasons is an unfortunate norm these days but maybe we need three or four years to forget season 3.
I heard filming starts in July so yeah probably 2026 airing. It sounds like a cash grab as the story seemed to come to a conclusion. I am hearing that Ted will be coaching a woman's team however.
I guess the Lasso folks aren't happy that Severance dethroned them
Oh boy that Severance finale. Please don't take three years for season three.