Did you watch Berlin Station?
No, I heard it being discussed on a TV podcast I listened to. Piqued my interest.
You should watch it. It’s everything The Americans isn’t.
Where do I watch a canceled Epix original?
Do you have a subscription to Epix?
Nope. HBO, Amazon, Netflix, Kanopy.
And whatever else in on my normal cable package.
You can do a free EPIX trial on Amazon Prime it looks like. While you’re there, binge Get Shorty, Counterpart (this appears to be on regular Prime), and if you want to see something truly weird that starts off great and falls of a cliff, try Perpetual Grace. It’s amazing for about the first 2 or 3 episodes, but needed someone to take a butcher knife to it after. The Missing is also on Amazon Prime for free. These are all shows you should really like (even Perpetual Grace to an extent).
Haven’t seen the show, but I had heard that lovely Lisa Page’s lover Peter Strzok was the case agent on the real life spies that inspired the show.
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Have you watched The Shield? I feel like a lot of the stuff you’re criticizing here is similar to what I criticize about what Prestige Drama has become in the last decade, and that’s my favorite drama of all time.
I haven’t watched The Shield because what I heard about it seemed to glorify police brutality and corruption. It’s not a show I refuse to watch but I worked a strange shift when it was originally on with no DVR so I would have been way late to the party. I’m open to being convinced to try to watch it but I need a good reason to, so I’m giving you the floor.
To give you an idea of where I stand on TV, in general, I love both Breaking Bad and Justified, but I’m in the minority who think Justified is a better show and I also loved the season 1 that many people didn’t. As of right now, my all time favorite show (drama or comedy) is Fargo. That’s the level I want all TV to be at.
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Absolutely correct. The last few seasons my wife and I would have endless conversations about how we should stop watching, but then carry on because we loved the central performances so much.
Overall the funniest thing might have been the endless rubbish disguises, especially for Philip. It was Clark Kent taking off his glasses level sometimes.
I loved The Shield, I don’t think it glorified the police beyond sometimes implying that not all of them were irredeemable and that the job was often unpleasant and difficult. But, in general I know I have a weakness for cop shows and am probably semi-blind to the odd bit of cop worship in them.
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When they went to Kansas or Oklahoma and killed the scientist on the suspicious the US was trying to make a weapon to starve the USSR when they were really trying to develop a hardy strain (wheat?).
It was definitely a “mood” show where they spent a lot of time building suspense and playing with the audience’s expectations.
Feel like @nunnehi et al mostly wanted it to be a different show. How creepy the thing with Kimmy is and what it costs Philip to turn out her and poor Martha is the point. How espionage is mostly boring cheap manipulation and the personal toll of living a lie is the point. Exciting James bond shit was never the point. That it’s more interested in character than plot is a choice. It may not be your bag but imo it did what it meant to really really well.
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Given I’m obsessed with John le Carré who writes about this endlessly then I have to defend the takes a little bit. I agree completely that the Americans wanted to be a show about that, and that they hired actors who were able to pull off the emotional stuff very satisfyingly.
The criticisms I have (and that I think others have) are that the plots, which are the events in their lives that are supposed to provoke these reactions, are really silly and unconvincing a lot of the time. Further, what those characters choose to do given their feelings and situations are often part of that silliness. It’s not that I want James Bond pay offs to the spy stuff, but I do want some pay offs and certainly some that make sense. That what happens is silly means that no matter how well acted the character stuff is, you can’t help but also think, “yeah but wtf is this shit?!”
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Suburban family in America with two children, one boy one girl, running a travel agency in the 1980s living the American dream.
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FYP
Yes, this is exactly it, exactly it. I forgive a ton in this genre because I’m a fan of it, but the absurdity of this show was hands in the air throwing.
I don’t know if any of you read scripts, but I tried reading the Pilot for the show and it was throw across the room levels of over the top piss poor writing. What I’m saying is it was even more try hard than the show appeared to be. I’m honestly surprised the show ended up as good as it did because the real problem with the show was the creator.
Do you like Happy Valley and Bosch, since you’re a cop genre fan?
I’m a creative person professionally. I give wide latitude to how people want to tell a story. How that story is told with the tools you’ve created is much more important to me than how I want it to unfold. I love a show that subverts my expectations in believable ways. The problem was many of the plot lines in the show were at the level of a 7 year old who discovered cuss words for lack of a better reference. Like I said to Dan earlier, one of the best scenes in the show was the OD scene, but the entire plot lead up of how we get to that scene is one of the most absurd things I’ve seen on TV filled with so many levels of incompetence that would never happen in real life to get to that point. This happened all the time in the show.
If you put nearly any other actor in those roles, the show just doesn’t work (a good comparison though at a much different level might be how well True Detective S1 worked with the great actors, while TD2 did not work with not great actors). In the early seasons, Keri really carried the show. In the later seasons, Matthew did because by then they had made so many terrible story decisions they couldn’t get out of them. I blame FX for a lot of the problems with the show because I think they both micro-managed and were way too hands off depending on what it was. All of the Russian storylines were far more interesting to me by the end than anything going on with the main characters.
If you want a good example of a show that intentionally painted itself into terrible corners and managed a way out every time, check out The Good Place. The best TV is that which does not create expectations by how it writes but just forces you to go along for the ride because you don’t know what to expect.
I think that was the final season storyline. I felt like a lot of that season was FX (or the writers) just making the actors have love scenes with other people because they got mad that Keri and Matthew ended up together in real life. I think that really shows how forgettable the show was by the end even though we knew it was going to end with a big moment.
You can call it a ‘mood’ show, but the more accurate word is vamping (time wasting in this context). They vamped for a big reveal all the time and the big reveal was never that interesting. There are thousands of people who will never get to create or write a TV show who would have done a better job with this show if they were given all the tools and told the creator to go away.
Tried 83 and hated the production values so much (looked like a play) that I tuned out after a couple of episodes.