I was expecting to enjoy Watchmen for how bad it is, but instead I just found it boring. It doesn’t even rise to so-bad-its-good level because it’s too contrived, not a shred of sincerity. And the whole ‘masked cops’ thing really is just so unbelievably fucking dumb.
It’s got all the bells and whistles, great set and costume design and production values overall, but there is just fundamentally no ‘there’ there. Total vacuity. Sad to see Jeremy Irons sullying himself with this dross.
I have no fucking idea what Silicon Valley is gonna be this season
(Jk, I know exactly what it will be and so do you)
I would be happily surprised if something else is revealed, but I really would be surprised. This is Lindelof we’re talking about.
That’s fair. This is a big reason why a lot of book series struggle to get off the ground now, too. No one wants to invest that much time until it’s over and they can be certain it doesn’t fall off the rails. And yet if the audience isn’t there now, how are you going to fund eight books/seasons? You have to get enough of an immediate audience to fund the project to completion, and so you get ridiculous script notes that are the equivalent to journalists being told to write more articles about puppies if they want to ever have the funding to occasionally practice real journalism.
I’ll add a few anecdotes to the discussions at hand that may be interesting or boring to some of you:
One of my best friends is in a role that gets a lot of notice related to GoT. It made him sad that it was one of his lowest paid shows (got progressively lower as CGI increased), and also one of his favorites. He found it amazing that a show with such a high budget could pay so low. He gets other trade offs, but does not necessarily feel they are worth it.
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I worked on some pre-release TV show of Battlestar Galactica before the first season. At the point I received the show, they had not finished the first episode. There were all kinds of space battles in it. My producer was not a very forward thinking guy, so I went to him and said we should take the irregular step to contact the sound crew because how people design space sound effects is really important (several schools of thought on it) and we shouldn’t just make random stuff up. After reaching out to them, we were told that they still hadn’t locked sound design on what they were doing (we would be on air before they would be locked).
They were very appreciative that I actually went to them about this (for the reasons stated), and sent me a bunch of temp effects they thought would be close, and I designed the battles from those. The crew went on to win some Emmy awards for sound editing, but not for that season (no idea if they changed from what they were doing, but it was pretty unique even if I didn’t agree with their choices). I felt vindicated going way outside the typical role of how stuff like this was done.
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This is a personal thing related to Miguel Sapochnik. Awhile ago, there was a show on NBC called Awake (don’t bother). In interviews the creator of the show said that one world was fake and one was real before it aired, and that they would tell the audience which was which by the end of the show. It was an obvious lie that the creator had never even had the thought cross his mind while making the show, and then trotted that out in interviews when it was invariably asked. Like the whole point of a show like that is finding the anchor, and then replaying it with the correct anchor.
Well, at the end of the first and only season (it was known it was going to be canceled probably when they were still in production as on network TV shows at the time you’re usually only 4-6 in the can before it starts airing), they ‘semi’ paid it off, but didn’t really. It led people to speculate in exactly opposite directions which one was real (I would tell people it’s whatever you want it to be, because the creator didn’t know), plus other interpretations. I thought neither could be real, based on logical inconsistencies inside each world and thought that other interpretations would be a no go at the big 4 network level. Like if the creator walked in and pitched what happened in the finale, NBC would have told him to f off or would have made him change his idea to something different.
What I noticed was that the finale had a really particular direction style filled with symbolism, and I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to the director to ask him about it. The director was Sapochnik and I asked him about the ending and how he directed it on facebook. I asked what his interpretation was of the story as he was making it, and he actually answered me (I can give his thoughts on this if anyone is interested who watched that turd of a show). That leapt into an explanation of my interpretation, and him writing back related to that.
We had a nice little back and forth, and it was a pleasant surprise that he would answer an essentially internet random on facebook. He probably wouldn’t do that today.
I like your hate of Lindelof (as an aside, if you see the name Howard Gordon, run away from any show he’s involved in). Did you watch Bates Motel, from his writing partner? I never had time to finish the final two seasons, but once it crossed a particular point I loved it. I almost quit it several times up to that point (I can tell you the exact episode I gave it one more to turn it around and it did).
When I heard The Leftovers was being made as a series, I said no effing way would I watch that because of how bad the ending of the book was. Lindelof apparently wildly diverged from the book (a good thing I’m guessing), but still managed to not stick the landing from what I heard.
https://twitter.com/OTLonESPN/status/1189590704529596419
couldn’t agree more mitt, oh wait you mean only for black people
Looks like it was a 24-hour strike or something. Funbag is up.
I don’t hate Lindelof, just increasingly aware of his strengths and weaknesses now that he’s seen several major long and short-form projects through to completion. I’m not amazing at everything I attempt, either.
I thought the ending was the only thing he stuck with The Leftovers. It’s maybe the most compelling evidence I can present for what I already suspect he’s really doing in Watchmen.
I haven’t seen Bates Motel, but you’re not the first person to suggest it to me. I do enjoy Freddie.
Another book that made significant changes but was excellent is Wayward Pines. Man, that is one hell of a first season. Just ignore season two. S1 stands on its own. Adapted and produced by none other than Shyamalan. Lots of people consider The Visit to be his return to form, but for me, it began with Wayward Pines.
posting this mainly for the photo, which is probably prize-worthy
https://twitter.com/WallySkalij/status/1189586925335695360?s=20
The series was great, the ending was about as good as it could have been; pretty good imo, some beauty in it. It may have disappointed some PTSD Lost people who wanted answerz, but the showrunner couldn’t have made it any clearer that he was never going to explain what really happened with the departure. The series’ greatest strength was that it stuck with a naturalistic lens of how people and society might deal with such inexplicable loss, playing with religious themes along the way but not necessarily endorsing anything.
My older brother lives close and they are ready to evacuate.
Safe wishes for him. Eek.
Here was essentially the ending of the book (details might not be exactly right as I tried to block it out of my memory, so I might remember it about as well as The Siege):
Jerkface ‘messiah carrier’ doesn’t go through with her job and bails. Her handler takes the baby and leaves it on the doorstep of the squabbling lead characters who wanted a baby. Last line of the book is essentially the woman opening the door, and saying, ‘oh look, a baby’. I don’t even know if any of those details made it from the book to anything in the show, as the Holy Wayne character was radically changed from the scope of the book to the TV show based on what I saw people say about it.
Why would they call it ‘the easy fire’?
You shut your filthy whore mouth about The Siege
