I tried watching the pilot of The Orville but it seemed like MacFarlane wrote a bunch of Vaudevillian setups but didn’t write punchlines to them. Like I remember talking to one crew member who was an alien and Seth’s character is like “Your species is pretty racist, huh?” And the alien just goes “Yeah.” Lots of stuff like that, where the script seems to say [put punchline here] and then he never did.
BoJack is a show with some good seasons and great moments but I didn’t care for the last few seasons at all. Repetitive and wallowing. I guess it’s great if you’re depressed and think you’re a terrible person and you identify with BoJack and want to see him punished for being depressed and terrible.
I’ve been enjoying the Hulu series, Woke, with Lamorne Morris (from New Girl), who plays a cartoonist who becomes woke after being manhandled by the NYPD after they mistake him for a mugger.
The story arc involves his attempting to get his life back on track after he blows up his career following his cop trauma, all the while arguing with woke, cartoon hallucinations.
Before the snap, I participated in the 22 Star Trek thread where we watched every single episode of TOS and then made it to like season 3-4 of TNG. I would say the good episodes hold up if you want a nostalgia kick, but there’s no reason to seek them out unless you’re a serious ST fan. One amazing thing I learned is that everyone fucking loved The Royale, which is an episode in which the crew completely ignore the plot and just hang out at a casino for a while. Data wears a cowboy hat. In terms of sci-fi storytelling, it’s garbage, but if you just want to watch your favorite characters chill out for a while, it’s great.
Also, it gave us this amazing gif, look at Worf having zero fucks to give:
My favorite seasons were 2 and 4 because they finished on an optimistic note and seemed to give BoJack a light at the end of the tunnel.
Of course, the final three undid all of that. I thought the ending was really forced.
Also it’s been really funny on social media the last week to see people dunk on the creator for calling Charlie Kaufman’s films white, when he cast a white woman as an Asian and a white man as a Latino.
There’s a lot to unpack here. DS9 is supposedly the successor to TNG, but also it just shits on the entire premise of Star Trek. Different alien species don’t work together, money is a thing, we are not exploring new worlds. DS9 was a great show but it’s not what Roddenberry intended. Gotta say, The Orville just feels like it is continuing the mission of ST much more than any of the latter-day Star Trek sequels.
The Twilight Zone is the greatest show of all time imo, but season 4 is so terrible. They had these great sci-fi ideas that could have worked as half-hour shows, but the networks insisted on an hour-long format and pushed their luck… Even with legendary actors like Burgess Meredith and Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper, it’s just boring sci-fi, tbqh.
Jumped in to mention Voyager. Just finished a rewatch and THAT is the worthy successor to TNG. Excellent high-concept premises and social issues explored in each episode. Plus omg so much Borg!!!
I think part of the issue with other Star Trek like DS9 is it’s exploring a now VERY well-explored galaxy. Now I adore DS9 and all of the aspects it explores that are not exactly about the Trek stuff we associate with Utopia and a species dedicated to betterment and exploration without greed.
But Voyager is all we love from TNG and everything that gave us a sense of wonder in TOS. They’re way off in a completely unexplored part of the galaxy. They encounter weird shit EVERY EPISODE that blows their minds. And there’s a real sense of OH FUCK YEAH!!! on the rare occasion they encounter a person or species that also got stranded all the way in the Delta quadrant. I think at one point they encounter Klingons who got stranded so long ago that they have no idea they aren’t still at war
Has one of the best intro scores too.
They had made some fun advances in the kind of visually stunning opening shots they could do for a Star Trek intro. I love the few shots that focus on the effect Voyager has on the environment, such as when it flies over the rings of Jupiter and oh! it’s only as it advances to the edge of the screen that you notice the ship’s subtle reflection in the stones that make up the rings.
I haven’t really given Voyager a solid second go, so I’m persuadable, but my sense is I just simply liked fewer characters in it than I liked in TNG and DS9. In TNG, I liked every regular, I even got over not liking Wesley pretty fast (he gets a bad wrap). In DS9, I liked almost everybody, a little meh on Dax and Sisko’s kid but that’s about all. In Voyager I loved Janeway, but after her, I don’t know. Was Harry Kim an interesting character, was Tom Paris (I hope I’m getting these names right; no google no problems)? Nelix? Kinda annoying. Nelix’s gf? yawn. The hologram Doctor, maybe. Sure 7 of 9 was goat but that was at least half way through the series wasn’t it?
Yeah, make your pitch, how should I get into Voyager with some question marks about the main cast.
I think the business model is immensely stupid, but tmobile Tuesday is giving 6 months free so I thought I would st least see if anybody has found anything interesting on it.
I had 90 days free and tried to watch the The Most Dangerous Game with Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. I couldn’t finish it. I just let my 90 days expire after that and didn’t bother trying anything else.
edit: wait, i forgot, right at the end of my free trial they started out with the first few episodes of the Princess Bride remake (shot by different celebs at their homes during COVID playing different characters) and that actually seemed kind of fun, but it certainly wasn’t enough to pay for a subscription.
They torpedoed the entire platform by making it impossible to share across OTHER platforms. Such a bizarre decision from an otherwise ostensibly smart person, but then that’s the way of a narcissist who had a string of hits lol. They got super lucky that self indulgence to that degree ever connected with anyone but themselves. Ah well! Nevertheless, time for Toy Story 5.
I confess I watched the first episode of The Stranger though and read a very good review, so maybe we are missing out.
Reading this it sounds like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were just convinced of their own genius and that their idea HAD to work because it’s THEIR idea, regardless of how poorly they understand the streaming model and what kind of content people are interested in (never mind, of course, a pandemic taking away the “watch a 10-minute show on the train while you commute” pitch).
The SFX are unreal. Look at the shot of the ships chasing each other through layered clouds. Haven’t felt the sudden depth perception akin to 3D like that since my first time seeing Avatar.
