I can’t wait to watch the Roy’s dealing with the pandemic. But seriously, is there anything at all good on HBO these days? I can’t remember the last HBO show I watched and liked. I mean, Succession I guess?
Barry and The Righteous Gemstones, whenever they come back.
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OK let’s see here:
The Undoing, sucked. Raised by Wolves, mega sucked. Westworld, stopped watching halfway through the first season. His Dark Materials, Lovecraft Country, didn’t even watch. Big Little Lies, sucked but fooled me into thinking it was good for like 3/4 of the season. Basically like the Undoing but fooled me longer. Barry is amazing. Didn’t like Watchmen, just expects you to care about Mr. Manhattan because he’s blue or something. Righteous Gemstones might be better than Barry, very funny and a few of the episodes were really beautiful. But shit HBO, that’s three shows out of like a dozen. Come on.
Haven’t watched it yet, but there’s a new detective show called Mare of Easttown that has a solid cast ( Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce, Jean Smart, Evan Peters ). On paper it should be good, but it’s set just outside of Philadelphia, so the whole thing could get train wrecked by Brits and Aussies trying to do Philly accents.
I liked the Nicole Kidman / Hugh Grant miniseries, but it was objectively not good.
Spoilers in this post. I’ve finished the show now. The last episode, or really just the last 20 minutes of it, is legit good, but mostly Lindelof is lucky that the show had great actors who can sell this stuff.
Where the premise of Lost was “what if we had a big mystery, with tons of weird intriguing elements, but didn’t bother with the work of making it coherent”, The Leftovers is “what if we had big emotional moments with lots of symbolism but didn’t bother with the work of making it coherent”.
The show continues to the end to treat its characters with indifference. Would Kevin REALLY approach Nora like their lives together never happened, like a total lunatic? Is that consistent with Kevin’s behaviour through the series? I don’t know, who gives a shit, we need to generate big emotional scenes. A favourite Oscar Wilde quote of mine is “a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it” and The Leftovers is a sentimental show in that sense. A reviewer who quit the show in S1 put it well:
Sometimes I imagine that the show itself is a little like the Guilty Remnant. It trades in long scenes of silence, allowing facial expressions and music to communicate how it feels. Though it’s unclear if it’s choosing to do this because silence is more powerful than words, or because it has nothing real to say.
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Episode 5 of Falcon and the Winter Soldier seemed bizarrely paced and sequenced.
A lot of speculation that the show originally had a plot line about a pandemic that was removed for obvious reasons but in some cases was difficult to edit around.
waaaaaaaat
Watchmen Episode 6 is the best episode of television I have ever seen.
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Yeah that was a great episode. But with any Lindelof thing you’re going to get some great, emotional, poignant episodes. Like there’s tons of great Lost episodes. I even liked a few season 1 Leftover episodes. But ultimately it’s all a lazy, incoherent, unmotivated mess.
Watchmen was none of these.
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First episode of Mare of Easttown is mainly just stage setting but it has my hopes up so far. Has the same feel as early True Detective or the Night of.
Two episodes in of the Nevers and I can say with good confidence that its absolutely not “HBO’s next great fantasy series” though its not particularly terrible or anything. Its about on par with Penny Dreadful where if you’re a fan of weird historical tidbits and purty ladies you can make it through.
Also caught up with City on a Hill (Kevin Bacon is super corrupt FBI agent in 90s Boston). I was about to say its a poor man’s Wire but that would be giving it too much credit. One great part about the Wire is that nearly all the characters (including and especially villains) are actually likable. City on a Hill just has no likeable characters at all. Will keep watching just since I’m such a sucker for these types of shows but I feel bad about it.
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Yeah that’s what I remember about the first season I hated. Like, OK, those weird cult people, would they actually behave that way? I don’t see why. And when they played their hilarious practical joke and staged all the real dolls of the vanished, well, am I supposed to care or be horrified that they all got viscously beaten to death? They got what they deserved, or close to it. Am I supposed to, I don’t know, be impressed that MAYBE THAT WAS THEIR OBJECTIVE ALL ALONG? Mostly I was annoyed that I watched the dumb show in the first place.
Are True Detective and Night of also on your hating list? Or are compelling HBO murder mystery detective shows laughably unrelated somehow?
Yeah, kind of. The Night Of started great but went steeply downhill in the last couple of episodes. Kind of in the mold of Big Little Lies and The Undoing.
True Detective season 1 was amazing but I’m sorry, the last episode was a big letdown. Still a good season of television, I’ll give you that. Season 2 was not very good.
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The night of started off great and was similar to the Undoing to where it went to complete shit by the end. True Detective definitely a step above
if you’re like me and you’ve always wanted to see marlo stanfield fire a machine gun into a bunch of cops, stick with The Strain through s4
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Yeah I don’t really remember the ending of Night of sucking though its been a while, and I’ve only seen the series once. Seems unfair to compare it to the Undoing where they were just getting straight goofy with the cliffhangers.
Kate just dropped a pretty solid wudder
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