From wiki:
Because the story is set in a fictionalized version of Easttown Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, which is where series creator Brad Ingelsby was born, there were discussions about whether to use the “Delco accent”, which is a version of Philadelphia English common in neighboring Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It was Winslet who insisted that the accent be used, despite being a particularly difficult accent to learn, because she felt the community itself was an important character in the story, and the authentic accent would help emphasize that.[14] She has claimed that it was so difficult to learn the accent that it caused her to “throw things”
Meh, idk, I quite liked the cult, it’s believable to me that you would get weird shit springing up like that in the aftermath of an event like the Departure. The show’s focus is how people cope in the aftermath of an event which seems to reveal a lack of meaning or purpose in the universe. A sci-fi type show investigating the social implications of that would have potential, but The Leftovers is only really interested in using that as backdrop, it wants to investigate how people cope on an individual level. Which is fine but you then need good characterization and that’s where it drops the ball. You probably didn’t make it this far but there’s a moment in S1 where a character who lost her whole family in the Departure is shown to be hiring prostitutes to shoot her in the chest while she wears a bulletproof vest. You can see the writing process there, like they want to demonstrate that she is flirting with wanting to die but can’t quite go through with it and instead of being like “how can we demonstrate that in a way that makes sense for her character” the question is “what’s the most shocking and striking scene we can come up with to communicate that”. That’s one example but I could easily give ten more.
As a result the emotional spectacle that The Leftovers wants to put on screen is just boring to me, because it lacks a grounding in reality. Where Lost promised a mystery and then didn’t deliver a coherent solution, The Leftovers promises character drama and then doesn’t bother to build coherent characters. I would be interested to hear someone who enjoyed the show describe to me Laurie’s character, for instance. What kind of person is she? Is she warm? Cold? Ethical, unscrupulous? Considered, impulsive? It can’t be done because she just does whatever the show needs her to do.
If you haven’t seen season 3 I definitely recommend it, doesn’t build itself up as a fascinating mystery in the same way as S1, but good character drama, Mahershala Ali is great in it and I liked the ending.
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toiletpaperusacurious.jpg. Both were… not good. TU slightly surprised me at least. TNO and its “lets go get the real killer” scene, among others, was really the dagger in the back though.
Worst HBO series?
- The Night Of
- The Undoing
0 voters
the strain
marlo stanfield plays this character who is a super capitalist, he’s all about making money. buying stuff, selling stuff for more, it’s all for money, that’s his main goal. and the character’s name is CREAM so i’m like cool Cash Rules Everything Around Me, that’s perfect for this character. and then you find out like 3 seasons later it’s not a nom de guerre, it’s his family name. his real name is angelo cream
I think this is because The Night Of started innovative but had to eventually resort to bland courtroom scenes to resolve the plot. I liked it, its just that courtroom dramas are stale as hell.
I’d skip it if you don’t like MCU films
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I have found the greatest show of 2021.
It’s Pui Pui Molcar on Netflix, a stop-motion animation about sentient guinea pigs that are also cars.
It’s twelve 2.5 minute episodes, so you can binge the whole thing in a half hour.
It’s Japanese, but there’s no dialogue, unless you count the adorable squeaking of the characters.
Look how god damn cute these things are:
All the bags of popcorn for this one.
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Yeah you’d get weird shit. But why did Amy Brenneman abandon her family to join the dumb cult? It’s never motivated. She’s still got a husband and children, no one in her family disappeared. But her joining the cult is just a thing that happened in the show, it makes no sense. She abandoned her family to smoke cigarettes and go around playing mean spirited practical jokes on non cultists. I have a lot of questions and Lindeloff predictably has no answers. This is the central conflict of the first season as far as I remember.
Then you’ve got the oppressive suffering of the lady whose whole family disappeared, that’s just exploitative emotional pornography in my book.
She was pregnant and her foetus disappeared SPOILERS. But yeah nothing her character does makes sense. She later leaves the cult and then deliberately drives into cult members at speed. We see her do it once and her son makes reference to it so we know it’s a regular thing. Then it’s never addressed so I guess she stops? Then in the final episode a character explains that Laurie was unable to do something because it would have been unethical. Ascii shrug.
Oh right, her unplanned middle-age pregnancy that she was ambivalent about.
Trying to kill those cult members with her car kind of makes sense, those guys were irredeemable assholes.
This post could be a John Oliver skit
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Does it ever divert back to the source material? I was super-disappointed with the first couple of episodes to see it only tangentially related to the graphic novel.
Ha. I can walk to Easttown township from my house in under 10 mins. I’m in the far NW corner of Delco.
No one in Easttown speaks with the accent. It’s on the Main Line. Lots of mansions.
It’s a start but if it was a John Oliver piece it would have to include him saying something like this:
“And there is this real hoodie that you can buy RIGHT NOW.”
“Look at this thing. It’s fantastic! It’s a still from Episode 6. The zombie episode! Yes. There’s a zombie episode.”
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Yeah I actually grew up there (I went to Tredyffrin/Easttown middle school and Conestoga). I didn’t even make the connection until googling afterward, I thought there was just some other Easttown somewhere I didn’t know about.
Found episode 1 of Pui Pui Molcar on Youtube. Tell me this isn’t the greatest thing ever.
A tight story with high drama wrapped up in two and a half minutes.
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Police brutality!
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I think you’ve found your avatar!
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I was prepared to enjoy this but even so it exceeded my expectations.
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