TV Series or Show You're Watching

For this evening:

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Episode 1.
 
^^ On my list.

I've been watching Clarkson's Farm on Prime - it's really! Funny at times but also brings to light the frustration farmers must feel when dealing with unpredictable events.
 
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I just finished Season 2 of Your Honor on Netflix. I was a little skeptical of this one, because I wasn't crazy about the way Season 1 ended. But I finally pulled the trigger, and I'm glad I did. I thought it was really good. Recommended.
 
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I just finished watching the first season of Fallout on Amazon Prime Video. I thought it was overall pretty good, if a bit violent and gory. The retro futuristic aspects were one of my favorite things, along with the grim humor. Having never played the games, I can’t say if they were true to the story presented therein. The season was pretty complete as far as it went, but it left things open for a second season.

Amazon has reported that the series was very popular, second only to the Rings of Power. Therefore, it has been approved for another season. This reportedly might be partially based on the New Vegas game setting.
 
I finished Presumed Innocent 2024 on AppleTV+. I liked the story, but to me, none of the characters were likable at all.
Also, finished all 3 seasons of The Bear on Hulu. I really liked this one. Some eps were kind of slow, but the good eps were amazing.
 
What are your feelings on House of the Dragon season 2? I rewatched season 1 to remind myself (it's been so long) and even so, although I did enjoy it, I found the entire series reused some tropes from Game of Thrones. There's the king dying (more slowly, admittedly, than in GOT) and the succession problem, the idea of bastards, the two strong women fighting it out for control of the Seven Kingdoms, the rivalry within families, and a riot in King's Landing, again, over food.

While you could say some of these are universal and to be expected, I thought the series maybe didn't quite push the envelope as well as GOT did. Yes there were dragons and they were cool, but I found it got bogged down a little, especially in the bloody haunting of Harrenhall, which to my mind went on far too long. There weren't that many battles, in fact the whole thrust of the second season seems to have been to avoid war,
though it looks at the end as if they failed to do so
. I guess it's unfair to compare a series that rewrote the fantasy genre, at least on TV, and ran for eight seasons to its smaller brother which has run for, to date, only two, but I found it a little insular. Too much time spent watching people around tables in castles and not enough full-blown battles; too much screentime given to two basic locations (King's Landing and Dragonstone) and again, very dark in terms of lighting. And why in the name of the old gods and the new do we keep having to have graphic depictions of childbirth? I get it: childbirth is messy, but not only do they show it, they keep intercutting it with other, important scenes so you can't look away or fast forward. Yuck. No offence, ladies.

Overall, personally, while I'd say I enjoyed it I don't get the gushing praise for it that seems to be all but unanimous among critics. I'll look forward to the third season, but I will be doing so a little more cautiously. Am I alone here?
 
Trollheart said:
What are your feelings on House of the Dragon season 2?
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I pretty much agree with most of what you said, but I still enjoyed it and looked forward to the next episode and after watching one. I think one of the key points is that GOT was so good, that this series was never going to be in the same league. And maybe the writers purposely made it different in approach to GOT, more insular, so that it wasn't just more of the same.

Either way for me it was still one of the better series currently running (that I'm watching).
 
I'd agree with that. Also, I read that Fire and Blood (on which it's based) isn't anything like the A Song of Ice and Fire novels. It's a "dry, third-person history with unreliable narrators", sounds boring to read. I think the guy who wrote it for television basically did it all himself, which is why it doesn't, for me anyway, quite have the sparkle of the GRRM type, especially in the dialogue, and why it tends to plod a lot. The dragons are cool though, no doubting that.
 
Trollheart said:
I'd agree with that. Also, I read that Fire and Blood (on which it's based) isn't anything like the A Song of Ice and Fire novels. It's a "dry, third-person history with unreliable narrators", sounds boring to read.
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Erm: yes and yes. In my opinion, it's Game of Thrones's equivalent to the Silmarillion - deadly dry, of interest to some but not everyone. Might be why some have said similar things about Season 2 - not enough identifiable/memorable characters - although I hasten to add that I've not seen all the season myself yet.
 
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I’ve been watching Salem on Hulu for a while now, and I’m almost done with the third and final season. It’s been a hell of a ride! The premise is essentially that witchcraft as understood by the Puritans is real, and Salem is infested by witches. This is an interesting blend of drama, dark fantasy, and horror. In Seasons 1 & 2 the witches sought to bring about the rise of the Dark Lord, now that has occurred, and it is realized that this was a bad idea. So now they try to thwart the hell on earth that is about to occur. The series has reinvented the characters regularly, and that in itself is really interesting. I am going to be sorry to watch the last epoisode, so I’m putting it off to later in the week.
 
Hobbit said:
Erm: yes and yes. In my opinion, it's Game of Thrones's equivalent to the Silmarillion - deadly dry, of interest to some but not everyone. Might be why some have said similar things about Season 2 - not enough identifiable/memorable characters - although I hasten to add that I've not seen all the season myself yet.
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Good comparison, and a fair one too. I doubt anyone would particulalry want to see Peter Jackson's 15-hour retelling of The Silmarillion! :rolleyes: :D It's also true about characters. Other than the sons of Rhanyria (sp?) and the queen, as well as Daemon, there's no real other main characters, not till near the end, so you're kind of focusing on the one group. I did like the sort of "rise of the Lannisters" and that the one Stark character looks dour and, well, northy, but other than that (and maybe the Sea Snake) not a lot to choose from. I think Viseryis was a wimp - I mean, who wants their sobriquet to be "The Peaceful"? and I found him quite annoying in his denial of what was in front of him. I also think setting it only 100 years (okay 172) before GOT was a mistake: I would have gone way back, back to the rise of the Targaryens, even the First Men. Go 1000 years back, when the sky was lousy with dragons. Or there weren't any - show where they came from. I think choosing the time period he did made it hard to feel it was any other period than "just before GOT", which then drew the obvious comparisons. I also think it restricted what he could do, particularly when we all know what happens in the near future.
 
A week ago, I watched the first episode of Rings of Power season 2... and yesterday, the second. We're in no hurry to watch episode 3, but will get to it at some point I'm sure.

And since all three episodes dropped at once, the fact that we're driven to this behaviour pretty bedamning. I'm not against reimagining the great pieces of fantasy, and Tolkien is one of the best. However... in the wilful disregard of much of his ideas the showrunners clearly have attempted to install one of their own, and at least to my family of fantasy/scifi geeks, it's nowhere near as good. I think we'd have liked it better if it hadn't even tried to be a Tolkien story in the first place.

Very much unlike that, we couldn't wait to get to the next episode of The Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Engaging storyline, cool characters, this show has it all. Similarly, we're rewatching TS: Strange New Worlds and turning my daughter into quite the trekkie. Bets Star Trek there has been in years (even better than Picard, arguably).
 
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High Intellectual Potential .

Morgane is 38 years old, has three children, two exes and an IQ of 160; her destiny as a cleaner is turned upside-down when her extraordinary abilities are spotted by the police who offer her a job as a consultant.
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Episode 1. English subtitles are out there. I thought this was OK. There is this remake, which is also OK, but if the episodes are all essentially scene for scene as episode 1 was, then you really have to pick one to watch. I'll stick with the original.

For this evening:

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Episode 1.
 
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Want to watch The Penguin: but will wait for a while if I can.

I'm currently on House of the Dragon, season 2. It's taken a while to get there, but so far it's OK. Interestingly, away from all the noise and the hype, I think I'm enjoying it more. I know it won't last though.
 
Only about 20 years late, but I've finally started to enjoy Supernatural! I kept stalling on Season 1, but am now rattling through Season 2. Only another 13 or so seasons to go....

Well, now that I've managed that, it might be worth another go at the Wheel of Time books! Never made it past Book 4 after about 4 goes.... :)
 
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