IdleRich

IdleRich
I love the dialogue and the humour and so on... there is a bit of a sense though that it just goes round in circles with that snappy dialogue and moments of genuine humour. I can't see it ever going anywhere, it will never truly succeed.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm enjoying series 1 so far, great bit where they try to have him ousted and he then has security remove the traitors.

Green frontier... Takes a while to get going but I enjoyed it.

Also watched the white lotus a few days ago, that's pretty lightweight but hilarious. Good Christmas series.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I love the dialogue and the humour and so on... there is a bit of a sense though that it just goes round in circles with that snappy dialogue and moments of genuine humour. I can't see it ever going anywhere, it will never truly succeed.
A common criticism seems to be that there's a death of sympathetic characters, which I think is fair. It would certainly be easier to support the kids' machinations against their awful dad if they weren't such awful people themselves - but I guess as it's gone on you've started to get some idea of what their upbringing was like, and how they never stood any real change of turning out like remotely normal human beings.

Kendall, in particular, becomes more sympathetic in the third series, but more because you get a real idea of how fucked up he is than because of his ham-fisted and largely self-interested attempts to expose the abuse scandal.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I actually don't mind a lack of likable characters, my issue is Shiv smiling with satisfaction as she realises (or thinks) she has become the favoured heir - as a viewer you're thinking "but doesn't she remember the last three times this happened before he switched to someone else?". Where is it going? Where can it go without it finishing? Nowhere really. So, as entertaining as the machinations are, this built-in frustration is becoming increasingly frustrating.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
We have been watching Mindhunter. Started great, I love the premise and the way it looks... I like the relationship between the two main guy's. A zealot and a cynic as usual, but not too much so, a relationship you can believe might work and progress and so on.

But it looks increasingly as though they are gonna fuck it up. I honestly couldn't give a shit about how the main guy gets on with his gf and the other one can't relate to his son.

There is a reason why they adverts describe it as something like "A rogue FBI unit develops criminal behavioural psychology by interviewing serial killers and attempting to apply what they learn to current unsolved cases" rather than "A miserable fat guy argues with his wife about their son and the situation is exacerbated by his stressful job" - the first one is a dramatic development in one of the most salaciously fetishisd fields of criminality, the latter is a day in the life of half of the viewers. So why the fuck let the show drift with the latter story becoming more dominant?

These last few episodes have gone in the wrong direction with bad narrative choices... they are in danger of wasting a good premise.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The only really great bits in Mindhunter are the interviews with the serial killers, especially Ed Kemper and Charles Manson. (Also some good creepy hints of what the yet-to-be-caught BTK killer is up to in season 2.)

The best serial killer series I've seen is The Fall which becomes increasingly silly as it goes along but starts off with a couple of genuinely disturbing episodes.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Just finished series 7 of "Spiral", one left. An all-time favorite, great cast and writing. Up there with another French series "The Bureau".
 

luka

Well-known member
on the few occassions ive stayed in english hotels over the last ten years ive found myself inexorably drawn to River Monsters
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The only really great bits in Mindhunter are the interviews with the serial killers, especially Ed Kemper and Charles Manson. (Also some good creepy hints of what the yet-to-be-caught BTK killer is up to in season 2.)

The best serial killer series I've seen is The Fall which becomes increasingly silly as it goes along but starts off with a couple of genuinely disturbing episodes.
Oh that is the BTK you see in the pre-credit bits? That's one of V's favourites... but yeah, obviously the best bits are the interviews with the killers, we need more of that and less debate about whether Tench sends his kid to a special school.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also, does anyone have any recommendations for good comedy? Something I can just dip into if I need to turn my brain off for a few minutes (a bit like dissensus really in that regard). Yesterday we started watching The Great which actually looked fairly promising but V fell asleep after five minutes - no real reflection on the thing it was almost six a.m.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The only really great bits in Mindhunter are the interviews with the serial killers, especially Ed Kemper and Charles Manson. (Also some good creepy hints of what the yet-to-be-caught BTK killer is up to in season 2.)

The best serial killer series I've seen is The Fall which becomes increasingly silly as it goes along but starts off with a couple of genuinely disturbing episodes.
You know that bit when they stop calling them "sequence killers" and change the tag to "serial killers" - is there any slight grain of truth in scenes of that nature or is it entirely a... what would it be.... dramatic irony?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Also, does anyone have any recommendations for good comedy? Something I can just dip into if I need to turn my brain off for a few minutes (a bit like dissensus really in that regard). Yesterday we started watching The Great which actually looked fairly promising but V fell asleep after five minutes - no real reflection on the thing it was almost six a.m.

Have you done Julia Davis? Not sexually

Hunderby flew under the radar. It’s not Nighty Night, still warped fun with bonnets and class
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I was actually gonna specify "something that is not dark" - it's not that I don't enjoy dark comedy, it's just that everything is dark these days. People often recommend It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia to me when I make a request along the lines of that above, and in most ways it does fit the bill perfectly. I can just dive in randomly cos they made at least a million episodes and they don't really follow sequentially - but the hateful nature of every character and the nastiness of the storylines grows quite tiring and depressing when I need cheering up, which is precisely when I tend to choose this sort of viewing.

So I should have said "something that isn't dark" in my previous post which would I imagine have ruled out most of Julia Davis' work. I've not really seen much of her stuff... a year or two back we did watch the entirety of the one about a couple of families filled with ghastly people going camping, I think it was called Camping. It had its moments certainly, but in my opinion a lot of its humour depended on saying horrible stuff in an attempt to get a kind of shock laugh.

This brought to mind something that Mr Tea said yonks ago about The League of Gentlemen - that at times, particularly in later episodes, they seemed to have lost sight of the fact that they were doing nasty stuff in service of the ultimate aim of making people laugh, and instead the whole programme became centred around trying to be as nasty as possible for the sake of being nasty. For me Camping was in danger of venturing into that same territory.

The only other one of hers I have seen bits of is Hunderby, strangely enough they showed a few episodes of it a year or so back on Portuguese telly - I got the impression that it wasn't as relentlessly vicious as her usual output but sadly I never knew what was going on cos here they have this weird habit of showing stuff in a totally random order... like they were showing Shameless (here called No Limit, which means something like On The Limit) and we were enjoying it, we saw all of season one and then we saw all of season two and we had watched half of season three... when it suddenly jumped to midway through season six with the Gallagher's patriarch (played by William H Macey) apparently dead. Makes no sense at all. It's like they put things on to fill up the schedule but they don't care whether or not people watch it. Also sometimes they fill up whole days, maybe even an entire weekend of repeats of the same programme... one time I counted 16 episodes of How I Met Your Mother in a row and that is not at all unusual. One time I woke up one evening confused and alone and I was too weak and hungover to search through the guide or switch channels - or really do anything except drink can after can of lager I'd wisely left in reach of my pit - and I got trapped in a CSI NY marathon, by the time I'd gone through several series of that and actually watched them age and get promoted and so on I became convinced I was part of Mac's team, I was hallucinating that I was chasing down bad guys and shooting various bizarre projectiles through tanks of water into dummies to determine the murder weapon.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Been watching Succession as well in covid isolation. I'm mid season 3 right now. You can tell by the amount of spontaenous idioms in the dialogue, that they're trying to be just a little too clever, which annoys me sometime but otherwise it's very good. Kendall is the most interesting character I think.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i've just finished it - favourite character was roman. good show, could have done with a few more levels going on but very entertaining.
 
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