What TV SHOWS are you watching?

I'll probably keep pushing. I have a lot of time on my hands in the late evening these days.

Rebels is AMAZING by the end. Even though it falls prey to Filoni's more unchained mystical impulses, it has so much good stuff.

Plus it has Hera and Sabine, who are both right up there with Ahsoka as Star Wars women done right. I'm REALLY hoping they are bringing Sabine into mando or one of the spin offs. Hera would have been a much better choice than Holdo though her race, like Ahsoka, don't translate to live action so well (at least for serious drama).

And I'd but the Ghost and Phantom up there with the Razor Crest for top post OT designs.

The latest episode of WandaVision was certainly unexpected. Major spoiler as they just shook up the MCU.

The Head on HBOmax is a pretty fun and interesting murder/mystery show about an international group of researchers left to mind an antarctic research base over the winter. Then the summer relief crew shows up most of them are dead or missing. The few survivors give conflicting accounts as the show retells the last days of the team.

This is basically Among Us as a TV Show. So much so I am convinced one of them directly informed the other. There are random technical tasks that need to be performed, when a body is discovered there is an emergency meeting to discuss, sabotage as a tool to flush out people is often employed, there are tunnels to hide in...the only thing missing is someone calling another person "Dude, you are soooo suss!!"

Anyway, it is a fun, fairly short experience at 6 episodes. The final reveal is almost too mundane though to justify all the events. The stakes don't quite seem high enough. But the first ep does give a lot of clues so watch it carefully if you are going to go for the ride.

BTW, actual antarctic researchers have gotta be saying "What the hell, man!" at the shows depiction of just what type of deviant, sociopath, or borderline outlaw are desperate enough to winter down there

I've watched two episodes of The Head so far. I'm enjoying it, although I am a bit worried that it will not stick the landing. We shall see.

Snowpiercer - The TV series not the movie which I have also seen. Jennifer Connelly is the main baddie. Overall I'd say "good not great" describes the series for me so far. Could be because I'm just not into dark future stuff nowadays so maybe others will like it better.

Finished up Haunting of Bly Manor. I liked it quite a bit but it is significantly less scary than the predecessor show. Focused much more on character relationships, love, and loss, to the point where the ghost aspect is almost completely absent in some episodes. But it is very compelling, with over all very good performances, especially the little girl. The accents are still distracting because some actors really seem to be struggling but it still works. The plot, such as it is, is mostly nonsense and a lot of it gets dropped along the way but it doesn't really matter because the show finds 3-4 relationships and really hones in on them with mostly tragic results but that still leave you satisfied.

jason10mm wrote: Finished up Haunting of Bly Manor. I liked it quite a bit but it is significantly less scary than the predecessor show. Focused much more on character relationships, love, and loss, to the point where the ghost aspect is almost completely absent in some episodes. But it is very compelling, with over all very good performances, especially the little girl. The accents are still distracting because some actors really seem to be struggling but it still works. The plot, such as it is, is mostly nonsense and a lot of it gets dropped along the way but it doesn't really matter because the show finds 3-4 relationships and really hones in on them with mostly tragic results but that still leave you satisfied.

They missed an opportunity to have a final "gotcha" but instead went for a very melancholy ending. IIRC Hill House did something similar, with no real vanquishing of any evil, restoring loved ones, or really anything other than just moving on as best as you can.

Just note that the last 20 seconds of EVERY episode is a shocking cliffhanger, making it very hard to turn the damn show off and go to bed

Hey mods. Maybe check that guzikos account. Just joined today. Only two posts are copy-paste of member posts. Something hinky. Maybe a bot.

Got it, thanks. I didn't read closely enough.

Finished The Head on HBO Max. It was good, although half-way through its 6 parts I had a theory about the end result, and it turned out to be correct.

I don't go out of my way to guess these kinds of things, because I enjoy being surprised. So the fact that this one didn't surprise me is a bit of a letdown. Still, very well done and worth a watch.

Good catch boothwah. I read that and thought "Damn, he had the exact some opinion i did!".

I agree with The Head. They don't really hide any info so the mystery can be resolved fairly easily.

Just in time for today's news, I finished watching Angel season 4 last night. It's clearly the worst season of Angel, with the problematic character arc for Cordelia Chase. She starts out the season sidelined due to non-starter of a storyline that has her transcend to a higher plane of existence, where all she does is miss her past life and spy on her old friends. Then she comes back, with amnesia, which is also not an interesting idea when the whole viewing audience knows exactly who she is, and her friends are constantly trying to remind her of who she is. Then she hooks up with a teenage boy, gets pregnant, and is revealed to be a major villain. And ends up in a coma, which is also an inert plot twist. And now we know that everything that happened to her character that season arose from Joss Whedon's bad reaction to her pregnancy announcement.

Whedon's reputation has taken a few hits in recent years. He admitted to cheating on his wife, and with an actress from one of his shows. Last year, he was accused of cutting an excessive number of scenes from the Justice League movie that featured an African-American character. And now this. On the other hand, cheating is pretty common in Hollywood circles and doesn't come anywhere near close to a cancellation level event. A producer or director sleeping with an actress is so common that the expression "casting couch" entered our language decades ago. I haven't seen the Justice League movie and will continue to not see it because it looked terrible in the trailers, and the African-American character in question came across in said trailers as a shallow dude-bro type that I wouldn't miss.

As for Cordelia Chase, I have mixed feelings. Charisma Carpenter may be a great talent who was treated poorly by Whedon, but I have seen her in only two roles in three tv shows, and she played a Mean Girl in Buffy/Angel and a similar character in Veronica Mars. That's not a lot of range, and I never got around to watching all of Angel before because I just didn't enjoy her character, even after she gradually became more heroic before her season four heel turn. I haven't rewatched season five of Angel yet, but it's the only really good season of the show, and that's why it's the only season I own. And even though Charisma only appears in one episode of season five, it almost feels like one episode too many.

I am very nearly finished watching the 7th and final season of Buffy. Even if worse news comes out about Whedon, I think it would be a shame if people decided to go full cancel culture against Buffy. She remains an inspirational role model. The final season closes with an amazing episode where a whole bunch of other young women suddenly gain the same power set, and they all fight a big battle against a horde of monsters to save the world. In black and white, that doesn't seem special, but the first time I watched that scene on tv, it was absolutely electric. The underlying message was that any young woman might be able to tap into her personal power and accomplish great things if she tried, and that is a great message that stands in defiance of a long, sorry history of human misogyny.

Didn't Buffy fall in love with Spike after he raped her?

ChristopherMD wrote: Didn't Buffy fall in love with Spike after he raped her?

She never loved Spike, and she had already broken up with him by the time he _attempted_ to rape her during a very bad attempt to win back her affection. Then he went off on a quest to regain his soul and came back a better person, though still a monster. In third to last episode of the final season, Spike is on a mission out of town when all of Buffy's friends turn against her and literally drive her out of her own home because she made a bad leadership decision that led to some deaths and the loss of Xander's eye. In the next episode, Spike returns to town and finds her squatting in an abandoned house. He says some inspiring things to her and she returns to save the day and take charge again, shortly before an apocalyptic battle against evil.