Westworld S1

I finished up Westworld S1 in March; it had an effect on me so I had Jenn watch it. The first three episodes in particular are a real slog -- call me repressed but I don't feel the need to see all this gratuitous sex, violence and gore that is available to directors on non-broadcast mediums. After that though it does get going well. It is a rare bird in that even once you know where things are going you can enjoy the slow reveals of what is going on. The whole thing was lovingly crafted and masterfully executed. And one of the reveals is a no-kidding "holy shit!" moment. It was a season which had an ending that made all the other season-endings seem boring by comparison.

Fall TV: What is it with time travel this year?

To wit:

• The Flash. Episode one and we're on our third reality of the season.
• Legends Of Tomorrow. Time travel is the whole schitck, although it will probably take some kind of left turn this year.
• Timeless. Personally if I was in this boat I'd ask Homeland Security to write up a dossier of my complete life so that it would be the first thing I read when I got back. Nothing like getting blindsided by (A) a missing sister and (B) a fiance.
• Travellers. Hasn't started yet, but I understand it too is a time travel gig.

Odds are at least one of the latter two won't make it to Christmas.

Fall TV: Pitch

One of Jenn's picks. Maybe I'm sexist/racist/stick-and-ball-ist, but the heart-warming story of a young black woman making her way through the big leagues of professional baseball does nothing for me on any of those three levels.

Fall TV: Gotham

We resisted going back to this, it just seemed too... much. Jim Gordon has turned into an anti-hero and it is hard to see how we'll end up where we allegedly are going with the Batman universe, I'm just not so big on these fallen-good-guys stories. But Jenn likes Fish Mooney so we're back on it.

DareDevil Season 2

Hmmm... since it is a NetFlix series, should it be called "series 2" instead of "season 2"? We're not going to get the third season until 2018. But I guess the US sensibilities apply, so "season 2" it is.

Anyways. This season started a bit unevenly, there was a bunch of "what the hell is really going on here" with things, and when things got amped up you realized that they already were amped up -- that transition, as well as the part-A to part-B transition, was more than a bit rough. The end was a bit weird too -- "We live to serve you, Black Sky!" "Well, I fight against you!" "Well we fight you then!" -- and I'm like, what? That was a very confusing five minutes. Then the pseudo-happy-season-endings with a hint of a cliffhanger tacked on the end of that.

The whole dragging-Murdock-through-the-dark was simultaneously too much and not enough, if you know what I mean. And I didn't really think Frank Castle's journey was worth the trip, in the end.

Overall, season one benefited from nobody really knowing what Daredevil was all about. Origin stories are useful for a reason, that being that the arc of discovery provides a real framework for the A-story. Absent that, you have to have a good A-story to carry the series, and I think that this season tried to have two of those and it didn't really work.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I am conflicted by this -- there are interesting things going on in this miniseries, but my need to find out what happens is constantly at war with the tedium with which things move forward. I think the fact that the episodes are longer than average -- what, 1h 20m each including commercials? -- is part of the problem. Had it been chopped up into hour-long presentations it might be much better, although the story pacing would have to be altered somewhat to make the beats work.

TV: Childhood's End

(Showcase, December 2015) Coming to it without any familiarity with the source material, I found the story rather slow, like it was trying to move deliberately and gracefully in some direction towards a specific, and then it just... ended. The trip back to the homeworld was, ultimately, pointless. The fact that the whole point of the exercise was to harvest humanity's potential before curiosity could place the future of that potential risk (although to what further end is unclear) -- was muddled and only clear to me on reflection. Overall it was a disappointment.

TV: Supergirl Pilot Is Really Bad

We finally watched the pilot. A super hero story with a strong female lead, what could go wrong, right?

Well for starters, the previews made it look like it was some kind of teenager drama, with emphasis on the drama. Not a fan.

Then the pilot actually starts, and we're in some kind of comic-book teen-drama mash-up with The Devil Wears Prada. And I'm not a fan of either genre. And it manages to conflict with the teen-drama aspect too, since our teen lead is not a teenager, she's clearly some kind of young, probably post-college, career woman who behaves like a teenager.

Then the whole episode they manage to go without identifying Superman by name. Did the series not get a license to use that name? It's always "him". And I turn to Jenn and say, why to they refer to Superman that way? He isn't fucking Jesus. Well except at the end of the episode where we hear: "He's proud of you." Maybe he is Jesus! TV rights do strange things.

Then Supergirl's secret identity is the only one to come up with a clear photo of the super hero. A real Peter Parker moment, if you would. And at this point I said to Jenn, have we seen an original idea here yet? And she couldn't think of one.

I'll give the show a pass on how bad the special effects were, too. They were cramming a lot of other bad things into the show and there clearly wasn't the time to design the effects properly.

At the end of it all Jenn didn't want to watch another episode. My view is, we gave Heroes Reborn two episodes before bailing, we should give this at least another episode. 

But on the other hand, Heroes Reborn wasn't this bad.

TV: Programming Note

What we're watching, winter 2015:

• Sleepy Hollow
• Elementary
• Resurrection (until it finished)
• Agent Carter (and I assume that's finished too, we just have not caught up yet)
• Agents of Shield
• Criminal Minds
• Big Bang Theory
• The Odd Couple
• Gotham
• The Flash
• Castle
• Stalker

TV: 12 Monkeys

Two episodes in and it doesn't suck. This Cole is more useful than the one in the movie. It appears to me at this point that the future is busy reinforcing its own past by creating it, just as in the movie. Hopefully the series won't turn into an anti-vaccination screed, that would be unfortunate.

TV: Resurrection

Finally got to the end of Resurrection. (Our PVR is running about two weeks behind the rest of the world.)

We both did a "What the hell!" to the "One Year Later" bit. That seems a bit much like "don't trouble yourself with the details of the immediate aftermath". Felt like a hand-wavey cheat to me. But overall the story was wrapped up well, leaving enough for a second set of stories with the same characters.

I liked the series. No word yet on if there will be more.

IRC on HD

[xdroop] HD comes out, and suddenly every sitcom DP thinks he's shooting a fucking movie.

Dr. Phil Needs To Get Over his New Toy

...his new toy being "being broadcast in HD". Today featured several shots of him standing next to a large display, and while the content on his display was readable, the right half of Dr. Phil wasn't.

This is my new favorite thing to complain about: TV producers and directors who see all their friends with shiny new plasma widescreen TVs and assume that the average man in the street has the same gear.

I'm sure that on a wide screen TV, Dr. Phil looked stunning -- but on my TV, the shot looked like crap.

Memo to TV producers: you are not shooting a movie. If your content falls off the sides of my screen, my viewership might fall off the side of your ratings.

Remember: for widescreen, stage wide, but frame narrow.

(Or letterbox. But we all know that if Dr. Phil got letterboxed, half of $STEREOTYPE's trailer parks would call in demanding to know why Dr. Phil looked all funny with them black bars on the screen.)