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somebody in their marketing dept A: went on a bender and B: is prob gonna get fired

assuming this is an attempt to get us to pay more per month for cooking shows and Dateline knockoffs

Or maybe they feel guilty sullying the HBO brand with cooking shows and Dateline knockoffs. I mean, I would

Prepare to say farewell to HBO Max pic.twitter.com/NL6gb4YZmI

— Alan Sepinwall (@sepinwall) April 12, 2023

This is good news for my plan to establish a cable channel that is entirely about riding the rails, cooking soup directly in its can, carrying one's possessions in a handkerchief tied on a stick, mournfully playing old folk songs on a harmonica, and having an adorably scruffy canine companion.

HoboMax

Econonmy/limited subscription option = littlest HoboMax.

Countdown to some stupid "see, we got you all talking!" response.

Anyway. There's been a lot I don't like about the current season of "Ted Lasso," but as I was watching the latest episode I kind of realized just how good the acting is across the board, which has really helped me deal with whatever ups and downs.

anybody seen BEEF (2023)?

Just watched some last night. Reluctantly at first - the promo art with the middle fingers is offputting to me. The first ep I was a bit unsure, thought it'd just be a ho hum knives out style escalation of malice, but it did NOT go where I expected it to!

Watching it and enjoying it but also feeling weird about discussing it in this thread.

Oh right bcs its actually a netflix show isnt it? lol. I dont even notice anymore - we pirate 80% of what we watch.

Anyone else here want to join in on a watch of Three-Body: a 30-episode adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem? I was completely pulled in by episode 2 - the first 20 minutes of which spin through existential physicists, pool balls that leave the solar system, someone shooting at two-dimensional life, and turkey scientists. Much of this is in the book, but I think I might like this more.

Non-committal NYT review: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/arts/television/three-body-review.html

So I watched all of it. It's a 23 hour combo police procedural, historical epic, action movie, and game cutscenes. It's incredibly flawed: a few roles seemed to have been played by folks who were walking by, 10 minutes were obviously censored out of episode 11, characters accelerate from skeptic academic to raving madness without warning, that "historical epic" I mentioned is a multi-episode trudge through the Cultural Revolution that hinges on the credibility of Wang Zi Wen's dead-eye stare (she's great). The current state of the English subtitles means that in addition to the repeated "physics is broken" quotes, you'll have to contend with lines such as "You found the weapon to harm socialism!", "You need to fill yourself with emptiness" and a secret society of alien supporters shouting "GLOBAL UPRISING!" during a factional purge.

It's also the most unique alien invasion story out there. The top billed cast are all very good. The low budget is maximized as best as possible (25% of the budget was spent on one super-complex cgi shot at the end) and the set design is OTT just enough to keep you muttering "WTF" at least once per episode. The long game cutscenes (there's a VR game in the show) are silly/entertaining enough that I didn't mind just how much the show relies on them. Compelling enough to eventually binge two a night towards the end and read up on events like the Four Pests campaign. Fucking state science...

I can't recommend it blindly and as a straight-up adaptation of the Liu Cixin novel, his off-page political positions are as fair game as is the obvious: it's a big Chinese TV show that has to conform to what is officially allowed.

Tencent put the whole thing on YouTube. I hope someone else watches it so at least it won't be just me in the dedicated thread I'm about to create. Netflix has their version on the way this year which insures easy cancellation odds.

I might be tempted, I quite liked the books

See, I liked the first book somewhat but found the second and third to be a fucking slog, so I'm highly reluctant to check out either adaptation.

I loved the books, really enjoyed how they kept turning into different types of books along the way, especially in the last two. Had no idea there was a different version than the Netfix one coming. Either way I'm highly skeptical about any successful adaptation of the novels.

well the Netflix one is Benioff and Weiss, so you can discount that

So a couple amazing seasons descending into complete shit at the end then?

If they go beyond the books i guess

Going beyond the books was a part of it, but far from the only reason the last season was so bad.

Ok i tore through three episodes of Night Agent yesterday and was enjoying it. It’s not the peak of the genre by any stretch but it’s paced well.

Today I started up on episode 4. I don’t know if being away from it for a day broke the spell, or it was like this all along, but suddenly all I can see are its flaws.

Of course I will still watch it to the end.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Sunday, April 9, 2023 9:38 AM (five days ago)

I got to the last few episodes and it totally did the thing of "supporting character talks about what they are looking forward when this mess is over and then shortly after gets killed." I was less interested in the main white dude than in ... most of the other characters tbh ... he had that anodyne Matt Damon quality where he is likeable, but not particularly interesting ... the sociopathic hired assassin couple was more compelling.

does HBO still exist as a cable channel and will Max get it's content or what

Yes and yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wVHEfH0fVM

As bad as the new logo is (and don't know why they're losing the purple), I think there's an element of "can't win" in the reaction to the rebranding... when HBO Max launched, there was criticism along the lines of - "Why are they diluting the HBO brand?" Now it's opposite - "Why are they no longer leveraging the famous HBO brand?" Seems like it makes more sense to confine the brand to the HBO section of the new app, where it can retain its sheen of quality.

Like, why can't they just call it HBO? What's so complicated? All this name change bullshit is a distinction without a difference.

Because HBO is supposed to stand for "quality programming," and now they're adding all the Discovery crap to the mix.

same model as other streaming apps like disney with content hubs. they’ve already done that within the app and it’s fairly clear what’s hbo vs other stuff, but I guess the felt the need to make it explicit

it’s not even HBO Max right now, more like HBO+Max or HBO/Max plus DC, TCM, Cartoon Network, etc

I got to the last few episodes and it totally did the thing of "supporting character talks about what they are looking forward when this mess is over and then shortly after gets killed." I was less interested in the main white dude than in ... most of the other characters tbh ... he had that anodyne Matt Damon quality where he is likeable, but not particularly interesting ... the sociopathic hired assassin couple was more compelling.

― sarahell, Friday, April 14, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Ultimately I liked this show even when it did dopey things or ran toward cliche. I appreciated that it spent time with multiple characters and got you to be invested in them. Even knowing that not all these characters are going to make it to the end (that’s not a spoiler - that’s a fact of the genre!), they still managed to earn a little pathos.

Anyway, it’s not going to rank among the best of the year for me but I enjoyed it most of the time.

I’ve got a few more Night Agent episodes to get through but it’s pretty much Reacher-but-joyless.

The 3body adaptation is curiously liger than the audiobook. It was fine,’even good in places. Some hilarious ‘bad guys must be evil so it’s okay to kill them’ stuff towards the end (which I don’t remember from the book, but I may be misremembering). Some of the cultural Revolution stuff drags, but I felt the same about the book. I’m

Liger = larger. How often does someone use the word liger?

Like the fabled half lion, half tiger? I dunno, maybe twice a week?

enjoyed the second season of Single Drunk Female

Anyway, it’s not going to rank among the best of the year for me but I enjoyed it most of the time.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Friday, April 14, 2023 9:15 PM (yesterday)

same!

We finally caught up with "Fleishman is in Trouble," and both really loved it. Some great casting/acting, and yeah, definitely in the pantheon of Jewishness depicted on-screen. Didn't read the book but kinda don't want to, since the show turned out to be pretty compact and satisfying. Some really funny stuff, some really sad stuff, some great song cues. Lives are messy, people are complicated, things change, things stay the same, college friends are great, kids are challenging and rewarding in equal measure, etc. etc.

men in power commit life-changing abuse, etc etc

but yeah the depiction of college friends/old friends was great and weirdly not seen that often on screen.

That's interesting, I didn't really catch a particularly prominent theme of abusive men in power. If anything there was a theme of powerlessness, told through the lens of various midlife crises.

Did we watch the same show? The whole story hinges around Claire Danes' breakdown after a male doctor reached into her cervix and broke her waters, while she is asking him not to do so. And how that birth trauma reverberates through her entire life (and by extension, the husband's, and kids').

I'm genuinely flabbergasted that this is seen as somehow not important. Or as 'some really sad stuff'.

Huh? No, that's absolutely accurate, as far as her character goes. But the Lizzy Kaplan character is going through something else totally unrelated, as is the more conventional midlife crisis of Adam Brody. And of course while Jesse Eisenberg is most directly impacted by the aforementioned (which is truly horrifying), he has his own shit to unpack. So no, not saying that wasn't a part of the story, just not a main theme, imo. It is for her particular story, though, for sure.

(To be clear, I wasn't even thinking of that event as an example of "some really sad stuff." I just meant the general ennui faced by the protagonists. What happens to Rachel is definitely a prime mover of the show, and something much worse and more specific than what Brody and Kaplan are dealing with.)

I haven’t watched the premiere yet but I’m really glad that Somebody Somewhere is back. First season was a real delight.

Termination List is even dumber than the Jack Ryan series, I didn't think that was possible.

Started this comedy Jury Duty on Amazon and it’s pretty hilarious so far.

It plays like a documentary and exactly one guy on the jury is an actual dude who showed up for jury duty. But every other juror, the judge, the lawyers and witnesses are all actors.

Thanks for the rec, watching it now. There’s a great bit of casting, haha (It’s on Freevee, btw)

we just started Jury Duty too - v funny, enjoying it so far!

omg that looks great!

ok this should be good: Bob Odenkirk joins S2 of The Bear.

https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/bob-odenkirk-the-bear-season-2-1235595584/

Hometown hero!

Yaaaaaay

I'm gonna have to get Hulu again eh?

I don't dislike Bob Odenkirk — I've never watched Better Call Saul, but the movie Nobody was good — but I liked the show as it was and don't think it needs him.

He could definitely chew too much scenery in that cast.