But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

I'm currently watching a French crime series on Netflix called Blood Coast — it's about drug gangs in Marseille and a somewhat crooked cop who's investigating them. It's only six episodes long so I figure I'll hang in to the end even though it's pretty generic.

oh also watched The Worst Person In The World on Hulu which i liked until the end when it got a little too wrap-things-up-with-a-bow sorta.
what i liked about the first 2/3 was that i didn't know where it/she was going. but, hey, they needed an ending.

― scott seward, Friday, December 15, 2023 8:30 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I tried to finish this last year but found it unbearable. (Not because the actors or director etc were doing a bad job. They did a great job! I just couldn’t handle watching the protagonist continually light her life on fire)

also kinda hard for me to relate to someone who is not only the worst person in the world but also the best looking person in the world.

i watched barbie on hbo. it was kinda long! i didn't laugh at anything. some kid movies make me laugh. rhea perlman's voice made me misty though! just hearing her voice. i wish she was in more movies. like, dramatic movies that are good. she has such a great presence. i will leave the think-piece *toy company teaches little girls about feminism* to other people. that's above my pay grade! t-swift probably teaches them everything they need to know. about commerce and power and boys. cool costumes in barbie!

The Worst Person In The World on Hulu

xp Nothing in Barbie made you laugh(?) It’s not really a “kid” movie, fwiw (although obviously plenty of kids saw it)…

our 12 yr old son really wanted to watch Severance so we started in on that with him. we'd already watched it and it's great, def the vibe is thoroughly creepy and there are more than a couple of disturbing moments to come, but he's into dystopian stories and is fascinated with office work. doesn't want to do it, but he's interested in it.

wow, I don't remember a single things about the movie, not even if I liked or didn't like it. I recall the actor is good? Maybe there is magic realism in it?

no, it's just about a woman whose life goes sideways.

Whenever people mention movies on this thread, esp. movies that are not original to the platform, it feels like sort of a microcosm of the way streaming platforms have flattened everything into interchangeable pieces of content.

maybe related but seeing that the new Beverly Hills Cop movie was a Netflix exclusive just made it seem vv cheap and disposable already.

xp Maybe, but the Barbieheimer thing also illustrates how movies that are original to streaming services also don’t seem to capture the zeitgeist the way that theatrical releases still can/do (and Scott seeing Barbie on Max now is no different from catching it on video in the old days)?

I could totally see an Americanized version of Worst Person... happening as a prestige streaming sitcom w/Anna Kendrick or Alison Williams or Melissa Villasenor or Zendaya or somebody

Whenever people mention movies on this thread, esp. movies that are not original to the platform, it feels like sort of a microcosm of the way streaming platforms have flattened everything into interchangeable pieces of content.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of a TV series as a really long movie that I get to take breaks from.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of a TV series as a really long movie that I get to take breaks from.

When I see something new announced that looks interesting, but it's a series, I will often skip it with the explicit thought that "if that was a movie, I'd watch it." Two hours OK, 8-12 hours not OK.

i always feel weird watching old t.v. shows on dvd! it feels wrong for some reason. and i have loads of them. i tend to not watch them that way too much but i have every episode of Homicide to watch...and that cool Sapphire and Steel box...and every sledge hammer!...and manimal!

(instead i just end up watching multiple episodes of monk or columbo on peacock...)

Sometimes I find myself thinking of a TV series as a really long movie that I get to take breaks from.

the spielberg / morgan freeman evolution thing on netflix is really well done - walking with + planet earth with new science and better graphics (lion king photorealism finally put to good use) - though I have to keep reminding my older relatives which parts are "real" so maybe the graphics are too good. I find it a bit of a tease - dinosaurs always get the attention and I've been waiting all my life to see temnospondyls and therapsids and land crocs portrayed as well as this but I want more - you barely get to meet them before it's onto the next thing. such is life

Like, I spent maybe two months watching a 70-hour-long movie called "Homeland" (for example), in installments.

Which is how people originally experienced many famous novels! Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dumas, Melville, and Trollope were serialized. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Brothers Karamazov.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of a TV series as a really long movie that I get to take breaks from.

This has been the worst part of the post-Sopranos 'prestige'/streaming TV world - producers forgot that individual episodes of the best shows still had self-contained plots. Four episodes into something and nothing has happened? I'm out.

OTM

Cue up the surfing Dracula bit

Milo, good point.

There was a time (back in my actual tv-watching days) when shows were more pointedly episodic. Simpsons of course, but Buffy, Scrubs, or Angel could and did make a musical episode, a silent episode, an episode where everyone was a puppet, etc.

It didn't need to be all just a continuation of the One Big Story Arc. Procedurals (L&O, CSI, NCIS, etc.) have this problem where they have to balance between one neat wrapup and the longer story arc of the characters. Some episodes strike a better balance than others. Sometimes you end up yelling PICK ONE!

Mythology won the war against Monster of the Week

Here is an Atlantic article arguing that the anti-episodic elements of long-form prestige TV actually derive from soap operas.

Non-paywall gift link
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/06/soap-operas-influence-tv/674337/?gift=Bqi2uZtdZSXIt7UBFZp4FGTRsuHCX4fGzIHBXSzElMg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

I feel like this was one of The Bear’s problems… nothing really “happened” in each episode (at least until the big flashback episode, which is when we stopped watching).

Stuff happened after that, bruv

Heard.

I think if the acting or writing and especially both are compelling, it almost doesn't matter what anyone is up to. I think of a masterpiece like Deadwood. Do people still sing the praises of its plot? It's one of my favorite shows of all time and I honestly couldn't really tell you what the plot is. However, I can tell you that the writing and acting is exemplary and that's why I would watch it again. That's also why The Bear is great, imo.

re Bear imo if you didnt finish it you dont really have much business summing up the series now do you hm

IF YOU YOU DONT EAT YR MEAT YOU CANT HAVE ANY PUDDING HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANY PUDDING IF YOU DONT EAT YR MEAT

jk

Haha, well I’m not summing it up! Just mentioning it as an example of a show that didn’t feel very “pointedly episodic,” but more like one long, meandering thing. (There were one or two more “distinctive” sidetrack eps., like when the pastry chef went to Denmarks). I did watch 1.5 seasons…

quitters will never prosper morrisp

nor will ppl who add an 's' to Denmark, apparently (I swear I know how to spell it)

The Bear had a lot going on in each episode!

The biggest offenders recently were Silo and Bodies before I bailed on it. Writing is the problem - the episodes end up bloated and repetitive filling space in the 10 hour movie.

Silo just kept going and yet went nowhere.

New Reacher! It's dumb ofc, and this time Reacher is an *angry man* but hell, I'm all in.

Domenick Lombardozzi!

I think if the acting or writing and especially both are compelling, it almost doesn't matter what anyone is up to. I think of a masterpiece like Deadwood. Do people still sing the praises of its plot? It's one of my favorite shows of all time and I honestly couldn't really tell you what the plot is. However, I can tell you that the writing and acting is exemplary and that's why I would watch it again. That's also why The Bear is great, imo.

I don't think "nothing happens" means there is no plot or that the plot is bad. Tons of stuff happens in every Deadwood episode! People arrive, people get killed, fights break out. The overall arc is less important than the fact that there are clear motivations to every character in every scene, and mostly stakes to it too. If anything these shows where nothing happens have very clear, tidy overarching plots and the static feeling comes from this plot being spread too thin, so that the setup in a lot of scenes is "waiting for this thing to happen" or "spinning wheels until next thing happens".

so now I, as a mom, get to deal with telling our toddlers we can’t watch Disney+ while in our Tesla pic.twitter.com/UfuCGdQx5H

— Zach (@floyding) December 19, 2023

supposedly it’s only been pulled from Teslas that have never used Disney+ so i’m calling you out Tesla Ho

Community note that ho

Thanks to the person upthread who recommended blue-eye samurai. Well done story etc and beautifully animated.

That was probably me so I’m glad you liked it!

Hilda is back on Netflix and I somehow forgot that there was a movie before this new season so I was, and since season 2 ends on a cliffhanger I was extremely confused when I watched the season 3 premiere.

Thought Murder At The End Of The World improved for a few episodes and then that stinker of a finale completely undid that.

Xpost ty leee

Yeah the ending murder at end of the world was really weak. Too bad - they had the bones for a great show but didn’t know where to focus. Makes me even more thankful for the shows that get it right.

(back to the 'nothing happens' discussion) For Deadloch, for example, (which is great and everyone should see it), the investigation has a lot of "this fact just came to light so now we have a new suspect" / "someone just dropped the one piece of evidence that discounts our suspect, back to square one", but all the time we're getting to know the characters of the community and their interactions better, and things are still ratcheting up.

I am slogging my way through Invasion s1 and it is taking aaaaages

finally saw some cool-moving aliums though

just need a few more hours of people looking tearful or baffled

Like, I spent maybe two months watching a 70-hour-long movie called "Homeland" (for example), in installments. Which is how people originally experienced many famous novels! Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dumas, Melville, and Trollope were serialized. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Brothers Karamazov.

And serialized movies were pretty common during the early days of film. Louis Feuillade's Fantômas (1913-14, five episodes, 333 minutes), and Les Vampires (1915, 10 episodes, 417 minutes), both of which I've seen and are amazing, are just two examples. It's a shame MGM didn't consider serializing Erich von Stroheim's Greed so it could be shown in its original nine-hour cut, but I guess by 1924 movie serials were out of style.

nah, they were still doing them in France at least by 1927 (Belphegor).

plenty of serials in the classic Hollywood sound age too but woof you need some patience for them

Feel the same about Murder at the End of the World, some cool/good ideas but also some really dumb ones, and so expository. was fine that it was the house, and on the positive side I thought mixing the son up in that was really good, some actual gravitas there, but still making Clive out as some obvious baddy weakens a lot of it. The whole show would've been better I think if Clive was more sympathetic. I know they walked that line a bit, but they had to make him the big asshole to give meaning to Lee's escape. He could've been presented as controlling without the sudden need to strangle Darby, and like, we really needed to hear his therapy session? It just dumbs it all down. We get it.