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

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.

Invasion is awful. Just quit now and save yourself some time xps

Carol & the End of the World (Netflix) probably deserves it's own (modest) thread, but it will probably get lost among the current glut of apocalyptic fare. It strikes me as a clever and realistic way of depicting how certain people might deal with an imminent disaster.

^We’ve long been Martha Kelly fans, so will consider watching that for sure (…my only concern would be the end-of-the-world content being, idk, slightly “triggering” somehow)

xxpost for a minute i thought you were talking abt the 2005 Invasion w William Fichtner lol (also that show rules) — but yeah Apple+ Invasion is pretty meh

I can't believe I'm saying this but I would like a moratorium on 'end of the world' shows/movies for a while, it's all becoming a bit much

Unless someone decides to do A Canticle For Leibowitz movie/series. (And it's good.)

Sign me up.

Postman reboot asap

Other than Carol, I can't think of any other animated thing where the characters look exactly like the actors that voice them. Not sure why that's important, I guess it helps make the animation seem more real.

The actors voicing Star Trek: Lower Decks' main cast look a lot like their characters.

But the actor/character facial similarity is definitely a thing in video games, and from what I gather that's to more easily animate/translate the subtleties of an actor's facial movement to their on-screen characters.

Undone does some kind of rotoscoping for its animation so Bob Odenkirk and Rosa Salazar basically look like themselves, except when things get weird

Invasion is awful. Just quit now and save yourself some time xps

― groovypanda, Wednesday, December 20, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I thoroughly enjoyed Invasion. But I seem to be alone in that opinion.

There doesn't appear to be a dedicated thread for it and I don't care to start one, but Billy Crudup continues to be a great reason to keep watching the otherwise mediocre Morning Show. The scene where he cranks up "Kokomo" in the car to brace himself for dealing with his mother was chefskiss.gif

yes! he’s so goddamn great in Morning Show. Aniston & Witherspoon are pretty excellent in it as well, i have really enjoyed the series.

Crudup's retro futurist Apple show was so disappointing.

I’m one episode into Gyeongseong Creature and it is 100% “fuck yeah!”

I often wonder if it’s time for a dedicated Korean TV series thread, but feels unnecessarily Balkanizing. Everyone on this thread needs to at least watch My Name and the others we’ve mentioned upthread

Would appreciate a list of essential k shows. Dipped my feet here and there but never found something that clicked

Rented God Is A Bullet on Amazon for $2 last night and have rarely regretted anything more. Easily the worst movie I saw in 2023: 2 hours 35 minutes of misogyny, genuinely surprising levels of gore, and a Criminal Minds-level mentality re Satanic serial killing cults that apparently roll through our world with impunity, dragging young girls into sinister black vans and then doing Bad Things to them because... well, they're just eeeeevil, don't you see? The movie's just stupid: ineptly written, portentously acted, shot with exactly zero visual flair...just garbage from beginning to end. A must to avoid.

My top 3 Kdramas:

- Kingdom: Humans vs zombies historical action in a Kurosawa-esque haunted landscape
- Zombie Detective: guy wakes up as a zombie, starts working as a private detective and tries to solve his murder/how to live as a human, also it's funny
- Happiness: "Parasite with zombies" undersells it, also it's funny and there is romance

Also worth watching:
- Moving: some discussion above I think, poignant story of kids growing up with superpowers and intergenerational trauma, also some legit beautiful soundtrack moments and some pretty extreme violence (the final third with the North Koreans was kind of pointless imo)
- Alchemy of Souls Part 1: epic fantasy about magical warrior people, lots of YA feelings and romance, some parts are legit hilarious and the world building is cool (I thought Part 2 sucked though)
- Jirisan: slice of life workplace drama x natural disaster action x ghosts x murder mystery x majesty of nature x natural park legislation; probably less than the sum of its parts but there are so many parts
- The Worst of Evil: undercover cop infiltrates a gang in 1990s Seoul, trust and mistrust among MEN, looks amazing
- Six Flying Dragons: huge historical epic about the founding of the Joseon Dynasty, cool fight scenes and surprise political manoeuvres and betrayal and tragedy

reading through my blurbs I'm thinking a bit "I wouldn't take these recommendations" but idk these all left an impression on me

Haha thanks. I also have to navigate around a skeptical wife who will cringe at the mention of zombies or .extreme violence’. Jirisan sounds like a good start!

I really don't like zombies!

in Zombie Detective it's just a weird thing that happened to the protagonist (there might not be any other zombies in the show iirc)