2025 Rolling Streaming Media Thread

movies, television, cable, games, videos, podcasts, music, ANYTHING streaming on ANY streaming platform.

i just want to know what people are seeing/watching/hearing and what they think. and i want to go to one place. in a casual way. so sue me!

but no DVDs or movies you see when you go to THE CINEMA. that way the SERIOUS film people can have their own fun. there is a film sub-baord. make it a thing again!

if you think something should have its own thread, start one! its a free countr....oh wait. if enough people love it or hate it they can talk about it there.

and there you have it.

i just wish i had remembered that the Roku Sports channel was showing the X Games all weekend. I love the X Games! oh well. i'll watch the reruns.

also, Go Eagles.

okay, i'm going back to Chopped. the one chef who had cooked for Kissinger and Lucian Freud had one whole finger of her glove filled with blood and she was still cooking. Ewwwww!

I watched the four episodes of The Pitt that are currently available on Max and they were OK, but I don't know if I'm gonna remember to watch the next one when it pops up on Thursday. ER + 24 = not as genius an idea as its creators thought.

I actually think The Pitt is getting richer as it goes - which is not what my expectation was. There were definitely moments in the first couple episodes that felt like clumsy track-laying (eg, when will the victims of the school shooting show up?). But now onto episode 4 I’m getting more comfortable with the characters and I think Noah Wylie is really holding it down.

Noah Wyle should have kept going with The Librarians

I watched a couple of the documentary shorts that were nominated for Oscars. Two that I watched by coincidence made a *perfect* double feature and a highly recommend watching them back to back in this order:

First, THE ONLY GIRL IN THE ORCHESTRA, on Netflix - about the first woman to play in the NY Philharmonic starting back in the 60s, on the occasion of her retirement after 50+ years. She is so humble and knows her role as a bassist in the orchestra.

Its made all the more compelling if you then switch over to YouTube to watch INSTRUMENTS OF A BEATING HEART, about a second grader in a Tokyo school who *desperately* wants to be in her school band as a percussionist. She is so adorable and the doc is very compelling, especially for something as mundane as small children doing a school assembly performance.

Watching both docs takes less than an hour and they both make the other richer and more inspiring. A real highlight of my day.

thought about watching Gladiator 2 on Paramount+ but then i make the mistake of watching the whole trailer and it all just looks so phony baloney with the cgi and everyone's face is all digitally smoothed and colored...bleh. i kept thinking that one guy was harry pooper. the young guy. i have no idea who he is. he looks like harry pooper. the only people i even recognize are denzel and the mandalorian. i had no idea who pedro pascal was until he was seemingly everywhere and world famous. i guess after mandalorian. i didn't even know he was in game of thrones until the other day. i didn't watch narcos. maybe he got famous from that. he must have switched agents at some point because he was in stuff for years and years before narcos.

He got famous for the Last of Us.

really? that seems so recent. i thought it was star wars people who made him famous. i did not love the last of us. it did make me watch the walking dead again though. with maria and cyrus. that was fun. until negan shows up then i stopped.

Will def watch that Japanese short, thanks.

I liked Chopped best when I used to watch it at the gym with the sound off, much more relaxing without their dumb music cues.

Pascal was def famous before The Last of Us. I first heard of him when he was on The Mandalorian -- never saw it bc I don't care about Star Wars, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. But he was also on Game of Thrones before that.

Which you already said! (I was skimming too fast.)

Pascal attracted attention for being on Game of Thrones, then he was on Narcos on Netflix. Then the Star Wars thing was sold as "starring that guy from Game of Thrones and Narcos!" And by The Last of Us, people knew his name.

Watched Alien Romulus. It’s well-made but doesn’t really add anything new to the franchise. Just feels like a rehash.

he's not young. his credits start in 1999. talk about working it. good for him. he seems nice. not that exciting to me but a lot of leading men now seem generic to me. hollywood leading men. maybe its easier to CGI someone if they have a really normal face. at least he has an interesting backstory what with his family being a part of the Castilian-Basque aristocracy in Chile. and then...tragedy struck...

"Two years before Pascal's birth, the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet, leading to the country becoming a military dictatorship.[12] Both of Pascal's parents were listed as enemies of the state by the Pinochet regime and the family eventually fled Chile when he was nine months old,[12] after seeking refuge in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago for six months."

x-post

I haven't watched Romulus. I'd probably like it. I don't care if its a lesser Alien movie. They all kinda are after the first three. Phil Tippett, the director of one of the greatest American movies of the 21st century, Mad God, did the stop motion rat in Alien: Romulus. HOW WAS THE RAT, PGWP?

The rat was nice.

It’s definitely not a disappointing movie - it’s exciting and tense and all that. You’ll like it if you like Alien movies.

I watched about half of Romulus and I don't even remember a rat. Maybe it showed up later.

i should watch it. i still haven't watched furiosa for some reason. now that its on netflix.

i would see some of these at the movies but the guy who bought the local theater is trumpy. its unfortunate. its good that someone took on the old heap of a movie house but on the other hand... i don't want to go there. they showed 2000 Mules there.

Pascal's real starmaking turn was being in a viral gif with Nic Cage IIRC

all of a sudden everyone knew his name. it seemed like it anyway. like olde-tyme hollywood. he probably got invited to a lot of swanky parties. does he have to hang out with george clooney now at Lake Como. with matt damon.

i'm watching american football right now and i like the ad where doja cat lurks around a taco bell.

i still haven't watched furiosa for some reason.

Very, verrrrry skippable. (But I am the only person on earth who hated Fury Road, so.)

oh i liked fury road. i like movies that never stop moving. that have forward motion.

i know its easy to make fun of tom brady but he is such a nothing broadcaster. he's no tony romo! he's so meepy.

Romulus is EXTREMELY disappointing; it’s a load of crap.

post malone/shane gillis beer ad is a big noooooooo. i never want to see shane gillis's grinning head.

but by what standard, james? is it even good as pulpy horror fun? cuz i'm fine with that.

my standards aren't very high anymore. but i do stop watching stuff a lot if it looks too dumb. it has to be pretty dumb or just low-budget filler that is boring. there is a lot of it out there. i want to watch good stuff.

i'm still watching the Eagles win but i'm also watching amy sedaris on david letterman. man, you don't see the likes of her anymore. unless its her. she would go full weird on national t.v. i'm also watching tom green on all the late night shows a long time ago. crazy. amy can make me laugh hard! not too many people can anymore. don rickles. her. some others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIshHZXVoQ

I liked Furiosa better than Fury Road, it's 25% less '90s music video.

Furiosa is good - it's not as good as Fury Road, but then nothing is. But it does recognise that funny dumb Chris Hemsworth is the best Chris Hemsworth.

I’m on my little kick of watching things that were nominated (after watching almost no movies all year), and starting with the movies that are free to stream. Therefore I’m getting in those films nominated for best visual effects (Alien) and now costumes—Gladiator II, since most of the prestige films haven’t hit streaming yet.

I don’t think I ever saw the first Gladiator so I dont have the baggage of comparison. Nevertheless I had low expectations for the sequel but it was better than I expected it to be. I doubt I’ll think about it much but it was a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Romulus is not good fun, it's mostly incredibly awkward callbacks to better scenes from the earlier movies. It really is terrible, and in a really small, scuzzy way, not even terrible and preposterous on a grand stage like the two idiotic Scott Prometheus movies.

gotcha.

Many xps Pascal was a known actor before LoU, but after he became a subject of celebrity media, which is a different thing.

fun thing about Pascal is his friendship with Sarah Paulson, it's really sweet.

what are the good recentish spy shows other than slow horses? i finished binging it and wanted to continue in that vein. tried day of the jackal but it feels very slow and cheesy.

I think people are split here on The Agency? or maybe its just me who got bored of it. I really liked the first episodes and then it just dragged for me. didn't love the characters that didn't help.

I liked the first season of the Night Agent on Netflix. I've canceled my subscription but there's a second season now.

i liked that first season of The Night Agent on Netflix even though the lead guy is kind of a generic dud. it was still entertaining spy stuff. more action-y though. maybe more Tom Clancy territory.

great minds...uh...think alike! haha!

what are the good recentish spy shows other than slow horses?

I enjoyed Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And just started Black Doves, which seems promising.

i saw that the Recruit has a new season starting on Netflix and i can't remember if i even watched the first one. i probably did. and forgot all about it.

i want to go back and watch old stuff. MI-5 and the like. loads of stuff i've never seen.

Berlin Station looks kinda cool but i think its one of those odd ones that isn't streaming on the stuff i have. mgm+ or apple+ or something.

Xpost recent spy shows. Black Doves was good. However if you missed The Americans, highly recommended to see that instead

The Diplomat is sort of a spy show. That one is good.

I thought The Agency was skillfully made, but every now and then I remembered it was about the US trying to maintain control over the world, which was a bummer. I wonder if I'd like the French original better.

thanks all. maybe i'll give black doves a shot. or maybe i'll rewatch the greatest spy tv show of all time (patriot)

also: that documentary on the Titan sub is highly recommended if you want to get enraged at a psycho narcissist CEO.

Re-binged Justified: City Primeval over the weekend, and man, the villain just absolutely ruins that whole thing. He's not ever even slightly charming or cool, he slides between being an obnoxious asshole and someone who's a danger to everyone around him. You never, ever want him to succeed, not for a second, and the longer he survives the more frustrating it becomes.

Meantime, KPop Demon Hunters has fully conquered the charts:

https://www.billboard.com/lists/huntrx-golden-kpop-demon-hunters-number-1-hot-100/

I see Vox Machina is back for season 3. I enjoyed the first 2 seasons, happy to watch if it’s more of the same.

First half of Wednesday S2 (Netflix) has been highly entertaining! I guess 2nd half goes up in a few weeks which is whatever

Some fun casting so far.

The Netflix algorithm served me an Australian comedy called Fisk which I’m really enjoying.

Yes, Fisk is great! Looking forward to the new season soon.

I really enjoyed Loch Ness / The Loch on Netflix, a strange Broadchurch ripoff from 2017 that’s probably the most ITV thing ever. It’s total trash, but has none of Broadchurch’s insufferable wannabe-artsiness, so it ends up being much better. No Tennant and Colman, but Laura Fraser is really good in a very unshowy lead role, and Siobhan Finneran, usually the MVP of any show she’s in, gives a weird, monotone anti-performance in which she decides not to bother acting or emoting at any point whatsoever, but is nonetheless compelling.

Anyway, it’s bad but it has a great ending, unlike many other shows right now, which are great but have bad endings.

> Laura Fraser

I've just been rewatching Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and recognise the name, but don't remember The Loch. a quick search says she was the police woman in Patience recently, which i didn't realise. and was Door in Neverwhere back in the day.

First episode of the Noah Hawley "Alien" show is great. Ambitious, intriguing and visually impressive, like the more recent Ridley Scott ones but not stupid. And somehow it even made room for a Dio-era Black Sabbath track.

i started a thread:

“ALIEN: EARTH” on FX: Peter Pan, Wendy & Albino Timothy Olyphant

Laura Fraser pops up in lots of different things - she's always good to watch!

The ads during Alien were super annoying and I saw they have the Stephen King movie The Monkey now and it would probably be ruined by their commercials but their ad-free price is nuts - $19 now, screw that.

It's on Disney in the UK so no ads but it was fairly obvious where they were and seemed to be a *lot*

Can imagine how annoying they must have been, especially in one of the tensest pieces of television I've seen in a long time

that Oura ad just about did me in what a load of horseshit i hate living in the future

I just bounce between services month-to-month, although not as much as I should. re-up and then immediately cancel, unless I know there will be decent content throughout the year and I can buy a yearly subscription at deep discount. I just pay for ad free everything when I'm watching.

I'm in the UK and get a few ads on Disney+. We get the subscription free with a bank account so perhaps there are tiers idk.

we decided to watch the first few minutes of 24 to see what it was like/for nostalgia's sake and I imagine we'll watch nine solid days of it now. Kim Bauer's password to her macbook is "lifesucks" and Jack got it by getting a CTU colleague to hack into a phone number and get the internet passwords.

Watched the first episode of Daniel Dae Kim secret-agent thingy Butterfly on Prime. Terrible. Cheap and generic-looking, terribly scripted, badly acted (probably because of the terribly script), poor fight choreography, etc etc. All of the production values of Reacher with none of the humour or charm. Daniel Dae Kim deserves better. Frankly even Piper Perabo deserves better.

I am an ad free maniac when it comes to streaming, in combination with getting yearly subscriptions for a price reduction. It’s an indulgence but man it’s a lovely one. (Honestly the key one for me was YouTube Premium.)

It’s significantly cheaper for students. I bought it to stop my kid seeing ads when the iPad was babysitting.

Don’t know if it’s mentioned on another thread but we watched Happy Gilmore 2 and it was unexpectedly enjoyable. I don’t know anything about golf, and I’ve only seen two Adam Sandler movies before - Wedding Singer and the PTA one - that might’ve helped. Admittedly the best bits were when Sandler hit himself in the balls. But there’s a pleasing number of old school smart-snarky-stupid Simpsons-style gags.

I haven't seen it in years, but the original Happy Gilmore was one of the few Sandler comedies I enjoyed.

Something I've noticed is that a couple of services we get, specifically Netflix and Amazon, iirc, have deliberately downgraded the quality of their streams to pressure you (me) into upgrading. The basic, ad-supported streams look so shitty and degraded, often sub-DVD quality in terms of image, but esp. with Amazon the interruption of ads also seemingly fucks with the connection itself. That is, the random ad breaks interrupt the stream and sometimes the app crashes. I assume the ads are being streamed in from a different server? That is, whatever I am watching is being hosted and streamed from a content server somewhere, then when an ad interrupts it's coming from a different server, right? And something about the the swapping/intermingling of servers on their end must make the connection even more unstable, which crashes the app. At least that's my theory. There have been a couple of shows in recent months/years, ever since Amazon went ad supported for basic, where the quality of the image and experience was so bad that after a few attempts I just downloaded what I wanted to watch from somewhere else. Like, I tried, you know? (Fwiw we barely watch Amazon and Netflix, but those two come bundled with other things we pay for already; we also get "free" HBO but it streams and looks great, at least for now.)

Agree with that. I’m going to keep streaming but I think I will finally buy a blu ray player too. My local library has cheap rentals, and like you say, the quality difference is becoming more and more apparent. I torrented a 5GB file of Manhunter a few weeks ago, and it looked miles better than the streaming version!

On the other hand, Criterion channel videos are generally sourced MP4 from the Vimeo

Their Vimeo channel (I think?) and they look pretty good.

Blu-Ray and 4K definitely look better than streaming, but some streaming services clearly still make an effort. Netflix and Amazon, they clearly don't give a shit.

Like, streaming is undeniably a good thing, but the three constantly shifting parts (content of library, quality of stream, cost of service) really underscores how unreliable all these companies are. Criterion, for example, I absolutely get what I pay for, and then some. Many of the more conventional services, though, they are constantly changing; it's hard to quantify precisely what I am paying for because they are constantly changing their minds what I *should" be paying for.

i just want to state here that the final episode of 'and just like that' and therefore the very end of the 'sex and the city' saga ended with a toilet overflowing multiple turds.

the ad thing is not a new problem as anyone who's subscribed to hulu for any amount of time can attest

I have ad-free Hulu, but it's been crashing in the middle of shows recently. "We're having trouble showing you that," and then I have to reload the page. At least it doesn't make me log out and log back in.

When I try to watch HBO shows on the HBO Max website the image quality is frequently shitty and low-res, but when I watch the same show on Hulu the quality is noticeably better. That's odd to me.

xpost The ad thing is not new at all, what is relatively recent is them outright downgrading the quality of the ad supported services. At least Netflix and Amazon, afaict you have to pay extra not just for no ads but also for a higher quality stream.

Finished watching Smoke on Apple TV and... fuuuuuck. Talk about squandering every bit of built-up good will. "Hey guys, I know people traditionally want an 'ending' — but how about if we just stop, leaving nothing resolved?"

Yeah I was admittedly kinda half-watching, but that was an odd finale

I bought the first and only season of Rubicon (an excellent paranoid thriller show on AMC from 2010 or so) on Amazon for $17 and am revisiting that.

Rubicon was so good. Excellent show

Loved that show.

Dept Q renewed:

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/dept-q-season-2-release-date-cast-photos-news

:D hooray!

Rubicon is outstanding: also, Rubicon on AMC

We’re back, baby

https://pitchfork.com/news/the-vince-staples-show-season-2-to-premiere-on-netflix-this-fall/

omg i forgot about rubicon, what a great show. def a precursor to mr. robot (not just because they both had michael cristofer, who should be in way more stuff, as a shady corporate exec)

We’re enjoying Platonic S2 - half hour comedy on Apple starting Rose Byrne and Seth Rogan. Shout out to whoever designs Seth’s ever-changing, crazy outfits

I started watching Platonic mostly because there’s not a lot else to watch right now. I’m midway through the first season. It’s ok - enjoyable but not first class

we enjoyed first season. Second season is...maybe a bit heavy on the cringe but rose byrne is killing it.

Did anyone else stay the course with Revival? That finale was...something

Season 2 lineup for Last One Laughing (UK) has been announced

Bob's back baby!

https://deadline.com/2025/08/last-one-laughing-uk-season-2-bob-mortimer-diane-morgan-1236494028/

you'd have to imagine Diane Morgan will be pretty good at this

maybe a bit heavy on the cringe but rose byrne is killing it.

My favourite thing about this programme is that you would expect another sitcom about some loser guy who can't get his shit together and the woman who keeps him in line and rolls her eyes and is always harping on at him to be better, when in fact she's just as much of a disaster as he is, and it's her husband who keeps them BOTH in line.

But I had a hard time making it through this week's episode. I am not good with eye stuff.

I thought the first few episodes of the first season were delightful, and then I sort of forgot it existed. I'm not sure much is powering me to try again, parasocial crush on Rose Byrne aside.

I think I’m the only one here who likes INVASION. Glad it’s back but whyyyy did they choose to release it right on top of ALIEN EARTH??