Tv

I gather that's a recommendation... have a ll the episodes (so far) downloaded but haven't watched any yet.

I expect great things.
 

Yes.

I also don't know how to say why this show is good. The potentially cheesy, possibly hackneyed elements turn out instead to verge on the stellar. It recalls Fight Club almost too closely, but without yet going wrong. In a handful of aesthetic elements it references movies like A Clockwork Orange, which could go awfully wrong but hasn't. It features hackers and hacker jargon, and no TV show or movie has ever done that without swimming the entire production in cheese and stupid special effects... until now. (This show displays an actual hacking of an actual Android phone using actual hacking tools, it's all reeeeeeeell!!) It appears to be tapping a vein of modern paranoid narrative that really is no longer that bizarre, not with real life stuff like Edward Snowden happening around us.

Plus, Rami Malek.


Either I'm really wanting something to watch or this show is pretty good.

The show is also inconsistent in alarming ways. The pilot is brilliant. The second episode somehow doesn't match the pilot in tone. The third includes a bizarre left turn. The fourth episode starts introducing all the secondary characters like somehow this is a Scooby team show now.

But this is a show I rewatch, sometimes immediately. Flaws and all, it's resonating in some seemingly substantial way. I don't know that all viewers will find it to, so I don't know exactly what's going on here.

The reason Mr. Robot is so good is the lead Rami Malek. All the elements that teeter on the brink of crap are pulled together by this guy's performance. He is doing some serious heavy lifting. I've never heard of him before but regardless of how successful Mr. Robot turns out to be, I am sure we are going to see a lot more of Mr. Malek in the future.

They do write the part of the geeky computer genius differently than we usually see. He has the usual social skills issues, although it's a bit Aspergery than through shyness but he's also a morphine addict that is getting laid all the time.

Yep, the show has a lot of potential and mostly because the story is channelled through his characteristation. I am looking forward to finding out Christian Slater is a figment of his imagination if only because Slater is goofy as a hacker prince. That could go either way though. Do they upend the Fight Club narrative chunk or do they keep it? How long can it go on? Does it have a core of its own? Aaaaaargh!

If ever there was a show that should be binged... and instead they string it out, 45 minutes per week.

Mr Robot continues - I don't want to say inconsistent. I shall say an awkward melding. We have on the one hand Elliot's paranoid inner world played out as a real world. We have on the other hand, the real world, played out as a real world, ike on a real TV show. I think that's what's causing the week by week incongruity. I keep getting a sense of WTF, like threads get tugged one week and next week we're working on some different quilt instead. This week, for instance, sort of suggests we're moving into caper territory, like this gang of ne'er-do-well hackers are being set up as a Scooby gang for season after season of exploit caper games. Which is astoundingly odd given how much anger has been set up underneath various of the character's stories. This should be a viciously paranoid show. But maybe that's the kind of show you can't sustain season after season, and there already has to be two. Maybe they have to settle Elliot into a steady state of mere grievance. Sam Esmail apparently wrote all this first as a movie screenplay.

The thing with True Detective s2 is there's all these bit players, man, and I DON'T KNOW WHO ANYONE IS! They saved a girl? I DON'T KNOW WHO SHE IS! They're looking for some girl because of some guy? I DON'T KNOW EITHER OF THEM! They killed Stan? I DON'T KNOW WHO STAN IS! I NEVER SAW STAN BEFORE! AM I WATCHING SOUTHPARK?!

I don't know who anyone is.

Been watching a lo-o-o-ot of episodic tv, including Falling Skies.

Aliens invade, zap nearly everyone, and those few left alive look to be goners unless they organize a resistance. The Second Massachusetts is formed, an irregular militia who take their name from a regiment in the American Revolutionary War. In terms of story, the first 2 or so seasons remains a family drama with American War of Independence themes. The 2nd Mass faces Mechs (large lethal robots) and skitters (eight-legged alien foot soldiers) and such horrors as the harness, a parasitic device that render a human subject to skitter control and thus enslaved.

Now, this is all good. As tv, it's old school, largely wholesome and serious, and raised up by the central performance of Noah Wyle. Then at some point - finally - the show shifts. They start telling World War 2 stories. All the while retaining this family-centric focus, they shift rapidly through all the American war back-catalogue and by Season 5 they've become a sci-fi horror show with Overlords on the back foot, ancient aliens flitting about, and the continuing threat of skitterised humans. They've even been to the Moon. There's a weird lack of affect a lot of times. Stuff happens that should be accompanied by wailing and rending of garments, but characters just shrug it off. And other times, they dip right into psychosis. All of which is great. They do retain the family-as-god theme of the original show, which is probably a fixed point the show will never escape. All to the good, I suppose. Don't abandon your roots. In all, it's meta-fantastic! Strong, weird, compelling performances persist, and the art direction is spot-on. They sometimes even - just every so often - they let the characters express how odd every storyline has become too. And I don't mean to mock. This show has mutated in a way that episodic tv shows don't often survive. They retain their core and yet have become something different. It's astounding.

As of yesterday I'm all caught up. Season 5, I'm happy to note, is moving into Walking Dead territory as well. Things can only get better.

If season 1 True Detective were season 2 True Detective, Rust and Marty would have made out.

The Daily Show 2015 08 06 - Jon Stewart's last episode.

That was pretty fun. Highlights: Stephen Colbert's impromptu toast; Stewart's "Bullshit... is everywhere"; and the rest of it too.

Jon Stewart - a man who was on tv

Ray Velcoro and Frank Semyon are Chad Brune.

Killjoys ten episode season one wrapped up last night. Comparisons to Firefly seem justified, though strictly speaking if you compare Killjoys to Firefly, Killjoys comes off goofy, so let's move on. Killjoys is more scifi, less cowboy western, thus cool in its own right.

 


I wonder what they make of it in China.

Currently watching Elementary Season 3.

Upgraded my TV on Saturday.  Lucy Liu's hotness is only increased by being on a larger screen.

I like this collection of claims:

USA's Mr. Robot became an obsession thanks to this one weird visual trick

It's true, one of the very attractive features of the show, right from the beginning, has been framing, in particular, how people linger at the edges, half their faces off screen. Another feature I notice is how when people have 1-on-1 conversations, you have to move your head when each person takes their turn to speak, because while you only see one of them on screen, they're located and framed differently.

Also, the show rewards a re-watch.

Fear the Walking Dead

Yeah, man! This show is looking good. I could do without the junkie main dude being quite so lame (literally), and maybe some of the other characters aren't toooo charismatic either, but the suspense the show generates around the imminent falling apart of all things is compelling.