The TV Thread

EricTheWeary

Mattharrier said:

Netflix:
Archer - animated spy series, very silly, very fun, mish mash of Bond, Bourne and every espionage film you can think of, plus dozens of other genres thrown in.

Brooklyn 99 - cop sitcom, gets progressively less about policing and more about the characters as it progresses, which is no bad thing. 

SWAT: reboot of the original size, and movie reboot. Think CSI, NCIS etc - impossibly glamorous people in an impossibly glamorous police station, with no concern about sticking to actual police protocols, but it's great, with some great action sequences. 

GLOW: 80s female wrestling, heartfelt and funny. Great writing, brilliant cast. Sadly canned before the final fourth season by fucking covid.

Superstore: sitcom based in a, uh, yeah. Lightweight but endearing and well put together.

Amazon Prime:

The Expanse: relatively hard Sci fi, solid cast and good writing, looks great too.

Six: Elite Navy SEALs doing their thing. If you like military shows that cover the hone front as well, you'll probably like this. Canned after 2 seasons which is a shame, it was good stuff and setting up well for a third season.

NOW TV:

The Rookie: reasonable cop show made really good because Nathan Fillion is in it.

Seal Team: another show about Seal Team Six, starting later the same year as Six. Again, if you like shows about soldiers at war and at home, you may well like it. Generally fairly realistic (people get hurt, they get in trouble for breaking rules, operations have consequences, gun handling is done properly and so on), and the cast is great.

I didn’t know a fourth GLOW had been in the works, seasons 1 and 3 well worth watching, season 2 to join the dots. There was a documentary about the real GLOW as well which is interesting. I also fell a bit in love with Alison Brie ( also one of my favourite cheeses). 

Mattharrier

Yeah, it had already been confirmed and filming had already started.

I first saw Alison Brie in Community, in which she was ace. That's why I watched GLOW, in which she was also ace. 

Oh shit, yeah - also on Netflix: Community. Brilliant, chock full of pop culture references, shout outs, parodies and huge dollops of meta. One of my all time favourite shows, and I can't believe it wasn't the first thing I mentioned.

ennspek

Philly_Q said:

breakstuff said:

Just finished the third, and final season of Ash vs Evil Dead on Nutflix. 

That's what I'm watching at the moment, just getting to the end of season 2.

Before that I watched Invincible, I was a bit hesitant because it's animated, but it's excellent.

It is. The source material is as well 

ennspek

Mattharrier said:

Netflix:
Archer - animated spy series, very silly, very fun, mish mash of Bond, Bourne and every espionage film you can think of, plus dozens of other genres thrown in.

Brooklyn 99 - cop sitcom, gets progressively less about policing and more about the characters as it progresses, which is no bad thing. 

SWAT: reboot of the original size, and movie reboot. Think CSI, NCIS etc - impossibly glamorous people in an impossibly glamorous police station, with no concern about sticking to actual police protocols, but it's great, with some great action sequences. 

GLOW: 80s female wrestling, heartfelt and funny. Great writing, brilliant cast. Sadly canned before the final fourth season by fucking covid.

Superstore: sitcom based in a, uh, yeah. Lightweight but endearing and well put together.

Amazon Prime:

The Expanse: relatively hard Sci fi, solid cast and good writing, looks great too.

Six: Elite Navy SEALs doing their thing. If you like military shows that cover the hone front as well, you'll probably like this. Canned after 2 seasons which is a shame, it was good stuff and setting up well for a third season.

NOW TV:

The Rookie: reasonable cop show made really good because Nathan Fillion is in it.

Seal Team: another show about Seal Team Six, starting later the same year as Six. Again, if you like shows about soldiers at war and at home, you may well like it. Generally fairly realistic (people get hurt, they get in trouble for breaking rules, operations have consequences, gun handling is done properly and so on), and the cast is great.

I was loving Seal Team but recently it's got a bit soapy for me. Especially with Bravo 1 never happy and throwing constant hissy fits 

TimmyO

Currently Re-watching The Handmaids Tale - still shocking and impactful despite having seen it before. Looking forward to carrying on into the new series 

Mattharrier

I was loving Seal Team but recently it's got a bit soapy for me. Especially with Bravo 1 never happy and throwing constant hissy fits 

Yes, he does need to make his mind up. When he'd quit the field and was settling down, I had an idea that they were going to do a spin off, with Jason moving to California and running ops for a team on the West Coast, but sadly not.

ennspek

Indian Detective on Netflix. Won't change your life but only four episodes and likeable enough.

Clarkson's farm was surprisingly good on Prime.

AlbertC

Alias Grace on Netflix
Another adaption of a Margaret Atwood novel (like The Handmaids Tale) but this is just 1 series (6 episodes) and sticks to boundaries of the book. Set in 19th century Canada about an Irish immigrant girl convicted for murder. Having already spent several years of her sentence in asylums and prison, a psychologist tries to figure out if she is guilty, innocent or insane as she recounts her story to him . 
I though this was very good and pretty compelling stuff.

TimmyO

AlbertC said:

Alias Grace on Netflix
Another adaption of a Margaret Atwood novel (like The Handmaids Tale) but this is just 1 series (6 episodes) and sticks to boundaries of the book. Set in 19th century Canada about an Irish immigrant girl convicted for murder. Having already spent several years of her sentence in asylums and prison, a psychologist tries to figure out if she is guilty, innocent or insane as she recounts her story to him . 
I though this was very good and pretty compelling stuff.

Thanks for the reminder - I think I watched part of 1 episode when it came out, got interrupted and forgot about it 

boogieman

The latest Fargo series. Not as good as some of the earlier ones, and not a patch on the original film, but decent enough. The nurse and the mad Italian brother are both massively overacted but still great characters. 

fretmeister

TimmyO said:

Currently Re-watching The Handmaids Tale - still shocking and impactful despite having seen it before. Looking forward to carrying on into the new series 

I'm watching the new series at the moment. The dynamic has charged quite a bit - in a good way.

I'm starting to get a hunch as to how it's going to end up.

hollywoodrox

Well , I’ve finished  all the Kevin James Sitcoms , so now I’m on season 2 of “Last man standing” which is very good 

ennspek

Yeah Last Man Standing was funny 

DonnyMac

Moominpapa said:

Contrasts - Marble Arch to Edgware (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00rzwzq/contrasts-marble-arch-to-edgware" BBC documentary from 1968, on iPlayer)

This documentary features John Betjeman following the Edgware Road from central London out to Edgware, commenting on the surroundings and notable places along the way. Betjeman was 62 - my age - when he made this programme. I have always been interested in the generation of English creatives who were born around the beginning of the 20th century and came to adulthood in the 1920s & 30s. 1968 was my childhood, and so a time that I would be nostalgic about. It's fascinating therefore to watch him responding to the London of 1968 with eyes and a sensibility that was nostalgic for the London of his youth. When I came back to the UK in 2010 I lived in a university hostel near Paddington for several months while looking for a place to rent for myself & family. I walked up and down Edgware Road an awful lot  in those months. The thing I remember most about it was the number of shisha bars & cafes. Otherwise it was monumentally uninteresting and always loud and filled with exhaust fumes from the constant traffic. To be honest, it doesn't look much better in 1968 - indeed it looks grimier and more run down.

I think anyone who lives in or is familiar with London (and the areas of it along the Edgware Road - Maida Vale, Cricklewood, etc.) might find it interesting. It's part of a curated (by Simon Jenkins) collection of programmes about London The BBC Four London Collection - so I'm going to check out some more of them in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for this, having grown up in Burnt Oak - my parents moved there from the Caledonian Road in 1971 - I found this totally fascinating.  

Moominpapa

Another foray into the BBC archives via an iPlayer Collection (this one curated by Janet Street-Porter). Architecture at the Crossroads is a superbly written 1986 opinion piece by Peter Adam about the challenge of designing contemporary social housing in architectural languages that are also contemporary and not backward looking or whimsical or an advertisement for the individual architect's 'brilliance'. Highly recommended.

Philly_Q

Just finished the third and last series of Ash vs Evil Dead.  Now I need to find something else to watch...

bobblehat

Ted Lasso  Series 2 -  only one episode so far but still as clever and laugh out loud funny as the the first series .

Moominpapa

A Skin Too Few (2002)  Old tv documentary on Nick Drake. (No longer available on BBC iPlayer so you'll have to find it through other sources.) Very frustrating programme for any one who loves Nick Drake's music - it's like a trailer for a really good documentary that doesn't exist. Thankfully, except for one skin-crawlingly misjudged appearance by Paul Weller  - so bad and so completely at odds with the rest of the film that even Larry David would find it hard to watch - it avoids the horrible "famous talking heads" syndrome. (Another hugely awkward aspect is the sound engineer John Wood, who you would love to see interviewed alone and in depth about the times he worked with Nick Drake in the studio but who here looks and sounds like he would rather be anywhere else on earth than doing this documentary.) The main criticism of this film otherwise is that there just isn't enough of it - the gaps are palpable and agonizing. It is worth watching, however, for two things. The first is Gabrielle Drake playing a tape recording of one of her mother's songs: you can hear pretty much all the inspiration for Nick Drake's music in that couple of minutes - really extraordinary. The other thing that raises this above the usual 'whatever happened to X?' type of prurient tv hagiography is the voices of Nick's mother and father talking about him and about the night of his death. They come across as thoroughly decent, loving people who did everything they could to help him and nothing they did was of any use. It's quite heartbreaking to hear.

hollywoodrox

ennspek said:

Yeah Last Man Standing was funny 

Tim Allen is good , even though he is a staunch republican , it mildly annoys me when he passes off  the daughters boyfriends “woke” ideas as lefty or communist   

Haych

Things I've recently watched are:

Clarkson's Farm - on Prime.  Love or hate the guy (I've always found him to be quite entertaining) the show is really very good and beyond being good entertainment it shines a spotlight on how gruellingly hard word running a farm can be, not that I have any personal experience, and how hit and miss the results can be.  Very enjoyable and informative.  Glad it's coming back for a second series.

While we're on Clarkson, I also watched the latest instalment of The Grand Tour, Lochdown.  Not their best production ever, I have to be honest, but still some funny moments (the "prank" - it has to be staged - Jeremy and Richard played on James May was hilarious) and it's still quite watchable for all that.

The latest series of Virgin River is now out on Netflix and I've already binge watched it with the missis.  It's very girly, a bit of a soap opera and overly dramatic for that and very, very twee but it's worth watching just for the gorgeous scenery.  This series felt like the writers struggled a bit and it had less substance as a consequence (it's that difficult third album, after all) but looks like they might have used it to set up a better storyline for series four, whenever that happens.

A good faithful I like to return to is Mythbusters which is available on Prime.  It's quite old now and I thought I'd seen them all but I'm pleasantly surprised by how many episodes there are which I don't think I have seen.  A bit of crazy science is always good and when done by these lunatics it's even better.  Oh yeah, and Kari Byron - do I need to say more?

James May's Oh Cook is also on Prime and we've finally got round to watching them all.  Yeah, it's pretty good and I've always found James May's presenting style very easy to watch whatever he's doing.  I think the story goes that when Amazon got the threesome for the Grand Tour it was on the proviso that they all got their own show as individuals as part of the deal.
Gotta be honest, this feels like a gap filler, as in - I've got my own show, what the hell do I do?  Oh, I'll do some cooking!  So it's a show made for the sake of making a show and fulfilling a contract obligation but he does make it work and it's quite funny and entertaining.