Feel the same. One of my fav’s.
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Yes, it’s incredible. I can’t believe what I’m reading about the shows critics score… never thought there are actually people out there not realizing what the show was about the whole time…
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Raffles. Modeled on Sherlock Holmes, Raffles the gentlemen burglar and cricketer, with his relentlessly naive sidekick Bunny, swans through Victorian society, never shy of a clever line and a clever crime. Very entertaining. Full of witticisms, and has the likes of Charles Dance looking very baby-faced indeed, hailing from the halcyon year of our lord 1977. Anthony Valentine is excellent in the titular role, though Christopher Strauli as Bunny gets annoying.
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Several comments about Raffles:
–I haven’t seen this in many years but enjoyed it when I did. And I recall Bunny getting a tad annoying as well, though he is the sidekick, so that’s kind of with the territory.
–I came to the series as a result of reading the books, which are very good–though, like Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, they are very much of their time period. Which is not a bad thing, IMO. EW Hornung wrote them originally, and then Barry Perowne did more after Hornung died. I still have all my Hornung books, but I don’t appear to have kept the Perownes, so I would take that to be a comment on the quality. The books are a little like Holmes with a dash of Bertie and Jeeves (which I love), but also their own flavor.
–I think it’s high time some enterprising producers pitch a new Raffles series to one of the many streamers out there. People seem much more open to rooting for the criminals these days.
Thanks for reminding me of the series–I may need to go back and watch it again : )
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The Hornung books are excellent. I was always more on-board with Raffles’ smugness than Holmes’.
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Very pleased to say that Dark Matter stuck the landing, didnt end on bogus cliffhanger, and told a whole story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Dont see that much these days.
They couldnt entirely resist the temptation though, as they neatly stuck a tiny hook in there for another season, but it was very brief and didnt impact the story at all.
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Justified. I never watched this back in the day, so I thought I’d give it a try. Olyphant is good, but I like Goggins better, and of course renowned character actress Margo Martindale is a gem. Some small surprises, mostly formulaic.
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Formulaic, yes, but still one of my favorites.
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The relationship between Raylan and Boyd is one of my favorite ever in a TV series.
I have always guessed the pitch at the studio was something like “So we take that Olyphant guy from Deadwood, bring him into a modern ‘post Breaking Bad’ type world, and throw in a little Northern Exposure quirkiness on top.”
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Goggins was also great in The Shield. Also reminds me that I need to catch up on Righteous Gemstones.
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I was writing movie reviews for a knockoff IGN site when The Girl Next Door came out, and I remember saying in one of them that I didn’t know who this Olyphant guy was, but the way he stole that whole movie, I had no doubt I’d hear a lot more of him. And sure enough, Cuthbert and Hirsch faded while he endures.
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Bodkin, on Netflix.
I really enjoyed this. Tongue in cheek’ish, enough twists to keep you guessing wrongly throughout, and dark humor. Plus the Irish accents. Not life changing but one of those that I enjoyed and can’t really put a finger on why.
Ripley, also on Netflix. Obviously based upon the book(s).
A good watch. Loved the use of black and white vs color and the motorboat scene legitimately made me lol. Ripley is likable enough while verging on creepy. Good, not great; worth a watch.
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Evil. This is a truly unhinged series. A group of investigators look into miracles, prophecies, demonic possession etc for the Catholic church, to see if evil is real. Spoiler alert: it is. I don’t honestly think anyone here is aware of how ridiculous the end result is.
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I started watching this and liked some of what they’re doing–they’re definitely willing to take chances and go weird at times. But I can’t stand Christine Lahti or her character, and she started to become too central. I usually really like Michael Emerson, but he’s hamming it up too much in this (he’s a very good actor, so I can only assume he’s being directed this way). At the same time, I think the three leads are all very good, even Colter, who was flat in Luke Cage, IMO.
I stopped watching at the end of Season 2. If you go past that and tell me it gets better, I’ll try it again.
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No scenery left unchewed.
Just when I think this show is on to something good it takes some really odd turns. The possessed foetus episode was such a banger just for watching a team employed by the Catholic Church try to navigate the issue of conception and abortion. Some good episodes and really interesting developments marred/enhanced by some absolute batshit ideas.
Supacell. A mutation of sickle cell anaemia gives people superpowers. This is actually quite entertaining; most of it is people trying to manage their lives and have superpowers, which is usually the most interesting part of these stories before they become boring.
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Baby Reindeer, Netflix.
Somehow this utter shit won an award? Wife and I made it an episode and a half before noping out cause it’s too dumb to watch.
tl;dr, idiot makes bed and is upset when he finds a crazy person in it, yet continues to make said bed.
Evil S3. I still can’t work out who’s stupider, me or the writers, but this is my favourite hate watch now.
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Umbrella Academy s4 coming August 8th.
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Currently up to date on S4 of Evil and fully enjoying it. Absolute tosh of course, but carried with conviction by the leads, and the balance of dry humour, moral ambiguity and genuinely creepy bits is well done. Once the writers abandoned the whole „is it real or is there a scientific explanation“ angle and went with nah, it’s totally real, here’s a bunch of demons and a 5-eyed goat managing the operation, they clearly started having more fun.
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Here’s a sort of interesting article from the New York Times today that does not at all live up to its title. I know the NYT is paywalled, so I’ll paste in the parts I thought were actually interesting below the link.
“The viewing experience, which used to be relatively straightforward and, dare I say, fun now feels as overwhelming and unpleasant as walking into a dimly lit, warehouse-size dollar store in search of one decent spatula.”
“I want a digital future for television that feels like it’s built by people, not a desolate machine-learning loop. I want to feel as if I might discover something so fresh and interesting, which makes me invest so wholly in the emotional lives of its characters, that I’m compelled to discuss it with everyone.”
The rest of the article is pretty much an ad for Tubi. No, I’m not kidding. So I’m ignoring that. I agree with the first quote, though I would add to her metaphor that as you walk through the warehouse, you’re barraged by sales assistants trying to get you interested in countless other things that you want nothing to do with. Much as retailers try to do things to keep you physically in their store longer, streamers seem intent on the idea of throwing distractions at you so you stay on their service longer. This “strategy” seems more about keeping you off of their competitors’ apps rather than giving you a wall of quality stuff perfectly curated for you that will keep you on their own app.
The second quote I think is indicative of what the entertainment industry is getting wrong (the writer of the article is a veteran TV writer)–people in the industry all seem to trumpet this idea that streaming was/is the path to some advanced, new level of content that can somehow transcend what we’ve had in the past. That’s not only unrealistic, it’s symptomatic of part of the problem with streamers–they create so much content in the name of diversity, award-hunting, and artsyness, but they balance it all with even more content that is just straightforward entertainment or (worse) filler for the sake of always having something “new.”
In a way, that sounds like the best of both worlds for us, the viewers–we can go artsy one night, action-horror the next night, documentary the next night, dumb comedy the next night, etc. But most people don’t watch like that–they know what they like, and they just want more of that stuff. In the old days of just a few networks, you had favorite shows, you knew when they were on, and you sat down and watched them then, and that was because you wanted to watch stuff you like. TV has changed to the firehose-of-content model now, but we, the viewers, still just want to watch what we like. Most of us aren’t looking around for transcendent TV, we just don’t want to be disappointed by what we spend our (limited amount of) time watching.
And, aside from that, I also think it’s time to stop including streaming services as part of the entertainment industry. They provide content made by the entertainment industry–they are a distributor. Some of them may put up money to produce content too. But even then, their goal is clearly “get more viewers, retain more viewers, keep people on our app as long as possible.” Their efforts to win awards with their content are to create PR. It’s content whose longtail is marketing for the streamer brand.
The list of problems with streaming is long and wide ranging at this point and kind of complicated, but the inability to bring us a transcendent “digital future” is not really one of them, IMO.
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