I really like Arcane Season 1 - I watched Season 2 on my travel to Paris last week and I thought the story was way better than Season 1, I really just loved Season 2. And of course, from an animation standpoint it is just spectacular.
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Silo season 2 is underway. January 17th is circled in red on my calendar; the season 2 opener for Severance will be released right after the season 2 finale of Silo. Iâve already informed the family that I will not be available that evening.
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I loved both Silo and Severance, best Iâve watched in a while, but after reading all the Silo books, thanks to you guys here, Iâm not so eager to watch the rest of the TV show anymoreâŚ. Happy Severance does not have a book⌠Canât wait to watch the rest of the show. And if it does have a book, I pray I may never found out about it (at least not until the show is over).
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Secret Level. Not quite as good as people are saying, but mildly enjoyable. Some nice moments, but it feels like a proof of concept that doesnât have a lot of actual substance (much like a lot of Love, Death and Robots).
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Iâve only watched the Unreal Tournament episode so far. (I was an UT whore back in the day.) Interesting with a few Easter eggs for viewers who played the game, but yeah. Not very deep at all. Felt like an extended cut scene, honestly.
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Im a big fan of Love Death & Robots, but then again Im a big fan of the literary genre that is sci fi short stories, with at least the first LD&R episode being taken from an actual printed sci fi short story.
So Im very happy to see them back at it with Secret Level. I didnt get most of the references, and the episodes seem to have mostly moved away from the short story format in favour of showing a slice of the game instead. I hope they give the fans of each game what they want. Keeping one group of âfansâ happy is quite the task in the age of rabid fandoms, keeping 15 different groups happy seems rather ambitious
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White Lotus Season 3 trailer, with the new season starting in Feb. Though I disliked Season 2 because I wanted every character to be hit by an asteroid, the presence of Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, and the Goggins makes me interested in this one.
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Great article. A long read, but really interesting. From it:
" Reaching seventy-two million households didnât mean what it sounded like it meant. What it actually meant was that seventy-two million accounts watched at least two minutes of The Old Guard . According to Netflix, two minutes was âlong enough to indicate the choice was intentional,â even though Netflix designed its viewing experience to be totally unintentional . An essential part of Netflixâs platform is its autoplay feature, which launches users into the next episode of a television series, or an algorithmically chosen movie, seconds after a program ends and sometimes just before the credits roll."
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I remember bringing this up when people talked about how popular Queenâs Gambit supposedly was.
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Bookie, on HBO or whatever tf theyâve rebranded as this month.
Sebastian Maniscalco (sp?) as an LA bookie. Halfway amusing. Knows what it is and doesnât try to overstep, making it kind of perfect in its own 20 minute or so per episode way. Certainly wonât change your worldview but itâs good for a laugh.
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The NYT has put out its list of shows to look for during the next few months. Iâve never realized it before (and donât know if it will work), but supposedly my subscription allows me to give article access without a paywall, so you should all be able to view this:
The bulk of what is listed sounds completely uninteresting, but I think that says more about the level of junk getting made than the article. Iâm sort of interested in American Primeval (though it sounds too violent for me) because we literally live in the Wasatch Mountains, where it is set. Zero Day sounds intriguing. Andor has a new cast member that will excite a lot of people here. The 2 BritBox series sound great, though we donât have that. Most shows get a full paragraph, but White Lotus gets just one sentence that accurately summarizes how I feel about it : )
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The sketch-comedy master David Mitchell (âPeep Show,â âThat Mitchell and Webb Lookâ) plays it straight, more or less, in this quirky mystery series, which was rapturously received in Britain.
A new Wolf Hall? And it turns out thereâs a third book I never even knew about? Woohoo!
I shall proselytize the gospel of Mark Rylance.
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I watched a few episodes of Landman. An upstairs downstairs show about oil drilling in Texas.
It was fun at first until I realised it was just another male power fantasy show, and that ruined the whole thing for me.
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Agreed. Iâm slogging through it for lack of anything better to watch right now.
Just tried High Potential with my wife. We are both major Psych-Os and I had heard this had some of the juice (shares some of the behind-the-scenes creatives and even had James Roday himself direct an episode). Itâs not at that level but itâs been worth it so far.
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American Primeval. This is a bit of a histrionic series, and I say that as someone who watches anime. Awful lot of repetitive shouting. And the camera work was probably exciting twenty years ago, too. Combined with the dour palette, Iâm not sure this really has a lot going for it.
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Black Doves (Netflix):
I think the surface reason that a lot of people will start watching this for is âKeira Knightley with a gun.â So I will answer some questions related to that right off the top: Does KK actually use a gun in this? Yes, repeatedly. Though not often enough, IMO. Does she use any other weapons? Yes, she does. Does she seem like she knows what sheâs doing? Actually yes, which was a pleasant surprise.
None of this, however, made me really like her character, and that is, at the core, why I have a hard time recommending this series. There are certainly things to like about itâthe cast is solid and sometimes surprisingly great, the plot and tone work well most of the time, and it is self-contained. While I think it does open itself up for a second season, it doesnât end in a way that would mandate one, which I really like in a series these days.
The cast includes a lot of other characters who get to use guns as well, especially the guy below, played by a bearded Ben Wishaw (known mainly as the most recent Q in the James Bond movies). He also behaves as though he knows what heâs doing with weaponry (but I mean, heâs Q, soâŚ) and his character is set up to be more of the heart or conscience of the show, despite him being a trigger man. At which he mostly succeeds. He and KK also have great partner chemistryâthey genuinely like each other.
Those are the two main characters. The tone of the show (which I mentioned earlier) is a cross between LeCarre and Guy Ritchie. Which sounds great, I know, and is sincerely the most positive thing I can say about the show. If that mix sounds good to you, it totally captures that, and you will enjoy how effectively the creators blend those two tones. You get a sense of serious spy-work but also plenty of Ritchie-British goofy characters and violence. This, at times, however, also creates moments in the plot where the suspension of disbelief is tested. Characters get into situations that seem so unlikely for them to get out of that, when they do, only a part of you thinks, âTheyâre totally bad-ass,â because another part of you is shaking your head a little at the screen. And as much as the tones mesh well, there are also a few moments where one of those tones surges so much to the forefront that returning to the other comes a little too fast. But these are small points, honestly.
My biggest issue, as noted, is that Knightlyâs character was really hard for me to like, and sheâs the main character here, so that was a hurdle. Now, if you want zero info at all about the show other than that, stop reading after the next sentence. Iâm not giving anything away that you donât learn from the trailers or within the first episode, so this is what I would consider spoiler-free, but other people define that differently than me, so continue as you like (or not).
Knightlyâs character is a member of Black Doves, a spy group who works for the highest bidder. She is married to a senior British government official who shares a lot of info about his job with her, which she funnels to the Doves. Thatâs her main function in life. All of which sounds great, Iâm good with all of that. However, (pre-now) she has an affair, falls hard for the guy, and he (now) gets himself assassinated. And sheâs heartbroken and wants revenge. This is where I have a problem with her. In flashback, we see how her and the dead lover meet, and itâs nothing special. Moreover, the husband is never portrayed as anything but a stand-up guy who really loves his wife (and their kids). There is not one thing that makes us feel like he deserves to be cheated on or that she has some great reason for doing this other than âOh hey, that guyâs hot and flirted with me.â In fact, overall, her character comes off as weirdly shallow. Not heartless by any means (which would have been more interesting), just as kind of basic for someone who is meant to be a really talented spy.
I kept hoping that it would be revealed that she was playing her dead lover, that he was part of some mission. Or that we would get a sense of her regretting how things went down. But no. She was in love, and she will happily leave her small kids by themselves at night so she can go out and get some revenge.
So this and other things made me dislike her character. And if youâre waiting for someone to put a bullet in the main character, that sort of disturbs your enjoyment of the show.
We are also kept in the dark for the majority of the series as to who the Big Bad is thatâs pulling all the strings. Which is how a lot of shows work, obviously, and I had no issue with that at all, but when we finally get the reveal, itâs a little too deus ex machina for me. It felt less like pieces were all clicking together and more like there was one big piece that we had never been given a glimpse of. It wasnât very satisfying.
The show is not bad or UNentertaining, but I also wouldnât recommend it very much unless some of what I described on the plus side sounds right up your alley. C+.
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Loved your âstop reading hereâ part, as I stopped reading there, as this is the next show we will start.
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