Here's my Hulu line-up.
Ironside (NBC) is about a police detective in a
wheelchair. My husband says this is a
remake, but we didn't get that channel when I was a kid so I'd never seen
it. Three episodes in and I'm not all
that impressed. I suppose it works as a
police procedural. Final verdict? I'll watch it when I'm looking for a cop show
to watch but if I miss it I won't cry.
Covert Affairs is getting close to tipping the balance where
there's not enough fun to outweigh the hopelessness of everything going so
badly all the time. Also, every man
Annie works with dies.
Castle is back on with new episodes. So far as solid as always. Alexis's new boyfriend is alternatively
adorable and so annoying you want to string him up and slap him silly.
Sleepy Hollow is a fun ghost story. I don't usually care for the spooky stuff but
I'm liking this. Abby (what is it about
names that start with A?) is tiny and hard to buy as a cop, but I'll let that
go. So far they haven't had her kicking
butt and even small girls can shoot monsters.
The set-up is that George Washington was fighting a war to stave off the
Four Horsemen of the apocalypse and Icabod Crane was one of his agents. Icabod cut the horseman's head off and then
was wounded himself. His wife (who he
didn't know was a witch) and a priest (apparently part of a secret order of
some sort) put a spell on him so he wouldn't die. When the headless horseman wakes up, Icabod
wakes up, too. The episodes are...
episodic. Some new creepy is introduced
and defeated each show.
The Originals is CW Vampires... which means a soap opera of pretty young
things playing ancient evil. I don't
watch vampires. I have no idea why I
watched the pilot. I don't know why I
watched the second episode. I don't know
why I'm going to watch the third. Maybe
for the same reason I put myself through watching the last season of Beauty and
the Beast from CW. It's so horrific that
you just can't look away.
Arrow has a new episode, too. At the end of last season the evil guy
managed to get *half* of his plot to work and destroyed the slums where his
wife was killed. He didn't live long
enough to find out that he killed his son doing it. So now that Tommy died heroically saving
Lauren, Oliver's romantic hopes are toast.
I've got both the first of this season's Arrow and third The Originals in my queue. Which goes first?
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't stink too much. Which means that, yes, there is some stinking going on. It may improve or grow on
me. So far I'm still going to watch it
each week.
The Tomorrow People (also CW) looks like an adaptation of
Jumper (and if it is, that might be why Steven Gould couldn't be at Bubonicon
this August). All teen angst and gorgeous
24 year old actors pretending they're in high school. It's sort of skiffy-ish and I do like
sci-fi. When the evil dude shows up at
the end and says "I'm your uncle, we're the good guys" and the kid
didn't reply that the night before his "uncle" strapped him to a
chair and fired a bullet at his head... at the very least, having him *doubt*
made him seem like a complete idiot and having his uncle believe that the kid
bought the "I'm the good guy" story made the uncle seem like an
idiot. I'll have to be really bored before I watch any more of this one.
Lastly... GRIMM is back in the next week or so. I didn't like the end of last season so much. Nick has been "killed" by a voodoo
priest and is being shipped to Europe.
I've been dreading what the writers might have in mind. The mini-teaser,
though is just... "Some Grimms are better off undead." So my faith has been restored.
44 comments:
At the moment, the Red Sox.
I watch Netflix mostly.
I also only watch TV on the internet. The free selection sucks so bad that it greatly limits how much TV I watch, which is a good thing. The only show that doesn't make me feel embarrassed to admit to watching in public is ' The Good Wife'.
I don't remember steadily watching anything since The Sopranos. and that was HBO.
I watched a bunch of Big Bang Theory episodes last week, all in one night. Mostly to see what the fuss was about.
Went from funny to amusing to mildly interesting to slightly boring to mildly annoying. If I watch it again, it will probably pick up where it left off.
OTOH, that one girl has some amazing breasts.
New Shows:
Agents of Shield -- Like alot
The Goldbergs -- Hated it, tried 2 episodes, dislike it. Stock family sitcom with 80s props, not even consistently 80s. Like what 80s icon from '82, '88, '85 can we fit in at the same time.
Michael J Fox show: wanted to like it. Second episode not good, can't quite get to 3rd.
The Crazy Ones: like it, don't love it yet, but it has potential
I got Arrow on Netflix DVD a month ago to check out the first season. Good stuff. Got the second disk right away.
Other shows we DVR: New Girl, Parks and Recreation, Castle.
Didn't like Castle's first 2 episodes. Sort of 24 like but without the cast. National crisis! 4 people around a table are responsible for solving it! Glad they got Kate back in New York. This week's episode much better, not cliche (which Castle usually avoids).
I liked the first season of Vikings, and I hear it's coming back for a second.
On various channels Synova. Some are basic cable and some not.
Ray Donovan - on hiatus
Shameless- on hiatus
Walking Dead- AMC
Sons of Anarchy -FX I think
Justified- FX
Elementary -CBS
Person of Interest-CBS
Strike Back [on Cinemax I think]
Kitchen Cousins on HGTV
Boston Leads 4 to 3 in the 9th
Racked up 5 followers doing on Twitter what I do here/top sometimes...
There are no shows that I can't miss. I will watch Castle, Elementary, Walking Dead, and British imports on public television like Sherlock, Foyle's War, and Death in Paradise.
I don't pay for TV and don't like it much beyond my beloved and quasi-almighty Broncos.
ME TV has some good shows, and a commercial with the kid that was the avatar of a former Althouse commenter, Quaestor or something. It was a kid, from a lont time ago as it was before I was born, pointing, in black and white and serious as flimber isn't.
Fox Antenna TV has Married With Children and All in the Family.
The best show ever was The Larry Sanders Show, so once Netfix got rid of it, I got rid of them.
Thank you for asking by the way. That is a very gracious action to set forth by one of uncommon skills in the arts of conversing (is that an O' Brother Where Art Thou? quote?).
"The Bridge", "Person of Interest", "Justified" "White Collar," "Suits" "Castle." "Royal Pains", "Burn Notice." (now defunct, but re-runs) "Psych" "Boardwalk Empire" "Southland" ("Warehouse 13" & "Continuum" & "Fringe"--All Sci-fi channel)
Just for starters..
For re-runs: "Bones", "Angel", "Numb3rs" "
Re-runs of 3 super CBC series--mostly on ABC: "The DaVinci Inquest", "Cold Squad", "Stone Undercover." "Republic of Doyle" (Current, from 2010--a PI & his ex-cop Dad in St Johns, Newfoundland. Very good on PBS)
* adventure time
* ramsay's kitchen nightmares
The premise each episode is a restaurant near collapse. The cases are chosen carefully for potential. You can imagine some cases too hopeless to touch. All his cases have some spark of potential, like great location.
The fundamentals of restaurants are all the same.
In the front:
* understand the location! Understanding people at that location. Nobody does that.
*obvious what the restaurant is from the street. Again, people are idiots about this basic thing.
* welcoming to visitors, clear simple thematic elements
* impeccably clean dining room
* simplified straightforward updated menu
In the back:
* clean thoughtful dry and cold storage for food
* clean kitchen, implements that work.
* fresh ingredients, local as much as possible, menu to reflect that.
* good chef
No matter the situation. All that is the easy part. It is all so very clear to a man who has opened and operated some fifteen or so successfully. They all follow the same simple pattern. A template placed on one to the next. And it is amazing how many owners resist the obvious.
The hard part, nearly impossible, the thing that makes the show so outstanding, is getting all that across the damaged psychologies involved. It's not just one, it's group damage. This is where Ramsay excels. He understands people and actually fixes families. They're all family fixes. Years of family therapy compressed in one week by the heat of the kitchen and a full bustling dining room. No time for self-indulgence. Egos are shattered and restructured right before your eyes. It is amazing. Filled with conflict. But each person trying. Each case is different. He comes up with all kinds of incredible techniques to get directly at the knot of the problem. He is very good at cooking things, and organizing things too, but Gordon Ramsay's genius is in his depth of human understanding his clarity and his willingness to address it directly.
I threw out the TV in 1971 and haven't looked back.
I bought the Get Smart 5-season DVD as the only good thing I remembered until then. It's still good, and every man in America loved Barbara Feldon's 99.
The perfect marriage is
1. Woman sends man on quest.
2. Man, being average, screws it up.
3. Woman shows man she's satisfied with him.
That can repeat forever, and 99 was loved because she always reached (3).
Without (3) it's nagging.
If it's aimed at no man in particular, it's feminism and (3) isn't even possible.
Women, feminist or not, always send men on quests. It's a test of their suitability and is wired in. It always seems like a good idea to them.
Men like to be sent on quests, fortunately.
So that series at its core always got to that, except for a couple of stray episodes.
Get Smart (2008) movie was a dismissive feminist noticing that the man's mind led to abilities worth admiring.
A woman can abstract and categorize but it's a grim sort of thing for her, where the man does it naturally and leaps around easily, which is how he has a sense of humor ("You're not much of a laugher, are you").
She winds up showing she's satisfied with him but I don't see how a sequel is possible.
They took the ending the wrong way in the movie, where she seems to be going all domestic womany; they should have had a fade to sweatsuit partnership in some other adventure. He liked her as a secret agent.
I dropped Castle a couple years ago, got tired of the paranoia and character dynamics, Fillion wasn't enough to make me keep coming back.
Looks like I'm dropping Covert Affairs, this last season had wavered between squalid and dull, but I'm still paying Amazon for episodes. I may have to figure out how to cancel seasons with them because...
Sleepy Hollow has been a disappointment, bad history and worse drama. Knew they were going down a bad road when they killed off their best actor in the pilot - Oh, Clancy Brown, why do you always get misused by showrunners?
Person of Interest is starting to show its age, I wanted to like the new member of the group, but either she sucks and has poisoned the well, or the second-season integration of the various assets into an actual everybody-knows-everybody team was a bad move. It was fun when Finch and Reese manipulated their assets without anybody knowing they were part of the same solution. With everybody in on the gag, it's more like Leverage without the criminal-leftist politics and slapstick.
Agents of SHIELD is a little empty, but they're starting to fill out the shell. I don't hate it.
Elementary is insubstantial but likeable - sort of like Castle in its early seasons. Probably means it'll go to hell at some point, but still good for now.
The Good Wife can be fun when it sticks to courtroom shenanigans. The firm politics are starting to get more than a little demoralizing, though.
the Blacklist is a crap show, but so far it's been a fun crap show. James Spader is different enough to keep my attention, even though the stories built around him are pretty much tissue-paper with a pretty soundtrack.
Shows I've bought episodes for, but haven't gotten around to watching the remnants from last year: Vegas, Bones, Alphas,Covert Affairs, Defiance.
rh is too busy scything his lawn and working on his Grand Unified Theory of Agent 99 for current TV. Don't laugh, unless your hobbies are more intimidating or fun, respectively.
I'm also waiting for rh to turn up in an episode of Sleepy Hollow.
Arrow and Grimm are the only two that I have watched so far last season. I was about to cancel Hulu because their interface really sucked but they seem to have improved it. Watched the first couple episodes of Castle but felt annoyed by the cliched plots.
We do have a few shows on the actual real time dish that we record and watch... Person of Interest, Elementary, Blacklist with James Spader is excellent, the Mentalist.
The rest is Netflix and Amazon. We finished Downton Abby and are waiting for more. Now wading through Game of Thrones, but I have to stop it and explain everything it seems to my husband who didn't read the books as I did.....and Dexter which we missed years ago because we didn't have HBO.
We rarely have the TeeVee on at all, even for the news. The internet is our source for that.
Thumbs up on SHIELD.
I find it interesting my last two favorite drama shows are House and Castle.
Everything else other than football is something to pass time. And football, like baseball before it, may get shutoff. Houston just seems cursed with having reliable teams to back. 2 weeks before NBA starts.
DBQ - the final season of Dexter was excellent - you should rent it.
Yes. We are working our way through the Dexter series from the beginning and have seen about 5 episodes so far.
We were at a hotel and had access to HBO and the final episode of Dexter was on. My husband wanted to watch it and I was.......NO!!! it will ruin the whole thing if we know what happens. I refused to let us watch!
Dexter is Showtime I think cause I don't have HBO.
Ok. Some pay for channel that we don't have and won't pay for. :-)
Catch on re-runs sometimes:
Burn Notice
Psych
Frasier
Golden Girls
Friends
Watch on Amazon Instant:
Inspector Lewis
Project Runway
Project Runway All Stars (Oct. 24, new season)
I'll be trying out True Detective with McConaughey and Harrelson )Jan 14, 8 episodes).
@ Mitch
You are so right about Person of Interest. I'd heard that they were not getting enough ratings from women, so they brought in the 3rd team member to try and catch some more female viewers. If you watch this season with that in mind, everything that seems so off about it makes a lot of sense. I still watch it though.
I also love The Mindy Project and I hated The Office.
We watch old Married, With Children episodes sometimes too on Antenna TV. It's held up really well considering how old it is. For a comparison, Friends has not held up well.
I like Sleepy Hollow. Yes, the history and the Bible is all screwed up. But I'm smart enough to know it is, so I don't mind. It's like National Treasure, but with demons and time traveling. Vacuous entertainment.
Also:
Big Bang Theory
The Office
rh is too busy scything his lawn and working on his Grand Unified Theory of Agent 99 for current TV
The interest is in why the two Get Smarts are popular. They get something right.
They also get a lot of extraneous stuff in - both think they're about gags.
That at best serves formally as content while the heart of the thing works.
In both series the creators didn't figure out what was going on either, but an intuition put the right stuff in.
So you get two Get Smarts with something compelling about them.
That's a puzzle for criticism.
The original Get Smart fans didn't much like the 2008 movie, mostly.
But they're both romances and both about what men and women find differently holds their interests so that they can live close to each other without taking up space.
So it's about men and women, not 99.
Yes, Mitch has nailed it with Person of Interest.
And if they needed more female viewers, why not give Zoe more play?
Personally I don't like the new character because it is pulling time away from Carter and (especially) Fusco. Plus, the woman playing Shaw just doesn't have as interesting a voice as the other regulars on the show. I much enjoy listening to that cast.
So it's about men and women, not 99.
So I'll rename it the Grand Unified Theory of Why 'Get Smart' Isn't Just About Slapstick and Agent 99. Otherwise, I stand behind my earlier comment!
The 2008 dismissive feminist 99 ended up taking up no space with Max instead of displacing him.
There's a scene in the middle where 99 tells Max, who'd said they seem to make a good team, that he's confusing adrenaline with some other hormone. Max is puzzled and moves on. 99 was projecting her own confusion, a development that mysteriously got written in, as if the writers actually knew what they were doing.
Which they may have, some of them.
There were a lot of cut scenes on the DVD, with 99 being various degrees of pissy. I think they cut them right so that you don't wind up disliking 99 on first viewing, but going back you can put some of them in in your mind and it makes sense.
The hidden battle of writers' commitees and the hidden heart of the thing remains visible.
TV is about attracting 20somethings.
Now that winter is coming (do I owe GRRM a royalty for that?), rh will have more time for hypothesizing and commenting.
The hidden battle of writers' commitees and the hidden heart of the thing remains visible.
If it was a movie, the writers had much less to do with it than studio execs and the director.
Everyone should watch Foyles War. Netflix or Amazon...I don't remember but it was very good and we were sorry when we got to the last episode. HIGHLY recommend.
Big Bang Theory. It just grates on me. The laugh track is so flipping annoying I can't get past it.
I'd heard that they were not getting enough ratings from women, so they brought in the 3rd team member to try and catch some more female viewers.
Well, that explains the dumbing down of the show. Women viewers. Sheesh. I really am not too enthralled with the new loony character......unless she goes bonkers and kills someone in a spectacular and bloody fashion, then I might like her :-)
It has to be said that the 2008 Get Smart plot doesn't make exact motivational sense, as to the external circumstances Max and 99 find themselves in.
An interesting criticism point, that it doesn't matter. Perhaps it makes no exact sense just so that the inessential isn't dwelled on for the actual point, as Wittgenstein said of the Gospels.
An interesting criticism point, that it doesn't matter. Perhaps it makes no exact sense just so that the inessential isn't dwelled on for the actual point, as Wittgenstein said of the Gospels.
!!
I think they shot this and that scene out of order, with variations and ad libs that Carell is good at ---
Here's an outtake where Carell broke Hathaway up a scene where she tells him off ---
so I suspect that the actors didn't know what the heart of the thing was or the plot.
There apparently were some hotel scenes that were edited away forever that I would like to see, just to see what they rejected about 99 and Max getting together at mid-movie. Some clue to their intuitions.
Postponing it might be the point.
Barbara Feldon said, in her summary, that 99's job was to get Max to notice that he loved her, the humor point being that Max is so clueless that he doesn't notice.
Which showed that Feldon didn't know what was working for her.
Always showing Max that she was satisfied with him after he'd screwed up or not.
That made the series.
@ Icepick
Totally agree. Zoe is way better than Shaw. She worked really well for those few episodes, but I haven't enjoyed her at all this season.
Fusco is one of the best parts of Person of Interest (that and Jim Caviezel fighting 5 on 1) and I, too, have noticed his diminished role. Annoying.
Repost:
Birches, I've only seen the first two episodes of POI this season, so I'm not yet familiar with them screwing up Zoe's character yet.
NOTE: Sorry for the misspelled name in the earlier post, Birches. My phone auto-corrected and I didn't notice it.
Don't get attached to Ironsides, as it has been cancelled.
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