In the same vein, leaving monster of the week and leaning into big arc story was an even bigger mistake for this show than most others. The show is about a guy who literally kills monsters! Come on!!
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It’s kinda surprising no Eastern European dev has tried making a ripoff of the Witcher games set in The Olde World of Warhammer Fantasy since you could basically do everything the same except it would be in The Olde Word and therefore way cooler.
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Why bother licensing something when you can make completely homegrown grimy fantasy? Legends of Eisenwald is cool
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Anyone wanna give Warhammer Online a shot with me in 2023 lol
Dead of Night was a public access shot on video series made by overnight mall security guards on the job in Seattle in the early 90s. It’s like a zero budget X-Files meets Sapphire and Steel.
The protagonists are two cops who investigate possessed kids, sentient bouncy balls, and basilisks, and sometimes will just casually travel into other dimensions or converse a blob monster named Frank in the course of their investigations. So far all the episodes I’ve watched end totally unresolved too. One just ends with text informing the viewer that food and other supplies will be teleported to the planet they wind up on for as long as it takes for them to complete their mission (which is shooting air rifles at an army of beach balls).
It’s amazing.
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Oh shit, I just watched another episode and it ends abruptly right when the story was ramping up with text explaining that the footage for the climax was stolen along with their car.
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Been watching Kingdom, the Korean historical drama equivalent of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, except it takes its premise totally seriously. You know what?
It’s good!
Like, it’s not great, but it’s good! The first season has like, themes and stuff. The zombies are legit scary! The fact that they sleep during the daytime gives lots of room for things that aren’t “wow i gotta hide from these zombies!!”
And good lord does it move. I got used to the Netflix structure of “there are 2-3 groups of people and we will switch between them in such a regular fashion that it becomes tedious, also the story will move at a glacial pace to keep you ‘’‘’‘interested’‘’'”, but Kingdom is like “HEY GUESS WHAT MOTHERFUCKERS IT’S GO TIME” pretty much all the time. Like, it’s not that high energy but there’s always stuff happening. It’s a very nice change of pace.
I’m less interested in Season 2 because it’s become less Theme-y and more serious. I would also say that they let the themes down even in season 1:
Basically, the zombie plague is all because they resurrected the king just to hold onto power, and it went from there. The royals are all worse than useless, actively starving the kingdom and spreading a deadly plague while blaming peasants and scapegoats. This is a real good Zombie Theme of “the royals are literally dead weight (lol) and are only concerned with maintaining their own power even in death”.
The problem is that the main character is an Anime Prince who wants to rule the country, but in a Good Way. So it undercuts that theme in a major way by saying “the noble class is bad, except this one guy, so he should be the king”.
So yeah I wish it was more thoughtful but it’s great popcorn viewing. The third season is not currently greenlit so it’ll probably end on a permanent cliffhanger, but the journey has been entertaining.
The Game of Thrones comparisons are overstated. I mean this in a good way.
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okay so i finished this and pleasingly it wraps up all of the plot points that were established in the first two seasons. like, it actually ends??
i mean, it ends with a hook for season 3, but it’s basically unrelated to anything that happened in the first two seasons, and that’s fine. i actually watched the prequel movie first and had been wondering how it was connected at all, and it turns out it’s explaining literally just the last 3 minutes of the last episode of season 2.
anyway i forgot to mention that the show is blessedly non-reliant on CG, and the fight scenes are actually really good in a way I forgot things could be. and they just hired tons of extra to run around like evil toddlers and bash their heads into things as zombies, and it’s great. and every zombie is just head-to-toe drenched in blood at all times, running at full tilt with their arms by their sides, falling all over each other and shit, it’s like
really funny and good
just watching like 19 real people fall off a dock into a river while going “grarg” is never gonna get old to me
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finally getting around to watching Sex and the City, I can’t believe they made seinfeld for girls.
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some people say House is kind of like Elementray? tried a few episodes.
did a child write this. whose child opened the ICD and picked stuff at random out of it. where is the mystery in “let’s try a bunch of stuff idk it’s my first day”
who are all these forgettable actors. lol one is told in character they were hired because they look pretty
Hugh Laurie is not as good of an actor as Lucy Liu/Johnny Lee Miller/Aiden Quinn/Jon Michael Hill
lol Bryan Singer directed the pilot, a mess. somehow colour-graded to be just teal orange and grey, looks like Michael Bay’s Sin City. lol x2 he didn’t know Hugh Laurie was English
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oh speaking of rugrats (in the movies thread) I’m rewatching aeon flux and OH MY GOD THE RUGRATS MUSIC IN THE SILENT ONES IS SO OPPRESSIVE. I’d rather watch them on mute!!! the episodes with dialogue are so much better, danger boy. the award winning fuck through the wall episode is still amazing
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Anyone watch that Takashi Miike series on Hulu? Looks kinda cool but don’t know if it’s good.
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I rewatched the Hanukkah and Pass Over episodes of Rugrats last week, both are fun. Rugrats was a great cartoon.
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I don’t watch a ton of TV but my favourite show this year was Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Mainly because it felt like representation that came from a place of wanting to integrate both positive and negative aspects of autism. Woo is framed as ‘Korea’s first autistic lawyer’ and has traits like eidetic memory, highly specific obsessions (cetaceans and Korean law), frequent stimming/hand body movement, and extreme sensitivity to noise.
The show could very easily fall into an ‘autism is a superpower’ trope (and almost does when depicting how Woo sorts her photographic memory). It’s not perfect but what I love about it is how it lets Woo also just be rude or take the piss in cases where she should probably know better and has to grapple with that as a person. She frequently corrects other people on the exact specifics of the law or ignores social niceties to get things done which is both her big strength as a lawyer, but also weakness as someone who wants to connect with others. If you talk to anyone about the show, you’ll probably hear episode 3 recommended since Woo is assigned the case of an autistic adult with high support needs who is alleged to have murdered their brother. At this point her boss is still operating on some stereotypical assumptions and assigns the case because Woo has autism and so does the client. Woo points out that their presentation of autism is completely different, and she can’t just magically communicate with any autistic person, especially one who is close to nonverbal.
Woo has one trait involving counting on her hand before entering any room which goes unexplained for a long time since most of the characters are somewhat bewildered, too polite, or presumably just assume it’s one of many things Woo needs to do. It doesn’t get explained until like 14 episodes in when a highly insecure colleague she gets paired up with has an outburst about her ‘unprofessional’ behaviour. I liked that they left stuff like this as a frequent behaviour throughout the show without feeling the need to explain it until a bigot addresses it, revealing their own discomfort with someone different.
This is probably the best I’ve seen fiction deal with a romantic relationship between an autistic person and non-autistic person as well (TV tropes notwithstanding). Even when the neurotypical partner is highly understanding, frustrations still happen on both sides as communication and stigmatism coat a lot of the interactions. The show can sometimes dip into madcap goofiness which I ascribe to my limited knowledge of comic relief in other K-dramas, but I found the show generally pretty touching.
It has some tropes that I find a bit tedious mainly because of their frequency in this kind of show:
- Prolonged delay of two people, who clearly like each other and have said as much to each other, actually getting into their relationship
- Main character has a blood relationship to a major up-and-coming politician who would lose face were their behaviour/connection known to the public.
- Sudden and abrupt switch to cartoonish comedy logic as soon as the characters go on holiday
- Two characters who hate each other could not be hornier for each other. (OK maybe I like this one).
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Billions has great eastern seaboard energy, I had not watched it until now and I adore every part of the writing and casting and production. like high camp for character actors
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It’s great for a couple of seasons and then kind of nosedives but definitely enjoy the ride until you get tired of it
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And then if you want to watch like, the police procedural version of this, watch Life, also starring Damian Lewis
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