I’m three episodes in to Severance right now and it’s real good. It’s like a twilight zone episode shot in the style of what if David Fincher made the X Files. I appreciate things that are eerie without being violent or like overly traumatizing so much. If you’ve seen more of it don’t spoil anything BC I’m really enjoying having no idea where this is going. I honestly didn’t know ben stiller had it in him I was expecting it to be way more like, I don’t know, the good place or something. It very much isn’t!
Side note but it’s also cool that half the actors are super famous people and the others are all people I’ve never seen before. But everyone is really trying their best
I’m also on the Severance hype train. It’s perfectly distressing in the same way the best twilight zone / black mirror episodes are. The Helly storyline really stresses me out.
Though I have the same concerns as Sleazy that season 1 is going to be some lost-style full season as a pilot episode type thing. So far it’s been propulsive and done a good job of justifying its length instead of just being a 2 hour movie (something I find to almost never be the case these days), but as the mysteries keep piling up and not getting resolved I am becoming concerned.
As an aside I’ve now had two people say “oh I was thinking about checking that out but I’m not into Shyamalan” and it was only after the fact I realized they were talking about Servant, also on Apple TV
yeah i think i may have seen somewhere that there is going to be a second season? this does not seem like the type of world i want to keep living in after a few weeks, so i am hoping they at least bring all of this to some kind of a conclusion by the end of the first season and use the next one to look at some other horrors happening elsewhere in the lumen building, or maybe one of the other severed companies that they allude to in the various news broadcasts and stuff.
i do feel like the aspects of the show that are more about how the lumen company is kind of a cult are less interesting than the rest of the premise. i just feel like… i get it already, and the more they lean into that angle of it the less intriguing i find it. on the other hand, i find the way the show is also on the basest level just like a satire of how workplace comedies try to make lighthearted mirth out of the toil of corporate life to just be like really funny. like there will be a scene where they are just bantering at their desks like it’s The Office, then someone will make a remark about something like “the bad soap” and everything just becomes intensely ominous
I don’t usually watch sitcoms or popular television shows with a lot of seasons, I guess I just don’t trust the praise and I’m suspicious about the brain deadening effects. But I finished watching all of Gilmore Girls, and its one Netflix season, and I am here to make excuses for that show because I thought it was really great. Okay, not many excuses, it is what it is: rapid fire quippy romcom drama with a heap of millennial relatability via not inanely deployed cultural references and fully of sappy but earned moments. But it’s very good at this for the most part, so it feels exceptional, and I wholeheartedly loved it. It would be a whole lot less enjoyable if it felt manipulative like a lot of shows like it do, but Gilmore Girls is kind of neat because it goes almost without comment into the flaws of its characters; and boy are some of these characters flawed and ultimately frustrating and maybe even unlikeable. They do not hold back from depicting the show’s ostensible main character as the selfish and oblivious person she sometimes can be. This kind of ironic distance is what distinguishes it from a lot of other romantic comedy stuff, it doesn’t mind if you change your opinion on a character because the show does not need you to think Rory Gilmore is amazing. It avoids the main character black hole thing that a lot of shows are structured on.
But also it really spoke to me in a personal way throughout. I can’t relate to the exact circumstances of Lorelai and Rory and Emily Gilmore’s life, they’re too rich and were always too stable, but I was raised by a single mom too with lots of found family and strain between the real ones and my mom. There were lots of moments between Lorelai and Emily, or with her and her friends, or Rory and her, which felt really true to my experience. I have had a lot of fun talking about the show with a bunch of women in my life who watched it as it aired, including my own mother.
I started to watch this show cause a girl I was trying to find more things to talk with liked it, but I ended with something I can’t really be impersonal about! It was a good time and basically a profound one for me as well. And in the exact kind of place in popular media I am so prone to avoiding, too.
Just finished all of the first season of Joe Pera Talks With You and I honestly just really dig the vibe. I wasn’t expecting there to be much of a “plot” at all but I like what they did. I appreciate that they don’t lean in too hard on the socially-awkward schtick. They just let Joe be a quirky dude, mostly surrounded by other oddballs.
is the second season of what we do in the shadows (tv show version) any better than the first? I was tricked by seeing someone claim the show was better than the movie
I mean it wasn’t horrible but it also wasn’t… good?
the first season seemed to mainly reproduce bits from the movie without necessarily getting why they were funny in the first place. i also feel like the movie managed to combine the generally silly tone with a few moments of actual horror more effectively. the energy vampire guy is funny as a concept but mostly boring to watch, esp when he is just doing his own lil subplots in isolation from everyone else. i also feel like once i noticed they were emplotting guillermo the familiar to become a vampire hunter and then realized i was probably going to have to wait to the end of the season for that to actually happen i got really bored with that subplot.
all the actors are good enough, but i feel like the only one who is actually funny was nadja. oh and matt berry’s guy being the only one who shouts BAT when he transforms into a bat is also very funny, but everything else about that character felt forced
i guess i’ll watch it eventually. we finally figured out how to unlock the parental controls on our shared disney + account, which for some reason has all the stuff hulu does in america but we just couldn’t see due to this one weird setting. anyway what i’m trying to say is i believe you but i still feel like it will be more productive to just watch atlanta first.
Have made Scrubs our datenight TV show watch of choice and my wife has confirmed the banal and common observation that it is the show that most accurately depicts life working in a hospital. It’s quite funny quite often and Zach Braff doesn’t ruin it as much as you think he would. I get how this show generated goodwill for him that propelled him thru all his later crap. If they made one of these for public defenders I’d probably just continuously rewatch it until I died
tbh I really like the first and seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, and the first a bit more than the second, but I got about halfway through the third season and haven’t bothered finishing it because the tone, sources of comedy, overall aesthetics, and reliance on self-referentiality and continuity have changed a lot. It’s become a lot more sitcommy. And I like sitcoms. But I’m not a big fan of this version of this sitcom.
