the character of joe pera in joe pera talks with you is so emotionally complex it’s like they fleshed out a weirdo side character from newhart to an exponential degree
it’s so refreshing, it feels like a revelation when it feels like so many comedies and dramas are about “i’m a sad mean genius with a huge ego”
oh my god this man is wonderful
My girlfriend is normie as fuck, so it’s incredibly difficult to find something we can both enjoy watching but we just blew through both seasons of “The Exorcist”. I had very low expectations coming in; mostly just wanted something that moved at a network TV pace so I could spend time with her but I was more than pleasantly surprised at how well put together the show is.
Gave Joe Pera Talks with You a shot after a particularly long day. Episode 4, with the wedding, is the most unabashedly wholesome and delightful thing I’ve seen in ages.
I’m also giving this a shot tonight. I’m halfway through the first episode, and it is wonderful. This is the show 2018 needed.
Better Call Saul season 4 starts Monday!
Chris Rock will star as a crime boss, in Fargo Season 4. Set in the 1950’s
The finale to this show is crushing. Midway through the season I lost the ability to tell where the satire starts or stops. I think these sociopaths might have too many layers for my tastes. I’m having a hard time parsing my feelings about it.
They went full Chappaquiddick!!!
I adored it, but I’m also 100% up for watching a fun nuanced story about a bunch of people I despise on principle
It doesn’t help that they get excellent performances out of almost every cast member. Quite the show!
A lot of the early reviews I read seemed to struggle with “who is the protagonist” and “are we supposed to sympathize with these people?” which were both the wrong question to be asking
I absolutely get why others wouldn’t be into it though, I’m in a reasonably rare Venn diagram of “has spent enough time among rich people while enjoying hating them” for the show to work thematically
anyway it’s the most HBO-esque thing that’s been, like, genuinely good in a very long time and in terms of stuff I’ve enjoyed this year I’d put it maybe below Atlanta s2 and Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits and Monsters but just ahead of killing eve and sorry to bother you (which were also both great)
I was pretty impressed with Succession considering the commercials looked obnoxious. We really don’t need any more television shows about rich people, despicable or not. Skewering the rich and pointing out how selfish they are hasn’t been insightful for over 15 years in TV, for over 50 years in film, and for 100s of years in literature.
In that regard, I never felt Succession brought anything the table. It never attempted to say anything insightful about being rich in America. And frankly I don’t want to hear anything about what its like to be rich in America (fictionally or not). Highlighting them is akin to making the same overheated jokes about Trump as president. Yes, these opinions are sort of true to life and it feels good on a very superficial level, but it seems to come from a place of weakness. Power rarely comes from toothlessly ridiculing the powerful. It comes from elevating and humanizing the disenfranchised. Not to be a cliche white guy who watches too much television, but The Wire is a far better indictment of wealth in America than any of these shows about rich people.
Anyways, I don’t think Succession really cared about any of this. It is ultimately just a family soap opera, a dark version of Dynasty. The show lived and died on the set pieces where the ridiculous family members interacted with one another. The strength of the series is the performances. Tom and Shiv are particularly great characters, the series is worth checking out just for them.
I honestly don’t know if the show has much else to add with a second season, though. The season finale nicely tied everything up. The foreshadowed political plotlines seem like a misstep and particularly redundant considering the show is already way too close to Veep.
Better Call Saul is still good, but the more they go into the cartel elements…it’s like…the show is a very good cold cut sandwich that sudenly someone keeps adding cheese to it and I like cheese but the balance is kinda off
(in this metaphor if they actually do breaking bad it will be like someone dumped too much olive oil on top)
I was hoping we’d get years of mike doing pi and crime stuff with oddball albuquerque criminals before he ever hooked up with fring
Kaylee Ehrmantraut is like opposite of those soap opera kids who grow up overnight, she’s just a weird eternal tween. Obviously this is an advanced metaphor for how Mike sees her.
Although that’s just another Breaking Bad Time Mystery considering how it felt like they were keeping it in a slightly pre-iphone ubiquity world and even having dates on screen to make it feel like less time had passed in show then suddenly that one dude mentions that they killed Osama and it gets weird.
If they want to try to convince me in a flashback that Odenkirk is playing a teen or whatever though, I’ll 100% accept it.
Westworld S2 is pretty erratic while circling the park repeatedly. Sometimes that kinda works for expanding plot, but it’s more uneven where S1 was fairly elegant.
Dragged in a few circles they eventually made some big jumps in the big scheme. I’m still engaged but they have to be radical with S3 to make it worthwhile.
Cut a few strings from Bernard let him call some SHOTS
appreciate that they filmed the whole song even if it wasn’t full in the episode lol
Flipping channels just now and uh, there are a bunch of old guys playing half-court b-ball on network tv. Is this a thing now or…?
EDIT: featuring Michael Rapaport as an interviewer and it’s on fox 
Resurrection of Frasier is considered to be in the “exploratory stage.” I’ve been there, first recording demos about Frasier on the MTV Music Generator: “The styles of Niles are beyond compare stop you dead in your tracks from a dignified stare / thinking of Daphne what a good masseuse taking care of Dad and Eddie with a tight caboose”. Sorry. But maybe I’m poised to strike with the pulse of a reboot.
