Star Trek: Picard will not be an action series. Patrick has been clear about this from the beginning. It's also important to note that Alex Kurtzman has minimal involvement in the series; the showrunner is Michael Chabon.

Anyone here familiar with Chabon's novels? He seems showered in acclaim but, so is Terry Goodkind.

I have friends who like him, haven't read anything myself. I was happy when I saw the announcement, because he seems like a person with actual taste and understanding of literary conventions. We can hope.

Hopefully the action-y elements of the trailer are a bit of a misrepresentation of the show's overall tone. Wouldn't be strange.

So excited for this show.

Between The Boys and Orange Is The New Black, this has been a fun weekend for TV. By fun I mean uncomfortable and soul crushing, but still.

Anyone checked out Another Life yet? Katee Sackoff, Justin Chatwin and Selma Blair in a big-budget Netflix sci-fi series, how could it go wrong? Well, at least according to Rotten Tomatoes, apparently it can very, very easily.

I watched the first episode, but just barely. Almost couldn't get through it. I tried the second episode just in case it picked up and/or started making sense, but it did not. I didn't even finish it.

The premise is a good one, but it goes nowhere. The parts that take place on Earth are agonizingly slow and meaningless, and the parts that take place in space are just bad.

I wonder if anyone else is into Steven Universe.

I love the LGBTQ positivity and lots of warm happy feels. I'm in Season 5 right now.

Steven Universe is a show I respect for how it handles its content metaphorically but just couldn't get into. It lacks the punch that Adventure Time and Regular Show had, overall. Still solid and I don't begrudge anybody who's a fan.

Anybody else check out the Boys on Amazon Prime? Loving it and all of its brutal satire about not only superheroes but the culture that's surrounded it. Garth Ennis knows how to mock subject matter on a level others wish they could and the first few episodes being written by Eric Kripke helped shove it all forward. THIS is what Snyder's Watchmen should have been.

I liked it at first, until the last few episodes - some of the problems it had just kept gnawing at me and then it became clear what sort of show this was.

Curious how they're going to incorporate this character into the show:



Yeah, I thought the comic was way too try-hard edgy and quit after a while. Garth Ennis is like a worse Tarantino or chuck Palahniuk in that he can be a smart writer but has this inner 13-year-old who sometimes takes over.

I get those criticisms, and I'm not really going to disagree with any of them, but I have a little more faith in Eric Kripke from SPN alone. He has a big hand in the direction of the series and has already changed enough from the source material to where the series could develop into something special.



I'm loving the cast, though. There's only one weak link for me and their role going forward will probably be minimized.

Yeah it's weird to be asked to sympathize with some of these guys in a show where a woman explodes a guy's head while he's giving her oral.

Who's the weak link? Got to say all the leads are fantastic. I do like Maeve quite a bit actually. She's got a quiet kind of insanity behind her eyes.

A-Train is the worst part for me. Maeve was awkward until that revelation and it took me a few to get on board with Starlight. Frenchie is my favorite.

He was pretty good at being a shallow douchebag, but yeah, I don't think the actor has what it takes to be dramatic/sympathetic. Dunno what happens in the comics though.

Starlight got really interesting around the middle of the season - particularly her church speech scene and her resistance to the Vought corporate bullshit.

Happy Birthday to Alfred Hitchcock. He would have been 120 years old today.

Finished Glow S3.

Still a good show, but my enjoyment is going down a little each season. I watched S1 two or three times, but doubt I'll ever watch S2 or S3 again. Will definitely tune in if a 4th gets made, though.

After scouring through old pages of this thread for good TV show recommendations, I decided to start watching Dirty Money on Netflix yesterday. TV show of the now. For those unaware, it's Netflix documentary show from early 2018 about various cases of corporate corruption and crony capitalism. The first episode was about the Volkswagen emissions scandal, and the episode I'm on now is about an insanely elaborate payday loan scam operation run by a sports car racer named Scott Tucker. Dude made about $400 million through various payday loan scam companies, wherein the company would immediately charge service fees on loans with 500% interest fees, and clandestinely withdraw funds from customers' bank accounts, only apply those payments to the service fees, and keep doing that in perpetuity without the knowledge or consent of the customer in question. On top of all of that, all of his companies were incorporated in Native American territories in Oklahoma in an attempt to get around state lending laws. And just to make things even more infuriating, Scott Tucker and family appear in this episode for interviews, and they are all 100% unrepentant for the damage and harm they caused to thousands of people. They have the fucking gall to act like the FBI coming in and arresting him in front of his kids is some kind of traumatic event, and getting his various race cars confiscated by the government is an unfair punishment for what he believes is a bunch of hullabaloo over no real wrongdoing on his part.

If you ever want to get so angry at a person that you wanna reach through the TV and punch them in the face, watch this episode. And there's still four more to go on my end, including an episode entirely devoted to Donald Trump's various corporate scandals and scams. Whoopee.

Krypton got the axe. So much for the only comic book show I could give a crap about! It's spinoff Lobo was also cancelled.

Haha, the quality jump from the first season of The 100 to the second was like moving from Twilight to LotR. Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic... but only a bit. It feels like a different show, which is good because that first season wasn't really something I'd watch.

I convinced a friend of mine to watch it and he's at the exact same spot as you and he's having the same experience, hah. Yeah, once the mountain men show up things improve a LOT. Their appearance was Lost-like to me, mysterious and fascinating. And it started to feel like Jericho or another post-apocalyptic show to me, which I'm a huge fan of.

Could someone jump into The 100 straight into S2? Or will we be missing too much background/development?

You could probably read up on the beginning. I assume you'd wanna at least catch the end of season 1 though rather than skipping the whole thing.

Just finished the first episode of Chernobyl and I absolutely will not be watching the rest of it. It made me feel too uncomfortable. It's well made but I just can't handle it.

Honestly, the first season wasn't bad. In fact, the first few episodes were rather good with a few surprising plot twists (characters you think are main characters suddenly die to never been seen again, while others who seem like generic filler background characters end up being super important). My problem with it was its, er, CWness. The pilot episode played a goddamn Imagine Dragons song and everything with the kids is in BRIGHT and COLORFUL environments while their sad parents all muck around in GRIM and HILARIOUSLY DESATURATED pallor, like they're on a low-budget BSG. There's also some bullshit teen drama, e.g., "The guy I just lost my virginity to last night has a girlfriend, my life is ova" and the first season slips too often into well-trodden Lord of the Flies territory, where there's cringey lines like "but wait... you're making rules... I thought you said there were no rules?"

One thing that helped me was when I found out all of the "kids," who are supposed to be under 18, are played by actors in their mid-20's (now in their 30's), and all the mud and cuts and scars and bruises they get caked with by the end of the first season takes the sting out of the fact they all look like Instagram models with four Maseratis.

I think the first season is pretty damn important; it's a highly serialized show, and a lot of the cool stuff in the second season is dependent on the characters and lore established in the first. 13 episodes at 40 minutes each makes it a modest time commitment, but there's enough good stuff in it to make the CW crap bearable. And the second season doesn't feel or even look like a CW show. No idea about where it goes after the second season, but I trust Comrade Nahsil.

All caught up on Supernatural, finished S14 last night. HOLY SHIIIIIIIT the final season is going to be insane.

yeah that's fair. It probably is best to just suffer through the initial CWisms.

re post-season 2, well, honestly I stopped watching for a bit after season 2, not sure which season, maybe 3 or 4. I came back to it though and I've enjoyed what they've done after that. It was some of the grounder politics that got a bit old to me, but it's not the end of the show and I've been invested for a while now. It's definitely a show that dips up and down in quality, but I've enjoyed a lot of what they've attempted, even if it hasn't *always* been perfectly executed. The show has vision and isn't afraid to try new things each season.

80s cartoons are generally wack, but every once in a while an episode came up that was weirder, darker, and more intriguing than the norm, and that tended to leave a lasting if not disturbing impression. One such episode that I've recently rediscovered is GI Joe's Nightmare Assault. I had it recorded on tape and must've watched it a few dozen times, along with some other ones on the same tape. Back then I didn't quite understand what was going on, but the vivid and intense visuals and the way the characters were scared continued to both fascinate me and freak me out, especially Low-Light's dream. Even now, after fuck knows how many years, I still got slight chills watching it. And, now that I've understood the context behind Low-Light's dream and character in general, I'm left a little bit more unnerved at the writing and overall message (edginess aside, basically his dad was an abusive motherfucker who wanted him to kill 20 rats in the dark to prove that he's a man, to which Low-Light seemed to internally acquiesce to please his dad, and that somehow ended up having a cathartic effect for him, also to the benefit of everyone else).

If anyone knows more of such old dark cartoon episodes with unusually perverse themes, then please feel free to share.

Try rewatching the Real Ghostbusters. It holds up the best of all the 80s cartoons, IMO, and has some pretty intense moments and ghost design.

Anybody remember Denver the Last Dinosaur? The weird ass cartoon from the early 90s? I don't remember any stories but do remember the weirdness of it.

Yeah I remember Denver. That show seemed too boring and forgettable. I mean it might've been good story-wise, but the art style and tame feel of it didn't interest me one bit to keep me watching.

I fucking love Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Visually, that show was fucking brutal and traumatizing, but that's not where the horror was. The real horror was discovering later on that the countless instances of anthropogenic environmental destruction happening in that show that I watched in my small room were also happening in real life, and that 30 fucking years later, things never got better and are actually worse than ever, with none other than Captain Chainsaw currently at the forefront of it all.

I also can't count the number of times that I've met or seen people who look, think, and act like Hoggish Greedly. It's eerie and kind of terrifying. It just makes me wonder how humans can have absolutely zero empathy for life.

the Mandalorian trailer released:



star wars spin-off with Boba Fett...

Grounders are by far the worst part of the show. They were insufferable in season 1, they're tolerable in season 2. Hollywood just can't do pre-industrial tribes right, they're always either honor bound caste systems who solve 99% of disputes through bloodshed or wide-eyed hippies who "commune" with mother earth, and it's always worse in sci-fi. See: Klingons, Luxans, Krogans.

I told myself I wouldn't give a shit about this show but honestly that trailer's pretty dope. Doesn't really show you much, but eh, I guess I'll at least check it out now.

Also, the main bounty hunter isn't Boba Fett. Also I love that Gus from Breaking Bad is now Star Wars canon.

I started watching Barry on HBO and it is surprisingly good. Kind of has an early Dexter vibe to it, but with more humor. There are also some pretty fucked up, dark moments. It's pretty amazing how comedic actors such as Bill Hader seem to be able to transition into serious roles almost seamlessly.

Although it's technically a special rather than an episode, "Halloween Is Grinch Night" qualifies, I think, having distinctly more nightmarish and disturbing imagery than the other Seuss TV specials.

So how fucking amazing is Dark Crystal on Netflix? Pretty.

This week I finished watching Wu Assassins on Netflix and I pretty much wish I hadn't even started. Good concept but poor execution. I guess that having Iko Uwais on board made them kinda go "ok, we gotta film this like The Raid", but it just doesn't work. It's not even funny bad like Legend of the White Snake, which I also watched on Netflix a few weeks ago, it's just boring bad.

One scene that stuck to me is a fight between Iko Uwais' character and Byron Mann's in which they just blurred out Mann's character's face and put lens flares on it in order to hide that it was a stunt double.