TV you've just watched

[Ed Oscuro]

Does anybody know where to find more episodes of Dasshutsu Game Dero / Takarasagashi Adventure Nazotoki Battle TORE! ?

Uh, in other news, I've seen all the episodes and films (bar the upcoming, final series) of Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet...half seriously thinking about finding "Blott on the Landscape" next.

[Rob]

Does anybody know where to find more episodes of Dasshutsu Game Dero / Takarasagashi Adventure Nazotoki Battle TORE! ?

Searching d-addicts brings up a few.

[emphatic]

Trying out Alias (Netflix). I'm about 5 episodes in. Jennifer Garner is certainly easy on the eyes, but her acting range leaves something to be desired... Either cloying sweet, neutral/pissed (indistinguishable), or crying/crying while pissed.

Her character also sucks pretty badly at being a spy. Seriously, she gets caught every single mission. I know it's mostly to facilitate catfights and leggy roundhouse kicks, but still.

Keep watching. The best part of Alias is the double-life aspect IMHO. Will Tippin is a very good reporter.

[Moniker]

Keep watching. The best part of Alias is the double-life aspect IMHO. Will Tippin is a very good reporter.

They let Tarantino play a flamboyant Bond villain. And then they had Roger Moore play a restrained Bond villain. In other words, best show ever. More ovaltine, please!

[CStarFlare]

Just powered through the first two seasons of Downton Abbey. Watched the first episode months ago and didn't understand the fuss. Picked it back up on Monday since I couldn't find anything on Netflix that looked appealing and have done nothing else with my evenings since. The second season made me groan at a few points, but I enjoyed it very much as a whole. And I was a little giddy at times. It was weird.

Now I guess I'll check out Upstairs Downstairs. I'm in the mood for more British accents.

[GaijinPunch]

X-Files Season 1

Was nice to start from the beginning. While the drama was laid on a little thick at the start, and the mythology still very up in the air, it was enjoyable. I did like a few quirks that they later "erased". Krychek (sp?) had a role as some random guy in one episode (definitely not the same character) and Scully mentions to Mulder that she has an older and younger brother. I believe one of her brothers surfaces towards the end, but the sister is the meatier extra character... for a couple of seasons, anyway.

[emphatic]

Hannbal was so much better than The Following.

[GaijinPunch]

Hannbal was so much better than The Following.

How many episodes are they in to? Might check it out. I watched about 6 episodes of The Following but I think I'm going to give up on it.

[emphatic]

Only one episode of Hannibal so far. I still watch The Following for some reason, but it's just not very good, is it?

[lilmanjs]

That ending to Psych last night. I won't spoil it, but could that mean this is the final season?

[CStarFlare]

There's at least one more season coming.

[lilmanjs]

There's at least one more season coming.

I have to say the show is well to me, still as good as ever, but this season and the later part of last season just seem to have a more "mature" vibe to it. Not as zany as it once was, but still a good show. Still where do they go from here now?

[emphatic]

I think it's an arch that'll make things a bit awkward, but not much more than that. I might be wrong though, the writing is pretty clever in that show.

[chempop]

Vikings - I'm not sure how good it is, but entertaining nonetheless. Looking forward to the next raid!

The Booth at the End (hulu) - Whoa, did not expect this to be so gripping and addictive. For a show that is entirely dialogue set in a single place it does an unreal job of keeping ones interest. The acting is amazing, where did they find these people?!

[BryanM]

Gentlemen.

Arrested Development beckons. Sunday.

Is your angus prepared?

-------------

Like the guy in the $10,000 suit cares about what the guy wearing pajamas thinks. Come on!

[brentsg]

Only one episode of Hannibal so far. I still watch The Following for some reason, but it's just not very good, is it?

We're still way behind, watching recorded episodes of The Following. It's not very good. The wife really likes it, and she's getting tired of my commentary during episodes so I may need to let her have at it for the remainder of S1.

[CStarFlare]

Gentlemen.

Arrested Development beckons. Sunday.

Is your angus prepared?

-------------

Like the guy in the $10,000 suit cares about what the guy wearing pajamas thinks. Come on!

What time does this go live? My brothers and I talked about marathoning it.

[lilmanjs]

Gentlemen.

Arrested Development beckons. Sunday.

Is your angus prepared?

-------------

Like the guy in the $10,000 suit cares about what the guy wearing pajamas thinks. Come on!

I'm looking forward to this, but I'm sure I will be fighting for time on the wii to watch this. My niece has found out there's kids stuff on netflix.

[BryanM]

Those who can't wait, there are clips. Clips sir. Clips.

What time does this go live?

Light googling says no one knows precisely. Could be midnight Eastern time, Pacific time, or maybe whenever their morning shift gets in.

Too cruel, I know.

I'm looking forward to this, but I'm sure I will be fighting for time on the wii to watch this. My niece has found out there's kids stuff on netflix.

I'm sure you can take her out with a hook and a cross, and maybe a couple jabs or footstomps.

[Ed Oscuro]

Pilot episode of The Flash (1990). Watch the lab computers for an Okudagram referencing The Blues Brothers.
Pet Fly was involved with a number of somewhat interesting-looking projects. It's just silly TV, of course, but through its pilot The Flash rolled out a few good jokes here and there. The main theme is composed by Danny Elfman. In terms of style, it feels a bit more like Darkman than '89 Batman. Not perfect, but not completely unwatchable either.

[Vurpa]

Blew through S1 of Breaking Bad today. Pleasantly surprised because of the premise had low expectations despite what's been said about it.

[BryanM]

Alrighty, finished it up.

The season is... well it feels like Ground Hog day, and it goes for a little longer than it feels like it should have been taken. Might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't seen a lot of groundhog day-esque stuff lately.

Love the actor who played Julius in Everybody Hates Chris. He's just hilarious without even trying, a great new character.

Hit and miss like all things, a small bump down for repetition. 3/5.

[GaijinPunch]

Gentlemen.

Arrested Development beckons. Sunday.

Is your angus prepared?

I gotta get my Netflix account. Kind of waiting for a time me and my ho have to watch it together.

[dcharlieJP]

I gotta get my Netflix account. Kind of waiting for a time me and my ho have to watch it together.

ADev : I'm going to suck it off the internet then get my head down one night and just blow on through it </tobiasmodeoff>

[Ed Oscuro]

Finding this thread again was a bit more trouble than it should have been, in part due to three letters tacked on to the end of a certain user's forum handle (ahem).

Anyway, I'm about done with the Neverwhere miniseries.

Visually it's a mixed effort. It employs the same "spooky" conceit you see employed in psychological thrillers like the American series Millennium (probably itself a borrowing from the movie Seven) - sepia-tone credits, grainy images flashing by accompanied by blood and random frames of people showing their teeth. Unfortunately, here they're always the same sequence, and repeating it until you can make out what it's showing doesn't make it any spookier. It disperses more tension than it creates, which hardly achieves the intended purpose. Speaking of things draped in fur and feathers, the quality of the costumes and set-pieces isn't always totally believable, either (the first exhibit: Old Bailey's silly black cap) - but given the project's home on the BBC, not the most shocking discovery. What I was actually most worried about, before I started, was the lighting and color rendition. Reportedly it was lit for film, shot on video, but not filmized. The result isn't as bad as I had feared - it occasionally is a bit garish but is often understated enough; besides, "neon fancy" often fits the theme.

What a theme it is, too! Apparently the best way to have a show about the homeless was to make absolutely everybody some variant on a bag lady / greedy subway minstrel / magic trinket collecting soothsayer / underworld hustler stereotype; most of the cast seems firmly ensnared within eddies of the fast currents of an underground economy based on barter and "big favors." The character that first introduces us to this unrelenting theme of Neverwhere, the Marquis, is often entertaining enough, but I started to tire of his extortionate behavior even before the show had shifted focus off him. He comes good later on (as expected), but unfortunately the series never seems (as far as I've gotten in the fifth part of six) able or willing to rise above this rather squalid and tenseless characterization of the second world.

Despite it all, characters are rather loveable - a couple even unforgettable (guess who, if you've seen the series, will be at the top of that list?). I don't fault the acting at all - some characters are plainly rendered but I have the feeling the source material was a bit thin to work off. You get the feeling that the actors rather shared the sentiment that would be held by their fictional counterparts - hide in a corner and wait until the whole thing blows over, and you might bring the bacon another day.

There is one central conceit to the characterization, and to some degree the acting, which seems to be dear to the various British television series I have watched: There is some painfully British thirty-something guy, who has a pretty normal life working in London, and a girlfriend. Something happens and he loses not only his girlfriend (who is prone to unrealistic histrionics and is a pretty much impossible, loveless nag anyway), but he has to retreat from his life into a shadow world, so he starts acting mopey until he finds some semblance of a fit with his radically upended world, at which time he becomes impossibly smug or cocksure without having the benefit of having escaped any of his core character flaws, still looking like a hapless puppy. That describes the arc and characterization of Ultraviolet as perfectly as it does Neverwhere. Anime gets away with this shit (as far as it does) because animated characters have more range than real people could hope to emulate without having to stitch their faces back on. With live-action, the sense of unrealism seems only more stark when they go through this gruesome book-pressed pantomime of relationships.

What's also rather embarrassing, aside from the stereotyped characters, is the way the plot unfolds around the core concept - the show really wants to be a travelogue and just show us characters in miniature, as set dressing. Soon in the show you start to realize "oh, Neil Gaiman's Big Idea was that station names would represent real things." Having Big Ideas is generally something I applaud, and this is no exception. What's awkward is to have payoffs as unimaginative and unsatisfyingly randomly plotted as they are here. Nightbridge is...well, it's just a bridge at night. Oh, and it randomly triggers the disappearance of characters we have had all of thirty seconds to become acquainted with - with this series' whiplash time at play, that's long enough for the hero to call the poor girl a dear friend of his!

Yes, there are black friars (black in skin color, not only in robes) toting AK-47s at Blackfriars. Old Bailey really likes his birds, though his rather seedy aviary looks rather sad in comparison to the grand domes of London behind it - and his black rubber cap in comparison to the almost magisterial Marquis and his splendid white-fronted hair thing; it calls to mind the splendid powdered wigs of the real patrons of the Bailey, with a little flair to announce it is not just fashionable, but homeless chic. Hunter, while one of the most likeable characters, is a flatly unimaginative stoic spear-toting African stereotype that wouldn't be seen on American TV. The main couple, Richard and Door, are rather sad. Richard continually calls for "Door" and I can hardly get past the pronounciation of the name...Door the Explorer! Door, is, eh, well, I don't know.

The main character was at his best when he was thoroughly confused - the whole thing is one gigantic unexplained fetch quest from here to there. You can see the intended audience - although a few curse words appear, the only real violence done to our hapless hero is the traditional kind of fainting, weakness to heights, being taunted by his overstuffed subconscious nearly to the point of suicide, and the old-fashioned getting beaned on the head, all staples of the Hardy Boys' (and its countless even further undistinguished imitators') genre. It takes something away from the moments where the show successfully uses violence and its implication for drama or comedy. There is something to be said for Chekhov's Gun - focusing carefully on one or two things. Neverwhere wants much more time to expand on how clever it is, so you spend a fair bit of time hearing about how tough somebody was in a previous life, or about what happened in New York, and not enough time seeing Croup and Vandemar menacing people or taking phone calls, and menacing people while disconnecting phones with finger blades. It's hard to fault anybody, including the writer, for wanting to fill out a rich world in even as narrow a time budget as the roughly three hours of Neverwhere, but we're left forgetting things too soon - like the rats who feature so prominently in the first few episodes and then disappear. It's hard to deny it - Neverwhere is guilty of sloppy pacing divorced from the realistic constraints imposed by running time and a rather too-formulaic travelogue of random shit (sometimes quite literally) hastily run around the core concept.

For me, there's a bit under 45 minutes of Neverwhere left (i.e., a bit over ten minutes left of part five), and it needs to dispose of a quest item, have at least one reunion, and at least one showdown, wrap up the early revenge story or do something else with it, and probably it would also be nice to get this impending bewitching, painfully transparently foreshadowed, out of the way. Anybody who has mastered the classic Holmes / Agatha Christie's Poirot method of determining who has to be the murderer by plot requirements will no doubt have puzzled over the rather inept way the apparent traitor was introduced and revealed. First two characters attempt to scare off the heroes with the taunt "there is a traitor in your midst;" the characters, quite refreshingly, immediately discount it as an attempt to set them against each other (as well they should). So far so good, but now we are too few characters with too little time onscreen to care about what any of them had done to each other. The apparent villain is simply one of the random stops on the crazy ride about the subway. Why should we care?

There are still some upbeat notes. Hywel Bennet not only matured very well in the years after playing the pivotal role of Ricky Tarr in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (also featuring Sir Alec Guinness), his portrayal of the dementedly persistent and strangely dignified Croup is the more memorable half of the already highly memorable duo of Croup and Vandemar - the other half of which is played with a well-balanced mixture of brother-worshiping comic insecurity and stony malevolence by Clive Russell. I'm not sure Neil Gaiman's novelization would prove especially rewarding to read. The following passage -

Door raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't look very nice." "Nice in a bodyguard," lectured the marquis, "is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.

- is considerably flabbier than simply having the Marquis utter his lung-puncturing reply on video, with a shabby "she-said, he-said" erected around it like a bent iron fence wrapped around the Sphinx. Although I think it is poorly replicated here, you can't help but admire Mr. Neil Gaiman for possessing the unhinged genius at the core of this exchange, and wish him well in finding further outlets for that genius. I'll be frank, though, I didn't really care for his plotting and characterization in the early Sandman comics I read either - too many characters served up and hastily chewed through before you can get any inkling of what they're about. In people, as well as in fiction, an attribute wisely excused for lacking glamor and has its virtues extolled as fitting the brave and heroic, is intestinal fortitude - and Mr. Gaiman would do well to listen to his character Mr. Croup extolling the virtues of the bowels, that part of the body so associated. The bowels are not merely a festive dressing for scenes, but represent that staying power and determination that will see us through.

I wanted to poke some fun at this mini-review, but I'm out of time - and I'm not sure we watched the same miniseries. I'll admit, though, that despite all my misgivings, it's quite watchable and I love the format - essentially a motion picture in even nicer bite-size chunks than you typically have to put up with, good if you start to fidget when it gets laid on a bit too thick.

Edit: Having finished it up now, they did somewhat clever things with the plot and a key character that I wasn't expecting - good on Gaiman, it needed some shaking-up. The constant flow of plot items continued almost unabated through to the end, though. The way they handled the Big Bads was very silly, but I can forgive that. What was more interesting (if a bit predictable) was how they handled the end of Richard's story. Rather satisfying, really.

[BrianC]

There's at least one more season coming.

I have to say the show is well to me, still as good as ever, but this season and the later part of last season just seem to have a more "mature" vibe to it. Not as zany as it once was, but still a good show. Still where do they go from here now?

The next episode is the musical in December, which was originally going to be a part of the current season, but now seems to be airing as a special separate from the main seasons. I heard that the next season is the last one. I can't wait to see the musical! I liked the season finale quite a bit, though it was odd for me seeing Anthony Michael Hall talking in a US accent.

[lilmanjs]

Psych, I'm not sure how to take the ending of the season. I liked it, but the shakeup really makes it seem like they are trying to really wind down the series. Though after 7 seasons its gotta be hard to come up with amazing ideas and still keep the show fresh. Still this season had some classic moments like the dad's version of Suck It! I'm not sure a musical will be awesome or not, but I'm sure psych will pull it off quite well. If next season is indeed the last season, I'm sure they will hit it out of the park quite easily. Even with the show maturing and not being as wacky as the earlier seasons, they still are making a show worth watching.

[BrianC]

The In Laws episode put me on a Sopapillas kick. I finally found a couple places near me with them. Every place I tried fixed them a little differently, but they are so good! I also had Mexican Coke, though I tried that before I saw the episode. Good stuff, though I like Mexican Sprite better.

The Clue episode also got me to watch Clue (which I saw before the episode) and Murder by Death (saw this after I heard it had some references to it). Both good stuff. I like how the latter has Peter Falk playing a Sam Spade/Humphrey Bogart parody.

It would be funny if more of the Buffy cast was on the musical episode. I loved Buffy's musical episode.

[ArmoredCore]

The Borgias on Showtime, Historic innaccuracies aside i never seen better acting in a long time. season 3 episode 9 final scene with the jew interceding with Rodrigo and his son Cesare was one of the most powerful scenes i ever seen as far as i can remember. Also sean harris as Micheletto ftmfw!! Trumps game of thrones season 3 so far for me.

[Ed Oscuro]

Not exactly TV, but it is a documentary: Detroit on Fire

Not really high production values here but a ton of good information. Gonna look into this and this next - about crime and the public schools.