Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

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Raid
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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Raid » Sun Jan 06, 2019 3:34 pm

Yeah, I couldn't recommend Prime solely as a video streaming service either. The selection isn't as good, and it's a more frustrating site to use given that not everything hosted is free to watch. You can browse by free, but it'll offer recommendations that aren't.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Animalmother » Sun Jan 06, 2019 5:22 pm

Ah, I assumed you got access to everything. Will give it a miss then, I barely use Amazon to order stuff so Prime isn't much of an incentive either. Thanks for the info chaps.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Alan » Sun Jan 06, 2019 7:10 pm

I like that it offers you the chance to buy things that aren’t included but I don’t like how muddled together it is in their UI.
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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by eny » Sun Jan 06, 2019 11:39 pm

Amazon Prime- promises with one hand.....but wants to take most of it back and charge you again with the other....I hardly touch the TV side of it tbh, use it mainly for the postage, taking every other month off or so.


BoT:

L'Amica Geniale/ My Brilliant Friend

We've been watching this all weekend, with one episode to go, and my word, what a fascinating series it has been so far. Italian with subtitles, which takes nothing away from it, and actually buries you deeper inside the tale of the lives of 2 girls and their community, as they pass through puberty into womanhood in post war Italy. The insight and depth of view into just what a girl goes through as she meets a hostile male-driven world, whilst dealing with personal and familial pressures, is incredible in both portrayal and casting. The subtlety and richness is so well realised, a true treasure of television.
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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Rusty » Mon Jan 07, 2019 8:04 am

Luther

Just started binge watching this. What started out as a finely tuned cat and mouse game has descended into a trope laiden lazy written pastiche. Just started season 3 and only watching it for the actualy pretty good acting. Idris to be 007!
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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Wrathbone » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:17 pm

Xena: Warrior Princess

Never watched it when it was on TV, so I thought why not give it a go now and pretend it's 1995. After all, trash fantasy is my thing.

And Christ almighty, it's terrible. :lol: Even for the time, the production values are rock bottom, but it's got heart to it and I love it. The intro sequence has a CGI Poseidon that looks like it could be one of the alternatives to Clippy in early versions of Office. In some (not many) ways, I miss how TV shows could get away with being rubbish because despite a budget of approximately zero they gave it a good try and hoped the audience would just go with it. Also, let's be frank, they knew Xena's impractical cleavage-enhancing leather gusset would carry them for at least a couple of seasons. It was the 90s, after all.

XWP strikes me as the kid in class who consistently gets C grades and doesn't care - simple, likeable and honest. Will never excel at anything.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Sly Boots » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:29 pm

Wrathbone wrote:
Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:17 pm
Xena: Warrior Princess

Never watched it when it was on TV, so I thought why not give it a go now and pretend it's 1995. After all, trash fantasy is my thing.

And Christ almighty, it's terrible. :lol: Even for the time, the production values are rock bottom, but it's got heart to it and I love it. The intro sequence has a CGI Poseidon that looks like it could be one of the alternatives to Clippy in early versions of Office. In some (not many) ways, I miss how TV shows could get away with being rubbish because despite a budget of approximately zero they gave it a good try and hoped the audience would just go with it. Also, let's be frank, they knew Xena's impractical cleavage-enhancing leather gusset would carry them for at least a couple of seasons. It was the 90s, after all.

XWP strikes me as the kid in class who consistently gets C grades and doesn't care - simple, likeable and honest. Will never excel at anything.
A wizard did it.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Wrathbone » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:41 pm

The greatest of all tropes.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Raid » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:42 pm

Similarly;

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

...is just as good as it ever was. It's all on Amazon Prime if anyone's interested. Yeah, the CG and some of the effects are pretty awful now (I don't remember them being great at the time), but it still feels relevant 20 years later, which is testament to how surprisingly forward thinking this vampire fantasy with a stupid name was. It's well written, which isn't surprising given that it was Joss Whedon's breakout hit, and it was remarkably light on punch pulling given its audience (particularly in season 6 which deals with toxic relationships and two separate instances of rape). It's not without it's dud moments - the commentary on nerd culture definitely *does* feel dated now (particularly given Whedon's own part in popularising it), but it gets so much more right with surprisingly realistic character development in amongst the somewhat sidelined apocalypse plots.

I have tried to watch Angel[/i] for the first time too, but it just isn't nearly as good. It doesn't help that it starts with putting Cordelia, the Buffy character that was originally written to be unlikeable, together with Angel (who is dull as ditchwater) and an expositional character who really isn't that interesting who is then killed and then replaced with another character written to be unlikeable from Buffy. I know it must pick up at some point (I've been on the internet long enough to know it was quite popular), and I'll probably go back to it after I finish Buffy's final season, but I get the feeling it'll feel like a bit of a slog.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Sly Boots » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:47 pm

Raid wrote:
Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:42 pm
Similarly;

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

...is just as good as it ever was. It's all on Amazon Prime if anyone's interested. Yeah, the CG and some of the effects are pretty awful now (I don't remember them being great at the time), but it still feels relevant 20 years later, which is testament to how surprisingly forward thinking this vampire fantasy with a stupid name was. It's well written, which isn't surprising given that it was Joss Whedon's breakout hit, and it was remarkably light on punch pulling given its audience (particularly in season 6 which deals with toxic relationships and two separate instances of rape). It's not without it's dud moments - the commentary on nerd culture definitely *does* feel dated now (particularly given Whedon's own part in popularising it), but it gets so much more right with surprisingly realistic character development in amongst the somewhat sidelined apocalypse plots.

I have tried to watch Angel for the first time too, but it just isn't nearly as good. It doesn't help that it starts with putting Cordelia, the Buffy character that was originally written to be unlikeable, together with Angel (who is dull as ditchwater) and an expositional character who really isn't that interesting who is then killed and then replaced with another character written to be unlikeable from Buffy. I know it must pick up at some point (I've been on the internet long enough to know it was quite popular), and I'll probably go back to it after I finish Buffy's final season, but I get the feeling it'll feel like a bit of a slog.
The first season of Angel is definitely a slog, particularly the first half until a major character leaves the series (due to their life off-screen being a train-wreck at the time). However I think it really comes into its own thereafter, to the point where I'd put it almost on a par with Buffy. I forget which season The Host is introduced and becomes a regular character, but he's never less than awesome. I really like how Wesley develops along the seasons as well. Fred is a much better female regular than Cordelia, and the season with Gina Torres as the villain has some genuinely hilarious moments. After the first season they start to have some fun with Angel's po-facedness as well, regularly sending it up, which works well.

Buffy also had some real low points that you notice more on a second or third viewing, namely Riley (godawful, dull boring love interest in circa season 4 or 5 I think), Dawn (awful character, nearly kills the whole show for me), the whole of season 7 (preachy, dull, almost nothing happens until the final episode, terrible waste of Nathan Fillion).

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Wrathbone » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:55 pm

I watched all of Buffy for the first time last year, and it's ridiculously good for a lot of it. As Sly says, there are low points but the high points more than made up for it for me. Angel I need to persevere with, as I drifted away after season 1.

Buffy, though... the impact of some of the episodes was up there with the best TV I've ever seen. In particular:
Spoiler
Season 2, where Evil Angel kills Giles' girlfriend. The horror as Giles arrives home and goes upstairs is palpable.

Season 5, where Buffy's mum dies. That whole episode broke me for a day or two. It's the closest I've ever come to experiencing near-real grief while watching a TV show.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Sly Boots » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:57 pm

Wrathbone wrote:
Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:55 pm
I watched all of Buffy for the first time last year, and it's ridiculously good for a lot of it. As Sly says, there are low points but the high points more than made up for it for me. Angel I need to persevere with, as I drifted away after season 1.

Buffy, though... the impact of some of the episodes was up there with the best TV I've ever seen. In particular:
Spoiler
Season 5, where Buffy's mum dies. That whole episode broke me for a day or two. It's the closest I've ever come to experiencing near-real grief while watching a TV show.
Spoiler
Be prepared to get over it when you see her corpse lying on the sofa in every episode recap for the next two series', eventually becoming hilarious :lol:
There were some truly standout episodes. I really liked the Hush one, where the town falls silent, moments of genuine horror and even laugh-out loud bits. I also really liked the musical episode, which could have been a train-wreck but was great. Xander's evil twin one was great, even more so when I found out it actually was his real-life twin playing the other role and not a camera trick.

The whole of season 6, I loved the three nerds being the villains, was a nice change up from the big bad norm, and Willow's transformation over the course of the season.

Man, I'm tempted to do a full rewatch of both now after this :-k

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Wrathbone » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:04 pm

Hush was fantastic, and the story behind it is great too. Apparently Joss Whedon read somewhere that Buffy was only successful because of the dialogue, and so he decided to disprove that by creating an episode with almost no dialogue. Suffice it to say, it worked!

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by DjchunKfunK » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:07 pm

Hatredsheart wrote:
Sun Jan 06, 2019 1:54 pm
Animalmother wrote:
Sun Jan 06, 2019 12:54 pm
So I'm thinking of getting Amazon Prime in the next few days. Does anyone use it and is it worth the price?

I want to watch Mr Robot, Man in High Castle, Black Sails and other stuff that I had been getting off "free" websites but that's just a pain in the bollocks. I know it's cheaper than Netflix and currently seems to have some more interesting shows on it. Anyone dipped a toe in?
I got Prime for this very reason. The main thing I dislike, and I wasn't aware of before, is the way prime has the first one or two seasons of a show free to lure you in - Fear the walking dead for example - but to watch the latest season (of some shows) you have to pay again, compared to Netflix where you just pay your subscription and get everything.
To be fair to Amazon I think this is a license thing rather than a way to try and get you to buy further seasons from them, there are plenty of shows that have the full run on there.

I generally agree that Prime is inferior to Netflix but it does occasional have the odd thing I like, for instance they just put the whole set of The Mentalist on the service. The way everything is jumbled together is a pain though. You used to be able to press a button to filter out everything that wasn't Prime but they appear to have removed that feature.

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Re: Good TV (aka, the TV series spamthread), the second series

Post by Raid » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:13 pm

I actually liked Dawn more on this viewing than I did back in the day. Sure, she's irritating, but then she was intended to be and her presence made one of the series biggest sucker punch moments in the series (The Body) all the more powerful, and Buffy needs her for her entire arc in season 6 to work. Riley was crap, yes, in fact he was so dull you have to wonder why they kept him around for season 5 after The Initiative arc was over with. Seemingly they'd written him boring to be the opposite of Angel... but then Angel was boring too when he wasn't playing the villain. I think they just worked out that Buffy didn't need a boyfriend for the show to work.

Buffy contains some of the best television episodes I think I've ever watched; The Body being one and Once More With Feeling being the other, for very different reasons. The former is seriously powerful set against the otherwise supernatural nature of the show, and the songs in the latter are so cleverly written that it makes the bizarre choice to have a single musical episode feel completely natural.

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