Topic: What's your favourite TV program of the moment?

[6pairsofshoes]

Just watched a lame production of The Moonstone, a reasonably good Wilkie Collins novel.  BBC production.  The show was kind of like everyone's an idiot and you'd rather read the book.  The costumes were good, though.  Some typical Victorian era fabrics used.  So that was a plus.  My husband, who wanted to watch it, over my preferences, slept through it.  Sleep would have been a better use of time, really.

[Beatrix]

I liked watching Reign for the Victorian wear and the characters you hated so much you loved hating them. Loads of fun for me, like a soap I enjoyed, dare I say.

[6pairsofshoes]

Just finished Absentia on amazon prime.  Oddball FBI agent kicks ass and deals with sinister/corrupt multinational bad guys while protecting her child and ex husband from said nutjobs.  Of course the family can hold its own. It dragged at times, but at least you got to see our protagonist knocking out guys 3x her size.  You are left wondering, who taught her to punch like that, and given her delicate hands and bone structure, why she can do that w/o breaking any bones.

[smokester]

Started watching Mare of East Town. One episode in it looks like a remake of Emergence but with her from Titanic as the cop. I'm willing to bet that it will be "grittier" and less sci-fi, but I'll stick with it for another episode or two - mostly because I quite liked Emergence.

I've seen the advertising previews of that show and I'm not convinced by her American accent. It sounds too deliberate. I think it would just get on my nerves after a while.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'm mostly immune to faux accents. Comes from years of living in the US, where all accents sound false to my tin ear. (It is difficult for a Brit to believe that a Texan isn't deliberately making up that drawl on the fly.) (... and what is it with Bostonians?) (In Alabama most vowels are comprised of three syllables)

Bostonians like to drop consonants and extend vowels or sometimes clip them short.

Park becomes Paaak
Large becomes Lodge
Buttered becomes budded
Popcorn = pupcon

So you can order a lodge budded pupcon at the movies but you'll have to go to a bubblah to get a drink of water. 
I had a friend visit me there once and we stopped in Quincy (just south of Boston) to ask directions of a traffic cop.  After we thanked him and drove off, my friend asked me, "was that man speaking English?"  I laughed.  There's also not a single Boston accent, but a working class one (typified by the above) and a more refined patrician one that has only mild touches of the above.

Clam chowdah at Legal Sea Food is delicious and they have a small restaurant at Logan airport so you can pop in for one next time you are transiting through. 

[6pairsofshoes]

I've seen the advertising previews of that show and I'm not convinced by her American accent. It sounds too deliberate. I think it would just get on my nerves after a while.

Emergence.  I'm always interested in new sci fi recommendations so I went and looked that up.  Ha!  I have a brain like a sieve.  I did watch that show and enjoyed it.  Would you recommend Mare of East Town?

I just got Season 3 of Mayans MC, the spinoff from Sons of Anarchy.  It's equally good, although it's hardly a feelgood kind of series, given the downward spiral of most of the characters.  Moral: being in a criminal motorcycle gang more often than not leads to unhappy ends.  Pro tip:  try to avoid doing business with drug cartels and international weapons smugglers as means to earn income.

[6pairsofshoes]

Working through season 3 of Mayans MC.  It's been consistently good.  I wonder why we are drawn to these dramas of people engaged in sociopathic endeavors:  The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Mayans MC.  They're all good dramas and popular.  The criminals are sympathetic and we want them to succeed, knowing that, ultimately, they can't and won't.  The main characters of these two motorcycle gang dramas both had the potential to avoid the downwards spiral of the criminal enterprise, but chose it anyway.  At least Walter White had cancer and a shitty salary so you could understand desperation driving him into it.  Why we identify with them and hope they will make a go of things is a mystery to me.  It probably says something about us, but I can't really venture what that might be.

[goldshirt*9]

Watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier all 6.
Good effects, Twas OK

[Beatrix]

A little something about desperation maybe, a little less to be said of our willpower?  Innately, we all wanna break bad. 
I hadn't watched mayans mc yet, definitely enjoyed songs of anarchy, special place for opi in my heart.  Great characters. 
I've been rewatching Dracula on nbc.  Watching Vikings again reminded me, with the character bishop headgmand, that I enjoy watching him as Dracula.  I also watched another Dracula series, twice in a year now.  It's on Netflix, a three part, andabsolutely gory psychological fun.

[6pairsofshoes]

Watching Banking District and while it's slow for plot development, it's well acted and nice to watch.  This is more than I can say for Line of Duty.  That's hard to deal with.  Everyone is basically a jerk.  There's plenty of violence and corruption.  It's a cocktail of moral ambiguity.  The writing is heavy handed as is the direction, despite a talented cast.  I just find it annoying.  There's some criminals you just want to madam slap every second they're alive.  I guess that means their acting is effective, but as for the violence, I refer the writers to Horace's Ars Poetica (15 BCE). 

Events are either acted on stage, or reported.
The mind is stirred less vividly by what’s heard
Than by what the eyes reliably report, all that
The spectator sees for himself. But don’t reveal
On stage what should be hidden, keep things from sight
That eloquence can soon relate to us directly:
Folk shouldn’t see Medea slaughter her children,
Impious Atreus mustn’t openly cook human flesh,
Nor Procne turn into a bird, or Cadmus a snake.
Any such scenes you show me, I disbelieve, and hate.

This, Line of Duty, is filled with Medea slaughtering her sons on stage.  It just fills me with resentment.  The effect of cinema verité misses by a mile.  And they can keep the stupid haircuts.  Everyone looks like "bullethead."  The aesthetics leave a great deal to be desired.  And there's 6 seasons of this dreck.  At current writing, Gina McKee's character is bifurcated and shoved into the freezer of a developmentally disabled man on a council housing estate.  Need I say more?

[6pairsofshoes]

Mayans MC.  Even newly promoted recruits would rather blow their own brains out than hang with this outfit.  Mexican drug kingpin thinks he should kill his wife under the mistaken impression that she killed his mother.  Then he thinks better of it and saves her after making an earnest attempt to kill her.  Ezie, main protagonist, seems to have decided to forego the murder and mayhem of being a motorcycle thug in favor of true love.  Will it hold?  Stay tuned.  No Latin American telenovela has anything on this series in the melodrama dept.  They appear to have cornered the market on it for this season.  I expect more treachery and murder in the final episodes. 

There's something epic and almost Classically tragedian about this series.  Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.  It beats the pants off most of the offerings on amazon prime, which appears to have begun a descent into the world of predictable dreck.

Tonight's example:  Ascension.  Great googly moogly.  Has there ever been a less talented cast struggling with worse lines and poor plot development?  It really beggars belief.  People put on a rocketship to another galaxy, a 100 year mission, with people born on the giganto rocket launched in late 50's/early 60's still on its way to as yet unspecified place.  How they have enough fuel, food, etc. to keep things going for 100 years is not really explained.  But who cares?  It's pure soap opera blather.  I've seen more subtle plot development on The Love Boat.

[6pairsofshoes]

Meanwhile, over at Fox News, the acid is kicking in...

[6pairsofshoes]

Black Sun.  aka Balkan Shadows.

Imagine Comrade Detective is actually serious as a period crime drama.  That's Black Sun.  The series is good so far.  Music is like people who escaped from richard Dale's band or something.

Then I found some trash tonight:  NY-LON.  are you too tired to sleep and too tired to watch tv?  Then this is the show for you.  Young romantic characters trying to hook up.  There's nothing new or original in this show.  Perhaps, it's the number of cigarettes consumed.  They may be attempting a record or something.  Everyone smokes like a chimney.

[Beatrix]

Watching Banking District ao Horace's Ars Poetica (15 BCE). 

This, Line of Duty, is filled with Medea slaughtering her sons on stage.  It just fills me with resentment. 


I've not seen this Line of Duty, but I absolutely agree to the extent of pushing the envelope beyond my respect.
There are other instances I've considered this topic and came to similar sympathies, I've none.

[6pairsofshoes]

"Dom" on amazon prime.  Brazilian production, based on true story of a cop who specializes in drug busts, dealing with an outlaw cocaine addict son and his merry crew of impossibly good looking friends who break into rich Brazilian homes in Rio de Janeiro and make off with jewelry and cash.  You just know this is not going to end well, but everyone is very pretty and the music is good.

Also, "Mad Dogs" a Sky TV production.  4 friends go to Majorca at the invitation of an old mutual friend who's done well in business.  They reunite at his fabulous private villa, but soon get dragged into a crazy plot involving murder, drugs, guns, etc.  Stellar cast with Philip Glenister, John Simm, Marc Warren, Ben Chaplin, etc.  I like to call this show, "Boys get into trouble."  That about sums it up.