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

[6pairsofshoes]

We are watching White Lotus.  The conclusion is:
combination of Murder she wrote and Fantasy Island. 
The title sequences have award winning artwork and the show is worth watching if only for those graphics.  We are on season 3.  Right now, other than Walton Goggins and his girlfriend, the rest of them could easily just fall in a hole somewhere and not be missed.
Jennifer Coolidge does a great job of playing a self absorbed annoying rich woman who stumbles through life nearly clueless in the first 2 seasons.  Tom Hollander is wonderful and demonstrates such range as an actor, that it's a real pleasure to see him act no matter what he's in (Season 2).

There's some good talent on here but the group of 3 girlfriends in the 3rd season is so shallow and artificial as to beggar belief.  They surely could come up with some better dialogue than this.  Anyway, in for an inch, in for a pound or whatever that saying is, we'll slog through the 3rd season.

EDIT:  well that was amusing to a moderate degree with a disappointing ending.  This show likes to provide disappointing ending.  I guess it makes it "edgy" or something.  I can't say I hated it but I have certainly seen better.  They sure threw money at it.  The sets were fabulous and they hired good actors.  Just the writing that was predictable or disappointing in some way.

If anyone has suggestions for some thing else worth watching, I'm all ears!

[goldshirt*9]

Watched the second series of The last of Us. I assume that finishes it off ?

[8ullfrog]

I have been watching murderbot. It is an incredibly fun show but the episodes are infuriatingly short.

Like if the episodes were an hour, it would be an amazing show. 20 minute episodes are almost a youtube video at this point.

I also want to know what the deal with the wormhole is. Everyone has to travel through the wormhole, and even the in universe media mentions the wormhole.

[6pairsofshoes]

I have been watching murderbot. It is an incredibly fun show but the episodes are infuriatingly short.

Like if the episodes were an hour, it would be an amazing show. 20 minute episodes are almost a youtube video at this point.

I also want to know what the deal with the wormhole is. Everyone has to travel through the wormhole, and even the in universe media mentions the wormhole.

I read one of the books in the murderbot series, Network Effect.  It was entertaining.  I did not feel compelled to read more in the series but I can see how it would make for interesting tv.  The wormhole seems to be the main transport but it's been so long since I read the book, I can barely remember it.  Maybe it's explained in the first of the books?  I think I was looking for Hugo award winners as I searched for some new SciFi novel to read and stumbled across that one.  I think it's been made into a movie.  I'll see if I can scare it up.

It's nice to see you back, goldie.  I hadn't heard of that show so I'll see if I can find it as it sounds promising.

[8ullfrog]

poo, my regular streaming site appears to have been killed by cloudflare. This absolutely sucks, finding a new streaming site that doesn't try to malwarefuck my browser is difficult.

I should have diversified my bonds. Wu Tang Financial warned me!

I got lucky, only my old mirror is dead. The new mirror worked great! And the new episode of murderbot was both highly amusing and infuriatingly short.

[6pairsofshoes]

On amazonprime video:
Ivan the Terrible.
Great costumes and sets.  In Russian with subtitles.  I think he needed to be more terrible to have earned this name.  I just finished episode 3.  I don't think this production gives much of an insight into his lasting impact on the Rus, the people who developed the modern state of Russia.  He does seem to prefigure the ambitions of Putin in terms of territorial expansion.  There's several boyars and members of the Orthodox Church who continually plot against him so there are internecine power struggles in the empire.

[8ullfrog]

The fakeout in the latest episode of murderbot was fantastic. Sec Unit bellowng "BOLDNESS IS ALL" and diving two feet down was hilarious.

Especially with what followed. My heart is broken.

[6pairsofshoes]

Two comedies that appear to have been produced by BBC 4:
The Book Group.  Kind of annoying but I watched 2 seasons.  Reminiscent of that tomato/tobacco hybrid, Tomaccy, that Homer Simpson produced.  It tastes awful but it's addictive.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, another 2 seasons of a show that I really couldn't warm to, but after a while you continue watching out of curiosity.  I suspect there's a 3rd season.

Neither of these was particularly compelling or funny.  I must be running out of stuff to watch.  I still have a couple episodes of Ivan the Terrible to get through so I'll get back to that, I guess.

[6pairsofshoes]

I would pop in to see what was up with WoT occasionally, but I got to the point where I had no idea what was going on and basically couldn't find a single character I cared about.  Well, maybe that odd guy played by Alvaro Morte, but I have a soft spot for him since seeing him in Casa de Papel.  I'm still annoyed that they pulled the plug on The Expanse before getting very near the end of the book series.

If you are referring to the Foundation trilogy by Asimov, I'd also be interested in seeing that dramatized but didn't think it was.  Ah, AppleTv.  Well, that sounds promising.

Last night I streamed a couple of knuckleheaded episodes of a German lawyer drama, Berlin Legal.  It was entertaining but forgettable.  on the public library streaming service, hoopla.

[goldshirt*9]

Watched Zero Day due to heavy rain all day. A tad mmm at times
The Agency has been killing a few lunch breaks at work.

[6pairsofshoes]

I think that the "Foundation trilogy by Asimov" has a lot more than three books in it nowadays, but I don't know how many of them are targeted for adaptation by Apple.

I had to laugh.  Clearly I'm not on top of this stuff.  I checked Wikipedia and found a slew of newer books.  Wow.  They started releasing them in the early 1980's  So there's 4 more of them.  Maybe I'll get to them, eventually.  Right now I'm slogging through The Man Without Qualities, which seems strangely appropriate to the times we are living in, but I digress. 

The German lawyer show is decent and I guess you can see it on AppleTV. 

[christ]

I had to laugh.  Clearly I'm not on top of this stuff.  I checked Wikipedia and found a slew of newer books.  Wow.  They started releasing them in the early 1980's  So there's 4 more of them.  Maybe I'll get to them, eventually.

It's worse than that: in the additional Foundation prequels/ sequels he entwined the Foundation universe with his Robot books (I believe the trendy term is "continuity"), so on a technicality there are now loads of Foundation books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_universe

[6pairsofshoes]

I finished Ivan the Terrible.  He was a very devout man with eczema.  Besides that he was a person who probably would have been better off doing something else, but he expanded the empire and established a printing house in Moscow, built St. Basil's, and revised the laws.   He also set up some undesirable groups who would rape and pillage the countryside, but I digress.  There were 8 episodes and they basically decided to pull the plug and have a voiceover summarizing the life of the Tsar and offering some basic assessments.  Like "ok, we've hit our budget limits, so even though we might like to include another couple episodes, this is what you should take away from this grim series...."

And the German Berlin Legal is building to a climax in a typical formulaic way.  I might go find Foundation or something.  TV isn't really cutting it for me right now.

[smokester]

Ok. I'm really, honestly, truly enjoying Apple TV's "See" with Jason Momoa. I can't think of a show quite like it that I have seen before.

[6pairsofshoes]

I read a novel recently called Blindness about a dystopian situation when a virus infects an entire country except for one woman who hides her ability to see in order to get along with everyone else.  By the Portuguese author, José Saramago.  He won the Nobel Prize for literature.  But there's no hot superheroes in it, just some thugs who extort from others when everyone's blindness renders them vulnerable.

Right now, I've stumbled onto Utopia, the BBC series.  It's kind of grim and has plenty of unnecessary violence in it, so that's irritating in that it detracts from an otherwise interesting plot.  On amazon prime with ads, so those give me the occasional break from the dread.  I thought someone else had mentioned it on here but couldn't find the references.