What was the last TV show you watched?

[Doctor Strange]

Sorry, I can't agree with you guys. I thought that episode was awful. Especially because it was so sure it was a serious inquiry into a thorny issue, when it was completely superficial and confused.

This is 2017, and when you write an episode like this that uses "sex" and "gender" - terms which really don't mean the same thing anymore - interchangeably, it shows you're lost. Not to mention that a ship loaded with alien crewmembers in a future era in which cultural differences are not only tolerated, but celebrated... yet in which everyone in the allegedly enlightened bridge crew is still MASSIVELY freaked out over how a particular planet behaves in their own family/society, just doesn't ring true.

It was bad enough back in TNG when they didn't have the COURAGE to let the member of the sexually neutral J'naii who loved Riker become/remain female, but had to have her "cured"... or not allow Beverley to still love the Trill symbiant when it was transplanted into a female host. But okay, that was thirty years ago, when TV and our society were in a very different place.

To have this Orville episode end with the reassignment surgery carried out despite all the arguments about tolerance and the value of difference, is just regressive, craven cowardice. It further proves that this is just MacFarlane (who has yet to prove to me that he can write drama) riffing on every aspect of Trek - which includes SF-as-allegory-for-problems-we-can't-discuss-easily - convinced that he's making a serious drama when honestly, it's just a Trek ripoff with dick jokes (that mostly don't land).

I've got a gay son and a daughter who identifies as bisexual. She's got friends who consider themselves "gender fluid". It's not 1988 anymore, and a treatment of gender this simplistic and regressive is an embarrassment. I'm not the only one who feels this way.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/th...rs-recap-transgender-circumcision-1201879087/

(And yes, in the comments below that review, there are many who argue that it was a great episode with a nuanced treatment of a difficult subject. Obviously, all these points of view are cool, we all have our opinions. But for me, this episode was just an unsatisfying mess.)

 

[Benzadmiral]

. . .

It was bad enough back in TNG when they didn't have the COURAGE to let the member of the sexually neutral J'naii who loved Riker become/remain female, but had to have her "cured"... or not allow Beverley to still love the Trill symbiant when it was transplanted into a female host. But okay, that was thirty years ago, when TV and our society were in a very different place.

I haven't seen any of The Orville yet, so I have no opinion, though it may be colored by my exposure to other Seth MacFarlane projects. But I disagree slightly with your characterization of the TNG episode "The Outcast," with the neuter people. I thought the episode was extraordinarily brave for those days, in not having a "happy" ending, in not showing us Soren becoming satisfyingly (to the modern viewers) "female." That would have been the safe way to go, and the way the Original Series would have done it, if they even could have. Instead we wound up with a sad story at the last: a reminder that not everything in the Trek universe would work out well for everybody in 50 minutes.

As for the other, I don't recall it as well. But it was pretty honest, again for those times, to admit that Beverly would have limits to what she found attractive in a mate, just as we the viewers do; that there were limits even to ST's optimistic view of the human future.

 

[MisterCairo]

Sooooo many reasons I did not/do not watch these shows...

 

[MisterCairo]

Another episode of Dalziel and Pascoe, season four. Sad that Warren Clarke is no longer with us...

 

[Doctor Strange]

Paul, I don't mean to denigrate either of those TNG episodes. They were plenty gutsy for their time, and had reasonable resolutions for the era in which they were written and aired.

But you must know that the endless WHY ARE THERE NO GAY PEOPLE ON STAR TREK? discussions that have gone on in the years since continually focus on those episodes as being cop outs. So I am guilty of having a sense of their "failure" drummed into me after all my years on the Trek mailing lists, bulletin boards, and forums. I repeat, I don't think they "failed" when they were first made.

But The Orville episode "About A Girl" was just made, and it's way, way behind current thinking.

BTW, did anyone watch the pilot for the new Star Trek series? I DVR'd it, but have been too overwhelmed with the Vietnam doc and returning shows to have had time for it yet. Not that I plan to subscribe to the dedicated CBS service that's showing the rest of the season whether it's good or not. I'm just curious if I'll find it more palatable than the Abramsverse Trek films.

 

[Touchofevil]

Fear the Walking Dead and The Andy Griffith Show

 

[belfastboy]

Just started to watch the Brit series on Netflix..."The Detectorists"....a wonderful, low key comedy with two of Britain's best in the leads.

 

[Zombie_61]

...BTW, did anyone watch the pilot for the new Star Trek series? I DVR'd it, but have been too overwhelmed with the Vietnam doc and returning shows to have had time for it yet. Not that I plan to subscribe to the dedicated CBS service that's showing the rest of the season whether it's good or not. I'm just curious if I'll find it more palatable than the Abramsverse Trek films.

I did, and I'd like to hear your opinions after you've found the time to watch it. It didn't "feel" like Star Trek to me, but I thought it was just interesting enough that I'd watch more of it if CBS aired it on their network channel; not enough to make me pay for CBS All Abscess.

 

[MisterCairo]

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

 

[belfastboy]

Started season 4 of "Line of Duty", a Brit Netflix offering. This season the plot is a bit convoluted and there were a few jump the shark moments but it is only 6 episodes so will see it through to the end.

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

Poldark. season opener (3?). Possibly...probably...the best episode of the series so far. Still, the acting is poor, and it gave a solid feel for how small the budget must be for this program. Looking forward to next week.

 

[MisterCairo]

Started season 4 of "Line of Duty", a Brit Netflix offering. This season the plot is a bit convoluted and there were a few jump the shark moments but it is only 6 episodes so will see it through to the end.

I will need to check this out, as I have watched the first three. As you say, only six episodes, how bad could it be to watch them through?

 

[belfastboy]

I will need to check this out, as I have watched the first three. As you say, only six episodes, how bad could it be to watch them through?

I agree, I love Brit TV even though I miss a bunch of the dialogue.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Poldark. season opener (3?). Possibly...probably...the best episode of the series so far. Still, the acting is poor, and it gave a solid feel for how small the budget must be for this program. Looking forward to next week.

Wasn't there an earlier version, a miniseries adaptation of the Poldark novels, on PBS in the Eighties or Nineties?

 

[MisterCairo]

Wasn't there an earlier version, a miniseries adaptation of the Poldark novels, on PBS in the Eighties or Nineties?

Indeed there was, 1975:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075560/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2

 

[MisterCairo]

Of course, the first thing I saw Robin Ellis in was the first episode of Fawlty Towers, as the under cover cop:

 

[Benzadmiral]

Indeed there was, 1975:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075560/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2

Ah. I know I read the first two Poldark novels sometime in the early Nineties, and probably had heard of them through this series. Probably PBS was re-running the series, as they often have with I, Claudius, some years after the initial airing.

 

[Fading Fast]

The documentary "A Football Life: Vince Lombardi." 2013

• Solid documentary that neatly weaves his personal life - how it made him the football coach he was - and his professional life - the way he coached and why it worked

• A surprising amount of - what look likes - home movies - more than you usually see in documentaries on the '50s / '60s

• And from a Fedora Lounge point of view, the man, for the most part, wore traditional American clothes - button down shirts, natural shoulder suits and, yes, that iconic polo coat

• You don't have to be a football fan to enjoy this documentary

 

[HanauMan]

They're doing a rerun of the 1965 TV SciFi show Lost In Space and I just watched the first episode where the Robinson family, their pilot, Major West, a robot and the bad guy, Dr. Smith, have left Earth (on 16th October, 1997!) to journey to a planet in the Alpha Centuri system. The plan is to eventually colonise the planet due to overpopulation on Earth. The bad guy, played by Johnathan Harris, sabotages the spaceship, the ship is hit by a meteor storm and the adventure really begins! Complete with bad acting (and some impressive overacting by Jonathan Harris) but some rather decent special effects.

The show makes a pleasant respite from modern SciFi shows and had I been a ten year old in 1965 I would have probably loved it.

I didn't see the original run of the show as I was born the same year it aired but I did catch some of the later color reruns back in the 1990s. However, when I was a teen I did read the Gold Key Lost In Space comics, so I was well aware of the characters (in fact, the comics first came out in the early 60s, before the TV show, and lasted well into the 70s).

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

American Horror Story: Cult. Honestly, I thought this would be upper-level stupid. I thought it would be beyond trite and preachy. I didn't care for a lot of the new cast. I was wrong. Most of it is interesting in its makeup. The character twists have been solid. It's been genuinely creepy and made-well for October. Really, with its shortcomings noted, it's rather genius. Absolutely better than the past couple seasons, and I liked the past couple of seasons. I've been surprised. I might go as far as to recommend it.