What was the last TV show you watched?

Seb Lucas said:

From this it sounds like you prefer shows about ordinary people and situations. Those other shows are somewhat baroque...

Click to expand...

I hadn't really put much thought into it, but you could be right. As I've grown older I find it's more difficult to determine in advance which shows will resonate with me and which ones won't. I mean, as my username implies I like a good zombie movie or story, but The Walking Dead was just monotonous and uninteresting to me. And more and more as the years pass it seems the people who produce television shows are convinced they must include some form of supernatural element--zombies, witches, vampires, superheroes, adolescent zombies/witches/vampires/superheroes, and so on--and that the ONLY people watching television are in the 10- to 25-year-old range with an I.Q. smaller than their shoe size. I want to like these shows, but I've seen all of those stories before and the writers are doing nothing more than piling manure on top of manure with regards to the stories they're attempting to tell; nothing new under the sun or moon. So, yeah, I guess what I need is a television series with a middle-aged main character who has no hobbies or interests outside of his 25-year career as a professional aglet installer.

Some recent TV viewing:


Dead to Me
In season two, this well-acted mystery drama hasn't lost a step with lead Christina Applegate doing such an outstanding job that you wonder why she doesn't have a bigger career. And with episodes that are only thirty minutes long (an unfortunate rarity today), the crazy of murder, mayhem and mystery that is woven into regular family life here feels much like an updated version of those '50s Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV shows. Is it believable - no, but the characters are fun, the stories engrossing and the acting is fantastic.



In The Dark
Season two (so far, three episodes in) is just as good as season one, but the plot is very bumpy as it appears the writers hadn't planned on a second season, so they've had to untie some loose ends they had tied up at the end of season one. The acting, like so many shows today, is outstanding, with Perry Mattfeld killing it as the beautiful young blind woman with a brilliant detective-like mind and self-destructive lifestyle. As with many modern shows, you can pick the unbelievable plot apart, or just go with it as the dialogue is smart, the storylines engaging and the acting excellent.



Perry Mason
A solid '30s period drama that is beautifully filmed (with awesome 1930s' details), very well acted (with a parade of stars from other successful series), a story that's becoming more engrossing (two episodes in) and characters that are developing nuances and real personalities. Here, Mason is a private eye, not lawyer (yet), damaged from WWI and the Depression, but with a preternatural eye (aided by his always present camera) for details that other investigators miss. I was suspicious of this one at first, but it's winning me over. N.B. The Los Angeles funicular, Angels Flight (outstanding name), is fantastic to see and plays a major role in the plot.



Velvet
This Spanish production, set in a high-end department store in the 1950s, is a fun soap opera kinda, sorta masquerading as a drama. The store is owned by a wealthy multi-generational family: a family that has many skeletons in its closet, many relatives fighting for control of the store and plenty of expensive homes, cars, clothes and lovers (eventually, everyone will have had sex with everyone else). You get it, it's Dallas or Dynasty set in '50s Spain. And since most of the rank-and-file employees live in the store (that was a thing), there's an "upstairs downstairs" dynamic at work with plenty of hanky panky within and between the groups. N.B. The department store where this is filmed is high-Art Deco gorgeous.



Godless (an @MisterCairo recommendation - thank you sir)
This 2017 TV miniseries (half way through) is a bit slow-moving-but-engaging offering in the 19th Century American West genre. The aging leader of a gang of outlaws takes his gang on the hunt for a former member who, he believes, betrayed him, which leads him right into a town of almost all women owing to a mine explosion that killed most of the men. Like so many shows today, it's beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted with an impressive list of well-known veterans - Sam Waterston, Michelle Dockery and Jeff Daniels deserve special mention - and up-and-coming young actors. The story and characters are well drawn and complex, with only the now-and-again virtue signaling of anachronistic modern political correctness and identity politics detracting from the narrative.

Season two of The Alienist. Finally got around to finishing season one. Visually very entertaining, but as said previously, the acting can and does at times drag the story down. Still, it is worth a viewing.

Finally activated my Prime TV as I have run out of Netflix offerings. Now I get to watch.."Man in the High Castle". 2 episodes in and it looks a keeper.

I like the 1st season of Man in the High Castle, currently watching Perry Mason while the setting and clothes is obviously HBO level... but to me there are too many agendas forced in.. racial injustice, lgbt, etc.

navetsea said:

I like the 1st season of Man in the High Castle, currently watching Perry Mason while the setting and clothes is obviously HBO level... but to me there are too many agendas forced in.. racial injustice, lgbt, etc.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, almost every period show today forces modern identity politics and political correctness into its storylines. It's not as if these weren't issues in those periods, often, openly discussed back then, but today's writers rarely present them in a period-accurate framework.

Instead, they jam in a modern view, which is really just virtue signaling - "if I lived back then, I'd have had a perfectly-aligned-to-2020 progressive view of these issues -" to make the writers/production team feel good about themselves, but it is, complete BS.

Heck, I tend to agree with many, not all, of the modern views and am still offended by the obvious modern political pandering as it's disrespectful to the period's true politics, which, as noted, were often times debating these same issues, but (and this is what the modern writers hate) not in ways that fit neatly with today's very unforgiving progressive views.

If you read the newspapers and novels from the '30s, you can learn how racial issues, gay and lesbian issues and other political/social issues were debated/addressed/hidden (or not)/etc. Sometimes they were surprisingly openly discussed; sometimes, horribly swept under the rug. And, just like our debates today, none of it was consistent or neat or perfect or resolved.

But to accurately present all that would, one, take hard work and, two, the results would be arguments and stances from that period that don't make modern writers happy as many of the progressive views of the past periods are unacceptable to today's progressives, so presto!, they just write the stories with a full-on modern take.

In the end, you either accept this as it is in almost every single period show or not. If it doesn't overwhelm and there are other good things, I'll usually stay with the show, but some are so egregious and obnoxious about it, I just bang out. So far, "Perry Mason" hasn't gone too far for me, but I'm only two episodes in.

I have the similar feeling shared between Perry Mason with Penny Dreadful City of Angel.
racial injustice (check)
lgbt (check)
fake priestess charismatic religious leader (check)
what next police brutality ?
nazi mastermind?

navetsea said:

I have the similar feeling shared between Perry Mason with Penny Dreadful City of Angel.
racial injustice (check)
lgbt (check)
fake priestess charismatic religious leader (check)
what next police brutality ?
nazi mastermind?

Click to expand...

It's sadly predictable. Heck, "Godless," set in the 1880s American West, checks off most of the same list. You could add "Mansplaining" and "MeToo" to your list as those are now quite commonly placed in period shows in the past few years wrapped, of course, inside a modern political meme. Just to be clear, broadly, I agree with many, not all, of the modern views, but find it ridiculous that they are jammed into these period shows in ways that nearly perfectly align to modern political takes. It's obnoxious virtue signaling.

Fading Fast said:

It's sadly predictable. Heck, "Godless," set in the 1880s American West, checks off most of the same list. You could add "Mansplaining" and "MeToo" to your list as those are now quite commonly placed in period shows in the past few years wrapped, of course, inside a modern political meme. Just to be clear, broadly, I agree with many, not all, of the modern views, but find it ridiculous that they are jammed into these period shows in ways that nearly perfectly align to modern political takes. It's obnoxious virtue signaling.

Click to expand...

Well said. I support many of the contemporary views too but I want them left out of my entertainment, especially if it is a period thing. And don't even talk about the last Doctor Who which became probably the most amateurishly written, most appalling example of didactic virtue signaling pap in British TV history. I will never watch it again.

An episode of Doc Martin on PBS. It was absent from PBS for a while, but has been back the past few weeks. Light and entertaining, I missed it. Too often, we find ourselves identifying with Doc.
Another episode of season two of The Alienist. A somewhat slow episode, it is still better than most of what’s out there.

The Alienist. TNT. Well, that completely fell apart. Those two final episodes were pretty much crap from the first moment of episode 7. Such a disappointment.

I didn't watch the last two eps of The Alienist yet... and I'm keeping my expectations VERY low. But I did binge the first half of the new HBO Perry Mason series on demand.

Okay, so it's not your father's Perry Mason, this is an origin story set in the 1932 when he's working as a scuzzy private eye for a senior lawyer (John Lithgow) and dealing with leftover trauma from his WWI experiences and failed marriage. Matthew Rhys is, as usual, very watchable, and the rest of the cast is game, but... it just leaves me cold. Oh, and re the too-contemporary-for-then comments in recent posts, we now get a black Paul Drake and a lesbian Della Street. Of course. Some of the expressions and attitudes in the dialog are way too contemporary also.

And while it's a typically classy HBO production... some of the costumes seem off to me for the early 30s. In particular, the men's hats. Very few of them exhibit the tall crowns, wide ribbons, and center-dent bashes that were then very common. The majority are more like 40s hats, lower-crowned and narrow-ribboned with teardrop bashes. One of the senior police character's hats looks exactly like something that Don Draper would wear in 1961. And Perry Mason's hat is essentially just a stock Akubra Stylemaster minus the brim binding.

I'll watch the rest, but I'm not convinced that this "reimagining" was necessary.

I recently (finally) watched the Netflix Original mini-series Rebellion and its follow-up, which I think originally had another name when shownj on television, but is now simply sold as "Rebellion Season 2". These tell the storyfrom several different perspectives of the Easter Rising of 1916 , and then in the second series the Anglo-Irish WAr of 1919-21, finishing with the split reaction in the Dail to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the beginings of the dispute that led to the Irish Civil War 1922-23. The Civil WAr is not covere - this may, perhaps, come to pass in a third series if they choose to make one. A mixed bag, but quite enjoyable. Some of the critics at the time picked holes in the accuracy (e.g. RIC Constable O'Brien, the first death of the 16 Rising, was shot very quickly, there was no exchange of demands or conversation between him and his killer), though there was nothing howlingly wrong, more just a touch of speculation. It's biggest sin in the eyes of the critics was its lack of educational value, in that unless you go in knowing the wider history of the Rising and the later conflict, you wouldn't get the context or the full background from this alone. It does assume a fair level of knowledge otherwise - not unlike the Dunkirk film of recent years.

The most perfect drama both as a piece of entertainment and as a historical education on this period remains The Treaty (1991) - head and shoulders above the Hollywood take on Michael Collins (though itself more historically accurate than might have been expected - the use of an armoured car at the Croke Park massacre, and a car bomb of the sort the IRA never used pre-1970 being its primary flaws). Rebellion doesn't match that, but it's an interesting enough watch for anyone already reasonably familiar with that period of Irish history.

I've also finally begun to watch Band of Brothers after avoiding it for many years. Not really consciously so, but I think it rather suffered in my mind from being associated with its near contemporary Saving Private Ryan. Two episodes in, I'm enjoying the very human portrayal of the men, which I find to neither down play the importance of what they did, nor tied up in the usual glamourised hero-mythology which has distorted the truth of much of WW2.

I've also been watching a lot of Salvage HUnters, which follows a UK antiques & interiors dealer around as he buys stock from salvage years and other dealers for his store. Fascinating what he turns up, and hisgenuine enthusiasm for what he oes and what he buys is a joy to watch. At the opposite extreme, Storage Wars UK is even moe of a freakshow than the US original, and worryingly fascinating for it. I do get a real kick out of watching some arrogant, nasty piece of work coming a croppe, whether it's in bidding out of greed where they've called it wrong, or thinkning they've forced the price up and stuck someboy with a bad lot - which then turns out to have some real hidden gems (sometimes literally!) that are worth a fortune.

Fading Fast said:

Unfortunately, almost every period show today forces modern identity politics and political correctness into its storylines. It's not as if these weren't issues in those periods, often, openly discussed back then, but today's writers rarely present them in a period-accurate framework.

Instead, they jam in a modern view, which is really just virtue signaling - "if I lived back then, I'd have had a perfectly-aligned-to-2020 progressive view of these issues -" to make the writers/production team feel good about themselves, but it is, complete BS.

Click to expand...

I enjoy seeing these themes dealt with if they are well-writtenm, though yes it is often clumsily done. Which is not to rule out the possibility of folks having "modern views" back then - change has to start somewhere, and there often were folks who thought "different". Slavery would never have been ended, for one thing, if noone ha ever had "modern views". There are ways of writing it, though. One of the neatest I've ever seen was in an episode of Timeless, where the scientific genuis had to be snuck in to some science facility or other as a janitor because it was still that era. I much preferre that they din't shy away from the theme, but the point was acknowledged in a way that was appropriate. I tend to get more annoyed when history is airbrushed, e.g. the Netflix "Grease Live" of a couyple of years ago which was vbeautifully done except for the fact that they had a number of persons of colour in roles in wihh they simply woul never have appeared in 1959 before desegregation. It's one thing to show it being challenged, but pretending it never happened just strikes me as wrong.

Doctor Strange said:

I didn't watch the last two eps of The Alienist yet... and I'm keeping my expectations VERY low. But I did binge the first half of the new HBO Perry Mason series on demand.

Okay, so it's not your father's Perry Mason, this is an origin story set in the 1932 when he's working as a scuzzy private eye for a senior lawyer (John Lithgow) and dealing with leftover trauma from his WWI experiences and failed marriage. Matthew Rhys is, as usual, very watchable, and the rest of the cast is game, but... it just leaves me cold. Oh, and re the too-contemporary-for-then comments in recent posts, we now get a black Paul Drake and a lesbian Della Street. Of course. Some of the expressions and attitudes in the dialog are way too contemporary also.

And while it's a typically classy HBO production... some of the costumes seem off to me for the early 30s. In particular, the men's hats. Very few of them exhibit the tall crowns, wide ribbons, and center-dent bashes that were then very common. The majority are more like 40s hats, lower-crowned and narrow-ribboned with teardrop bashes. One of the senior police character's hats looks exactly like something that Don Draper would wear in 1961. And Perry Mason's hat is essentially just a stock Akubra Stylemaster minus the brim binding.

I'll watch the rest, but I'm not convinced that this "reimagining" was necessary.

Click to expand...

I'm not entirely surprised to hear some of the styling is late forties rather than when it is set. It souns to me al ot like a case of the wardrobe and costume design people being told "it's a noir", and then them reaching for the cinematic conventions of noir - it's a noir, so we dress X like Bogart in The Big Sleep or whatever. It sort of rmeinds me how many men at a mainstream "20s" night wil turn up approximating a 50s look, because the popular culture notion of the 20s is so often based on the gangster pictures of the 50s where the stoy is set in the 20s, but the wardrobe is pure 50s.

Fading Fast said:

It's sadly predictable. Heck, "Godless," set in the 1880s American West, checks off most of the same list. You could add "Mansplaining" and "MeToo" to your list as those are now quite commonly placed in period shows in the past few years wrapped, of course, inside a modern political meme. Just to be clear, broadly, I agree with many, not all, of the modern views, but find it ridiculous that they are jammed into these period shows in ways that nearly perfectly align to modern political takes. It's obnoxious virtue signaling.

Click to expand...

Thank you...I feared it was just my wife and I that thought this way.......my wife won't let me yell at the TV anymore....or I have to do it on my own time.

Edward said:

...
I enjoy seeing these themes dealt with if they are well-writtenm, though yes it is often clumsily done. Which is not to rule out the possibility of folks having "modern views" back then - change has to start somewhere, and there often were folks who thought "different". Slavery would never have been ended, for one thing, if noone had ever had "modern views". There are ways of writing it, though. One of the neatest I've ever seen was in an episode of Timeless, where the scientific genuis had to be snuck in to some science facility or other as a janitor because it was still that era. I much preferre that they din't shy away from the theme, but the point was acknowledged in a way that was appropriate. I tend to get more annoyed when history is airbrushed, e.g. the Netflix "Grease Live" of a couyple of years ago which was vbeautifully done except for the fact that they had a number of persons of colour in roles in wihh they simply woul never have appeared in 1959 before desegregation. It's one thing to show it being challenged, but pretending it never happened just strikes me as wrong.....

Click to expand...

I, too, absolutely enjoy seeing these issues dealt with as a natural part of the story, but in a period accurate way. But what usually happens is you can see, from a mile away, that this will be, for example, "the brave woman who won't back down to a man," who will put him in his place verbally (with a speech right out of today's politics) or this is "the sensitive man" who somehow learned how to behave toward women exactly like a man should by today's standards as he incredibly managed to not pick up any of the cultural norms and views of how men and women interact in his day.

Also, the stock bad characters - usually guys and usually of one race - are as insulting and inaccurate as it would be if done in reverse. None of this happens one-hundred percent of the time even in these shows (yes, there are the occasional counter examples), but you can usually guess what profile a character will fit just by seeing them.

And yes, our modern ideas were incubated in the past, but only very rarely were they seen/understood/expressed in the exact same way we see/understand/express them today. I've read many of-the-period books and newspaper and seen many of-the-period movies that had, for their day, very progressive views on race and gender issues - and it's encouraging and enjoyable to see - but those views almost never align neatly to our modern views, especially today's very specific and unforgiving standards on these issues.

But the modern way (maybe, slightly tweaked for the period) is almost always how they are presented in period shows and that is part of what turns me off because it's neither period accurate nor interesting, but just modern writers virtue signaling to modern viewers. Heck, show how progressives really thought about race in the '30s (say, as in the book and movie "Son of the Gods"); now, that would be interesting, but it wouldn't fit our progressive views today - hmm.

Race (your point about roles in "Grease" is spot on), sex, religions, raising children, on and on - all of it - is so clearly reverse engineered to fit our modern views and, then, forced into the plots that it's laughable. I chuckled with @navetsea when he made his list a bit back in this thread about the issues that you all but know will come up in a period show and the characters they'll employ to cover this or that modern issue - it was spot on. The fact that you can all but guess immediately who's going to be what type of character or where a plot is going to go tells you they are just writing from a modern political template.

So, yes, by all means, put race and sex and other modern issues properly in these shows' plots and characters - they absolutely were issues discussed and debated in almost every period in history - but accurately show how these ideas were viewed at the time. Also, let's not have the story all but seem a vehicle to simply push a modern political view.

Does Hollywood inject contemporary moral change because they feel public moral pressure to necessarily include it? Because they feel they should use their platform for change? A business decision? Throwing younger generations a bone? I honestly don't understand why you'd do a period piece and then alter how people behaved in a way that falls outside of something like budgetary restrains, ie not being able to hire historians and consultants? That's what really gripes me. It's such a common practice that it can't be ignored, and we're accustomed to giving it all a pass. Downton Abbey or Mad Men would have been 1/4 the shows if they'd not taken such a rigid and accurate approach. Part of what takes them to the next level is: ACCURACY.

Ernest P Shackleton said:

Does Hollywood inject contemporary moral change because they feel public moral pressure to necessarily include it? Because they feel they should use their platform for change? A business decision? Throwing younger generations a bone? I honestly don't understand why you'd do a period piece and then alter how people behaved in a way that falls outside of something like budgetary restrains, ie not being able to hire historians and consultants? That's what really gripes me. It's such a common practice that it can't be ignored, and we're accustomed to giving it all a pass. Downton Abbey or Mad Men would have been 1/4 the shows if they'd not taken such a rigid and accurate approach. Part of what takes them to the next level is: ACCURACY.

Click to expand...

I very much doubt Hollywood does anything unless those pulling the levers smell money. To paraphrase the legendary banner in the Ford Motor Co's Detroit Head Office in the esrly sixties: Hollywood doesn't make entertainment, it makes money.

Edward said:

I very much doubt Hollywood does anything unless those pulling the levers smell money. To paraphrase the legendary banner in the Ford Motor Co's Detroit Head Office in the esrly sixties: Hollywood doesn't make entertainment, it makes money.

Click to expand...

I would normally not argue at all, but I'm concerned that is comes out of fear of cancel culture, which I guess is also about money. Not to get political, but cancel culture doesn't acknowledge context. A show set in 1872 has the same expectations and morality as a program set in 2020. Makes no sense, but absolutism and authoritarianism usually don't make any sense.

I read a review of The Alienist that wasn't about the program at all. The Alienist was a bad program because in this time of C-19, we don't need to see a dark series. Now what in the heck does that have to do with whether this is a good program or not? Or about anything about the program itself? Thank goodness the comment section let the reviewer have it, but still, that has no business in the review section. Go write an editorial instead.

Ernest P Shackleton said:

I would normally not argue at all, but I'm concerned that is comes out of fear of cancel culture, which I guess is also about money. Not to get political, but cancel culture doesn't acknowledge context. A show set in 1872 has the same expectations and morality as a program set in 2020. Makes no sense, but absolutism and authoritarianism usually don't make any sense.

Click to expand...

I think, though, to an extent it's inevitable. I don't care for crazy anahronisms, though tbh I'm not sure I want to see "1872 morality" preached either! History is an awful lot more complicated than morality, after all.

I read a review of The Alienist that wasn't about the program at all. The Alienist was a bad program because in this time of C-19, we don't need to see a dark series. Now what in the heck does that have to do with whether this is a good program or not? Or about anything about the program itself? Thank goodness the comment section let the reviewer have it, but still, that has no business in the review section. Go write an editorial instead.

Click to expand...

I'll forgive a lot of sins in a review if at the end of it I know whether it's something I want to see - rather than, as all too often happens these days, just reading a screed about the reviewer's opinion on something tangenital - like "I hated the last film this guy made, so...."

My favourite used to be Julie Burchall in the Sunday Times. As with anything else she's done, hew fiml review column was just glorified self-promition. Fortunately, she was so reliably wrong on everythin,g that if she hated it that was always a good sign!

There has never, at any time, been "period entertainment" that actually and honestly reflected the mores of the period in which it is set. All entertaintment is created for the audience of the time it's created, and reflects the attitudes and expectations of that audience. Otherwise, it wouldn't sell. It's just that simple.