Last television show you watched

Ha, yes. Such things were part and parcel. I'm reminded by the above, of an episode of Ironside supposedly set in London. The streets are all sun drenched and cracked, the buses are clearly American dashed with red paint and shots of the London residence in the ep show people driving past on the right hand side of the road.

Find myself glad that the Persuaders never got remade one way or the other. It'd go down the Starsky & Hutch style way of remake I suppose.

Yeah, it would likely have to be a send-up nowadays.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

In my defence, Discovery is not your dad's Trek

Indeed ... I heard that a recent episode dropped a couple of f-bombs. I'm not averse to swearing by any means, but it seems out of kilter in Trek (especially one set before the original series).

Fearfully, I've not seen Discovery and I'm not beating a path to its door anytime soon. Like Bond, I'm almost off 'newer' Trek and whatnot, sticking with the movies that were.

Stranger Things

One of those things you watch because everyone else is. A few missteps in the second season (the episode with the street-tuffs was awful), but a nice bit of entertainment anyway. The kiddies and the shop-lifter do OK in the acting stakes. The real highlight, of course, is the 80's-inspired soundtrack.

I don't know how to feel about remix shows like "Stranger Things".
I'm not personally offended by their existence, but I don't see how you push a medium forward by just redoing stuff from the past, however lovingly your homage might be.
Was it Bret Easton Ellis who wrote an angry diatribe about this show?

Full disclosure: I have watched both seasons of the show.
My personal pet peeve with season two is that they have ruined the best character, Jim Hopper, by turning him into Mr. Dad. I liked him more when he was a beer-guzzling, tortured, barely functioning alcoholic who liked to sow his oats around his little town and who still managed to get the job done when the shit hit the proverbial fan.

Though the Mr. Dad stuff did give me one scene I enjoyed.

Like so much of the show, Hopper was already a walking cliche. Grizzly cop with a tortured past who wakes up next to a naked broad and empty bottles. I'm not really fussed that they softened him up a bit because, frankly, we've seen his character a million times before anyway.

I think there's a lot of charm to the show, simplistic and derivative though it may be. I doubt creatively they could do more than another two seasons before staleness sets in.

Shame I wasn't born two to three decades earlier. I feel like the 80's were a decade I could've racked and snorted with gusto.

Well yeah, Hopper is a stock character, but then so are all of the "Stranger Things" characters.
That is a conscious choice.

Hopper - Grizzly veteran cop
Joyce - Neurotic mom
Jonathan - Geek/outcast (with added stalkerish behavior)
Nancy - The Popular Girl
Steve - The bully/jock (who gets redeemed towards the end of season one and even more so in season two)
Billy - Basically the replacement for Steve now that they made Steve one of the good guys
Dr. Brenner - Evil Scientist
Mrs. Wheeler - The suburban MILF

I'm told Stranger Things homages the best of 80s Spielberg mixed with the best of 80s Stephen King.

I'd probably enjoy it. If I had Netflix.

First month is free.

'Course there are other means to watch these programs, but I will not utter such things on a law-abiding site such as this.

I had a free month's trial code before (promotional thing to do with the launch of Season 1 of The Crown). Used it to watch Season 3 of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

Watched the first few Punisher episodes. Gets better as it goes along, though the plot is a hackneyed as they come.

Possiby the most Jewish show I've seen since the heyday of Woody Allen and Golan Globus.

I'm a couple of episodes into the season myself.

It's off to a strong start, by the standards of the Marvel shows (I do think there is a limit to how good this stuff can be).

I'm interested in seeing if the intensity of Jon Bernthal's performance will wear off as the audience is exposed to it over an entire season.

I thought the character worked well on Daredevil because he was in and out of the story rather quickly.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

Haven't seen Daredevil and didn't like Shohreh Aghdashloo much in The Expanse. Am interested in seeing where Netflix goes with this, though; I'm sure there are Americans out there who still have no idea what it gets up to abroad. Outside of National Lampoon's Vacation.

What's your take on "The Expanse" otherwise? It's my favorite current sci-fi show and the most interesting genre exercise since the best years of BSG.

I'm only familiar with the adaptation, so I can't really say if the series compares favorably to the source material or not.

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Narcos

I was skeptical about the show's direction post-Pablo, but I must say that this season delivered the goods. Much better than season 2 which dragged on and on; Pablo's rise and fall could have been effectively told in one extended season I suspect. Nothing much was lost with the absence of Agent Murphy and his marital dramas.

Don't do drugs, kids.

CJB wrote:

Narcos

I was skeptical about the show's direction post-Pablo, but I must say that this season delivered the goods. Much better than season 2 which dragged on and on; Pablo's rise and fall could have been effectively told in one extended season I suspect. Nothing much was lost with the absence of Agent Murphy and his marital dramas.

Don't do drugs, kids.

Boyd Holbrook was always the weakest link in an otherwise good cast, I thought.
The bigger focus on Pena certainly didn't harm the show.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Salomé wrote:

What's your take on "The Expanse"

I stayed with it, but think the ideas are better than the execution.

Positives
The class war between the UN/Earth, the Mars colony and the asteroid belt is clever, and the protomolecule/bioweapon/corporate maleficence plot has legs.

The way it treats diversity/men and women is unpreachy and adult, and the second season is better than the first.

Negatives
The dialogue is some of the worse I've ever heard.

The characters are mostly crude stereotypes.

Julie Mao and Joe Miller appealed to my romantic side and I hope they re-appear. They already have in amateur erotica.  

What did you make of it, Sabs?

I love the ensemble, though I do think that Steven Strait is perhaps the only truly miscast character. Not sure how well he works as the archetypical hero, I found him much more enjoyable as a far swarmier individual on "Magic City".

The politics are interesting and the protomolecule has so far been an effective MacGuffin (though I suspect it will end up being a red herring and the true threat will be of a different nature).

I thought the abrupt end to the Joe Miller/Julie Mao story arc had to do with Thomas Jane's schedule, but apparently it is pretty close to how it is resolved in the books.

By the sounds of it, the Netflix series sounds like a more successful outing for the Punisher than the big-screen efforts with Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane and Ray Stevenson.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

By the sounds of it, the Netflix series sounds like a more successful outing for the Punisher than the big-screen efforts with Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane and Ray Stevenson.  

Lexi Alexander's "Punisher: War Zone" is credited with creating the visual template in which most of the Netflix Marvel shows have been shot and I have to say that I can kind of see it.

Cadfael on DVD.

This Witnesses (Les Temoins) thing on BBC4. Spiral it isn't, the comparison is not far off (both have a woman cop lead with a chummy male cop friend). But Audrey Fleurot sinks her teeth into the nutso schtick well enough. Traces of Josephine after Pierre checked out.