Last television show you watched

Used to be a huge Miami Vice fan and have contemplated buying the full series on DVD. I even had a Sonny Crockett white linen jacket. Those were the days.

Incidentally, I suspect the Bond films' emphasis on masculine aesthetics and high living influenced MV.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Used to be a huge Miami Vice fan and have contemplated buying the full series on DVD. I even had a Sonny Crockett white linen jacket. Those were the days.

Incidentally, I suspect the Bond films' emphasis on masculine aesthetics and high living influenced MV.

Then again, DAF Bond might have influenced in a different, lesser fashion, given Bond's unforgivably unforgettable tie color while investigating WW's desert country digs.

I've only ever seen the first couple seasons, plus one or two of the Sheena Easton shows, which is I guess around the time that the show formally 'jumped the gator' with Crockett thinking he really is a drug dealer. Is there much worthwhile in the later years? (always found it funny that a writer/producer early on with VICE wound up showrunning TREK Next Gen's rocky first two seasons -- talk about going from one extreme to another! Then again, he did invent the Borg and hire writer Melinda Snodgrass, so that's something.)

This was a non-issue back then, but rewatching it now gave an odd feeling.

They said he hung himself at the end of the episode, but I think he went undercover as a shoe salesman.

Miami Vice comes up often here but I still haven't seen it. I really enjoyed that first Star Trek movie but haven't watched beyond that.

Phantom Commander wrote:

This was a non-issue back then, but rewatching it now gave an odd feeling.

They said he hung himself at the end of the episode, but I think he went undercover as a shoe salesman.

Rumour has it that more recently he got himself a stunning, much younger South American wife.

Sarai wrote:

Miami Vice comes up often here but I still haven't seen it.  I really enjoyed that first Star Trek movie but haven't watched beyond that.

I was just on blu-ray.com, which indicates Amazon is selling the whole series for less than $30 on blu. That's like 70% off, but the picture quality seems rather limited, which may be as much in the source material as in how it was handled.

""Twelve television series make up the bulk of the Star Trek franchise: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds. All series in total amount to 880 episodes across 44 seasons of television."

oh lol

Yeah ... bit like me saying to someone that they might enjoy Doctor Who, then them realising that this year is its 60th anniversary. lol.

Sarai wrote:

""Twelve television series make up the bulk of the Star Trek franchise: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds. All series in total amount to 880 episodes across 44 seasons of television."

oh  lol

Sturgeon's Law applies to Trek as much as anything else: 90% of everything is crud (but there's probably another 20-30% that can be seen as pretty fun crud.)

permission to board Janice Rand please

Rewatched both seasons of MANHATTAN as a run-up to OPPENHEIMER, and actually think I may have to wait a while on the Nolan, because I think I may be a little disappointed ... yeah, I like the series THAT much! (full disclosure, just finished writing a tech article on shooting of OPPENHEIMER, and the crew are just over-the-moon about the finished film, so my expectations have been hyped into stratosphere and seeing these eps made me wonder about how this can top that.)

Some very skillful and inspired writing elevates what could have played like soap opera in other hands, and nearly all of the acting is absolutely first-rate, especially the limited supporting turns from the guy who played John Doe's lawyer in Se7en in s1 and Justin Kirk in s2. I'm amazed I haven't seen the lead in anything else, he has a Chris Cooper quality. Oppie himself is only a supporting part in the series, with the creative genius being ascribed to fictional characters working under him ... don't know how accurate that is, but dramatically, it worked like gangbusters for me, as did the way they portray US intelligence as morphing toward what would become the CIA in the postwar world.

Started a rewatch of THE WIRE and again, words fail me on this series. It's like high literature, and knowing what is going to happen doesn't seem to impede entertainment and engagement in the slightest, because it is such a marvel to see a thing structured so well, and for directors to 'get' the material and even embellish it through the skilled use of such wonderful actors.

One of my DVDs got messed up (it must be a Dominic West thing, because both seasons of THE HOUR on blu-ray have disk problems for us) so partway through s1 I switched over to watching the streaming version, which is cropped for widescreen. I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but the cropping doesn't often bother me, and the picture quality is a lot better than the DVD (which is the only way I've ever seen the show.)

After finishing THE WIRE yet again, went onto CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, which I think I've only seen once all the way through. Almost as funny and definitely as outrageous as I remembered, but my main takeaway thus far while starting season 3 is how much it makes me want to watch a lot of SEINFELDs again.

Great show Curb, albeit I feel like it went off the rails in the last three or so seasons. Far too obvious and self-aware now.

I find Curb to be much funnier than Seinfeld, probably because Seinfeld is in Seinfeld, and I never found him funny in the slightest.

GANGS OF OSLO

Mainly about two brothers. One is a gang leader, the other a cop. This show seems to present both the gangs and the police as cool people, when the opposite is true for both in real life.

Recently gave Mad Men a full rewatch. Still the greatest TV show ever made.

I've been delving into back-in-the-day shows, thanks to ITVX - sci-fi/paranormal number Sapphire And Steel with David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, Space : 1999 with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and Hammer House Of Horror with various.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Space : 1999 with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain

Watched that as a kid and thought it was awesome. Seeing some clips of it recently, I was shocked to see how bad it really was. The child brain transforms second rate images into some kind of magic impressions. I have experienced the same phenomenon with other films and shows as well.

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

Recently gave Mad Men a full rewatch. Still the greatest TV show ever made.

 

Me too (well, by recent I mean I wrapped up early this year) and yes, inclined to agree that it's one of the best shows ever produced. Maybe the last we saw an "intelligent" long-running series that had mass appeal.

CJB wrote:

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

Recently gave Mad Men a full rewatch. Still the greatest TV show ever made.

 

Me too (well, by recent I mean I wrapped up early this year) and yes, inclined to agree that it's one of the best shows ever produced. Maybe the last we saw an "intelligent" long-running series that had mass appeal.

We rewatched it over a year back, though it is one case where changing tech hurt the look of the show. When they went from film to digital, they seemed to have decided to stop lighting the show cinematically and settled for a kind of underexposed mush that didn't seem true to the 60s or the emerging 70s, and for me it hurt the storytelling. I don't want to think of it as second-tier, but I don't keep it up there with THE WIRE anymore ... maybe more like the reboot of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (which has its own visual issues all the way through, plus a disappointing wrapup, which mars all those great political/real-world aspects the show touched on back when regular shows ran scared of them.)

Has anybody here ever seen IT'S GARY SHANDLING'S SHOW? I always enjoyed him in THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW but never saw this earlier series, though I saw a complete series set of it in a second-hand store this week and was thinking of doing a blind-buy. I know they do a breaking-fourth-wall thing that was considered really out there (and this is back when MOONLIGHTING was doing it regularly), but nothing else.

Can’t say I noticed the lighting per se, but I did note that when the agency moved to the new office in Season 4, that the new, white set didn’t lend itself to something as visually appealing as the first office space. And I recall in that very first episode of filming in the new office, that the framing didn’t help matters either. Thankfully this was remedied by the second episode and by the time we get to the Suitcase, it felt as moody and cinematic as it was when it began.

I read somewhere that the lighter office spaces were supposed to signify the opening up of Don’s psyche. This makes sense, considering how dark it becomes as the merger occurs in Season 7.

With David McCallum's passing, jumping back in for a viewing of Sapphire and Steel. My re-watch of The Man from UNCLE has already been under way before the news.

Eagerly awaiting the new Frasier. I'm trying to be optimistic it will be good....

Of course not much can really be done about John Mahoney no longer being around, but none of the rest of the previous cast signing up probably doesn't bode well.

THE ROCKFORD FILES
Not sure why I enjoy this so much, but it is a childhood memory, so that has something to do with it. It is very 70s, in a good way.