Your Ten Favorite Shows Currently on Television

Yeah I was put off by James Badge Dale's writer character at first, but I ended up loving it

I've mentioned this in the mr. robot thread but there's a scene w rami malek in the pacific that's forever burned into my brain and just sickening but astounding, one of the most disturbing filmed portrayals of PTSD ever

The brain one?

that's the one

He does the weirdo thing really well.

otm

I guess there isn't a rolling 2015 TV thread. I am not claiming this as one of my ten favorite shows, but DIFFICULT PEOPLE on Hulu starring Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner is pretty funny.

the show ALONE on history channel is p good -- ten guys seperately competing as to who can stay in the wilderness of vancouver island the longest & winner gets 500k

i really like the editing and music used

last ep a dude carved a lute to occupy himself and sung an kindof amazing low-fi folk song and then was like "next week im going to look into BUILDING A SAUNA", you can watch full eps on history channel website but i prob wouldnt recommend it as the interface/their ads are 100% terrible

Top Tier TV of the Moment:
- Hannibal
- Last Week Tonight
- Mr. Robot
- Married
- Rick and Morty
- Hard Knocks

Secondaries:
- The Meltdown
- Key and Peele
- Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell
- Review

Hannibal Buress' Why? is consistently and mystifyingly not funny or even entertaining but he's justified the show by creating the most interesting live music segment on television right now with Flying Lotus as his DJ/Music Director and guests thus far including Thundercat, Open Mike Eagle, Jean Grae and Two Fresh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tus4c3Mx_ps

Stalled on: Cancer - Emperor of All Maladies (deeply depressing watch tbh), Wolf Hall (great but I need full focus)

I need to set aside some time to get caught up on: UNReal, Humans

Still need to watch: Deutschland 83, Rectify, 12 Monkeys, iZombie, American Crime, Between, Bloodlines, Killjoys, Ballers, The Brink

watched the first two eps of s3 of Masters of Sex; hooboy that show has gotten dumb

UnReal went out strong fyi

glad to hear! i need time to binge on it.

Jordskott, Mr Robot, and Bojack Horseman are just about all I'm watching at present. I'm relieved that True Detective has finished - it means that I don't have to watch it anymore.

damn the first ep of Narcos was good, hope it holds up?

and I keep thinking about Rectify, the first season of which I liked a lot, and then it just totally lost me shortly into season 2. now it's being heralded again... anyone watching?

will update.

Yeah Rectify series 3 is pretty good so far.

yeah for me s1 > s3 > s2

Teddy Jr a quietly astonishing character/perf

Rectify, the first season of which I liked a lot, and then it just totally lost me shortly into season 2.

Yeah, I stopped watching after the first episode of S2. I wonder if I could pick it back up at the start of S3 without missing much.

the s2 finale is pretty pivotal but otherwise you should be OK

Psyched for You're The Worst and The League to be back this week.

s1 of YTW was so great, hope they can keep it up

enjoyed Other Space way more than I was expecting to!

i liked season 2 of rectify a lot. i think i just like that show a lot.

digging Person Of Interest a bunch. worth it just for Cookie pre-Empire. but i dig Benjamin Linus in his role too.

enjoyed Other Space way more than I was expecting to!

ME TOO it's kind of a bummer the way this sunk without a trace given that it's actually good

I was v surprised at the fact that it actually makes an effort to hang together as an actual rinky-dink serialized sci-fi show, instead of just using its premise as a pretense for joeks

we talked about it a bit in the Community thread, but yeah - generally positive reception by those who bothered to watch it

Summer brought a new ridiculous unseen-force vs. small group sugary serial to rival the one with the dome (successors to the Kansas one a few years back?), and if it won by a whisper it was probably because it starred my girlfriend Lily Rabe, who I've never bothered with when "horror" is in the title and unfortunately missed (visually) in the park with her other boyfriend this year, even if in lesser Shakespeare.

A little less ridiculously, I've also come around very late but not small to The Good Wife, contra my usual relative disinterest in lawyer shows (see also Better Call Saul). I'm still a bit mystified by its particular appeal to me and others, though think it may have a lot to do with the not-legal-so-much-as-professional/class milieu that I suspect accounts for most of its awards and guest spots (Frasier 2.0?), and, quite possibly and as with Meredith Grey, et al (from whom I expect returns to continue to diminish with Dempsey joining Oh in absentia), the illusion of intimacy with an intelligent (no-bullshit, perhaps a little sad, but fairly nice and genuine?) female lead (and support - Sharma, ok, but see also Tascioni), even one to whom I have no particular attraction.

Letterman, one of whose last shows (Clooney/Pacino/Waits) I caught along with some final-show-guest-gawking, is missed, and, apart from the occasional dip into Conan among others (Corden has his moments but is not yet and probably never will be Ferguson; previously-ignored Meyers has entertained cheerfully on the few occasions allowed, though I had to "laugh" whenever they cut to the pickup band led by Fake Fred Armisen (or Fake Will Ferrell Chad S.); Leno II Kimmel remains mostly unwatchable with too-faux Fallon only a notch better), largely replaced by a papier-mache of Charlie Rose and Seinfeld reruns (I've come around to Samberg too in his post-SNL life; his show may be a bagatelle but after Mindy the best I've seen of the mostly-unwatchable Koosbane-set meta-ironic-sitcoms of the Community/Parks and Rec age (who can I pay to design me an Ansari-blocker?)). Stephen may save the day, shortly. Neither he nor Stewart nor anything else on their channel ever interested me much - politics a bit too remedial, partisanship a bit too muddy, cynicism a bit too broad, comedy a bit too lowbrow, Colbert a bit too Carolinian, Stewart a bit too Jersey - and Batiste doesn't make my top dozen NoLA musicians either, but my hopes are high.

The return of Sherlock (and his Ophelia, by which I don't refer to "the woman") is certainly awaited, though not quite with looking-for-tickets-outside-the-NT levels of bated breath.

Christian Slater hasn't impressed me in two decades, but maybe I should check out this new one? I doubt I'll last longer than the 15 minutes or so I lasted with the latest from the more visually and cortically appealing Duchovny.

I'm sure David Simon's new one would make and perhaps top the list, in no small part due to its subject matter, but I no longer pay for HBO so...

/damn/ the first ep of Narcos was good, hope it holds up?

and I keep thinking about Rectify, the first season of which I liked a lot, and then it just totally lost me shortly into season 2. now it's being heralded again... anyone watching?
--rip van wanko

narcos is pretty damn good, never quite gets great but that's nbd due to how consistently good it is

The actor who plays Escobar really steals the show, even if he's never quite allowed to because of how evil Escobar himself is. It feels like reigning in the story and providing this American voiceover throughout was kind of a compromise. But I thoroughly enjoyed this even if sometimes the pacing was either too fast or too slow for the topic.

Eagerly awaiting the return of Person of Interest
Elementary is comfort viewing with just enough brains to be interesting
Awaiting the return of Empire with some trepidation
Greatly enjoying Ray Donovan, a show I caught up with when Hulu started offering Showtime shows (I'm currently in the middle of the second season of Masters of Sex as well)

Masters of Sex has turned utterly unwatchable this season after major stumbles about halfway through the second season
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/masters-of-sex-recap-with-an-ape-the-show-jumps-the-shark/

Power watched Show Me a Hero; good but not great? woulda liked deeper characters for the public housing sector tenant storylines and Simon has issues with female storylines being anything but reactive.

Stumbled into Worricker on Amazon Prime and that show scratches my Graham Greene itch nicely. Recommended!

Fear of the Walking Dead suffers from some of the same dogwhistle classism and racism as it's namesake but is more interesting not least because of Kim Dickens. Worth following for the moment.

Married's second season has held up surprisingly well; great casting throughout and the writing is still fairly fresh.

at least Fear seems to be actively trying to fix these issues compared to the original series; i'm giving it the benefit of the doubt for now.
not a great sign for the fate of the first black character though :/
(also i'm sure there are evil Hollywood types on the horizon re: classism)

I'm enjoying Married, I love how relaxed everyone is. Most recent ep was v funny

Fear of the Walking Dead is just kinda boring & paint by numbers for me, I don't think I like it much at all. But I fell off the Walking Dead wagon & it all feels like it's of the same piece

I've been meaning to try Worricker, will def give it a go

worricker is the kind of spy story where winona ryder tells bill nighy "there's just one problem with that plan... you're gonna have to trust me" and then stalks away on the beach while the music / tide rises
it's also a wonderfully engaging high stakes spy story of intrigue and corruption that has SPOILER no guns, no profanity and no physical violence of any kind over a two hour stretch
what it does have is great actors devouring scenery, carefully decomposing their poker faces in close up and pirouetting through david hare's cleverly convoluted purple prose with acrobatic ease
the whole show is dipped in honey: occasionally cloying but generally sweet, infused with the profundity of natural gold

Masters of Sex has turned utterly unwatchable this season after major stumbles about halfway through the second season

Yeah, I've been keeping half an eye on recaps and I'm a little worried. But I'm nine episodes into Season Two (Masters' long-lost brother has just turned up) and it's still interesting.

i don't want to tell you you're at the point of disintegration but

Survivor's Remorse started out dabbling in shibboleths in an original way and allowed its nouveau riche characters considerable latitude for character development. it has almost immediately fallen apart in S2 and lazily shifted into CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS 4 U like the recent ep where the lead character (an athlete) is knocked cold by his lesbian sister in a cringing Ray Rice semi-satire. At the behest of his shoe sponsor they produce a horrifyingly cynical "women have to stop abusing men" spit-take on the NO MORE PSAs, which I mean, yeah NO MORE is horrifyingly cynical too but who are you really mocking here?
i appreciated the show's boundary pushing with regards to stereotypes but it often shits on the floor, laughs and pretends it is being meaningful. I think I'm done there.

I lasted two and a half episodes with Blunt Talk. It has Patrick Stewart gleefully overacting and pretty much nothing else.

Currently on or about to be on that I'm following:
Last Week Tonight s. 2 - HBO
Your Pretty Face is Going to hell s. 2 - Adult Swim
Married s. 2 - FX
Jeopardy s. 32 - ABC
Rick and Morty s. 2 - Adult Swim
Review s. 2 - Comedy Central
Fear the Walking Dead s.1 - AMC
Drunk History s. 3 - Comedy Central
The Bastard Executioner s.1 - FX
How to Get Away with Murder s. 2 - ABC
Limitless s. 1 - CBS
Moonbeam City s.1 - Adult Swim
Minority Report s.1 - Fox
Undrafted s.2 - NFL Network
You’re the Worst s. 2 - FXX
NFL and NFL related chutzpah - Every channel ever all at once
American Experience / POV / Nature - PBS

I also plan to eventually finishing
Wolf Hall s. 1 - PBS
Unreal s.1 - Lifetime
Masterpiece Contemporary: Worricker s.1 - PBS
American Crime s. 1 - ABC

Masters of Sex has turned utterly unwatchable this season after major stumbles about halfway through the second season
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/masters-of-sex-recap-with-an-ape-the-show-jumps-the-shark/

Parsed that as "Masters of sex with an ape"

it basically is.
http://pmctvline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/mastersofsex_ape.jpg%3Fw%3D620

The Masters of Sex discussion is precisely why, these days, I wait a few seasons before starting to watch acclaimed (non-superheroic) dramatic series. The vast majority of those shows seem to hit a hardcore sophomore (or at least junior) slump anymore. I can't handle the disappointment.

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9301867/peak-tv
http://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Z7dGpyP_BLIiczZ7gmGGq3IvjuE%3D/800x0/filters%3Ano_upscale%28%29/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4048068/fxchart.png
there is twice as much scripted television airing right now as there was in 2009

In 2009, there were 211 primetime scripted series on television. That number steadily climbed until in 2014 there were 371, an increase of 160 shows. FX expects the number to top 400 in 2015. (There are already 267 series, and that's before the glut of shows that will debut when the fall TV season begins in late September.) And if it somehow doesn't this year, it almost certainly will in 2016. (Keep in mind, that's just scripted programming. Once you factor in reality shows, talk shows, and every other manner of program, the number climbs north of 1,000 — it was already at 933 in May 2015, the last month FX has data for.)

Wow, that's a lotta shows. Good to see scripted stuff is on the rise, though.

I have binged s1 & 2 of Proj Greenlight, now starting the new season, i love the shitshow-ery of it

I nvr watched it previously but the new ep was kinda perfect w/ who they chose as director. I think they pretty clearly did it for the conflict it will (and did immediately lol) create but ya know im cool w that

the bastard executioner is the worst title btw, I cringe for ppl having to read promos abt it during sports

Watched the Masters of Sex season 3 premiere last night; a definite drop in quality from season 2. I'm now mentally prepping for the upcoming trainwreck.

Also watched the season premiere of The Mindy Project, which retained the things about the show I hate (Ike Barinholtz) but was also funny as hell.

I guess there isn't a rolling 2015 TV thread. I am not claiming this as one of my ten favorite shows, but DIFFICULT PEOPLE on Hulu starring Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner is pretty funny.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Thursday, August 6, 2015 12:08 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Been watching this and agree but sometimes they're too much and too OTT even for me. I do like it though. Fred Armisen is really good as Garry.