Your Ten Favorite Shows Currently on Television

Knocked out the first two hours of "OJ: Made In America" last night and it's excellent.
Samantha Bee / Jason Jones are straight up killing it right now; The Detour ended great and Full Frontal has become necessary viewing.
Watched the first episode of The Girlfriend Experience and was pleasantly surprised by how solid and non prurient it is. Kinda excited and hopeful.
I appear to have taped 85% of All in the Family. I've watched about three seasons. I may have burnt myself out.
Still good: Amy Schumer, Veep, Silicon Valley, Adventure Time
Still need to have a go at: UnREAL, Outcast, nu-Roots, Casual, The Path, Vikings, Fear the Walking Dead
Coming soon: Mr Robot, Queen of the South
Not that good these days: Last Week Tonight, Game of Thrones

I watched the first few episodes of veep - is it worth revisiting? Or is that indicative of the show as a whole?

veep just gets better and better. this season is the best one yet.

I haven't loved this season of veep tbh; also think amy schumer show may be past its expiration date

i'm finding veep pretty consistent from season to season. schumer, as I'm prone to repeatedly saying, is extremely hit and miss but her hits are super solid and she has about a 50% signal to noise ratio so i'm willing to sit through some stinkers.

Currently streaming Season 1 of unREAL and Season 2 of Banshee; winding down Person of Interest; gonna check out Animal Kingdom.

Veep is a weird show. It's often extremely funny, like I LOL more often during an average episode than maybe anything else on TV. Yet watching it is not an altogether pleasant experience because roughly 80% of the characters are basically complete unrepentant assholes. So basically individual lines and moments are often so great yet it kind of wears you down to watch certain characters just shit on other ones relentlessly, episode after episode. And I don't mean Jonah, because he's a dick himself (I'm about five episodes behind but I hear he has an unexpected renaissance coming). But like Mike and Gary and Catherine and Amy (though she can dish it out too) and the nice young guy with the glasses who's basically that Furlong's constant bitchboy.

the ability to find relentlessly unrepentant assholes' lives interesting is more or less necessary to enjoy the current golden age of teevee... see also breaking bad, better call saul, unreal, silicon valley, the americans, black sails, basically almost every highly acclaimed scripted show on right now!

i like veep whenever i watch it but i can take or leave it so i often forget that its on

from what I've seen of the ones you listed (not Unreal and Black Sails), the main character(s) are anywhere from halfway to very sympathetic, with the exception of the last few seasons of Breaking Bad, and in that case pretty much every major player except Walter was likable to some degree.

the best comparisons I can make to Veep are probably Archer and (ironically) House. both of those shows kind of wear me down too, though I think Archer's gotten better. don't get me wrong, it's a very bold, ballsy thing to do, especially with Selina being a woman, not sure if there's ever been a show where the protagonist is female and a flaming asshole 98% of the time.

This show... it's a lot of squandered potential but occasionally it is incredible and unlike anything else. In particular, the debuts for each season stand apart in that so far they have all been explorations of desolate landscapes and the insanity of loneliness, and packed with great imagery. This last one just holy shit - airfields full of corpses, cruising around abandoned cities in hazmat suits, paddling across empty oceans. Ballard would surely see it as an homage (or at least some kind of pop culture validation of his obsessions and themes). Unfortunately, after these episodes the show more or less devolves into a much less interesting comedy of manners that only fitfully engages with the much more interesting ideas at its disposal. idk maybe it's a budget thing.

― Οὖτις, Friday, March 18, 2016 2:53 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

btw Angie Tribeca - this show busts my guts and i feel soooo bad about it, it's Police Squad! all over again, so shameless and punny

i wish i liked angie tribeca as much as i liked police squad... there's just something about it that makes the silliness boring to me

it's worth restating that the OJ: Made in America documentary is excellent and I say that as someone who lived through it and wished desperately it would go away. This is good filmmaking.

so good

Halfway through love it so far

And I too was fine never hearing about it again in my life.

i only got half it in Aus, with way less tv coverage & i didnt fully get who he was at the time, like the level of celebrity
over time i've gleaned more & more but this is like a college course in oj 101, it's so *comprehensive*
the contextualization is so good

ie i wasnt aware of the teenage girl that got shot by the korean grocery store worker, stuff like that

First ep of The Night Of was a good watch

I had to stop it about 15-20 mins in when [SPOILERS I guess] our very dumb hero accidentally stabbed the doomed girl in the hand.

_Mordy wrote this on thread Conventional Mealy Mouths: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 5 on board I Love Everything on 25-May-2016

that argument only makes sense if your self-conceptialization is entirely as a lone independent actor - in which case one solitary vote does not participate in any meaningful way in the political process. however *there is such thing as a society* and we are not just independent actors but part of large collectives of self-interest, identity and affiliation and the only reason why NY is a stable blue state is because there are a whole bunch of "independent actors" who go and vote and make it that. you have to be dripping w/ self-aggrandizement to not understand that your participation in the vote matters not bc you alone get to make the decision but bc /you/ collectively do. i wonder if other countries have this "your vote doesn't matter" argument or if it can only exist in the context of america's radical cult of individualism._

I haven't seen it but my wife is raving about some French show called the bureau

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WQw3PxYpF1Q

^ exactly what i was about to mention haha

anybody want to speak for or against "The A Word"? Starts in America in a week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXJvWVl2KKM

I think it is very trite and dull shite. Autism is a spectrum condition that also effects women, all racial groups + social classes and they also grow into adults - the cutesy middle class boy with autism causing much hand wringing thing has already been flogged to death.

I only saw the end of it and it wasn't very good.

mmm. that's what i was afraid of. Just saw "Life, Animated" and it had the same issues: treating the best case scenario like a brave fight against the odds and ignoring the vast majority of diagnosed individuals without the resources or the support necessary just to get by.

I haven't seen it but my wife is raving about some French show called the bureau

― Heez, Thursday, July 7, 2016 7:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm gonna guess you mean le bureau des légendes (starring matthieu kassovitz, about an undercover agent coming back to normal life after a stint in syria) rather than the french take on the office (starring françois berléand, lived a very short life).
couldn't agree more about bureau des légendes though, it's really great.

I watched the first episode of The A Word and felt no need whatsoever to continue with it. As pointed out, dull, trite, middle-class woe-is-me selfish parental agony bullshit. It might have got better, but I doubt it.

I started watching A Very Secret Service (Au Service de la France/Frankreich Gegen den Rest der Welt) over the weekend and soon burned through the whole series as it's absolutely delightful. A sitcom about France's Secret Service of the early 60s and their struggles with colonialism, international relations and France's place in the world, and the changes to France both post-war and the modern age; it's really well made and frequently laugh out loud funny.

At 20 odd minutes an ep (and there are only 12) you owe it to yourself to give at least the first couple a try but even if it's not sticking it's worth going as far as ep 5 (the CIA one).

Working my way through Nathan For You - the first season was patchy but second is flat out hilarious so far.

He's so off puttingly weird.

Started watching Orphan Black.

First ep of The Night Of was a good watch

― Number None, Monday, July 4, 2016 2:10 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Richard Price, John Turturro = I'm in

xpost You may have to push through parts of s3 of Orphan Black when you get to it but s4 makes up for it in spades.

I thoroughly enjoyed Orphan Black season 1, thoroughly didn't enjoy the hugely sloppy and eliptical s2, haven't watched any more.

same here

yup

Kind of like Casual on Hulu. Not groundbreaking and mildly irritating at times and reminds me a fair amount of Transparent without the trans aspect, but it's watchable.

has anyone watched The Path on Hulu? Saw it pop up on some best TV shows of 2016 list and hadn't even heard of it.

would have thought a new Jason Katims show with Aaron Paul would be getting more buzz

I watched it. It starts off slow but gets rolling by about episode 3. Definitely worthwhile if you're at all fascinated by cults.

First ep of The Night Of was a good watch

― Number None, Monday, July 4, 2016 2:10 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Richard Price, John Turturro = I'm in

― skateboard of education (rip van wanko), Monday, July 11, 2016 12:31 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

watched the first two, its good
somewhat hard to see gandolfini as the turturro role, wonder how much it was changed?
didnt realize its 8 eps, looking fwd to it all summer
detective dennis box is a great character name

second season of Difficult People clicked for me so I went to Billy in the Street; it's great

Currently catching up on Shameless, which I had mistakenly pegged as Married With Children but with more tits and profanity 'cause cable; turns out it's a surprisingly dark and perceptive comedy-drama about how to survive against all odds, but turns into a show about how living in constant white-trash survival-hustle mode totally fails to prepare you to live among people whose lives have been even incrementally more privileged than yours.

Just starting on Stranger Things, The Night Of, and catching up with, of all things, Community.

loving The Night Of! first time i've watched a series in real time in a while, and the wait is beautiful and agonizing

Trayce I've just been watching s7 of Community. Didn't really feel it although it had some good lols

damn, The Night Of seriously went off the rails

I haven't watched the latest ep yet, but despite it being absolutely unconvincing fluff - i've enjoyed it up to now.