Your Ten Favorite Shows Currently on Television

It doesn't premiere for two more weeks. I liked the book a lot but am wary of the show.

I've been watching season 1 of Hannibal and enjoying it - kinda - but I think I might be done. I'm nine episodes deep now and having read summaries on Wikipedia, I'm definitely not watching seasons 2 or 3.

hannibal s2 is like....one of the best things ever

agreed completely

oh youve got to finish hannibal

yeah i can't think of a show that would be served worse by wiki plot summaries than hannibal.

Hannibal is top ten all time, full stop.

Search Party - s3 is by far the dumbest but this is fine, if stupid, low stakes television

aw man, worse even than s2? I was really disappointed by s2 (s1 was so good!) but was debating giving s3 a shot anyway...

i loved s2 though it was very different. a much darker show than s1.

yeah, search party has unfortunately chosen to chuck all the larger and more interesting existential themes from s1 out the window. I think it's still worth watching for casting (cole escola!) and just for shits and giggles but keep your expectations low.

Everyone is Dannemora is impossibly good but Patricia Arquette as Tilly and Eric Lange as Lyle were painfully effective. The weight and the jaw prosthetics!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjoKJllxneE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvrVGiA0ePc

don't

tell

AAAANNNYYYYYBOOODYYYYYY

Sweet, didn't know there was a TJ & Dave improv series. Thanks for the heads up, forks, and I second your recommendation. They do improv for people who think they hate improv.

@ulysses THAT was Lyle?! holy shit. he was also great in a tricky role as the sympathetically inept detective on Unbelievable

the 'stache and makeup and the extra pounds do a lot of the heavy lifting, but still, goddamn.

Can I start Hannibal at S02E01?

I'd watch the s1 finale first maybe but I am notorious about not being a purist when it comes to skipping seasons. hannibal s1 is mostly very good tho tbh

need to start from the beginning imo. I loved Hannibal S1 & S2. S3 was even more stylized and it had a narcotic quality that was hard to get into at first.

but I ended up liking it, and the ending was...

the abstract extremes of the first half of s3 are my favorite parts of the whole show

season one gets referred back to pretty often, you should watch it

Sweet, didn't know there was a TJ & Dave improv series. Thanks for the heads up, forks, and I second your recommendation. They do improv for people who think they hate improv.

― Why does this relates to Yoda? (Old Lunch), Monday, July 27, 2020 6:57 PM bookmarkflaglink

had no fucking idea this was the Sonic commercial dudes

season three is as i’ve said on the hannibal thread is as beautiful and immersive an aesthetic experience as they come, each episode like prism built out of dreams and memories. i don’t see much of a decline in quality from the first half to the second but i know ppl are less thrilled with the red dragon stuff

well i think i know what show i'll start on next

I didn't see a decline in S3 but overall it was so extremely morose, it was hard to take at first. I really loved the ending, hope there is some future for the series

I gave Corporate a shot, seems somewhat like Silicon Valley meets Office Space. (Also a script that seems kind of like it was written by Reddit dudes.)

In that vein I've been watching Silicon Valley again, it's mostly solid but some hasn't aged too well. TJ Miller sporting his "I know HTML (How To Meet Ladies)" t-shirt, a fair bit of sexist humor, the stereotypical woman of color prostitute...

Simon: Lol, i loooooooved that episode end. My partner and i have taken to calling each other "Lyle" when we catch each other in particular dumb moves.

OL: the TJ & Dave series is eight 50 minute improv sessions; they're basically all great. If you knock those out, there's a documentary called "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up" that offers another hour plus some process notes with the two of them by interview. I saw them live at Town Hall some years back and it was not the greatest set. It's a game of chance!

Neanderthal: One of the weird things about the modern world is that the "sonic guys" are both comic geniuses.

Rip: Hannibal is a fine wine to be savored; I wouldn't leave out anything tbh.

Viborg: Corporate occasionally wallows in its own jaded dipshittery but it's always self aware and doesn't really punch down. I like it a lot and respect its unwillingness to try to be likeable.

yes I appreciate how deliberately not appealing or charming the main Corporate guys are

and I just watched the s3 premiere of Corporate and it was delightful. amazed that despite being years late they were still, AFAIK, the first to use the nightmarish youtube algorithmic "children's videos" as fodder for dark laughs

yeah, that was inspired.

I'm strongly considering making separate click polls for the best series endings of the 00s and 10s. I'm compiling lists for both right now...I think I have most of the obvious ones in, but pls suggest notable series that you wouldn't want to see forgotten, especially non-US stuff and anything else that might escape typical radar (like animated/kids' series for instance, though I have Adventure Time in there already and I'm considering whether or not Steven Universe makes the cutoff - inclined to say no)

the spoiler alert polls

Umbrella Academy S2 was great, a marked improvement on S1

I might check it out if I keep hearing good things. I liked some individual elements of s1 but the A plot, most of the dialogue and a bunch of the supporting/tertiary characters (especially the hitmen...complete waste of time) were a total drag

I liked all the characters but thought some of the s1 pacing was sloppy (although I'm rewatching it with my partner and it seems that things are moving along faster than I remembered; Leonard is interesting way earlier than I expected him to be, for example). s2 has some necessary plot contrivances but by the time the threads start converging mid-season, it gets very engrossing.

lol DJP, my very opinionated TV friend online was loudly proclaiming the opposite ("it was so much better in Season 1!!!"). that makes me more curious

guess I'll watch both and inform whichever of you that is wrong that they are wrong.

You know what's surprisingly fun to watch for me, a childless american man in his 40's?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nv1m-aTCZI
this show is fucking great!

Umbrella Academy S2 was great, a marked improvement on S1

― shout-out to his family (DJP)

Could only bear three episodes of the first season, I found it terribly derivative.

I think you’d like the second season of UA Simon, I thought it improved on season 1 as well. It’s a lot funnier now too, which helps (I’m thinking Gerard Way had more input on this season than before, some of the lines are very... him.)

Diego is much-improved as a character

enjoyed s1 in the beginning, thought it got markedly worse as it went along.

i do find it amusing that diego's power is basically 'knives.'

basically a gritty reboot of hank azaria's character from mystery men

I think the most interesting thing about the show is the interplay between the siblings and s2 leans into that much more along with better individual arcs for everyone (including Ben!)

Corporate started out kinda shocking this week but ended up in a more normal/standard place. For a few minutes there I truly thought maybe they'd lost their minds.

Did that High Fidelity show get dramatically better in the second half? Never watched it, but I seem to remember it getting terrible reviews after the first few episodes, but suddenly lots of people are sad it got canceled.

i think the social media hullaballoo (hula-balloo?) is mostly about losing a show with a black female lead moreso than people enamored with the actual quality of the show
https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/zoe-kravitz-high-fidelity-hulu-diversity-1234729635/

I thought the 2-3 episodes of High Fidelity I watched were terrible, it just stole so liberally and unimaginatively from the movie

Finally finished season 3 of Goliath. Pretty unsatisfying overall; it seemed really messy and flailing compared to the two previous seasons, with a lot of threads left dangling but in a way that made me dread, rather than hope for, a season 4. At this point I'm happy to walk away with positive memories of the first season.

it was less than the sum of its parts by the end. no big twisteroo. i still loved it though.

I've been revisiting a comfort series of mine, the MMA drama Kingdom (not to be confused by the more recent series of the same name, or the LvT one of course) w/ Frank Grillo, Jonathan Tucker, Matt Lauria, Kiele Sanchez and the great Paul Walter Hauser. It's incredibly flawed and deeply misery-porny but I love the hangout vibe and (mostly) low-key dialogue. It ran for three seasons and ended in just about the bleakest fashion possible, which was only appropriate.

Just finished S2 of Umbrella Academy, loved it. Robert Sheehan is a doll.

ZeroZeroZero is really great, amazing locales