But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

enjoying mare of easttown even though my initial reaction to it was "every element of this has been done to death". i guess i just like kate winslet and jean smart?

― 《Myst1kOblivi0n》 (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 6 May 2021 20:58 (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think its gone for "very well done" and also managed to throw a few loops without it feeling like it was just for the sake of it

All on winsletts shoulders too, shes terrific

AppleTV+ or whatever it’s called has a pretty good interface.

Alas, it lacks virtually anything I want to see, aside from Ted Lasso. Like, if it was just an app that opened up straight to Ted Lasso I'd call it a raging success.

I hate how Disney+ puts the alphabet in a single-line row when you're searching, so you gotta mash that button over and over to hit up the letters you want (as opposed to a grid of letters, with the bonus of letting you slide off one side and end up on the other, Pac-Man style – which some of them use).

New season of Mythic Quest is out on AppleTV. I thought the first season was pretty hilarious.

Something about Mare makes me think of Happy Valley, as far as being a police procedural that aims at least a little bit higher, though it's too early to tell if Mare will deliver.

xpost Awesome, the show was OK but it feels like it would totally hit the spot right now. (Right now meaning while we have a free year of Apple+.)

I only just caught up with Mythic Quest a few weeks ago, I loved it! It was nerdy in all the right ways without being clueless about it (compared for example with Dead Pixels which was dreadful).

Watched Michael B. Jordan's Tom Clancy's John Kelly Clark Is...Without Remorse on Amazon Prime. It's pretty good, but there are some absurd aspects. In the opening scene, Jordan and his top secret Navy SEAL kill squad emerge in full scuba gear from a swimming pool in the middle of a building in downtown Bombed-Out Middle East-burg, kill a bunch of anono-goons and then as they're walking toward the next stage of their journey, not only is all the scuba gear gone but they're not even wet! Also, how did they get into the pool in the first place? After that, though, it's pretty solid. Jodie Turner-Smith from Queen & Slim is Jordan's running partner throughout, and she's excellent in both the dramatic and the ass-kicking scenes. The actor playing the villain is...a surprising choice, at least he was to me.

I gotta check out that opening scene, after that description.

OK, that wasn’t quite as ridiculous as I was expecting (I thought it’d be, like, a pristine blue swimming pool surrounded by deck chairs)… but yeah

It's directed by Gomorrah/ZeroZeroZero director Stefano Sollima, so there are some nice touches throughout but it's getting absolutely panned by users on IMDB because Without Remorse is the first Jack Ryan book and the film bears no resemblance to it other than the title (and no Jack Ryan either)

too bad. the source material sounds amazing!

In 1970, former Navy SEAL John Kelly, who recently lost his pregnant wife in a car accident, picks up a hitchhiker named Pam on his way to his home on Battery Island in the Chesapeake Bay. They quickly become lovers, and over time Kelly discovers that she is a runaway who became a drug mule and prostitute; she has recently escaped from her drug-dealer/pimp. Kelly helps rehabilitate her from barbiturates. Weeks after recovering, Kelly and Pam go to Baltimore for follow-up treatment and pass through a neighborhood where her pimps work. One of them recognizes Pam and pursues them in a car chase. Kelly is gravely wounded by a shotgun blast, while Pam is recaptured and later tortured, gang-raped, and killed.

bit of a downer

he went back to Baltimore, what a crazy mistake...

The summary just keeps getting nuttier from there.

sounds like a crowd pleaser

good stuff on hbomax for the tcm classic film festival - last night i watched the interview w rita moreno, george takouris and russ tamblyn about west side story.

apparently theyre even putting up the dana gould/sketchfest tableread of plan 9 from outer space tonight? i hope so :D

Everyone who said good things about Mythic Quest was OTM

Cool! I’m glad you liked it.

Girls5eva is getting pretty good praise -- is it worth signing up for Peacock?

I am laughing a lot at myself for looking at the promos and thinking "who is that one woman, she looks super familiar but I can't place her" and then finding out it's Sara Bareilles

enjoying mare of easttown even though my initial reaction to it was "every element of this has been done to death". i guess i just like kate winslet and jean smart?

― 《Myst1kOblivi0n》 (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 6 May 2021 20:58 (forty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think its gone for "very well done" and also managed to throw a few loops without it feeling like it was just for the sake of it

All on winsletts shoulders too, shes terrific

― flagpost fucking (darraghmac), Thursday, May 6, 2021 2:44 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's only been one more episode since this exchange but it continues being great imo, enjoy having regular sunday viewing and it turns out i much prefer watching a drama series not in binge format, who knew?

Most recent episode was possibly the most conventionally TV show-like of them so far, but we didn't mind. It's sort of nice to see something that doesn't feel like a four or eight hour movie for once.

And of course coming up really soon is Underground Railroad on Amazon. I like that these things seem to be staggered out, so it's not like a whole bunch of new shows being dropped all at once. There always seems to be something to pick up the slack, letting you get a little rhythm going.

Last thing, I really like that a lot of these shows are coming out one a week rather than all at once.

Yeah I'm glad that's taking hold

Yeah, agreed, really happy things are swinging back in that direction. Was getting annoying to look at Twitter the morning after a new season dropped at midnight to tweets about, "okay, powered through the entire season last night, here's why I hate the ending and what specifically sucked".

Weekly episode cadence definitely makes it more fum to discuss TV on, say, a bulletin board.

Also more fun to watch because, yeah, it doesn't feel like you're sitting through a 10-hour movie. It lets you anticipate something for a week, which feels more like an event.

I am laughing a lot at myself for looking at the promos and thinking "who is that one woman, she looks super familiar but I can't place her" and then finding out it's Sara Bareilles

And I just realized that the person I pictured as Sara Bareilles is actually Sharon Van Etten.

My wife heard lots of good things about "Hacks" on HBO, so we watched the first two episodes and ... eh, so far it's like some airplane film you half-watch. Maybe it gets better? Jean Smart is great, but I'm sure so is Judi Dench in a bunch of middle of the road stuff I've never watched. There were a couple of scenes that went on way too long, and it occurred to me that these were the scenes that, were this a theatrical release, would have people rolling in the aisles, but we just sort of watched them in silence.

Also saw the first couple of episodes of "Rutherford Falls" own Peacock, and while not terribly funny it is pretty promising in terms of premise and characters.

my wife is pretty involved in native academia circles, so she and a number of people she knows are watching Rutherford Falls and getting geeked out on spotting the t-shirts, art, and jewelry designed by people they're friends with.

Thanks for the “Hacks” review – I was wondering if worth checking out.

airplane film you half-watch is exactly my speed these days

i watched shtisl the other night and i was a little bit like, this is not trashy enough

i really like Hacks so far!

also i learned last night that the costar Hannah Einbinder is Laraine Newman’s daughter

I only recently learned that as well! Her other child, Spike, is on Los Espookys!

i am also enjoying Girls5ever - first 2 eps were v funny imo

i got through half an ep of Girls5eva and bailed

Same for Rutherford Falls, though i kinda bet it will find its way by the end of getting all its characters together so i'm probably in for s2. fairly certain there has never been a US sitcom focus on contemporary native american culture so that's a great draw but it's just so hacky.

I like the actual show Hacks though! I have been watching an enjoying Jean Smart telling bad jokes on a television since i was a kid, why stop now.

You know what's pretty great btw is Chad on TBS which is pretty clearly a benefactor of PEN15 and Ramy as it is a weird sort of amalgam of both. It's not-so-secretly about male privilege and consistently funny.

I am clearly a Hacks outlier, people love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyuDnI8TJ3I
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/arts/television/chad-nasim-pedrad.html

“I really knew that I could disappear into looking like a little dude in a way that would be helpful to the performance,” she said. “I felt like a 14-year-old boy could get me further from me than had I been in pigtails, as a grown woman, playing a teenage girl.”

She said that it was especially important to her that “Chad” include the home life of an Iranian immigrant family. Going back to the start of her acting career, she said, “All the representation that I did see of Middle Easterners on TV was predominantly negative. Everyone who looked like me was either working actively for or against a terror cell.”

Fox commissioned a pilot episode but passed on the series in the summer of 2016. Pedrad said there were no hard feelings but suggested that the network may not have been fully on board with its central conceit.

“When I first pitched it, there was definitely an emphatic hope that I would change my mind and play his mom,” she said with a laugh.

here's an indicative clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNCyH3Mmpl4

pretty funny! i am still incredibly weirded out by Nasim Pedrad playing a teenage boy, though

Girls 5 Eva's opening "Your boobs are perfect" joke is EXACTLY what I've been missing.

"It must be fun to have hundreds of billions of dollars on hand to patch over the inevitable fallout from your chronic incompetence."

various citations in response

"ones which are part of a wider telco/broadcast offering probably have more stamina to ride it through than standalone offerings. in theory there are huge war chests from mergers to create new content

AT&T took on $170 billion in debt to buy/merge with Warner/DC/HBO and DirectTV, they're probably in a far worse position than standalone offerings."

― huge rant (sic), Thursday, December 17, 2020 11:55 AM (five months ago)

AT&T now looking at spinning off all of WarnerMedia and CNN into a new company in order to do a merger with Discovery.

No matter what becomes of the AT&T-Discovery talks, it’s clear that AT&T is maneuvering to find a new configuration for the assets that it acquired for $84 billion only three years ago — after a hard-fought anti-trust battle with the federal government to complete the deal.

But AT&T has been grappling with the enormous $170 billion-plus debt load racked up by its $48 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2016. That deal proved disastrous from a timing and bottom-line perspective. AT&T acquired the satcaster just as the pay-TV marketplace started to unravel in earnest with the rise of SVOD and free streaming alternatives like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and now Disney Plus, HBO Max and Discovery Plus.

DirecTV has steadily lost subscribers at a fast clip over the past three years and its operations have been a drag on AT&T’s earnings. AT&T put the company on the block last year as part of its debt-reduction campaign but wound up setting a deal in February with private equity giant TPG to spin DirecTV out as a standalone company, in which AT&T owns 70%. The enterprise value of DirecTV in that deal was $16.25 billion — a far cry from the price AT&T paid five years ago.

https://variety.com/2021/biz/news/att-discovery-hbo-cnn-food-network-hgtv-1234974077/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-in-talks-to-combine-media-assets-including-cnn-with-discovery-11621183450

cool cool cool

(muffled screaming)

From a consumer perspective, it’s welcome to see AT&T turfing out on DirecTV & WB, so their hubris is checked and they can focus on what they’re (sort of) good at. I also assume a Warner-Discovery JV will work better as a media company than WB has under AT&T’s management (tho it seems they’ve already f’d it up).

(by which I mean, made big changes that have hurt the studio in ways that may not have happened if Warner had stayed out of AT&T’s hands and then combined w/another media company on its own.)

At least we got this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lVJBsKyTW2c/mqdefault.jpg

lmao