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TV series recommendations general (excluding Netflix/ Amazon)

The Good Fight is brilliant, in some ways even better than The Good Wife, the original series from which is was spun-off. I don't know how they were getting away with some of the Trump stuff. Brilliant characters, strong women.

And also features one of the best ever examples in television of breaking the fourth wall, when Nyambi Nyambi's character Jay Dipersia gives a monologue that ends with him saying 'It's time to punch a few Nazis.' Hell, yeah!



"In the episode titled 'The One Where a Nazi Gets Punched', series lawyer Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) and the firm's investigator Jay Dipersia (Nyambi Nyambi) are sent out of the city to a voting booth where a special election is being held. Their job is to represent the Democratic Party and to ensure that lawyers there to represent the Republicans aren't preventing questionable votes from being lodged. In the afternoon, a team of white nationalists dressed in red jackets (quite likely a reference to yellow jacket-clad protesters in France) arrive to aid the Republicans in suppressing the vote.

The episode culminates in a scene with Jay in the men's room talking with the white nationalists organiser, who is very clearly modelled after white supremacist Richard Spencer. The organiser tells Jay, "I'm not an anarchist. I'm an agitator", prompting Dipersia to punch him out cold.

In a complete shift from the show's regular style, the episode breaks the fourth wall with a monologue by Jay. While this is in character, the scene can just as clearly be read as a position statement by the show on the issue of whether punching a Nazi is a break in one's moral code.

We're on the 5th season and am amazed at the quality of it. How the writers got away with it (in general) is astounding. I can only imagine that none of the Trump people have actually seen the show.

The Epstein episode was a standout - such a difficult subject but they managed to tell a compelling tale and send up conspiracy theories quite deftly.
 
Have you watched Douglas Is Cancelled on ITVX?
I highly recommend that. I mentioned it earlier in the thread - for anyone late to the party, joining this thread now and wondering what it's about:

Douglas is Cancelled - on ITVX

"TV news legend Douglas Bellowes faces a career crisis when he's overheard making a sexist joke at a wedding."

Starring Hugh Bonneville as Douglas Bellowes, who comes across as a bit hapless and out of his depth, who seemingly represents a generation of men who's a bit bewildered by the societal changes whereby the kind of risque humour that was once acceptable is no longer, and there's a sense of panicked fear and incredulity about the possible repercussions as the crisis builds.

Karen Gillan is brilliant as his co-presenter Madeline, who's quite mercurial, a simultaneously forceful and determined yet vulnerable character. Alex Kingston is also good as Douglas' wife as as Ben Miles as Toby.

It starts off as more kind of sitcom, but becomes darker as it goes along.
 
We're on the 5th season and am amazed at the quality of it. How the writers got away with it (in general) is astounding. I can only imagine that none of the Trump people have actually seen the show.

The Epstein episode was a standout - such a difficult subject but they managed to tell a compelling tale and send up conspiracy theories quite deftly.
Yeah, The Good Fight is superlative television drama.

I guess they could argue First Amendment free speech rights and also that it was intended as satire (like SNL gets away with stuff, is often close to the bone), I wondered if using the animations and songs intended to bolster the satire argument, just in case? But still... am amazed so much of certain scripts (Trump stuff and yeah Epstein) survived being legalled. Maybe Trump's people hadn't seen it. When The Good Wife then The Good Fight first came out, they used proxies for well-known people and companies, like Chumhum for Facebook, and the internet right wing controversialist guy [I forget character's name] who was obviously a Milo-type youtuber.
 
Yeah, The Good Fight is superlative television drama.

I guess they could argue First Amendment free speech rights and also that it was intended as satire (like SNL gets away with stuff, is often close to the bone), I wondered if using the animations and songs intended to bolster the satire argument, just in case? But still... am amazed so much of certain scripts (Trump stuff and yeah Epstein) survived being legalled. Maybe Trump's people hadn't seen it. When The Good Wife then The Good Fight first came out, they used proxies for well-known people and companies, like Chumhum for Facebook, and the internet right wing controversialist guy [I forget character's name] who was obviously a Milo-type youtuber.

The Good Wife was enjoyable but not a patch on The Good Fight, the former seemed to tread more safer ground. Would highly recommend the spin-off but it adds an extra (but not essential) layer to have seen TGW.
 
I find modern life too complicated. I don’t like interfaces. I don’t like buying a new thing then finding I have to learn new things in order to use it. Then those skills becoming obsolete. I was really good at Windows 95. I was really good at texting with the number pad. Really fast and accurate. But now I get fed up logging into each TV app, finding the user, clicking that, working out the platform’s interface, finding the programme, finding the right episode.

I want to press play.
You are the kabbess and I claim my twelve hundred old pence
 
again, one episode, people screaming at each other for 30 minutes. Turned it off. It was stressful.

Everybody seems to love it though.
Exactly. I was stressed to fuck.

Also, I could see everyone was very emotional about stuff. But I had no idea what. And I had the subtitles on, but it didn’t help. It was random high emotions, 60 per second, for the whole episode. Relentlessly.

I got that a guy was trying to run his brother’s business up to the standards he felt it should be run to. I got that bit. And fair play to him. But the rest was just high emotion interaction after high emotion interaction, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. On and on. I was exhausted by the end, and really none the wiser about what I’d been through.

I think we watched Gone Fishing afterwards to decompress.
 
Our TV remote has five buttons on it. FIVE. A massive central button, two marked as “left” and “right”, a volume button (that can be toggled up or down) and a channel button (that can also be toggled up and down, and which we NEVER USE because we don’t watch broadcast TV).

We’ve had this TV for five years now. FIVE. YEARS.

To do anything except adjust the volume, you just press the central button and scroll left right and press the central button again. YOU CAN DO IT ALL LIKE THAT. All of it. All.

After five years of ownership, what percentage of occasions do you think maybe she still asks me how to pick the program she wants? No, bigger. Bigger.

Then when we talk to other people, she tells them she can’t control the TV because it’s “too complicated”. This woman wrote a 30 page biomedical paper about the workings of a bacterium I can’t even pronounce, which another researcher who cited it referred to as “excellent”. Most of the words in that paper had more syllables than this remote control had buttons. Which, let me remind you, is FIVE.
 
Exactly. I was stressed to fuck.

Also, I could see everyone was very emotional about stuff. But I had no idea what. And I had the subtitles on, but it didn’t help. It was random high emotions, 60 per second, for the whole episode. Relentlessly.

I got that a guy was trying to run his brother’s business up to the standards he felt it should be run to. I got that bit. And fair play to him. But the rest was just high emotion interaction after high emotion interaction, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. On and on. I was exhausted by the end, and really none the wiser about what I’d been through.

I think we watched Gone Fishing afterwards to decompress.
It's a bit like urban, come to think of it
 
Our TV remote has five buttons on it. FIVE. A massive central button, two marked as “left” and “right”, a volume button (that can be toggled up or down) and a channel button (that can also be toggled up and down, and which we NEVER USE because we don’t watch broadcast TV).

We’ve had this TV for five years now. FIVE. YEARS.

To do anything except adjust the volume, you just press the central button and scroll left right and press the central button again. YOU CAN DO IT ALL LIKE THAT. All of it. All.

After five years of ownership, what percentage of occasions do you think maybe she still asks me how to pick the program she wants? No, bigger. Bigger.

Then when we talk to other people, she tells them she can’t control the TV because it’s “too complicated”. This woman wrote a 30 page biomedical paper about the workings of a bacterium I can’t even pronounce, which another researcher who cited it referred to as “excellent”. Most of the words in that paper had more syllables than this remote control had buttons. Which, let me remind you, is FIVE.
Thing is, in my family I’m the one who has to do the TV. Find the shows. Work the internet banking. Download the apps. Explain why her phone isn’t doing something. Or doing something it didn’t used to. Or reinstall things when they crash. All that.

And I don’t want that role. I hate it. I don’t want to remember logins. I don’t want to explain the difference between wifi and data. Again. I don’t want to find the document on the laptop she asked me to save. I don’t want any of that.

I want to press play. That’s all. Play.
 
I join up every few months when I can get the month's free trial. I watch all movies I would otherwise have to pay for, not actually many I want to see, then cancel when the free month is up.
I’ve got Amazon Prime Spain ( they deliver to Portugal) which is 49.99 euro a year , about £42 . Think I watch a film or series on it about once in two months .
 
When did the TV recommendations thread become a thinly disguised relationship counselling one?

Anyway, back on topic, I’m quite annoyed that Mrs Loom nixed Shogun as “boring” when she was looking at Facebook Reels of huge joints of meat being sliced on her phone instead of paying attention to the subtitles on the big screen. I really want to watch the rest of it, but I’m effectively limited to an hour of TV drama per day.
 
Has anyone seen The Franchise yet? Rave preview but then bitter review in the Graun, started on 21st I think. Iannucci.
 
I feel we need an urban75 club wherein we watch TV together while our collective spouses don’t watch TV together while pretending that they are watching TV together
Prime has that 'watch club' facility or whatever it's called where you can watch the same thing at the same time as friends/family. If you did a thread on Shogun and got other people to watch along, you could all chat in the thread it would be like the urban equivalent of Googlebox.
 
Prime has that 'watch club' facility or whatever it's called where you can watch the same thing at the same time as friends/family. If you did a thread on Shogun and got other people to watch along, you could all chat in the thread it would be like the urban equivalent of Googlebox.
It’s a good start, but it doesn’t work unless Prime also has a ‘pretend to watch’ facility for all the spouses to simultaneously not watch the thing that they have spent the last hour negotiating to see.
 
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