Tag: television

Mindhunter is a damn good show

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last two weeks, I’ve watched all of Mindhunter on Netflix.  That’s as pretty close to binge watching from me as things are going to get these days, as by the fifth hour of anything, I’m usually apt to passing out in my recliner, no matter how good of a show it is.

But after watching both seasons of Mindhunter, I have to say that it’s a pretty excellent show from beginning to end.  Often times, I feel that shows tend to start too slowly, and as I get into a show by the midway point, I have one of those revelation moments involving something seen at the start of the first episode that I might have to go re-watch to remember.

That wasn’t the case with Mindhunter, which starts off with a metaphorical and literal bang, and establishes characters quickly and begins their development immediately, that it’s easy to become interested right away.  And it’s the characters that I think are the strength of the show as a whole, because there are three core characters, and it’s really easy to become fairly interested in all of them, whether it’s collectively as the Behavioral Sciences Unit, or their own personal lives.

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GLOW, season 3: the setup season

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just finished watching GLOW, season 3 on Netflix.  In a nutshell, it was an okay season that dealt with some heavy-handed topics, but feels like it’s straying away from everything that made GLOW, GLOW, and that everything in the season was mostly to set up for future seasons of the show.

In some degree, it’s smart that they’ve sowed the seeds necessary in order for them to have future seasons of GLOW, but at the same time, they kind of sacrificed a lot of the present in order to prepare for a future that doesn’t exist yet, as (to my knowledge) there is no future season(s) of GLOW yet ordered.  If I’m a betting man, I bet there will be, but frankly in this day and age, it’s hard to ever be certain whenever it comes to the futures of any show, because every show is one actor scandal, writing controversy or some executive going bonkers from getting killed off, regardless of if they’re already nicely wrapped up, or if the plot is as open-ended as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

But still, I had a really hard time getting into this season as I did the previous two, because I think that the plot bounced around a little too much throughout the season.  Sure, it’s good to shine the spotlight on all of the girls in various times, but when the day is over, the show really is generally centralized around Sam, Ruth and Debbie.  And as potentially interesting the lives of Bash, Rhonda, Carmen, Cherry and the others are, ten episodes just isn’t really enough time to get into everyone, and ultimately, I felt as if the show couldn’t really decide very well which plots to stick with, and was just kind of all over the place.

And for a show that’s technically about women wrestlers, the show strayed pretty far from the wrestling itself and touched on some pretty heavy handed topics, such as homophobia, racial/religious awareness as well as eating disorders.  I’m not saying that such things shouldn’t be touched on and fleshed out, because they are most definitely very important things in today’s society, but again, going back to the fact that there were just ten episodes, I don’t think there was simply enough time to really get in on all of them, as well as try and be remotely cohesive to the rest of the show.

Ultimately, maybe it was just not being in the right frame of mind to watch, but I did think it got better as it went on.  It was a little slow starting, but did pick up a little momentum along the way.  I don’t think it’s the best season of the three, and I still maintain that it felt like they were spending more time planting seeds for the future rather than being in the present, it was still alright, and as I often say when it comes to Alison Brie, it’s very hard to not fall a little bit of in love with her, when she’s on her game, and thankfully the show made sure to give her enough screen time to get in her shining moments.

And hopefully for the writers of S3, there will be a season 4 announced soon, so that the seeds they’ve planted actually have future seasons to grow into.  And hopefully then, they won’t spend so much time re-preparing for the future that they won’t be able to shine in the present.

Praise for Amazon’s The Boys

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It’s not often that I find shows that grab me, and really elicit a must-see response.  A lot of the time, I spend an inordinate amount of my evenings watching a lot of things that are okay, enjoyable to differing degrees, but when the day is over, they’re not things that I genuinely think I could probably watch again, or be willing to tell people to watch, and let me know when you watch it so that I can watch it with you, kind of shows.  I watch a lot of slice of life types of television, because they’re often times quick, simple, and are enjoyable to a degree where I can spend 30-60 minutes, and then walk away and not feel like I’ve wasted too much of my time.

Out of the blue, my brother texts me and asks if I’ve seen The Boys.  Nope, never heard of it.  But the timing was good, because I had just finished season 2 of Kakegurui, the gambling anime, which I had watched as something of a pallet-cleanser after the fairly lackluster Jessica Jones season 3.  So since all the stars were aligned for me to start something new, I gave it a whirl.

At the very first inkling of the plot coming together, revolving primarily around the corruption of superheroes backed by corporate, I was pretty much engaged.  My brother said it took him about five episodes to really get into it, but it latched its hooks into me after just one.  The sheer idea of compromised superheroes who are just as much shitheads as the vast majority of the population is an intriguing plot, and I was committed to watching more of it.

I have to say that I’m kind of impressed with Amazon’s batting average, as it pertains to shows its released.  Granted, I’ve really only delved into stuff like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Electric Dreams but as far as I’m concerned, for a network that is trying to shake itself out of the shadows of Netflix, The Boys is a solid contributor to helping them achieve such lofty ambitions.

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Jessica Jones S3: The Insufferable Adventures of Trish Walker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I personally would rank Jessica Jones to be on the lower tier of the Netflix Marvel Universe, as long as it has that Marvel nameplate at the front of it, I’ll still inevitably watch it.  Considering the fact that I’ve watched everything from Daredevil, the Defenders and even Iron Fist, I had to do due diligence and finish up with Jessica Jones; especially since this was truly the swan song last of the Netflix Marvel series, thanks to Disney starting their own service, this was really going to be the last time we’re probably going to get to see any of the Defenders any time soon.

Overall, I didn’t much care for season 3 of Jessica Jones.  Frankly, it could barely be called Jessica Jones, since 90% of the season revolved around the insufferable Trish Walker and her ascent into becoming the ultra-lame Hellcat, although they don’t actually use the name at all throughout the show, except for one episode title that most people don’t actually read while they’re in the throes of binge-watching a show.

Don’t get me wrong, despite my general ambivalence for the season as a whole, I still recognize the show as still having strong writing, with fairly complex and intriguing storytelling, it’s just that I didn’t like particular character(s), but ultimately the goal of storytelling is to elicit some sort of response from the viewer.  By that regard, Trish was written very well, because it was extremely easy for me to dislike her and all her insufferable traits as a person.  But it was almost delving into X-Pac Heat, to where I was just getting sick of the character, but not quite to where I was willing to walk away from too much Trish.

But I digress a little; if not for Trish becoming so insufferable, it probably doesn’t help the story arcs of Malcolm or Jeri Hogarth, because ordinarily they’re pretty pedestrian characters on their own, but seeing them after 15 minute chunks of Trish bullshit makes them welcome reprieves, and storylines worth caring about, that is, until they collide and intertwine with Trish eventually.

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Black Mirror S5: I think we’re out of ideas

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure it’s a shock to those who know me, but I’m pretty staunch about the order in which I watch things.  Nowadays, content is released so frequently and there’s so much of it, there have literally been nights where all I do are surf through previews on Netflix and just add things To My List, but then don’t actually watch anything, because I’ve just spent 45 minutes combing through content and now it’s 11 pm and I need to think about going to bed.

Black Mirror however, is one of the few shows in which I’ll pretty much drop whatever else I’m watching and fast track it to the front of the line.  It’s a series that I’ve often extoled my general love and admiration for, and all the way up to Bandersnatch, I’ve always been a fan of the risks they take and the creativity they express when making the show.  The writing is strong, and the acting is often consistently strong, so it’s an easy show for me to have fallen in love with.

Season 5 of the show, understandably “short” on account of the fact that Bandersnatch kind of folds into it, was but a mere three episodes outside of the aforementioned choose your own adventure.  As a whole, I enjoyed the season, as I often did with all preceding seasons, but by the time I got done with it, I couldn’t help but have this sentiment that, I think the show is running out of ideas.

I stumbled across this specific article when Googling the show after watching the season, which is often times the norm after I watch a show, and it basically mirrors my exact thoughts about the season; the writing is still strong, the acting is still good, but in terms of storyline, the plots aren’t really as … innovative as episodes from earlier seasons have been.

Make no mistake, Striking Vipers is the unmistakable star of the season; every season has one, like how U.S.S. Callister shone through season 4, and Nosedive was for season 3, and at least for me, White Bear and Fifteen Million Merits were for seasons 2 and 1, respectively.  It was the one episode that wasn’t just the most outlandish, as lots of Black Mirror plots kind of are expected to me, but it’s one that provokes a tremendous amount of thought and debate on how the viewer(s) should feel.

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It could only have ended poorly

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the third grade, I used to “read” Choose Your Own Adventure books by deliberately making the worst possible decisions possible in order to get to a The End as fast as I could.  And as soon as I got myself killed, about to be killed, or in a position to eventually die, I declared the book “read” and entered it into my Pizza Hut-sponsored Book-It reading list, where every 4-5 finished books meant a certificate for a free Pizza Hut pan pizza, which meant a perfect excuse for my parents to take me to Pizza Hut, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to my childhood obesity.

I abused the hell out of this system, until my teacher caught onto my little system, and eventually prohibited me from reading anymore Choose Your Own Adventure books, at least as far as the Book-It program was concerned.  I eventually began reading them more thoroughly, and enjoyed a vast number of them throughout their publication, but the point is, the whole thing started with me reading like six pages of the book in total, and deliberately making all the worst choices, in order to get to an ending, regardless of if it were good or bad.

So that being said, Game of Thrones.  The series is now, officially over.  For better or worse, considering the putrid manner in which the series ended.  I’m still mentally deliberating on where GoT’s ending falls in comparison to other shitty endings out there, and I think I’m a place where it’s somewhere in between Mass Effect 3, and the series finale to Dexter.  Needless to say, that puts in pretty rarified air of being especially terrible, and a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that all aforementioned series’ churned along swimmingly at various points and collected large numbers of dedicated fans, sucking up emotions and commitment and dedication for several years, before taking all their hopes and dreams for a good ending, stabbing them in the heart, boating them into a hurricane and synthesizing them with machines.

I mean, I can’t say for a second that I didn’t see this coming.  Endings are the hardest thing in the world for any story, and the list of popular, epic and legendary stories that have shitty endings is longer than the equator.  Plus, the dumpster fire that episodes 4 and 5 steered the story going into the finale all but sealed the series’ fate as just another story with a shitty ending incoming, because they simply went past the point of no return in episode 5.  The question really was, how shitty the finale was going to be, because at this point, the vast majority of people I knew who watched the show had all resigned themselves to the obvious notion that it was going to suck.

And boy, did it ever suck.  I found myself predicting just about everything that occurred in the episode like 10 seconds before it happened, like particular characters saying certain things, doing certain actions, or predicting very obvious outcomes.  Getting back to the point of talking about Choose Your Own Adventure books, it legitimately felt like the entire season 8 was one live-action Choose Your Own Adventure story, where there was one linear plot that consumes the majority of the season, but when it comes time to start winding down, there was literally nothing but a whole bunch of shitty and rushed endings, where not a single one of them is capable of making the viewer not seem I’m not mad, just disappointed.

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Let’s talk about Game of Thrones

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Normally, I haven’t really posted much about Game of Thrones.  It’s one of those properties that I really love, and I often times don’t really write about the things that I really love until they’re over, be it being between books, seasons, or a definitive end of some sort.

But with the show winding down, and that we’re getting to the point where the remaining episodes presumably are all going to be epics in their own right if episode 3: The Long Night was any indication, I’m finding it difficult to contain all the things swirling around in my head about GoT, and by the time the next episode rolls around, I’ll probably lose my shit if I don’t take the time to do any writing about it.

Plus, speaking of writing, it’s pretty clear to me that George R.R. Martin isn’t actually ever going to finish the actual book series,* so as far as I’m concerned, the tv show is pretty much shaping the end of the series, definitively.

*Even if Martin finishes, I have little faith that the evolution of the show will mutate all of the thought processes that went into the original five books, to where he’ll deliberately alter and swing the story (and not in good ways) to keep book followers on their toes, and there’s no way he’s not going to be picturing Kit Harrington, Sophie Turner, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey or any other actor in his head when he’s writing key characters.  The books will DJ Tanner Wrestle tragically as a result, and it’s at this point where I’ll bust out the phrase “Dextering” again, named after the shitty way Jeff Lindsay steered the Dexter book series long after the television show started and ended.

SO, the Long Night – needless to say, this is where I write my disclaimer about how there will be spoilers, but also the fact that I’m still offline, and there’s no definitive timeline to when I’ll ever be back online, because I never have any time, and even if I did, by this point, I’ll have nearly four years’ worth of posts to back fill into the brog, which is a Sisyphus’ boulder in its own right.

SO, the Long Night – fucking incredible.  Kind of everything I had imagined the inevitable, eight-year build up to the battle between man and dead would be.  I can’t really think of anything that I was legitimately disappointed in, and despite the fact that a lot of my GoT death pool predictions did not come true, I still felt a sense of great satisfaction when it was all over.

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