Be Excellent To Each Other

It's all downhill from there, dude.

I totally love Suburgatory. So funny and silly.

Suits is pretty damned good, isn't it?

I'm waiting for Joan's to watch S1 so I can start S2 with him!

So it seems, halfway through season 3 and i'm getting a bit bored.

I concur. We started watching this about a week ago and we're already on S2. Really enjoying it.

Harvey is troubling my "top ten awesome people on TV" list.

We're halfway through Season 2, and we'd have to agree with you here. Very good find.

Amusingly, when we're stuck for something to watch Mrs K just asks "what are your imaginary friends watching?" and I dig out some recommendations from this thread.

Because of this thread, I now have far more TV than I could possibly watch in my limited free time.

Read WH40k novels then.

We had just about caught up with the backlog over Christmas, and already have a huge mountain to watch again.
That's just the shows we've started on, not including the ones that we want to watch...

http://www.cracked.com/blog/108-answers-to-losts-supposedly-unanswered-questions_p1/

Some guy has tried (and failed, I think) to answer all the unanswered stuff in Lost.

The truth is the show was about the characters. It was a vehicle for character development as well as being about wondering what the hell was going on. The fun in Lost was wondering what it all meant, not revealing what it meant and by not really anwsering most of the questions this article makes it clear that it didn't really mean anything. The finale tied up loose ends by finishing off the remaining character arcs. It also said "oh, by the way, the island was magic".

The thing is, whilst I get that the show isn't like the original Prisoner (which had a far more baffling finale but was fully explainable without 'magic'), I think people felt cheated because it wasn't presented as just a show where you wonder whats going on. How many times were random things given lots of emphasis only for them to be forgotton later? Characters knowingly looking at each other over random facts? Plus we had interviews with the writers giving the impression that they knew where it was headed. They obviously didn't, which is fine, but it didn't need to be done in such a dishonest way.

In retrospect you can I think you can keep this up for a couple of seasons but after a while questions that are sign posted and then forgotton to be replaced by yet more random stuff can really grate. That's why the first two seasons are the best for me. That moment when you realise that Desmond is in the hatch at the start of season 2 is one of my favourite TV experiences ever.

When we got to emo-beardy Jack and his boring tatoos it wasn't the same for me. Still good TV, but it probably ran for too long.

I picked up Lost quite late, there were at least 2 seasons out maybe 3. We used to watch it one episode after another at the start, as did my brother and his wife.

The end was disappointing and I agree many things that looked interesting at the time were never touched on again. They set at expectation that all would be revealed at the end, as it got half way through the last season it was clear that this was not going to happen so I was sort of prepared for a rubbish ending

Very late as usual on this one, but a colleague of mine brought in the Sopranos Season One boxed set for me to watch after I expressed a passing interest. I'd not seen a second of the show before and wasn't sure if I'd like it, particularly if it was going to glamourise Mafia life. Halfway through though and I'm pleasantly surprised by it - only one dull episode and the others have ticked along nicely.

I have to fast-forward past the intro every time though.. god it's dull.

I liked the ending to Lost, as I had accepted long before that there was no possible way they could explain everything satisfactorily, so I was glad they didn't even try.

What weirded me out was the sheer amount of people who incorrectly thought it meant the entire thing was the afterlife.

I get what you mean about he unexplained Facts thing. I read the Lost wiki at the time, and at the end of each episode summary was an Unanswered Questions section that just boggled the mind as to what hadn't been dealt with.

Probably the finest and most intense four episodes of any TV show I've seen in ages. Mindblown.

Marred only by

Breaking Bad is finally getting a blu ray release in the UK in June. All except the second half of season 5. I'll be waiting for the inevitable boxset.

I think it is the best TV show.

It sure is the best TV show - I find it very hard to find fault with it.

The West Wing calls you both fools.

The Wire then proceeds to shoot The West Wing and Breaking Bad, before leaving the corpses in abandoned houses.

I hear people telling me that The Wire is excellent and the best thing ever, but it sounds so... grim. I'd rather not spend my precious leisure time watching something like that when I can get the same feeling from watching the news!

Nope the wire is pure Awesome, but still not as good as the West Wing.

Trailer for Hannibal is up

http://www.sonypicturestelevision.com/l ... nhannibal/

But grim, yes?

It's not too grim.. but it doesn't pull any punches. I'd recommend at least watch teh first season, and stick with it. It burns very slowly.

Not too grim.

There are plenty of scenes in bars and drunken camaraderie, and loads of jokes and funny parts too. Plus some of the coolest characters ever.

I developed genuine affection for many of the characters in teh first series, and really should start on series two. After BSG series three and House of Cards.

House of Cards US has continued to be most excellent, by the way.

That sounds quite a lot like Grim... to me.

POTW!

So you can only derive entertainment pleasure from super happy fun time shows? That's kind of odd dude.

It's odd that you've made that leap from "I'm at a place in my life where I'd rather not be watching horrible things done by horrible people" to "Only kids TV for me". You shouldn't try to boil people down so quickly. There are degrees, dude.

You know what though, I could happily watch nothing but Abney and Teal for a good long while.

DavpAz! Fetch the special chair and the duct tape!

Nah. Too many drinks being drunk, not enough being randomly thrown all over the place.

Unfortunately, Onóra has moved on and now only wants to watch 'Sarah and Duck'.

Which is also cool.

Zero Hour looks to be a good show, Nazis, maybe time travel and clocks

What's not to like?

The boys are 6 and 4 and still love Abeney an dteal. Neep is the bestest thing ever.

They're also now into "Old Jack's Boat" in a big way - proper old school story telling, Jackanory-esque.

That one gets "No Jack. No Jack" when it comes on.

She's possibly a little bit little for it.

Well, yes, that would be odd if either of us had actually said those things; but we didn't. You just made some vague allusion to 'stuff like that' and my super happy fun time line was just supposed to represent anything purely light hearted, I wasn't specific accusing of you consuming nothing but Sesame Street or whatever (and I genuinely apologise if it came across like that).

To try and make this into a wider and more constructive point, I personally can happily find escapism and entertainment from quality fiction based purely on that quality, and I do find it a bit odd that something which had characters behaving 'horribly' would stop someone from enjoying said entertainment. I mean yes, there's degrees within that obviously (a film that was just two hours of some guys beating the crap out of each other with nothing else going on would obviously be disturbing and, eventually, boring) but it's pretty safe to assume that, in the case of something like The Wire, if HBO did go mad and put out my putative 'Five Guys Hurt Each Other for a While' show that practically everyone in the world wouldn't be raving about it so that's obviously not what's happening there. Practically everything that's any good has people behaving horribly in it; otherwise surely you've just got some people being nice to each other all the time and that's not going to go anywhere interesting very quickly.

So, is it grim?

Saying that, I've just this second finished watching episode one of Dead Set on Netflix and that's very horrible. I loved it. Probably shouldn't be watching it at work.

Actually, therein lies the problem. Entertainment at home has to go through the 'Will MrsPaz like this?' filter. MrsPaz will most likely not like The Wire. MrsPaz will most likely not like Dead Set either.

The things we do for love.

Anal, Roy, anal.

I personally don't think so. Obviously the set up of the entire thing has some grimness baked into it given that crime and drug dealing are the initial main motivations for everyone involved; but it quickly delves down to the character level at which point you get, as Curiosity said, "scenes in bars and drunken camaraderie, and loads of jokes and funny parts too". So, yeah, there are characters acting 'badly' at point throughout but not only is far from unrelenting nastiness, even the negative traits and behaviours are so nuanced and believable that it comes across more as 'compellingly flawed characters acting human' than 'horrible arseholes shitting up my TV'.



That's totally fair enough, I'm lucky that Mrs B is happy to watch near anything as long as it's genuinely well made/written etc. Mind you, she'll also happily watch a whole load of utter shite that I wouldn't touch wit a bargepole (Bones, Law & Order: Terrible Subtitle, Revenge, etc) so maybe she just has no critical faculty whatsoever. Which would explain her being with me I suppose...

I work on the basis of whether or not I like the lead characters. Whether the show's light-hearted and witty or dark and unpleasant, as long as I can root for whoever's in it, I'm good. Which is the main reason I couldn't take to Breaking Bad at all.

Have you watched Banshee?
None of the main characters are entirely likeable, but it's great fun.

Quit your job.

WTF is the name change about? "Cras"? You sound like a rapper