series What series are you watching?
- Thread starter sfoster
- Start date
Finished the 7th and final season.
Glad the ending wasn't stereotypical.
@Nate North thanks for the recommendation. Good stuff.
I like how the camera style is similar to 24. Even the opening credits have a little shake to them.
I finished Three Body Problem... I've gotten into the alien thing since I saw a UFO two summers back.
My opinion on this series? Nonsensical.
Alien species "incapable of lying"... consistently lies about it's appearance everytime we see it. Supposedly lying is so foreign to them they struggle at first to understand the concept... yet they are constantly lying about their looks? What the fuck. PICK A LANE. You can't have it both ways.
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We watched the first episode because a friend is an extra in it.
You're not inspiring me to continue
I might end up being wrong about this, hard to tell at this point, but I'll mount a defense for the 3 Body Problem.
Here's why I think there's a chance that this could turn out to be a great show.
For those who don't know, this is the follow-up project to Game of Thrones. Same showrunners.
Game of Thrones is famous for a lot of things, but to me, there is a main thing about it that most people don't reference.
It was a breakthrough in a sorely needed area, "Long Attention Span Television". When the two showrunners initially pitched GOT to HBO, they asked for an unprecedented deal. A deal that went down in network history. They asked for a guaranteed 2 seasons, regardless of ratings. It was a bold move, for anyone in their position, since it doubles the normal risk that a network takes on a new show, making it twice as likely that HBO would reject their offer.
Why did they do that? It was because they wanted to create a fiction on television with a story arc more akin to what we find in written works that span thousands of pages. They knew before the first episode that GOT would not really be interesting enough to retain viewers until this larger format plot structure had time to get on it's feet. They knew that the show would likely be cancelled before it actually got interesting.
Somewhere along the way, they managed to convince HBO of their logic, which entailed HBO coughing up literally hundreds of millions of dollars before ever seeing a response that could justify it.
When GOT completed it's 8 year run, despite some major issues at the end caused by one single person who couldn't write two books in 7 years. (Steven King and Dean Koontz write two books before breakfast each morning), it set a precedent for complex, long forum fiction on television. It set a precedent for deviation from the "Hook em in the pilot or you're fired" mentality that had always crippled tv plotlines.
I watched GOT season one a few years after release, and honestly, I was bored. Another generic fantasy, so what. Why were all these people that had watched 4 seasons of it telling me that it was the greatest show of all time? And this move near the end of the first season where you had me all invested in a main character and then I suddenly lost all that investment? Stupid, this show is wasting my time.
In hindsight, a decade later, GOT is considered one of the landmark achievements in television history. It swapped out fast, catchy first episode hooks and cheap cliffhangers for a shot at something far more substantive, and mostly succeeded.
Now the people responsible for this are taking a second shot at creating something big. Maybe it won't work, pioneering projects fail more often than those that play it safe. Nasa still looses a rocket here and there, and they've had more than one prior chance to make it work, unlike these showrunners.
I'm not saying I was blown away by the first season of 3BP, but what I am saying is that I felt almost the same way about the first season of GOT, and I feel like I have a rational reason to at least follow through with them for a few years and see what they have in mind. People really had to convince me to watch the first 3 years of GOT, but I'm glad I did.
Here's why I think there's a chance that this could turn out to be a great show.
For those who don't know, this is the follow-up project to Game of Thrones. Same showrunners.
Game of Thrones is famous for a lot of things, but to me, there is a main thing about it that most people don't reference.
It was a breakthrough in a sorely needed area, "Long Attention Span Television". When the two showrunners initially pitched GOT to HBO, they asked for an unprecedented deal. A deal that went down in network history. They asked for a guaranteed 2 seasons, regardless of ratings. It was a bold move, for anyone in their position, since it doubles the normal risk that a network takes on a new show, making it twice as likely that HBO would reject their offer.
Why did they do that? It was because they wanted to create a fiction on television with a story arc more akin to what we find in written works that span thousands of pages. They knew before the first episode that GOT would not really be interesting enough to retain viewers until this larger format plot structure had time to get on it's feet. They knew that the show would likely be cancelled before it actually got interesting.
Somewhere along the way, they managed to convince HBO of their logic, which entailed HBO coughing up literally hundreds of millions of dollars before ever seeing a response that could justify it.
When GOT completed it's 8 year run, despite some major issues at the end caused by one single person who couldn't write two books in 7 years. (Steven King and Dean Koontz write two books before breakfast each morning), it set a precedent for complex, long forum fiction on television. It set a precedent for deviation from the "Hook em in the pilot or you're fired" mentality that had always crippled tv plotlines.
I watched GOT season one a few years after release, and honestly, I was bored. Another generic fantasy, so what. Why were all these people that had watched 4 seasons of it telling me that it was the greatest show of all time? And this move near the end of the first season where you had me all invested in a main character and then I suddenly lost all that investment? Stupid, this show is wasting my time.
In hindsight, a decade later, GOT is considered one of the landmark achievements in television history. It swapped out fast, catchy first episode hooks and cheap cliffhangers for a shot at something far more substantive, and mostly succeeded.
Now the people responsible for this are taking a second shot at creating something big. Maybe it won't work, pioneering projects fail more often than those that play it safe. Nasa still looses a rocket here and there, and they've had more than one prior chance to make it work, unlike these showrunners.
I'm not saying I was blown away by the first season of 3BP, but what I am saying is that I felt almost the same way about the first season of GOT, and I feel like I have a rational reason to at least follow through with them for a few years and see what they have in mind. People really had to convince me to watch the first 3 years of GOT, but I'm glad I did.
We watched the first episode because a friend is an extra in it.
You're not inspiring me to continue
To be fair to the series, there was some cool stuff in it too, and I did finish it.
I'd probably check out s2.
I've started watching Fallout on prime and it's got a strong variety of characters, really enjoyiing it so far.
Definitely the better of these two shows. For context - I didn't play the fallout video games.
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I would say that the original Fallout game was at the very core of my creative inspiration, that and Homeworld. Video games were kind of the opposite of Hollywood in terms of cliques. Hollywood gated out people who weren't good looking or wealthy for the most part, and the gaming industry, at that time at least, had little use for anyone who couldn't code, organize, and create on a budget... so, highly intelligent people only.
While both groups were visual storytellers, the fictions they spun used to be quite different. Today the two industries are much more similar, with corporations homogenizing the games industry into a patchwork of user feedback pandering. In the pioneering days of the interactive screen however, you really got a unique breed of filmmaker, low on money, high on brains, and typically quite fun loving and imaginative.
Here are a few clips from those days or in some cases newer work that's similarly inventive, illustrating the other side of electronic entertainment, now 3x the size of Hollywood. I grew up on Fallout, and still play it to this day, when I have spare time, which is almost never, lol. There's a lot more filmmaking talent in the games industry than most people would imagine, and it's also interesting to just see kind of a parallel dimension version of cinema evolving separately and driven by different origins, goals, and constraints. Fallout is an incredible fiction world, and I doubt it would have ever existed if Hollywood was the sole decider for what entertainment was produced.