TV Series On The Television

[Mothra]

Pretty nice upscale of the Space: Above & Beyond pilot:

[beatbandito]

we just post about all shows here now, right?

Silo is bad. Bad decisions are made for dumb reasons and obvious connections are never drawn. The series starts with lies in the place of what could just be mystery, and ends with information meaningless without a second season.

It's not terrible moment-to-moment. But it fooled me into thinking that it might actually have a resolution, and don't want anyone else to fall for the same thing.

[Upthorn]

Scavenger's Reign is an amazing animated series about a group of cargo haulers stranded on an alien world with a hostile biome.
It has similar vibes to Raised By Wolves but significantly less dark. Also significantly less sense that everything is of cosmic significance.

Keep watch for all the weird little dudes in the background! Puffy balloon crabs, weird monkey sharks, that one guy with the eyes, and especially those birds that you keep thinking are just part of the trees!

[KingRoyal]

This actually looks pretty good, though I'm wondering how much of it will survive the adaptation from the Chinese setting to the US

[Mothra]

Latest season of For All Mankind just sorta kept on the trajectory the show’s been on since season 3, adding more and more soap opera bullshit, and less and less alt history stuff.

I appreciated the attempt at a company town/exploited labor/unionizing storyline, it’s just like, shit, I wish it wasn’t so fucking boring and cheaply dramatic. Also just amazed we’ve gotten this far in the show and they can’t be bothered to explore the russian side of things in any meaningful way but “they’re always scheming”.

All that said, Krys Marshall continues to carry this show on her back like Hera herself.

[Thad]

I'm not caught up on Fargo but I watched the first episode of the latest season and my favorite thing is that it opens with people in a school auditorium violently attacking each other like someone's released a rage virus and a woman trying to escape with her daughter and I'm like "Jesus Christ, what happened?" and then you find out it's a school board meeting in 2019 and no further context is necessary.

[Destynova]

Been watching Upload and I do like how there are little world building things outside Lakeview even if not all of them are really delved into. The cow actually creeped me out.

[Thad]

I feel like with Fargo season 5 Hawley challenged himself to make a season with an unusually low bodycount but still have it feel more disturbingly violent than all the rest.

It's the domestic abuse. This season's villain, Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), is many things, but above all else he's an abusive husband. That specific choice of subject matter makes this season more uncomfortable than the bloodbaths of past seasons, or at least it did for me. (Even if they know how to pull back, at times, to add a bit of detachment and unreality to cushion the blow just a little. Most notably with an extended scene involving puppets.)

I'd say this is also the first notable work of fiction I've seen that's about the Trump Administration. Trump himself is only onscreen briefly and only directly mentioned a couple of times, but he permeates the story. Season 5 is about Trump, just as surely as season 2 was about Nixon. Trump is the reason people like Roy are emboldened, the reason they feel their time has come.

And another major element of the season is the clash between Roy and Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the season's other villain, which reflects the tension Trump's brought about between the two major planks of the Republican Party, the nativists and the plutocrats. It's about a clash of cultures that don't understand or respect each other -- and it rivals Game of Thrones in how frequently somebody who's used to being in control walks into a situation he doesn't understand and faces a swift and brutal correction to his assumptions.

With the show's usual deft touch, Lorraine is introduced as the head of the country's biggest debt management company. That tells you everything about her in one line. She's the devil. But ultimately she's the devil you know, the lesser evil, the enemy of my enemy; by the end of the season you come down on her side and even root for her a couple of times.

Like this one.



But she's not the good guy, and it feels uncomfortable rooting for her. And it should. As a metaphor for rooting for the establishment to defeat the insurgents, it's not a question of "who's worse?", it's a question of "who's the immediate threat and who's the long-term one?" The show doesn't directly address that it's people like Lorraine who empower people like Roy, but it doesn't have to. It makes it very clear that she never would have had any interest in stopping him if he hadn't fucked with her family. And even then she takes a lot of convincing.

Leigh is fantastic in the role, playing it with that low purr (lion pun!). The cast is stacked as always, and she gives my second-favorite performance.

My favorite is this season's lead, Juno Temple, as Dorothy Lyon (because we're still doing Wizard of Oz references, and for more ironic wordplay when people keep calling her a tiger). I liked her on Ted Lasso but she's fucking fantastic here, showing real range. Fargo is, ultimately, a story about facing darkness and coming home in the end, and Dot shows that contrast more starkly than any protagonist we've seen before. Dot is many things -- a hyper-capable badass, a survivor who's been through hell, but also a suburban wife and mother who has a normal life and is genuinely happy and in love.

There's that speech in Kill Bill where Bill taunts the Bride that her marriage would have been a lie, an act; that she's an assassin and that's who she is even if she pretends to be something else. Roy says something similar to Dot, that she's always been here and that other life was a dream.

Temple shows us that they're wrong, that that Minnesotan wife and mother is who she really is. It's the life she's chosen and it's not an act; it's her real life. That stuff in her past, that's part of who she is too. But it's not what defines her. Nobody's past has to define them, not even a 500-year-old sin eater.

...okay yeah some shit gets weird this season. But not any weirder than the aliens in season 2.

I think this is also the first season that doesn't directly reference any past events or characters from the earlier seasons or the movie. At least, not in-universe; there are a whole lot of moments that directly reference, and intentionally subvert, things we've seen before. The first episode has a kidnapping scene that draws directly from the movie. The finale uses the same "it looks like everything's over but then surprise! somebody shows up looking to revenge-murder a major character" trope as the last two seasons, but instead of fighting him Dot has him sit down for dinner and they have one of Fargo's great philosophical conversations that sort of bring the whole arc home, and she convinces him that he doesn't have to do the things he insists he has to do, he can make a different choice.

I think Hawley's been feeling how fraught Fargo's relationship with law enforcement is these past couple seasons. Fargo followed the "hero cop protagonist" formula from the movie through the first three seasons. Like a lot of people, he seems to have taken a second look at the implications of that trope. Season 4 doesn't have any good cops. Season 5 has two (plus two FBI agents who seem to at least be trying to do the right thing but don't do a particularly good job of it, in part because they don't listen to the two good cops), but the overwhelming majority of cops this season aren't just bad, they're just about the evilest motherfuckers you can imagine. Plus, by the end of the season, we're down to zero good cops; one dies and the other quits to get a job as private security. This season the cops and the criminal syndicate are one and the same.

All in all, ten years and five seasons in Fargo's still got stuff to say, and still puts together a fantastically talented cast to say it. Cripes, I haven't even mentioned Dave Foley or Joe Keery.

[Friday]

Fargo followed the "hero cop protagonist" formula from the movie through the first three seasons. Like a lot of people, he seems to have taken a second look at the implications of that trope.

I've never seen Fargo (it's on my list, though) so maybe I'm talking out of turn here, but:

I think the reason we keep seeing the "hero cop" trope in media, even (and especially) in media made by leftists, is despite knowing the truth, leftists desperately want the "good guy cop" idea to be true. We've been exposed to so much copaganda throughout our lives that it's not even funny, and even today we have Paw Patrol, which is a fucking copaganda show aimed at 5 year olds. This isn't random. It was done with intent and on purpose the same way the US Military did a fuckton of propaganda after Vietnam. And it worked, both times.

Now everyone thinks the Military is some sort of Heroes Hall of Ultimate Sacrificers when instead it's just a shitload of assholes and poor kids with no other life options. And the exact same thing is true for cops, minus the poor kids with no other life options part. And yes, that needle is finally (FINALLY) starting to move just the slightest bit as cops continue to fire their weapons in all directions at all times, except when they aim at black folks. But the seductive idea of "actually cops are heroic people who have given up their lives in order to make us all safer" is still wedged firmly in everyone's mind, like it or not. Even in the minds of people who fucking know better. They desperately want cops to be heroes, want it bad, want it so much that they will create fictional worlds populated by them.

And in the meantime, in real life, what do cops do when a shooter is in a school gunning down children? When the chance to be that hero cop comes along? What do they do? They stand outside and listen to the screams.

[Mongrel]

I think we all understand that there's almost certainly got to be some sort of organized and well-resourced group, probably government-run, and which isn't, you know, THE ARMY, to keep actual crime and violence in check, because we will never have *no* crime, that there IS a role in society for people who are capable, intelligent, and courageous to act as their brothers' keepers. So like, the purely theoretical ideal of a hero cop is fine. We have heroes of all kinds, in all sorts of unlikely ways and places, so why not heroes among people doing potentially-dangerous community work.

And yes, what we have in most places are armed guards for the rich, and in some cases the government, formed from the usual recruiting pool for such people: violent, stupid, venal, intensely tribal, petty, power-hungry, cowardly idiots with poor prospects in life.

But there are still well-intentioned idiots who join the police with the idea of being a hero. On rare occasions sometimes they even do do something like that, but it's almost an accident that a member of the goon squad can be heroic. Copaganda is, as the name intends, an insult, but cops themselves are not immune to copaganda. They WANT to see themselves as heroes and be seen as heroes.

Society no longer granting that unearned and for free is an EXTREMELY important step towards actually making that leap. We're at least moving back to the pre-20th century common wisdom that cops are, on the whole, shitty people who are absolutely not to be trusted. This was the majority belief for the first hundred years of police forces! Farther back, if you include things like bailiffs and "revenoors"!

There were some aspirational expected norms described by copaganda which actually held for quite a few decades, like "A cop using a gun implicitly means that cop has failed in some way.", which yeah, beatings are still terrible things, but allowing cops to be trigger-happy on top of everything else obviously didn't make things any better.

Anyway, if we want to move beyond the current shit state of policing, a lot of things have to happen, but it's good to have some examples of what the "expected" behaviour for a person holding some sort of police role ought to be.

That's not actually John McLane though. It's the TV thread so let's talk TV.

I think the all-time greatest American copaganda is The Andy Griffith Show. It is some corny-ass shit, yes! But like, it described EXACTLY the sort of person we would hope to have in whatever "social assistance and keeping of good, or at least reasonable order, without bias" role we would be fine with, whether or not they're called "police": You have a good-natured and patient person who

- Is courageous and who helps others around him build confidence and courage
- Is compassionate and is shown as having genuine empathy both as a natural talent and through self-reflection
- Who remains calm under stress, and understands that keeping one's head under under stress helps him perform better
- Is not some unthinking tool of the political authority
- Who knows his community extremely well and regularly uses discretion in a sensible way, understanding that justice and law are not always the same thing and avoids applying the law or branding someone as a criminal fairly often
- Who treats substance abusers with respect and is mainly concerned for their safety and health rather than their obedience or puritan notions of forced sobriety
- Who not only uses violence extremely sparingly and only as a true last resort, but also ensures his fellow officers do the same as well.

This is all mostly hidden under a jokey, and now-extremely dated formula sitcom disguise, but it is still legitimately a thorough examination and description of the ideal skill set anyone in a role like that should be expected to have; he is constantly shown trying to bring around the best outcome for as many involved in a very classically Utilitarian sense. The show describes a time and a place which do not exist and never did, but it does not describe a situation which is impossible, instead it describes a difficult ideal worth striving for.

Like, Columbo is great because he tears down rich assholes and fights for the ordinary person and for actual capital-J Justice. But I consider that more of a detective story. Something like Sherlock Holmes. Columbo's holding a badge is almost incidental, but in Sheriff Andy Taylor's case it's a defining part of his identity.

[Thad]

And a corollary is Andy Griffith's second-most-famous character, Matlock.

There used to be a lot of TV shows and movies where defense attorneys were the good guys. Not so many anymore.

[Friday]

You're not wrong, Mongrel, and maybe having a bunch of shows about cool-headed people with a badge who use diplomacy and empathy to solve dangerous situations would actually be a form of copaganda that would improve the world.

Unfortunately, that's not nearly as sexy as a dude who asks "do ya feel lucky, punk" and then shoots 100 bad guys and then flicks a cigarette onto the ground and then says "tell the coroner that this one... is dead on delivery."

But yeah, all TV show cops being replaced by Picard would probably be amazing.

[Mongrel]

And even better if we replaced them with an actual good show! Heyooooooooo

But yeah, I really appreciate how both of Andy Griffith's law-related shows were actually quite subversive, under the cover of their superficial reputations.

[Büge]

But yeah, all TV show cops being replaced by Picard would probably be amazing.

not season 3 of picard, please

I've had enough of media leaning heavily on memberberries

[Thad]

I fell off Justified after season 2 but fired up City Primeval to see if it was any good and the first episode was solid and had Keith David in it.

I'm not an Elmore Leonard expert or anything but I've read a couple of his books and know his style well enough to recognize it when I see it. I didn't know City Primeval was another Leonard novel that they'd decided to swap Raylan Givens into, but I probably could have guessed based on the plot beats and characters; I spent most of the episode thinking "wow, this is Elmore Leonard as fuck."

It's got a cast of excellent character actors playing colorful characters who do outlandish things. Hard to ask for more than that, but I also can't help but crack a smile at seeing that Raylan's daughter is played by Timothy Olyphant's real-life daughter Vivian. She's good, too!

[Upthorn]

Fargo followed the "hero cop protagonist" formula from the movie through the first three seasons. Like a lot of people, he seems to have taken a second look at the implications of that trope.

I think the reason we keep seeing the "hero cop" trope in media, even (and especially) in media made by leftists, is despite knowing the truth, leftists desperately want the "good guy cop" idea to be true.

I think that there's also a thing where a "hero" is, by definition, not an ordinary person. So like, the stats about cops don't matter, because you're not writing a story about an ordinary cop!

[Thad]

Decided to look for Space Cases after Charlie Jane Anders reminded me of it in her recent 10 Space TV Shows That Don't Get Enough Love listicle.

It doesn't appear it's available legally anywhere. I found a couple of really low-quality torrents of old VHS rips, but these uploads on YT are ripped from more recent cable reruns and look Actually Pretty Good:

[Mothra]

On a similar note I started watching Seaquest again out of some vague impulse to see how it compared to my memory. It is very not good, but in season 1, there are sometimes moments where the great lead (Roy Schnider) and the socio-political setting where they're mining the ocean floor come together nicely. Mostly happens in the pilot and the one where they find the library of alexandria.

So much schlock otherwise, though...

[Friday]

On a similar note I started watching Seaquest again out of some vague impulse to see how it compared to my memory. It is very not good, but

I did this with the X-Files a while back. Growing up watching it, all the conspiracy alien shit was cool and mysterious, now it seems stupid. I can suspend my disbelief and treat it like I treat Deus Ex somewhat, (this is just a universe where all the conspiracy nonsense is true) but it's pretty hard to swallow sometimes. It doesn't help that modern conspiracies are less fun aliens and shadow governments and more about harmful misinformation and shadow governments.

The "but" in X-files case is when you hit one of the really, really, really good episodes, and there quite a few of them even early on. s1e8 "Ice" is a love letter to The Thing, and s1e20 "Darkness Falls" is just a really effective horror episode. And of course you've got both Tooms eps. Compare it to my beloved TNG's first season, which has exactly zero good episodes (though a few of them are okay) and you can understand why The X-Files was a hit.

[Mongrel]

On a similar note I started watching Seaquest again out of some vague impulse to see how it compared to my memory. It is very not good, but in season 1, there are sometimes moments where the great lead (Roy Schnider) and the socio-political setting where they're mining the ocean floor come together nicely. Mostly happens in the pilot and the one where they find the library of alexandria.

So much schlock otherwise, though...

Oh my god, I don't think I've had a single thought about that TV show in, like, 25 years.

And yet I can immediately picture it.