TV Series On The Television

[Thad]

And I'm loving the deep cuts. Hard to decide which is the deepest

The answer is Marv Wolfman.

[Thad]

This is a month old, but I'm just seeing it:





Now, Laura Hudson is far from the only woman who Brian Wood has harassed. And this show is still promoting Brian Wood and his work. So there are plenty of good reasons not to watch it.

But it appears that "to support Laura Hudson" is not one of them.

...that's too many negatives. To put it more clearly: if you want to boycott the DMZ TV series because Brian Wood is a shit, that's a good reason. But don't boycott it on Laura Hudson's account; she's used it as an opportunity to make lemonade.

[zaratustra]

So Bojack Horseman is over. Spoilers follow.

So, the question posited by the first half of the season - "once a truly despicable man finally finds his center, how does he redeem himself for all the damage he's done" - has been answered:

He doesn't. He can't.

And, fair. But the show is so intent on the message - "some things just can't be fixed once you realize they're broken" - that it forgets to answer: why even bother to try to go legit, then.

No wonder it's hinted Bojack is moving to become an alt-righter, the perfect place for people that want popularity and blame insufficient emotional labor from everyone around them.

[Thad]

I finally got around to checking out The Orville. The first two episodes have some teething problems but I already agree with the general consensus that it's a better Star Trek than Picard or Discovery. (Short Treks is pretty good, though.)

I've observed this before, but any sufficiently long-running corporate-owned franchise turns into fanfic. The Simpsons is written by people who grew up watching The Simpsons. Batman is written by people who grew up reading Batman. Doctor Who is written by people who grew up watching Doctor Who. DuckTales is written by people who grew up watching the original DuckTales, which was written by people who grew up reading Carl Barks's various Disney Ducks comics.

But sometimes the fanfic that acknowledges it's fanfic is better than the fanfic that's part of the official canon. Watchmen is an obvious example. Galaxy Quest is another one, and now we're back to Star Trek pastiches.

I knew Seth MacFarlane was a big TNG fan. But being a fan of something doesn't necessarily mean you get what makes it work. Based on what I've seen, again, there are some rough edges here (and those rough edges are very definitely MacFarlane's handiwork; this is a show that has a gross-out gag involving alien spooge in its very first minute), but he seems to understand Star Trek better than other fans like Kurtzman and Chabon who are currently in charge of the franchise.

[Friday]

McFarlane's problem is he actually is capable of writing pretty clever, biting jokes, but usually instead just opts to have Neal Patrick Harris shit into a hat for a minute straight.

[Friday]

Oh, and if anyone thought that was an exaggeration or even slight fabrication:

[Upthorn]

The first season of The Orville does have a few painful "MacFarlane comedy" moments, but it grows out of them fairly quickly. The larger problem is that he's nowhere near as good a progressive moralist as Gene Roddenberry, or even Rick Berman. So, there are a few episodes where the moral is painfully bad, such as:
Judging celebrities based on social media clips is really bad, guys!
Porn is shameful, never use porn when you have a partner!

But there's also a fair number of really good episodes, with properly thought out commentary on social issues that are actually, kind of, really important. So it's a mixed bag.

Oh, but also its depiction of relationships is super, super toxic and bad. Don't follow any of The Orville's relationship advice, ever.

[Thad]

McFarlane's problem is he actually is capable of writing pretty clever, biting jokes, but usually instead just opts to have Neal Patrick Harris shit into a hat for a minute straight.

He's also capable of self-awareness. The most savage and on-point criticism anyone has ever leveled at Seth MacFarlane comes from Seth MacFarlane himself, in his portrayal of Brian Griffin as a smug "liberal" who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk, who condemns other people despite his own raft of faults from laziness to barely-concealed racism, and who, in one episode, gets called out for this by, of all people, Quagmire, one of the most morally reprehensible characters in TV history.

That's real "here are my deepest insecurities about myself, put up in public for all to see" stuff. But then it's back to "edgy joke, '80s reference."

MacFarlane's a smart guy who mostly coasts on stupid humor.

(American Dad is great, but of MacFarlane's cartoons, it's the one where he's least involved in the writer's room, and I think that's probably not a coincidence.)

The first season of The Orville does have a few painful "MacFarlane comedy" moments, but it grows out of them fairly quickly. The larger problem is that he's nowhere near as good a progressive moralist as Gene Roddenberry, or even Rick Berman. So, there are a few episodes where the moral is painfully bad, such as:
Judging celebrities based on social media clips is really bad, guys!
Porn is shameful, never use porn when you have a partner!

But there's also a fair number of really good episodes, with properly thought out commentary on social issues that are actually, kind of, really important. So it's a mixed bag.

Oh, but also its depiction of relationships is super, super toxic and bad. Don't follow any of The Orville's relationship advice, ever.

Yeah, I'm only two episodes deep and so far the only heavyhanded moral is "zoos are bad." But that sounds consistent with what I know about Seth MacFarlane (see above).

[Friday]

Yeah I'm not gonna pretend I haven't ever laughed at his jokes or that I'm too good for Family Guy or whatever. He's a mixed bag like you say.

[Thad]

(Also I went back and edited my posts to correct my consistent misspelling of his name. It's MacFarlane, with three A's. McFarlane, with two A's, is the Spawn guy.)

[Mothra]

This physically pains me to say, but I consistently have enjoyed watching The Orville. It has moments I like, and it has moments that make me question what the fuck I am thinking watching another Seth MacFarlane thing, and these happen in equal quantity.

[Thad]

BSG is streaming for free. Including the miniseries, Razor, and The Plan.

[Niku]

HBO Now has released some free streaming options that'll work in any version of the app (on the PS4 version at least, you just pick "browse without subscription" or somesuch on the first screen); a handful of movies and TV series and documentaries. Relevantly, this means we finally got around to watching Barry season 1 yesterday and will likely go through all of season 2 today. People saying it's Bill Hader's best work weren't kidding around.

[Niku]

okay barry season 2 episode 5 might be one of the best half-hours of television i’ve seen in a good damn while. the rest of the series is very good but that one episode is sublime.

[Thad]

Wife was watching Saturday afternoon broadcast TV and caught a MacGyver episode involving an apparent UFO encounter. She asked me to look it up so she could pass along the episode title.

I found it on IMDb, where this is the episode summary and I love it:

MacGyver interrupts his car voyage after witnessing at night what seems an UFO landing. Meeting young Tommy Wiley, who pouts having to move to a paradisaic planet as his father, a simpleton farmer in debt, sees no other hope for his terminally ill mother, Mac smells a rat. Indeed, the 'phenomenon' is staged cleverly by the crook couple Ray and dawn Rigel, who charge the farmers the price of their farm, but will stop at nothing to cash in and move on. The sheriff has no basis to act, except against Mac.

[Mongrel]

ahahahaha

[Thad]

The Community cast is reuniting tomorrow at 5 PM EST for a table read of the script for Cooperative Polygraphy, with Pedro Pascal replacing Walton Goggins as the executor of Pierce's estate.



Seems like a good choice for a table read, since it's a bottle episode focused on the core cast after Chevy Chase left but before Donald Glover did.

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

I didn't really catch anything after "It's not a theory" because I was too busy shouting at the TV.

It may be a little harsh to judge a TV series by a single line in the trailer, but I think of how many people that line had to go through from first draft to trailer and how not one single person appears to have said "Yeah maybe don't say that, that's not what 'theory' means in this context and using it that way is the sort of thing dipshits say when they're lecturing people on how evolution isn't real," and it doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

[Mongrel]

It's not going to be true to the source material unless everyone is smoking and there's no fully electronic computers.