TV: what have you been watching?

I found S1 a slog, and want to rewatch before doing S2, but I have so many other shows I want to watch before it.

Alien: Earth was pretty terrific, not perfect, but pretty great.

Finally got into Taskmaster.

Always thought it was over-hyped from clips I'd seen, and didn't really see the appeal. Also it's super popular and I'm a contrarian curmudgeon.

Starting watching the full episodes on YT and it is very entertaining.

oh it's a bananas show, and really, really shouldn't work imo, but it completely does.

I'm on season 18 😀

Season 19 was great, and I'm enjoying S20 so far.

My favorites are probably S7 with James Acaster and S10 with Mike Wozniak.

I love James Acaster. His three books are well worth getting, ideally listening to (he narrates).

Had to stop James Acaster's Classic Scrapes many times while listening to near other people as I was laughing too much.

I never made time for Westworld, fixing that now. Found a good deal on a blu-ray box set. Figure it's Jonathan Nolan, hard to miss, right? I'm 4 episodes in and enjoying it. Jeffrey Wright is a special talent, love watching him cook. Also an interesting time to watch as I watch AI take up more space in day to day life.

Oooh, a new season of The Diplomat is out! I love political thrillers. Especially a fun one.

Agree 100%. An almost perfect dystopian imaginary societal portrayal of what the (fascist) Empire should look like, me thinks...

Darn the first season of Westworld is as epic as can be!!! Season 3 is a bit of a (big...) drop-off, but I still mightily enjoyed it. I have to watch the fourth season yet...

Season 4 was really good.

Excellent, thx

I'm excited for the all Native American episode. It was a really big deal to my brother. He encouraged me to watch the show but for some reason I couldn't get into it. I'm enjoying it.

I watched the first couple episodes of the Scorsese docuseries on Apple TV, really good stuff! Offers a ton of insight to things I didn't know before. A majority of my Scorsese knowledge is from Goodfellas onwards, I still have many of his films I haven't seen, including Mean Streets. Think I'll order the 4K Criterion of Mean Streets to fix that. speaking of, I think there's a Criterion sale coming on Tuesday.

Me and my 89-year-old mom are gonna start Parks and Rec tonight, right from the beginning. I've warned her that the 6 eps of season 1 aren't very good, but I'm confident I can get her hooked. We spent the late 60s thru mid 80s watching Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart Show, Get Smart, Newhart etc., so she's got good sitcom taste already.

I'm having a hard time picturing Kioshk with an actual mother

You'll have a blast.

Enjoy your time together watching! My mother (98) and I are Jeopardy pals and we watch it together every day. As our parents age its nice to have some sort of regular involvement with them.

absolutely

Off to a good start, watched 2 eps last night and I wrote out a little character guide to help her remember who's who.

Watched quite a bit of it with my Mum when I was back living at home for a bit, as well as the some of the US Office and 30 Rock.

She loved it, but is only a mere sprightly ~70yo.

Hulu was great when I was taking care of gma, who turned 105 on the 12th! I could just put The Golden Girls on and by the time she went through all 180 episodes and we started it over it was just like a brand new show to her! It was a little uncomfortable when we watched GoT together, but whatever.

watched peewee as himself

lacked substance, he's so cagey, even contradicting himself, numerous times he'll say "of course i don't mean that, or do i?" stuff like that - very clearly worried about his legacy and saying the wrong things and that detached manner means it has no soul

should have been a single episode, pacing was far too slow

i think it became a two parter because he absolutely refused to talk about anything from the scandal and onwards - so they had hours and hours of footage and interviews of him talking about childhood friends and parties at art school etc etc but nothing in the way of what people actually wanted

what makes him famous is not his rise, but rather his fall, so i think since the filmaker only had about 5 minutes available on the fall, he thought it'd be less of "look we got nothing" if they dragged it out into an origin story instead

peewee straight up refused to talk about anything scandal(s) or post scandal(s) - so everything is mentioned in passing - we never get his perspective on it, and frankly, you would be far more informed after a 10 sec drive by googling as to what happened rather than watching a 3 hour documentary film on the man

huge letdown - still somewhat interesting but hard no - would not rec - i was ok with the origin stuff because i thought it was good seasoning for why we were actually watching but instead you get an extremely detailed glimpse into the outward persona he had before he got famous, none of it during or after his fame - and zero personal insights whatsoever

the closest we get to anything deep and personal are the few moments where his sister talks about his struggles with being in the closet - something which is apparent in the doc itself as peewee even straddles the line of kind of just sort of implying he was gay and even kind of playing with the idea of still being in the closet - all this while talking about an ex boyfriend of his that he deeply loved and lived with at one point

great idea - terrible execution - hard pass

also - after the wild success of i claudius

the bbc tried to replicate that success with the cleopatras

why is it "cleopatras" and not cleopatra you say - well those ptolemys really liked more than incest, they also really liked a small handful of names, the name cleopatra can be found in every generation of their royal dynasty so majority of the ptmolemaic queens have that name

so we start with a much earlier cleopatra and work our way down to the famous one under whom the kingdom collapsed and became a roman province

and... and... it used to be easily available on the youtubes but got removed a few years ago and i could never find it, until just now

https://archive.org/details/the-cleopatr...

and you can even download the videos directly if you want

i've also been meaning to watch the caesars which predates them all and is likely what greenlit the iclaudius production - which is also available on the tube

I Claudius is among the 5 greatest TV shows of all time IMO

The Cleopatras was fun fluff.

You might want to try The Borgias next. On a par with The Cleopatras imo.

ooh thanks i'll check that out

To cause some confusion,

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1736341/

IMDb

Borgia (TV Series 2011–2014) ⭐ 7.7 | Biography, Drama, History

Hard to top Jeremy Irons tearing it up every scene in The Borgias though.