The Official Good Television Thread

I don't even know how to respond to this. If you wanna defend that casting choice go ahead. :lol:
I'm trying to see why it matters whether or not the racoon city pd cops or whatever they were called, are white or not. Pretty irrelevant from my memory
 
My wife watched that shit and my thoughts are mostly…this is awful feminist propaganda dogshit dressed up as sci-fi for housewives… and I call it the handjobmaids tale because I see her physically cringe every time.
 
i’ve taken to watching stuff while i work from home, mostly comedies so i don’t need to actually concentrate that hard. binged the entirety of after life which was a pleasant surprise. it isn’t one of the funnier things gervais has been involved with, but it may bring the most pathos. it’s obviously a tribute to groundhog day and references it constantly, but i interpreted it as an apology from gervais for being such a dick over the years, taking characters that would normally be the butt of cruel jokes and giving them a lot of dignity and genuine pain etc. it doesn’t always get the tone right and there are a lot of incongruous juxtapositions between the maudlin and mean which didn’t work at all, trying to have and eat the cake as though the show is embarrassed about its sentimentality and has to undercut it (which is in keeping with its protagonist i suppose, but i think the show is generally not supposed to be mirroring that headspace but commenting on it). i also don’t like when he throws his little hot button topics in there so he can sneak in one of his opinions, like there’ll be dumb convos out of nowhere about what trans- means and stuff like that, feels very shoehorned in. but there’s also a lot of really well pitched and acted slice of life stuff that caught me off guard, it’s really sincere and generous toward characters when you least expect it, even some that most shows would reduce to pure gimmicks. i especially loved most stuff involving the ‘sex worker’, not sure i’ve ever seen that archetype portrayed quite like that before. i’ve only really seen that actress on panel shows before but she totally nails this. nearly all the side characters are remarkably well acted actually, it’s almost like watching mike leigh at times.

there’s even an arg character who says “the man who’s tired of the anus is tired of life”.
 
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when it’s the only substance to the show, sure it is.

If you're being super reductive.

Or you could call it a fairly cohesive vision of a dystopian near-future where human fertility has declined and the ideas of the religious right are taken to the extreme, with caste or feudal type social hierarchies and the commodification of women's reproductive rights.

I'm hardly the biggest fan of the show but saying it's "just feminism" is like saying The Wire is just about race.
 
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i’ve taken to watching stuff while i work from home, mostly comedies so i don’t need to actually concentrate that hard. binged the entirety of after life which was a pleasant surprise. it isn’t one of the funnier things gervais has been involved with, but it may bring the most pathos. it’s obviously a tribute to groundhog day and references it constantly, but i interpreted it as an apology from gervais for being such a dick over the years, taking characters that would normally be the butt of cruel jokes and giving them a lot of dignity and genuine pain etc. it doesn’t always get the tone right and there are a lot of incongruous juxtapositions between the maudlin and mean which didn’t work at all, trying to have and eat the cake as though the show is embarrassed about its sentimentality and has to undercut it (which is in keeping with its protagonist i suppose, but i think the show is generally not supposed to be mirroring that headspace but commenting on it). i also don’t like when he throws his little hot button topics in there so he can sneak in one of his opinions, like there’ll be dumb convos out of nowhere about what trans- means and stuff like that, feels very shoehorned in. but there’s also a lot of really well pitched and acted slice of life stuff that caught me off guard, it’s really sincere and generous toward characters when you least expect it, even some that most shows would reduce to pure gimmicks. i especially loved most stuff involving the ‘sex worker’, not sure i’ve ever seen that archetype portrayed quite like that before. i’ve only really seen that actress on panel shows before but she totally nails this. nearly all the side characters are remarkably well acted actually, it’s almost like watching mike leigh at times.

there’s even an arg character who says “the man who’s tired of the anus is tired of life”.

Man you really nailed how I feel about the show (warts and all). Reading this even makes me appreciate the show more than before, haha.
 
i get the impression we’re generally on the same page with slice of life kinda stuff. but yeah i loved how it sets up all these characters to be running jokes and then gradually gets you caring about them. the postman’s date with the hooker in S2 is a good example of that kind of payoff. the gervais character is a lot more genuine and shaded than i expected too, it’s actually painful watching his emotional highs and lows lol

i actually assumed it had ended but apparently season 3 is coming soon and expected to be the final season.
 
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So the missus has gotten into that "the handmaids tale"

Lets be clear from the start, the the very idea of a world where women are treated as depicted by the show is fuckin awful, what's worse is that the treatment of the women isn't exactly a million miles away from what some women (past and present) may well have experienced, and neither are the misogynistic views held by some of the men in the show.

I initially had sympathy for the main character, and still do to some degree, and in the beginning had some sympathy for the commmanders wife (having to sit there and watch your husband do the deed with another women because you cant conceive seems incredibly cruel) HOWEVER I started to think of the wife as less of a victim as her treatment of the handmaid got more aggressive and not so much the behaviour of someone who has no choice. As for the main character, yes, she is stuck in the awful situation, yes, to a degree she has little, if no choice..but then her history with how she met her husband, her willingly carrying on with the driver after discovering the husbands still alive, oh and the fact that she willingly carried on with secret visits with the commander AND the driver, admitting that she did it because she liked it, just negated some of that victim I.D. for me.

I get that the portayal of sex in this,is purposefully awkward and uncomfortable to watch, and it does that incredibly well...but does it need to be every second scene?
I don't know, maybe I'm not getting it, maybe I am...what I do know is we watched season 1, the missus cant wait to start the next season, and me...well iv got more time for my hobby, woodwork.
 
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they really should have just went with Tom Hopper
 
i get the impression we’re generally on the same page with slice of life kinda stuff. but yeah i loved how it sets up all these characters to be running jokes and then gradually gets you caring about them. the postman’s date with the hooker in S2 is a good example of that kind of payoff. the gervais character is a lot more genuine and shaded than i expected too, it’s actually painful watching his emotional highs and lows lol

i actually assumed it had ended but apparently season 3 is coming soon and expected to be the final season.

For sure man. It was pretty refreshing how the show took 2 dimensional tropes and built them into 3 dimensional characters. The whole bittersweet aesthetic of the show is my kinda thing tbh. Shoehorning the hot button topics does make me cringe though, but I guess that's to be expected since that's Gervais' stand-up material for the most part.

There were so many moments that genuinely hit me in the feels, which I wasn't really expecting haha. Glad to hear that the third season will likely be the final one though, things like this are best as short series.