Anything good on TV this season?

most tv sucks these days, but there are some shining examples of good writing, acting, camera work, etc... we call those Deadwood and Arrested Development. Family Guy sucks ass, though...

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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Diabolical »

I can only think of three that I've seen so far.

Dads - Shit. If it says Seth MacFarlane and its on tv (and it ain't Family Guy) it will suck.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine - Very funny. Far better than I expected.

SHIELD - I dig it. Thought in the SHIELD thread.

Everything else looks horrible, especially Sleepy Hollow.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by vynsane »

Tom Foolery wrote: Sleepy Hollow. The pilot was better than what I thought it would be. The two leads did a good a job, so I'll forgive the show teasing me with The Kurgan and Kumar and killing them both off before the hour was over. Will I continue to watch? I dunno. Maybe.
i ended up watching half of this pilot because my wife fell asleep while we were watching SHIELD (not because of the show, she's been through a lot lately, what with four broken toes) and it popped up next on HULU. it was intriguing, but i'm not sure i'll continue.
Brooklyn-99. Andy Samberg's new cop comedy. The first episode was pretty fucking funny. Too bad it's on opposite Agents of SHIELD. But other than that, I recommend it.
i always find it amusing when people are concerned about what time shows are on. i loved this episode, andy samberg is freakin' hilarious.
Diabolical wrote:Dads - Shit. If it says Seth MacFarlane and its on tv (and it ain't Family Guy) it will suck.
fixed that for you.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Tom Foolery »

Smug Guy with Income wrote:i always find it amusing when people are concerned about what time shows are on. i loved this episode, andy samberg is freakin' hilarious.
It's the one house in America without a DVR. Or Netflix. I can only watch one channel at a time. Don't judge me.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by vynsane »

netflix + HULU + cable internet < cable TV + cable internet

even adding amazon prime to the left side of that equation, it's still cheaper. we're going to drop amazon prime, though, because the free stuff is basically all also available on netflix and the interface for their wii channel is atrocious. having netflix for older TV shows and having HULU for new stuff is the best of both worlds.

we've been cable-free for almost three years now, i think. i've missed it MAYBE four times since... mainly for the olympics. but i simply found a proxy server service that let us watch the BBC online coverage which was more well-rounded than the american coverage anyway!
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

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No way am I dropping Prime here. Without a reliable comic shop, and living a half hour or more from most decent stores, their free shipping is a lifesaver. Between the streaming (even if it is a bit limited) and the free shipping, it's like air or water to us. :)
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

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i figure it's easy enough to hit the $25 mark to get free shipping without paying for prime, but whatever floats yer boat.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

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Thanks for mentioning Brooklyn-99, we watched the first 2 and had a good laugh. And I got a bj out of nowhere. New favorite show by a margin.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Tom Foolery »

Watched a few more new shows.

The Crazy Ones. Mork from Ork and Buffy run an advertising agency in Chicago. Is it strange that in all the promotion leading up to this series, David E. Kelly's name was never mentioned? Are they afraid of backlash? In any case, Kelly usually uses the courtroom as his soapbox, now he'll be commenting on society via advertising.

Michael J. Fox show. I missed the premiere, but saw the second episode. It was weird that Fox's real life wife Tracy Pollard(?) as his "sexy" upstairs neighbor. It seems a typical boring comedy using Fox's disability as a hook. It's like The Huxtables except it's 30 years too late and nobody cares.

Hostages. I caught the encore showing. It's based on an Israeli miniseries, so I assume it's not an ongoing series. None of the characters were particularly likeable and I honestly don't give a shit if the TV President dies or not. Maybe he's an asshole. Who knows? I'm sticking with Blacklist. If they keep showing this on Saturday nights, I'll watch it then. There's nothig else on. Saturday nights is a wasteland.

Also watched the second encore episode of Sleepy Hollow. The post it notes on everything were fun, as well as Crane railing on 10% tax on his donut holes. Also, Clancy Brown and John Cho aren't as done with the show as I expected given their deaths in the pilot. Cho unbroke his neck and is an agent of the Horseman. And Clancy is sticking around as 'ghost/hallucination' Obi-Wan style. Also that albino faceless horned guy is seriously creepy. It's in danger of being a 'freak of the week' series though, so it's not completely out of the woods. But, It's growing on me.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Diabolical »

I also caught The Michael J Fox Show. mainly because Besty Brandt (of Breaking Bad and Bay City, MI) was on it and it's good to see Fox back on the air. It had a few half-way decent chuckles, but it's not something I'll be making time for, especially since I think I have 2 other things set for the DVR at the same time.
To steal a joke from Adam, the premise seems a bit shaky.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Tom Foolery »

RRRRRRIMJOB!






...errr...I mean shot. Rimshot. :oops: :shock:


Some more thoughts on the Fox show. I don't care for the 'talking to the camera' trope. It worked on The Office because it was new and it paid off big time when the series ended. But in other shows like Modern Family and now MJF, it feels like a crutch to make punch lines pay off.
And Fox never really left TV. He's been playing sleazy corporate lawyer Louis Canning on The Good Wife the last few years. It's only a recurring guest role, but it's one of his best characters ever because he turns his natural likability and subverts expectations as the antagonist lawyer. He's slimy and yet still lovable because he's Michael J. Fox. When this new show dies in 13 episodes, they should spin Canning off into his own show. I'd watch that.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

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Yeah, the talking to the camera shtick sucks on anything but The Office and Parks & Rec. It kinda worked in the first episode because it related to the plot, but it didn't fit in the second episode at all.

I was aware M.J. Fox made appearances on The Good Wife, but I don't watch it because I don't have a vagina.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Tom Foolery »

A few more new shows sampled.

We Are Men. Tony Shaloub and Kal Penn raised this above mediocre. The premise doesn't lend itself to anything groundbreaking, but if there's nothing else on I'd watch it again. The "No. No. Maybe. No." cracked me up.

Goldbergs. No. Why do networks keep green lighting shows about families with kids? What story could you possibly tell that Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Charles in Charge, Just the Ten of Us, Malcolm in the Middle, Cosby Show, every Tyler Perry sitcom, Roseanne, The Middle, and the other 300 sitcoms I'm forgetting right now haven't already told ad nauseum??? Fuck off.

Trophy Wife. Tries too hard to be Modern Family 2.0. Wasn't bad, but wasn't great either.

Ironside. Every hardass cop cliche + every disabled people aren't helpless cliche rolled into one cornball show(seriously? His last name is literally Ironside??) The one semi bright spot was the guy who I thought was Ray Winstone but is really Brett Sexton as Ironside's ex-partner who accidentally shot him and has now climbed into a bottle. But that's not enough for me to not make this an easy pass.

Sean Saves the World. Ugh. Canned laughter is awful. Thomas Lennon is completely wasted in this as Sean's boss. I laughed at Lennon throughout the episode, but the rest is weak and Hayes has never been funny. Megan Hilty is hot.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by Diabolical »

Tom Foolery wrote:Megan Hilty is hot.
From a google search, she looks like that annoying bitch on Ridiculousness on Mtv.


No, not Rob Dyrdek, the other annoying bitch.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

Post by vynsane »

the 'talking to the camera' thing continues in the second episode of TMJFS? i thought that was just the daughter's school project for the pilot. that's unfortunate.

Sleepy Hollow
better than it had any right to be. the fact that kurgan got beheaded yet again was actually a funny homage (if it was intentional). having been in the actual town of Sleep Hollow quite a bit in my life (my aunt and uncle live in tarrytown directly to the south and my uncle grew up in SH) they do a fair job of making Wilmington, NC look like the hudson valley. at least the aerial shots used in the credits and interstitials are real shots of the surrounding area. i understand that they made the population count 144,000 as a biblical reference, but it's laughably about 12-15 times larger than the actual population of the town (just under 10,000 as of 2010). it seems like the whole plot for the show has been too overloaded in the first episode. hinting at the 'four horsemen' thing would have been enough, but they basically confirmed it and threw a whole lot of exposition about it via kurgan's 'note to self' tapes. the only glaring issue i had was how badly the scenes changed from day to night to day within seemingly the span of a few minutes, the worst was when the horseman was forced to leave a skirmish because of an incredibly fast sunrise (he can't be out in daylight.) it wasn't just the first rays of the sun coming up over the ridge of a mountain, but the sun rising from behind the peak of a church roof, which would place it about 8am or 9am... before which it looked like midnight.
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Re: Anything good on TV this season?

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Tom Foolery wrote:Goldbergs. No. Why do networks keep green lighting shows about families with kids? What story could you possibly tell that Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Charles in Charge, Just the Ten of Us, Malcolm in the Middle, Cosby Show, every Tyler Perry sitcom, Roseanne, The Middle, and the other 300 sitcoms I'm forgetting right now haven't already told ad nauseum??? Fuck off.
I was inclined to not like this already. It bugs me that it's like That 70s Show in that it's this fake version of the 80s, but at least T7S had the sense to have some vague resemblance to the real world. (Like they didn't see Star Wars until 1977.) The commercials showed all sorts of stuff from around 1984-6, but with bits from before and after. The white nerd saying that Flava Flav was the only person who understood him was the killer; no white 80s kid (particularly a nerdy one) would say that. Even Jeff Garlin couldn't make me bother tuning in.
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