The Official, Long Awaited, TV Shows Thread

[Sigfried1977]

I enjoyed it, It was no Daredevil, but at least it was reasonably-fast paced. The fact that no-one is ever allowed to die in comics is getting more and more annoying though.

Jessica Jones is not meant to be Supergirl strong, btw. Just very strong. When it came to dislaying superpowers the show was really inconsistent, though:

Spoiler

In one scene Electra effortlessly mops the floor with 3 defenders at once within seconds (Cage was weakened, but still ...), yet at the end Daredevil alone could miraculously hold his own against her. And even though neither Jones nor Cage are supposed to be Superman strong, they should both be strong enough to utterly destroy human opponents with a single punch

Bummer Netflix is gonna lose the rights to Dr House come August 31th. Binge-watching 30+ episodes until then seems like a rather daunting proposition.

 

[London Geezer]

I enjoyed it, It was no Daredevil, but at least it was reasonably-fast paced. The fact that no-one is ever allowed to die in comics is getting more and more annoying though.

Jessica Jones is not meant to be Supergirl strong, btw. Just very strong. When it came to dislaying superpowers the show was really inconsistent, though:

Spoiler

In one scene Electra effortlessly mops the floor with 3 defenders at once within seconds (Cage was weakened, but still ...), yet at the end Daredevil alone could miraculously hold his own against her. And even though neither Jones nor Cage are supposed to be Superman strong, they should both be strong enough to utterly destroy human opponents with a single punch

Bummer Netflix is gonna lose the rights to Dr House come August 31th. Binge-watching 30+ episodes until then seems like a rather daunting proposition.

You're right, that's what I meant. Very inconsistent with how she is portrayed, which I don't like cause she's actually my favourite.

 

[Grall]

Also, if Netflix doesn't have enough to watch for you then perhaps also you just watch too much TV

It's not that Netflix doesn't have enough stuff to watch; they do. They have absolutely tons of stuff I could watch. It's just that they've almost never have stuff I WANT to watch - which is typically older stuff. They announced they were removing The Running Man from U.S. Netflix at the end of the month some time ago, I quickly went to check, and it was not even available in Europe at all.

Same thing with a lot of other older stuff I want to re-watch. Can't find it. It's not available on blu-ray, and it's not available on streaming video either. It's in some sort of fucking limbo, and I have a suspicion it is kept there so that I will be forced to watch newer stuff that makes someone more money than ancient movies and TV shows would...

 

[Arwin]

Yeah it is a bit of a mess between all of the different digital and non digital platforms battling for exclusive rights and such. My son really wanted to watch the first Commando, and I ended up having to buy it on iTunes and watching it on an iPad.

I will end up only watching movies that are easily available or buy stuff on BluRay again when possible, which I didn't think I would be doing anymore.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Defining Breaking Bad by that one sex scene is hilarious.

On the other hand, it actually makes sense - when viewed in context. One of the most interesting themes of that show is how a middle aged, middle class man becomes empowered in all other aspects of his life - including sex - because of his "breaking bad".

 

[wco81]

So stuff happened in the GoT season finale, to set things up for a short final season.

More expensive visual effects. The percentage of CGI footage has been high this season.

I think the show runners wanted to move on and end the series so they plotted out 13 episodes for the final 2 seasons. Pacing of this season has been frenetic, like it went to warp drive after the slow build and cruising pace of previous seasons.

It set a record for TV show budgets yet you wonder if costs were a reason they compacted the number of episodes and had so many things happen in each episode, especially how the players moved around the continent so quickly.

With the ratings the show has been getting, HBO probably wants the loot train going much longer than planned. But maybe it wasn't willing to write blank checks for all the visual effects, location shooting in multiple countries, high cast salaries, etc. so they had to make a lot of things happen in each episode and reduce the episode count.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Thought the season finale was rather lame and predictable, not to mention unrealistic.

Spoiler

Fine, dragons are strong. I get they would be powerful against humans or walkers. But bringing down a massive hunk of ice that's been there for thousands of years with an ice beam in a few minutes? Too much.

I suppose next season will be a bunch of big battles and that will be it.

Kind of sad though. Part of the fun was all the intrigue but now the show has degraded to cheap shots by going with a CGI action fest.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks the CGI isn't really that good? A lot of it looks kind of gamey, not that good angles etc.

 

[Arwin]

I haven't seen it yet but read spoilers by accident in the newspaper - not much I hadn't expected though perhaps they happened a little sooner.

I am rather expecting humans to lose and be wiped out altogether. It sort of suits the tone of the series. The real question is what on earth the necromancers will do then. Play undead battle chess? Take up making ice sculptures? They kind of seem so devoid of purpose other than wiping out the humans. This is also why I think they are so incredibly boring (as anything zombie typically ends up being imho), and why the season is more boring than most. They are just not an interesting enemy.

 

[Svensk Viking]

GoT really went downhill IMO.
The wight plot proved itself to be as stupid as everyone guessed. The show makes it seem like it even encouraged Cersei to reclaim areas in the North, as well as providing the Night King with the only way to easily pass the Wall.
Littlefinger's death was also crap. The real Littlefinger would have denied everything. LF's vassals didn't even seem to consider that both the judge and witness being Starks wasn't a fair trial. They should have shown a scene where Bran got the trust of LF's vassals.

When we saw that killing a walker destroys the wights it controls, and them talking about how killing the Night King, I think it's obvious that there will be a single large battle in Season 8, where Jon and Daenerys board the two dragons and makes a suicide attack on the NK.

I fully agree that the show feels like cheap shots CGI action fest

 

[wco81]

Wow people got sick of dragons real fast didn't they?

They didn't really deploy the dragons attacking until a couple of episodes ago, in the loot train battle scene.

The alternative is what, have thousand of extras stage battles? That's ludicrously expensive.

Russian director tried it, employing thousands of Soviet soldiers and the film didn't make its money back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(1970_film)

If not CGI dragons, then it would be CGI soldiers and you wouldn't have any depictions of large scale battles without CGI.

Some shows tried it that way, like HBO's Rome, co-produced with the BBC IIRC. That was expensive to produce and HBO cut it after two seasons. In it, they cover the timeline of some famous battles as Julius Caesar takes over and then is killed and Augustus gains power. But they don't show actual battle scenes that much, and you just see the characters reacting to the aftermath of the battles.

However, they did rush this season, maybe because of production costs, to have a lot of movements of the players and forces occur in just 7 episodes.

 

[Davros]

Same thing with a lot of other older stuff I want to re-watch. Can't find it.

Print a list

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Wow people got sick of dragons real fast didn't they?

They didn't really deploy the dragons attacking until a couple of episodes ago, in the loot train battle scene.

The alternative is what, have thousand of extras stage battles? That's ludicrously expensive.

Russian director tried it, employing thousands of Soviet soldiers and the film didn't make its money back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(1970_film)

If not CGI dragons, then it would be CGI soldiers and you wouldn't have any depictions of large scale battles without CGI.

Some shows tried it that way, like HBO's Rome, co-produced with the BBC IIRC. That was expensive to produce and HBO cut it after two seasons. In it, they cover the timeline of some famous battles as Julius Caesar takes over and then is killed and Augustus gains power. But they don't show actual battle scenes that much, and you just see the characters reacting to the aftermath of the battles.

However, they did rush this season, maybe because of production costs, to have a lot of movements of the players and forces occur in just 7 episodes.

Because the way they used the dragons is dumb. A 12 year old could have written a script less predictable.

They don't need to have 10.000 people fighting in every shot. They could do some overhead shots with CGI like in LoTR with massive armies and do the rest with close up fighting. That wouldn't require that many actors. Vikings is doing it like that. I think most of their battles feel a bit empty but its budget probably doesn't come close to that of GoT. I doubt the GoT budget would not allow to hire sever hundreds of local stand ins to swing a sword in the background.

The CGI in GoT just isn't that good. It's three dragons, most of the time flying far from the camera. The close up shots look good but nothing we haven't seen before and close up footage can be measured in minutes. There isn't a lot of action footage and the footage that is there in my opinion does not look good. The final scene could have been coming from a video game.

With the popularity of the series I doubt budget is an issue. Maybe HBO wants a bigger slow of the revenue to go to profits rather than production.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I think it's still an enjoyable show, but it's a far cry from the quality of the first couple of seasons. The sharp dialogue is gone and the whole thing is just so rushed. I mean the way the players were hopping from episode to episode was already quite jarring in the the last season, now it's just utterly breaking the illusion of that carefully crafted world. The great sea is apparently a puddle. No problems with the dragons though. I thought that stuff looked great.

 

[Grall]

I mean the way the players were hopping from episode to episode was already quite jarring in the the last season, now it's just utterly breaking the illusion of that carefully crafted world.

It was pretty stupid in the previous ep. to have a guy run on foot back to the wall, send a crow to an island that's essentially been deserted for decades (they just point them in the right direction and they get to where they're supposed to go? lol), then have the dragons show up in time for everyone to not get chopped to bits?

Pretty weak scripting there, probably the shittiest bit of all of GoT. Why didn't they have Bran see what was going on when the undead surround Jon and his gang, and mind-control one of the dragons and fly it up there himself? Dani can then follow on another to ship back the survivors on its back.

Or maybe he can't mindcontrol stuff from so far away? *shrug* He had crows flying far beyond the wall, watching through their eyes. That seemed to work just fine...

Regardless, I like my idea better than what made it in there. Still, I've liked the 7th season, even though not all that much has happened. Lots of people moving back and forth and not really all that many big developments. Well, maybe in the last episode. Some good stuff happened there.

 

[London Geezer]

I think it's pretty clear that the show has a clear path to the end right now and that after a few years of diluting content, the showrunners only have a set amount of screen time to just bloody end the story.
Before, we were taken in by the intrigue, the mysteries, the deceptions. Now we know exactly where we're heading. So many characters have already died and out of the ones that are still alive, we're all pretty damn sure who is way overdue their death. So that takes away some of the qualities that made GOT so good, especially the sense of surprise.

 

[Davros]

There's a GOT game

 

[Clukos]

GoT S7 spoilers: /tv/ at work: https://vocaroo.com/i/s0RUxdZcUcDf

He nailed the accent

I think it's pretty clear that the show has a clear path to the end right now and that after a few years of diluting content, the showrunners only have a set amount of screen time to just bloody end the story.
Before, we were taken in by the intrigue, the mysteries, the deceptions. Now we know exactly where we're heading. So many characters have already died and out of the ones that are still alive, we're all pretty damn sure who is way overdue their death. So that takes away some of the qualities that made GOT so good, especially the sense of surprise.

And then the Night King wins and the good guys lose and it's back to being GoT again

This is what the show has been building up to, you can't have dragons flying around, the dead marching and intrigue/schemes at the same time, although Cersei is still trying her best.

 

[Sigfried1977]

The writing of the show went from unexpected-yet-entirely-sensible to lazy and whatever's-looking-cool.

Spoiler

Why didn't the Night King just kill the dragon with Danaerys on it? Is his goal to conquer all? Or is he a pro wrestler who just wants to drum up some extra drama?
Why does it matter whether the dead can swim or not? They're dead. The oceans aren't bottomless. They can simply walk. Also, did the dead guys pull these massive chains out of their collective asses? And how did they manage to pull the dragon out of the lake when water is supposedly such a massive problem for them?
When did the Dothraki become this unstoppable force of which Jaime is so goddamned terrified? If it wasn't for the dragons, the Lannister armies should have crushed them no matter how skilled they were. Loads of bowman, shields and spears should do the trick when the enemy has no armor and barely any artillery. We've also learned rather early in the show that the Dothraki weapons were really rather useless against armored opponents. Remember the duel between Jorah Friendzone Mormont and the Dothraki bloodrider in season 1?
What's with the contrived Littlefinger "surprise" execution?

 

[Clukos]

The writing of the show went from unexpected-yet-entirely-sensible to lazy and whatever's-looking-cool.

Spoiler

Why didn't the Night King just kill the dragon with Danaerys on it? Is his goal to conquer all? Or is he a pro wrestler who just wants to drum up some extra drama?
Why does it matter whether the dead can swim or not? They're dead. The oceans aren't bottomless. They can simply walk. Also, did the dead guys pull these massive chains out of their collective asses? And how did they manage to pull the dragon out of the lake when water is supposedly such a massive problem for them?
When did the Dothraki become this unstoppable force of which Jaime is so goddamned terrified? If it wasn't for the dragons, the Lannister armies should have crushed them no matter how skilled they were. Loads of bowman, shields and spears should do the trick when the enemy has no armor and barely any artillery. We've also learned rather early in the show that the Dothraki weapons were really rather useless against armored opponents. Remember the duel between Jorah Friendzone Mormont and the Dothraki bloodrider in season 1?
What's with the contrived Littlefinger "surprise" execution?

The main theory is that:

Spoiler

Bran or at least a part of him is in the Night King and he doesn't actually want to kill everyone, just make them cooperate against a common enemy to avoid a very bloody war which would really not benefit anyone in Westeros. As for the Dothraki it is generally believed that they are unbeatable in open field fighting.

Not sure about the validity of that theory but it looks like it might be possible with the way this show has been developing the past few seasons.

 

[wco81]

Thing I wonder about is what the NK wants, what are his motivations.

Does it matter to him either way if he conquers the living world? Or you just can't superimpose human motivations on him, even though he was human at one point?

If he's a figure like Satan or Hades in Greek Mythology, at least their motivations are drawn out.

As readers or viewers of this story, we should only care that the characters we've come to love face an existential threat from some abstract malevolent force?