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metachronos posted:Y'know this doesn't seem a that terrible compared to the poo poo show that Dexter is. I'm not sure. I've been marathoning my way through Dexter over the past month or two, I'm halfway through season 7, and while a lot of it is pretty bad, there's usually at least a couple of clever ideas and likable character actors to keep it afloat. Maybe the difference is that while Dexter will occasionally have some scenes that fetishize women getting beaten and menaced by Bad People, SoA will follow up that scene by having Gemma smash a DIFFERENT woman's face into the counter because haw haw dumb slut, and then follow it up with more torture porn arab bros. with arabic music in the background and some more prison rape and scary black folks and a school shooting. h_double fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 04:52
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I'm pretty down with the fact that apparently Tara learned to fight at the Starfleet Academy Hand to Hand Fighting Academy. Other than that a bunch of poo poo I don't really care about. There is some good stuff in there but it all gets convoluted with pointless rape nonsense.
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Sep 12, 2013 06:07
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Spoeank posted:I'm pretty down with the fact that apparently Tara learned to fight at the Starfleet Academy Hand to Hand Fighting Academy. Something I got to thinking about : Wendy (Jax's ex) told Gemma that she nearly relapsed after Jax drugged her last week, and that she was giving up custody of the kids before anyone else got hurt. This means that Tara was in jail for, and let's be generous, a week. This means that Jax could hardly wait to cheat on his wife who went to jail to protect him and the club (and was sent there by his mother). How is he our protagonist? 
Ghostpilot fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 06:25
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Ghostpilot posted:Something I got to thinking about : Wendy (Jax's ex) told Gemma that she nearly relapsed after Jax drugged her last week, and that she was giving up custody of the kids before anyone else got hurt. Protagonist doesn't mean hero, it just means the main character. Jax is a dickhead biker, and the show was more interesting when it was just a bunch of dickhead bikers and their relation to a small town in California. Them being involved with the CIA, international terrorists, and Colombian cartels is what really ruined the show. That and the loss of Charlie Utter's deputy.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:38
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Almost scared to post here. I don't hate the show. Quality has definitely dropped. They seem to be blindly pursuing some sort of plot at this point. But I've been entertained quite a bit by this show over its seasons. Yea, it's cheesy at times. But at least it's action packed. And I laughed two times this episode. Once when the Persian was pissed on, I mean, who wouldn't have to piss after being around all that sloshing piss. And once at the school shooting. I still marvel at how blood splattered onto the window with closed blinds... Some of the show is tired. Gemma can hit the bricks any time now. The club constantly struggle could get a pass. At least at the internal strife. There is so much going wrong at any single time, I'm surprised I'm not stressed out watching this show. I'm not saying this is the best show ever, I just don't loathe it as much as you guys appear to. I just stopped taking this show seriously when they were in Ireland riding motorcycles.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:45
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BAD POSTER ALERT!
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Is Jax going to have to get to the bottom of this school shooting.sportsgenius86 posted:Kurt Sutter is basically Shawn Ryan's Vince Russo This is an excellent comparison. Right down to Sutter's hatred of internet critics.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:53
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SnowDog posted:It's like watching something spiraling out of control It's not even good enough to spiral out of control. It's more like when you fold a paper airplane wrong and throw it and it just sort of lamely loops over on itself a couple times 5 feet off from the direction you threw it and falls pathetically to the ground. Ghostpilot posted:Somehow this was much less painful to make than the gif-that-shall-not-be-named. Imagine that. I'm so sorry for making you make that .gif.  I like the prison guard in the background. Instead of being the lookout he's just watching with a bored expression on his face. I'm so loving done with Jax. There are a lot of reasons but this was the last straw tonight. Tara has sacrificed so loving much for him and his stupid club and he can't even wait a week before banging a hooker? Your wife, who is in jail because she tried to help you, wouldn't talk to you for a week? Poor loving baby. She should take the Marshall up on the WITSEC offer and get away. Jax has already ruined her life, maybe she could salvage some of it. Man that school shooting was horrible. And not in the 'school shootings are horrible' way but the execution (har) was just so loving stupid. You are some kind of special if you can turn a school shooting into something that just confuses the audience and irritates them instead of making them feel something. I never thought I'd see something like that and have my reaction be, "Um..what was the point of that?" instead of some sort of real emotion. Even if they tie it into the plot later you at least try to set it up to mean something to the audience before you toss something like that into a show so the general reaction isn't just confusion and disinterest. Also, I feel bad for the medical examiner if they ever find that body Tig dumped into the ocean. Can you imagine doing an autopsy on him and you get to the point in the procedure where you have to take out the lungs? Then getting to write on the report that the lungs were somehow full of piss. "Cause of death, drowning...in piss"
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Sep 12, 2013 08:22
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Spoeank posted:I'm pretty down with the fact that apparently Tara learned to fight at the Starfleet Academy Hand to Hand Fighting Academy. I came here to post this exact same thing. Rampant misogyny? Rape? School shootings? Whatever. Tara used the loving double fist. We have a closet trekkie in SoA.
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Sep 12, 2013 09:14
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Jax and Clay used to have redeeming qualities. They could still objectively be awful people, but they were at least either a) fighting against a system or b) excellent at working within the system. I feel like the show wants me to be thinking "Boy, Jax sure is a great leader! Too bad he sold his soul though. Moral dilemma!" The problem is that when SAMCRO is getting into diplomatic cockups and gunfights literally EVERY.DAY. in the show's timeline it makes Jax into the head of a keystone cops documentary.
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Sep 12, 2013 09:17
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KilGrey posted:There are a lot of reasons but this was the last straw tonight. Holy poo poo!!!!! I think you figured out the meaning behind the episode's title, "Straw"!!!
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Sep 12, 2013 09:47
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Narcissus1916 posted:I feel like the show wants me to be thinking "Boy, Jax sure is a great leader! Too bad he sold his soul though. Moral dilemma!" The problem is that when SAMCRO is getting into diplomatic cockups and gunfights literally EVERY.DAY. in the show's timeline it makes Jax into the head of a keystone cops documentary. Funny you mention that: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/11/why_we_watch_shows_we_hate/ quote:Unfortunately, as with many relationships, the little things that bothered me about “SOA” in the beginning only grew more disturbing. More and more, characters seemed to make erratic decisions that served the plot but not, ultimately, the world. (I don’t want to get into spoilers for the uninitiated, but Opie sacrificing himself for a club that had given him nothing but heartbreak seemed to me an unforgivable breach of believability.) Also, episodes more frequently veered off from the overarching story into unconvincing episodic adventures that felt a little like the Hell’s Angels meet the Keystone Cops. And, while “Sons” consistently attracts great underappreciated talent like Adam Arkin, Harold Perrineau and Jimmy Smits, it has yet to make the most of these guest arcs. Poor Donal Logue emerges this season as an inexplicably nudist heroin addict. Where is that going?
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Sep 12, 2013 10:19
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Ghostpilot posted:This means that Tara was in jail for, and let's be generous, a week. This means that Jax could hardly wait to cheat on his wife who went to jail to protect him and the club (and was sent there by his mother). How is he our protagonist? These days I watch SOA in the firm and honest hope that everyone will eventually be killed. It doesn't need to be torture porn, I'd be happy with a metorite hitting the clubhouse during a big barbecue social. Or a carbon monoxide leak. Or maybe an outbreak of fatal food poisoning. Just something that removes all these horrible horrible people from the world. Tara can survive though, and anyone under age ten.
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Sep 12, 2013 11:59
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I feel like we need to talk about just how much piss would be required to fill a tub. I mean how long did it take to fill that poo poo.
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Sep 12, 2013 12:25
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They probably just bought some jugs down at Tractor Supply.
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Sep 12, 2013 12:51
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Kurt Sutter posted:So, I tried to layer in my point of view in terms of why I think these things happen. And what I hope is that people come away with [the idea that] if there is a social and political point of view about the shooting and a moral point of view, it is not one particular party that’s responsible for these tragedies, that it is a combination of gun laws, mental health, schools, parents, media... I have to say, I appreciate how the scene really delved in deep to examine all the factors involved in school shootings. It was very subtle, but the kid had scars on his arms from cutting himself and he drew these creepy drawings and wrote pages and pages of the same thing, like that guy off of The Shining. Mental Health, see! The school was actually a catholic school. Religion, am I rite?!? Disinterested mother! It also got really stuck in to how messed up America's gun laws are, and how they just lead to pre-teens getting hold of automatic weapons from the gang member their mother is banging whose gang has teamed up with outlaw bikers who sell Russian guns from Irish terrorists to CIA cartels. The whole thing is basically a microcosm of modern America. David Simon, eat your heart out. You oval office.
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Sep 12, 2013 13:11
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In a weird way, this could be somewhat beneficial. The typical SOA viewer is not the most sophisticated so if Sutter can, even in a hackneyed bad-television kind of way, make those people consider mental health as a factor more than before, something useful may come of this. I liken it to when an intelligent person tries to explain something to someone stupid and they don't get it, then some other moron poorly explains the same thing and the first idiot magically has it all connect.
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Sep 12, 2013 13:35
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Armyman25 posted:Protagonist doesn't mean hero, it just means the main character. Jax is a dickhead biker, and the show was more interesting when it was just a bunch of dickhead bikers and their relation to a small town in California. Them being involved with the CIA, international terrorists, and Colombian cartels is what really ruined the show. That and the loss of Charlie Utter's deputy. Oh certainly, but they're typically written to be relate-able on some level (as he was in previous seasons: not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps, wanting a better life for his kids, etc). Now he's blackmailing his friends, injecting his recovering ex-wife with heroin, the aforementioned cheating on Tara, and so much more. Lee Toric (who was cold, calculating and had laser focus last season inexplicably became a jittery heroin addict this season) is supposed to be the big bad of the season, but I can't help but to root for him. Ghostpilot fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 13:38
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Ghostpilot posted:Lee Toric (who was cold, calculating and had laser focus last season inexplicably became a jittery heroin addict this season) is supposed to be the big bad of the season, but I can't help but to root for him. Oh I'm pretty much always on the side of the "antagonist". Even the wonky mouthed murderous FBI lady, horrific a person as she was, the Sons are worse. And the weird voiced Jim Henson looking guy was just awesome.
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Sep 12, 2013 13:56
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Fatkraken posted:Oh I'm pretty much always on the side of the "antagonist". Even the wonky mouthed murderous FBI lady, horrific a person as she was, the Sons are worse. And the weird voiced Jim Henson looking guy was just awesome. The only antagonist I actually enjoyed was AJ Weston in season 2, until the incredibly lame & cheesy brawl in the forest took place.
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Sep 12, 2013 14:31
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Stay Out of FYAD posted:I hope you're not talking about Stahl, that bitch was just low. You know she's the reason Opie became so hosed in the head right? It was more Tig splattering the back of Opie's wife's head that did that. You could probably trace most of the bad things that happen to the club (or those close to it) back to Tig.
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Sep 12, 2013 15:55
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Ghostpilot posted:It was more Tig splattering the back of Opie's wife's head that did that. You could probably trace most of the bad things that happen to the club (or those close to it) back to Tig. Exactly. I'm under no illusions, the woman was a total sociopath, but she was at least fun to watch and she didn't shoot Mrs Opie, the club did that when trying to murder HIM. You might be able to manipulate a murderer into committing a murder, but they still need to have murder in their hearts first. Had she "won", one sociopathic arsehole would have put seven or so sociopathic* arseholes away and probably saved dozens of lives based on how many people were killed because of the club in subsequent seasons. *Each individual member of the SOA may be acting according to some internal code of honour or whatever, but the practical upshot of it is that a lot of innocent people die for no reason, so in terms of it's impact on the wider world they might as well be entirely amoral.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:01
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The funniest thing about Stahl to me was that she came off as cartoonishly ridiculous and evil compared to everybody else (I seem to recall someone likening her to Wile E. Coyote). Now? Not only would she not be out of place, but she actually could be considered tame.
Ghostpilot fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 16:11
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Armyman25 posted:Protagonist doesn't mean hero, it just means the main character. Jax is a dickhead biker, and the show was more interesting when it was just a bunch of dickhead bikers and their relation to a small town in California. Them being involved with the CIA, international terrorists, and Colombian cartels is what really ruined the show. That and the loss of Charlie Utter's deputy. loving amen brother. This is absolutely what ruined the show. Keep it focused on the small scale stuff. You don't need to keep upping the ante every single season. This isn't just a problem with SOA though. Nearly every franchise runs into this problem eventually. "Ok so in the first movie we had Ironman fight one single enemy robot in the finale. That was cool and all, but we can't do that same thing again for part 2 because it will be boring! The audience will say "been there, done that" and get bored! To get ratings we need to outdo ourselves. So that means for the second movie we should totally up the stakes and have Ironman fight like twenty enemy robots at once!!" "Oh man, how are we going to top ourselves for part 3?? We can't move backwards here. Its a sequel, we have to keep pushing the envelope to get viewers. I know! Lets have like 100 Ironmans on the screen at once, fighting a huge army of thousands of bag guys! Yeah, that will totally work!!!" When is the last time you saw a sequel move backwards in scale? It almost always goes from "hero saves town" -> "hero saves nation" -> "hero saves world"
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Sep 12, 2013 16:33
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I hate this show so much, but keep watching it just so I can read this thread and know what you guys are talking about. Chekhov's pisstub is one of the funniest things I've read in a while, so thanks for that. This thread is what makes the show bearable.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:42
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:loving amen brother. This is absolutely what ruined the show. Keep it focused on the small scale stuff. You don't need to keep upping the ante every single season. I agree that they should've focused on the small scale stuff more (Ernest Darby!), but I had doubts about this show since I heard it was going to be on basic cable. A show about an outlaw MC done right on HBO or showtime would be phenomenal. Nothing held back on violence, sex & language. 
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Sep 12, 2013 16:43
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holding back on sex, violence or language is most certainly not the issue here
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Sep 12, 2013 16:45
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sportsgenius86 posted:holding back on sex, violence or language is most certainly not the issue here
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Sep 12, 2013 16:49
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:When is the last time you saw a sequel move backwards in scale? It almost always goes from "hero saves town" -> "hero saves nation" -> "hero saves world" Riddick (the new one). Chronicles was a huge 40k styled beast with galaxy spanning consequences. The new one is just "escape the bounty hunters" with a dash of Aliens. Speaking of which, Alien 3. Smaller scale than the second, fewer aliens, no queen. Reboots probably don't count as it's a new team and new story, but the new Dredd was very much more restricted in scale than the Stallone attempt
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Sep 12, 2013 16:49
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Stay Out of FYAD posted:I agree it's not the main issue, but when a show about Wizards & Dragons (GoT) has more of this in terms of content then a show about an outlaw MC it kind of makes you wonder. Dude, this latest episode had male rape, female rape, torture porn, a woman breaking another womans nose played for laughs, prison beatings, TONS of shooting, a drowning in weewee, naked bums while loving a sex worker, hard drug use and a SCHOOL SHOOTING. Previous seasons have had more rape, more shootings, live immolations, graphic domestic violence, even more shootings, beatings, torture, mutilation, more loving and shootings. Whatever the show's issues, they have nothing to do with Kurt Sutter not being allowed graphic content.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:53
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sportsgenius86 posted:holding back on sex, violence or language is most certainly not the issue here The only thing that Sutter can't do on FX is show tits and dick/bush and say "gently caress" or "oval office." Aside from that Sutter is pretty much given free reign content wise, probably to the show's detriment. BrandonGK fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 16:54
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So was it Navarro's kid that did the shooting, or is he just sleeping with the kid's mom? I hope he's his real father so we can see some of the lamest "We heard about your kid, bro, so sorry" *bro hug* from Jax and Nero and Chibbs and everybody else Navarro might cross paths with for an entire episode.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:55
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Fatkraken posted:Dude, this latest episode had male rape, female rape, torture porn, a woman breaking another womans nose played for laughs, prison beatings, TONS of shooting, a drowning in weewee, naked bums while loving a sex worker, hard drug use and a SCHOOL SHOOTING. I don't know why you guys are being so negative. Cramming all this garbage into one hour of television is a real achievement.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:56
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This show has become the worst. That episode was nearly unwatchably bad. Still, I'll keep up with it because this thread is fun and I'm so far down the rabbit hole, why would I stop now? I knew full well what I was getting into. (Seriously though, that was awful.)
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Sep 12, 2013 16:56
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It's not a coincidence that the more dumb poo poo gets crammed into this show, the more people watch. Tuesday was a series high for viewers. The people I work with in the "I LOVE CBS PROCEDURALS!!!!" crowd love Sons more and more each year because of the stupid poo poo. America is just really dumb.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:01
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Fatkraken posted:Dude, this latest episode had male rape, female rape, torture porn, a woman breaking another womans nose played for laughs, prison beatings, TONS of shooting, a drowning in weewee, naked bums while loving a sex worker, hard drug use and a SCHOOL SHOOTING. Previous seasons have had more rape, more shootings, live immolations, graphic domestic violence, even more shootings, beatings, torture, mutilation, more loving and shootings. I never SoA didn't have violence. When I said "nothing held back" I meant in terms of explicitness. You will never see someone graphically loosing a limb or full nudity in SoA. I'm not even getting into the limit on language. You'll notice I agreed this wasn't the primary problem of the show either.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:09
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Stay Out of FYAD posted:Are you stupid? quote:I had doubts about this show since I heard it was going to be on basic cable. A show about an outlaw MC done right on HBO or showtime would be phenomenal. Nothing held back on violence, sex & language It would make almost no difference to the show though. A show about outlaw motorcycle clubs on HBO would be very similar to a show about outlaw motorcycle clubs on basic cable, other than having the words "gently caress", "oval office" and the occasional shot of a penis or boob. The actual plot and script, bar two specific swears and the framing of an occasional sex scene, could be utterly identical.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:14
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Stay Out of FYAD posted:Are you stupid? You quoted a post in the SoA thread, this question is redundant.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:14
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Stay Out of FYAD posted:Are you stupid? A dude got his arm chopped off on Justified, also on FX A dude got his face loving exploded from a high-powered rifle round and they held on the shot of his cratered head for a while on The Bridge, also on FX A dude got his throat slit on The Bridge, also on FX FX has allowed some graphic violence.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:58
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Yeah between SoA and The Walking Dead I don't think graphic violence is really an issue for basic cable Standards and Practices at all.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:14
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:This isn't just a problem with SOA though. Nearly every franchise runs into this problem eventually. The thing is, I know SoA decided a while ago to go down this road, but there's nothing carved in stone that says a show has to follow a "bigger & badder" arc. Look at something like The Sopranos, which I admit did drag a bit in pacing near the end, but there was still some serious big deal holy poo poo dramatic events that happened even late in the show's run, and the show maintained interest and popularity without having Tony teaming up with rogue CIA agents and getting into rocket launcher shootouts. It never lost sight of the fact that the key dynamic of the show was (as with SoA) "these are big fish in a pretty small pond". Pretty much the only thing that keeps me watching SoA (well, this thread is probably the main thing), but other than that, it's because I still think "Hamlet with biker gangs" is a great concept. It's a tragic arc with lots of built in potential for badass conflict and betrayal and drama and eventual exciting resolution. "Breaking Bad" has a rise & fall thing going on, but has never lost sight of its central arc, never felt the need to ramp up much beyond a small cast who has mostly been there since the first episode, and yet five seasons in, manages to be probably the most white-knuckle intense thing I've ever seen on tv. "The Shield" had some big-ish setpiece stuff, but never lost site of the tight conflicts between the central characters.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:53
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