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Bagarthach posted:I thought I'd give Nikita a shot since it seems to be mentioned pretty often in TVIV. Got through four episodes so far...does it get better or something? It's made well enough to never have distractingly poor sets, action scenes or acting but the main attraction is the speed at which the show advances the plot. Every single character you see now will be in a hugely different situation at the end of the season, some of them dead without warning. With so many shows dragging things out because they fear having to write something different then they are doing Nikita is hugely refreshing.
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Sep 27, 2011 10:19
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I just finished episode 7, season 2 of The Vampire Diaries and it already feels like a whole season has passed. A good season full of character development, crazy twists, mythology building and a cliffhanger ending. It's crazy how good the writing is for such a seemingly cheesy show like its network buddy Nikita.
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May 20, 2012 18:49
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EddieDean posted:That doesn't sounds bad at all. How many episodes does it take to get into its groove, or does it hit the ground running? Episode 3. This is when poo poo starts getting real and you know this show pulls no punches.
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Nov 13, 2012 15:17
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Scandal is really addictive and the First Lady is completely stealing the show. One thing that keeps distracting me is the repeated use of the music from a German movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT3D4-JTgRc
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Dec 27, 2012 16:41
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With all the talk on the most soulcrushing moments of The Shield it's probably a good time to mention Capadocia which I found on my local HBO GO listing. It's made by HBO in Mexico and takes place in a privately run women's prison/brothel/sweatshop/drugsmuggling operation where things are as bleak as anything you'd see in Oz. And no matter how horribly melodramatic it is I can't stop watching it, the performances are very compelling and the storylines take a lot of suprising turns. Usually for the worst. Especially good is Cecilia Suarez as psychotic inmate La Bambi who is the scariest woman since Snoop from The Wire. The showrunners must have realized what a loss her death was to the show so they brought the actress back for season 2 as a different character.
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Mar 29, 2013 14:12
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I watched Les Revenants / The Returned and it's every bit as beautiful as everyone said it would be. The story delved a bit too much into 'why did the dead come back' and not in the much more compelling 'what happens when the dead come back' towards the end but it was enthralling to watch every moment. Everyone was very good but the young actors playing Lena, Camille, Victor and Chloe were such a fresh breath of air, showing what you can do if you write good roles for kids.
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Jan 5, 2014 13:14
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The ending of the first season of Line of Duty made me not want to see season 2. But when it was on a lot of 'best of 2014' lists I gave a try and basically watched the whole thing in one sitting. Keeley Hawes is amazing and it's baffling how she and Alex from Ashes to Ashes could be the same actress. Right up to the end you're not sure what her role is and if she's manipulating the audience as well as she's manipulating the cops invesigating her.
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Jan 18, 2015 12:14
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Binging Parks and Recreation is really hard. I keep rewatching the best bits and each episode just makes that process longer.
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May 27, 2015 12:53
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Rapsey posted:Anyone watching Flesh and Bone? It's fantastic. It's a drama about a (messed up) balerina making it in New York. Almost every character is crazy (in an interesting way) and they get naked a lot. It's a bit too grim for binging, to balance out all the beautiful dancers and dancing they made everyone's lives totally messed up. The only one who seems to be somewhat enjoying dancing is Daphne but I'm still early in the series. Weird so say this in a show about ballet but her strip club dance was the best dance scene.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:29
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LORD OF BUTT posted:I noticed that they didn't use "my" or "your" but they used "his" or "her" pretty often. They also don't ever use the word 'money' in the entire series, it's always 'coin'. No one wants to get rich, coin is just a thing you use to get more status. This may be by financing a military campaign or buying a gladiator the Legate will endorse but the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is completely absent in any of the characters. Maybe this is historically accurate or it's bullshit but it makes for interesting characters. Spartacus and Batiatus were very similar, and Batiatus and Lucretia's desire to rise above the position a lanista had in society was the main engine of everything that happened. Maybe Spartacus even had it easier, there was a legitimate way for a gladiator to become a free man but no way for a lanista to achieve more then being close to people in real power.
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Nov 21, 2015 11:47
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The Norwegian series Occupied about a Russian invasion has had some angry reactions from Moscow so I had to see what the fuss was all about. The premise is that in na future without NATO (the US having gone isolationist) after a hurricane casued by global warming killed a thousand Norwegians a party had come into power promising to stop fossil fuel extraction and switch to thorium reactors. But with Middle East oil production destroyed by conflict the European Union demands the Norwegians keep producing oil and gas and have the Russians stage one of their non-invasion invasions with Little Green Men, getting a pretty prompt surrender to their terms of 10 more years of oil production. Everything starts spinning out of control soon and a resistance movement (which may or may not be Russians escalating things) starts sabotaging oil fields and killing Russians, threatening all out war. It appears more gripping then it actually is with a lot of time spent setting up and then defusing various situations that threaten escalations and an odd setup where a lot of episodes starts some time after the previous ended and important things have happened in between. Towards the end poo poo starts getting real though and I really hope there will be another season. Hopefully with some better actors, the main leads of the Norwegion PM and one of his bodyguards were not very compelling, the only real standout in the cast was Ingeborga Dapkunaite as the Russian ambassador/viceroy. I also wonder if the EU will still subsidize another season as they did this one, they come out as the biggest jerks in the storyline.
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Jan 2, 2016 13:22
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bring back old gbs posted:Season 2 of The Leftovers is a mild reboot of the concept with the same characters, pretty much universally perceived as heads and shoulders above season 1 as far as pacing and mystery goes. Everything they change is for the better. I hated season 1 but on a rewatch came 100% around to it. In a way I was like the GR, going 'millions of people just went up in smoke, why the gently caress are you not focusing on that but wasting time on mundane poo poo !!!' and getting angry.
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Jun 24, 2016 13:15
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Watched Dark and most of Travelers in a week and my brain is starting to melt from all the time fuckery. One of them will be in my 2017 top 10 but I'm still not quite sure. Dark has the superior cinematography, acting and writing but there are just way too many characters and they're all assholes. Less is indeed more here.
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Dec 23, 2017 09:48
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Drunk Driver Dad posted:How did you like season 2? I thought season 1 was pretty good, although I'm still not sure what was going on. Was Hitler the man in the High Castle?, What exactly was the point of those films, where did they come from? I do most of my TV watching as I'm drifting off to sleep so I could just be an idiot. At some point I will give season 2 a watch, I just wanted a break from it. I just finished season 1 and somehow found myself rooting for the side that includes Hitler
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Mar 9, 2018 13:16
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Unzip and Attack posted:I wanted to cheer for the locals when the story began because all I had ever heard about this story was the mass poisoning but I quickly came to the conclusion that aside from having a few hippies wandering around at the beginning, the commune wasn't really impeding the goings on in the town. It was several miles away from the city. The recurring theme of the "complaints" against the commune at the beginning was that they were out there having sex and those old white squares just couldn't handle the thought of all those people out there having orgasms. The townspeople were definitely the aggressors, digging through their trash and trying to get the commune dissolved. That triggered the whole cycle which kicked into high gear when they actually bombed the hotel. The bombing was not done by the townspeople but by a Pakistani Islamic terror group. It's a chicken and egg situation but when looking at some of the stuff not in WWC like Sheela having one of her rivals sterilized against her will or the biolab not just making salmonella but also trying to create the AIDS virus that was prophesized to kill 75% of the world the townsfolk were quite right.
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Apr 3, 2018 08:35
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Finished Broen/Bron/The Bridge IIII, the final one and the image of IIII nicely matches the four giant towers of said bridge. It was a solid season, they brought it back to a smaller set of villains and motivations, but still with gruesome, elaborate murders and a vast collection of suspects and victims all connected somehow. Sofia Helin said in an interview that the did not have the stamina for another season of being Saga Noren and I can understand her. I was pleasantly suprised this bleak show gave its main characters a happy ending. Henrik found one of his daughters and Saga has proof she was right about her mother killing her sister.
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May 11, 2018 07:57
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Recently I watched season 2 of the Norwegian series Occupied and rewatched most of season 1 because it was so long ago. This was made immensely more enjoyable by the excellent podcasts at https://soundcloud.com/occupied-podcast who went through each episode. With several International Relations graduates, an actor, a Norwegian and a lawyer on the team every bit of the show was covered by their expertise.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:48
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The Leftovers should come with a warning of sort not to binge it.
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Nov 30, 2018 11:31
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It's one of the shortest binges you could possible have at six times 20 minutes and Derry Girls was an absolute delight. Fortunately it had subtitles to make it possible to follow what was being said even though they made the colossal, unforgivable error of labeling Misrilou as that Black Eyed Peas song. Wierdly I hope my favourite in the cast, Orla, does not get a more prominent role in the coming season as her expressions in the background are so amazing.
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Mar 2, 2019 17:33
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Rocksicles posted:I'm about half way through The Widow, Kate Beckinsale goes to the DRC to get to the bottom of the mystery of her husbands death. Charles Dance is in it too, it's really loving good. Just finished it, some of the parts (the blind lady in Rotterdam, Judith's backstory, Nigel) seem to have little purpose as if there was more to them which was cut but overall it was a solid show. Not at all the Kate Beckinsale star vehicle I had expected, she looked as rough as it's possible to be if you're her. The little girl soldier was a great actress, it's so harrowing to see her lug around a rifle almost as big has her and seeing she know how to use it quite well. In the seventh episode there is also a very impressive long take of a street riot with hundreds of extras. South Africa is putting out some great stuff.
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Mar 8, 2019 20:53
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I really wanted Hanna to be as good as the first episode dropped weeks ago but it's just not delivering. Around episode 3 they leave the path of the movie but not taking it into any interesting new directions. The leads are great but the action is shot poorly and a lot of time is spent on the weakest part of the show, the family Hanna meets when she escapes. One scene stands out as especially poor when Heller is lured into a trap and despite being fired on by a SWAT team on an airfield runway and chased by cars he still gets away, the bullet wounds he takes healing in about three days. They should have not just used the locations from Strike Back but also some of their action direction. While Esmee Creed-Miles as Hanna is good it's Mireille Enos in Cate Blanchett's role who really shines, especially when in a scene with Joel Kinnaman. Maybe I should go back to The Killing, back when it aired I could not get into it.
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Mar 31, 2019 10:15
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Eight episodes into Succession and it's so loving good I wished I'd waited two months so season 2 could be binged as well.
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Aug 18, 2019 11:19
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The greatest thing is Spartacus is how everything, all the death and violence, is a result of Batiatus and Lucretia's love for each other.
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Sep 6, 2019 08:13
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Rain Brain posted:Is anyone watching Beforeigners? I checked out the first couple episodes this weekend (the whole first series is on HBO) and am enjoying it. It's a Norwegian production about a world where ~15 years ago people started appearing from the past (going back at least 10,000 years) and we're following two cops, one a former Viking shieldmaiden, as they solve a murder. Really good production design and I'm torn between wanting more information about how the world now works and being happy with just what I can infer. I just started on it and it's like the anti-Leftovers with people appearing instead of vanishing and none of the existential dread of a world where science and religion are at a loss to explain what happened. The elevator pitch for this must have been 'A washed out cop has a new partner.... Lagertha !' D-Pad posted:If you like this check out Occupied on Netflix. It is also a really great norwegian what if show. Occupied is cool but suffers from some weak performances, apart from Sidorova, who is amazing, I couldn't name or accurately describe anyone from the show. I need to see season 3 and listen to the excellent podcast on the show from some fans.
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Feb 23, 2020 19:08
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Zerozerozero on Amazon Prime is very much worth checking out. It's a mix of Sicario, Narcos and Gomorrah following a massive drugs shipment to Italy and how many parties are working to get it delivered or stop it. And it's not law enforcement who are trying to stop it, in this show they are a slight nuisance an envelope of cash takes care of, only rival criminal enterprises are a real obstacle. It's gorgeously shot on location in Italy, Mexico and Africa and they really went the extra mile actually filming in Senegal and not just Morocco which is the standard place to go for anything set in Africa or the Middle East. The way the episodes are structured is interesting, you follow a character for a bit and at some crucial moment you flash back to another character's events before they arrive at the same moment. At first it's a bit confusing but they execute it very well and after a few episodes I really was excited when the POV switch came. It's also a brutal show, giving Narcos a run for its money. Good guys, bad guys, main characters, background extras, women, children, cops, soldiers, clowns, truly no one is safe. The cast is solid, Dane DeHaan was suprisingly compelling and while Andrea Riseborough's terrible hair annoyed the hell out of me it was all forgiven with an amazing final scene where she thinks she is going to pay her contact in Mexico for the shipment only to find Los Zetas had just murdered him and dozens more and she has to deal with the new, quite psychotic, cartel head literally between the bodies of the old ones. Oh and it has a soundtrack by Mogwai.
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Mar 12, 2020 20:57
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Wafflecopper posted:Got caught up with Strike Back last week just before the series finale which just aired. Uh... what the hell was that? First half of the ep was fine, classic Strike Back gun fights and explosions etc but after the helicopter fight it got kinda dumb. So they escape to the shore and apparently there's a massive patrol of soldiers that just happened to be going through this random spot in the woods? Okay whatever it's Strike Back, more gunfighting is cool, looks like they're getting overwhelmed, fade to black. Next scene they're fine, they just killed them all I guess. They get Gracie patched up and discover the money is counterfeit and we get the scene of the real money being loaded up and taken away. Next scene Coltrane is in a house with Arianna, who escaped in the tunnel fight earlier. What? Did I miss something? Apparently they just tracked her down off-camera somehow and strolled in? I thought she and the money both got away and basically the Russian op was a success? Coltrane executes her, good guys win, show over. The whole back half felt really rushed and nonsensical, somebody tell me how I'm bad at watching TV and explain how Strike Back of all shows has me so confused. It's not you, apart from the John Wick like casino shootout with Novin it was quite sloppy and rushed. The helicopter chase looked nice initially but apparently it's armed with guided missiles that have a range of 25 meters and they still miss most of the time and require you to make three low passes over a boat with people shooting you to lock on. And no Scott/Stonebridge cameo ! Ivana Milicevic was wasted too, obviously she is not the killing machine from Banshee but on The 100 she was intimidating as hell just sitting in a chair.
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Apr 18, 2020 10:56
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Bosch season six was a little less for me then the ones before. Too much time spent on petty office politics and a main case that felt off. The way they portrayed the Sovereign Citizen group was odd. Unlike the shrieking morons they are in reality this is a tightly knit, diverse group who have extreme views but are proven correct when an FBI agent tries to frame them for a murder. And then this same FBI agent kills one of them in a search needlessly escalated by him. Once the truth comes out the FBI agent is conveniently killed by another one and the remaining organizer of the murder looks to be on her way to her release because the cops messed up the investigation. It does not justify bombing a courthouse but it's more background into their motivations then any other villain in the show ever got.
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Apr 27, 2020 12:00
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ToxicToast posted:Just finished watching the Korean drama Itaewon Class on Netflix and I enjoyed it a lot. As far as kdramas go it is pretty different and the first 3/4ths were amazing where it focuses on a revenge story but it lost a bit of its steam at the end. Cool, I was really impressed by Kim Da-Mi in The Witch and that little last bit in her character's description on wikipedia she is a sociopath should be good.
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Jun 29, 2020 14:25
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On Amazon Prime there is a new show The Head. Weirdly enough this is not a Snatch prequel series on Doug The Head and his daughters (which there should be) but a Scandinavian noir mystery set on an Antarctic research station where the crew staying through the winter start getting killed one by one. The Scandinavian part comes from the station being a Danish one with some Danish actors in it but it's 75% English language as most of the characters are from all over the world. The show is actually made mostly in Spain by Spanish creators which makes this Spandinavian Noir ? I'm at 4 out of 6 episodes and it's pretty entertaining as a whodunnit locked-base mystery which drops the reveals nicely one episode at a time as you switch between the relief crew finding the bodies and trying to figure out what happened and scenes in the station before which may or may not actually have happened as it shows. Every episode there is one big twist which is sometimes coming out of nowhere The relief crew comes and finds everyone dead or missing ! There is a survivor ! Another survivor ! Who claims the first survivor is the killer ! A body is found, someone who is not part of the crew ! There is abandoned station nearby where a tragedy occurred years ago, involving most of the surviving characters ! edit: Amazon Prime in Netherlands CeeJee fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 27, 2020 08:43
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D-Pad posted:If you enjoyed that you should really watch Occupied next. Also on Netflix. Also a norwegian political-military drama. Very good and I keep recommending it to this thread and haven't seen anybody else post about it yet. I've been waiting for season 3 to show up for what feels like 5 years. Most of what happened has faded except Berg and Djupvik are idiots and Sidorova is the best character in the show. And that they had a DayZ level as a major location. Also good from Norway is Beforeigners which confusingly has the actress who played a police officer named Wenche in Occupied play another police officer called Wenche.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:26
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Finished Katla, and phew it’s got some dark scenes but I generally really liked it. I think I liked it better than Glitch. I’m sure I’d watch another season but I kind of hope they stop here. Glitch was as much about the mystery (what’s happening, who are these people), but Katla is much more about the reactions of people. It's pretty grim, people barely get the time to acknowledge the miracles that happened before everything turns to poo poo. It was very well made and acted, every Icelandic series suprises me with the talent they have in that country the size of an average city. And it's not even like shows share all the same actors. Here's Grima singing some tunes to feel a little more cheery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOeYgfaOJYY
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Jul 6, 2021 15:58
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Glitch is a very similar show to Katla. It’s pretty interesting to see two shows with such similar premises but that have their own distinct flavor as well. I put it down in S3 and never finished it but the first 2 seasons were good. Les Revenants (also called Rebound in some markets) is a French show in this subgenre of 'the dead come back but not as zombies but just as they were' with a great atmosphere and supernatural mystery. Season 2 is a bit weaker though.
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Jul 20, 2021 07:30
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Random Integer posted:
And he's still (at least a few episodes in nothing indicates otherwise) a violent gangster breaking skulls so his gang kan keep their monopoly on dealing drugs. The action is solid enough to keep watching, Han So-Hee has obviously worked very hard to pull off those non-doubled long fight takes.
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Oct 20, 2021 14:14
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Open Source Idiom posted:Pretty much every Strike Back season is ten episodes long, divided into five two-parters. It's kinda like watching five action films in a single season. The first season had Richard Armitage and is very different from what came later. That one has three 1,5 hour storylines, then it becomes a completely new series with Scott and Stobebridge after a tiny scene to connect season one and two.
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May 26, 2022 13:53
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After really enjoying Irma Vep I started Call My Agent and it's very much that vibe. Scootering through Paris, casually glamorous stars, weirdos hanging around those stars and a general sense of barely contained chaos.
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Jul 27, 2022 12:56
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It's been interesting to see The Undeclared War from Channel 4 and also on Peacock, a show set in 2024 about a major Russian cyber attack on Britain. They went quite far to set it into our world in two years with the PM being 'the one who ousted Boris Johnson', some covid measures still in place and a reference to 'the Ukraine war' but reality has overtaken it as they clearly do not mean the actual Ukraine war with a RT clone still operating in the UK and travel from and to Russia being normal. As a show a lot of it is painfully familiar. The protagonist is a brilliant young woman who cracks the case on her first day at GCHQ but is still rejected by her colleagues and also by her family. The hacking is portrayed quite well but they do a Queen's Gambit with hacking being portrayed as someone trying to access a physical thing like a building in their mind with a belt of tools. But just as it seemed to be going nowhere the third episode is set entirely in Russia at troll farms and the FSB, opening up a whole new perspective and also being done very well with native Russian speakers and Russian looking locations. That drew me in enough to go watch the rest, cast is also quite good with Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance and Alex Jennings as the GCHQ people. Maisie Richardson-Sellers (from Legends of Tomorrow) is an odd choice to play an NSA liaison officer, with all the Russian speakers you'd think they would get an American for this.
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Aug 25, 2022 08:35
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Escobarbarian posted:Maybe. It’s a lovely show about the power of art and community. Not some big plot thing I had the same feelings about The English where major events happen offscreen. It goes out of its way to not do things like they are supposed to be done in TV land. And for me it worked, helped by some absolutely gorgeous (and nigthmarish) visuals and strong performances. Emily Blunt is the big star but Chaske Spencer and Rafe Spall give performances of a lifetime.
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Dec 21, 2022 14:30
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Gangs of London season two had the usual stylish ultraviolence but was nothing special. It's been so long since season one I had forgotten most of what happened and had to peek at imdb to figure out who was who. The combination of a cast mostly playing their actual nationality in a fantasy London where two dozen deaths in a shootout are a normal everyday thing remains weird. Standout for me was Orli Shuka playing the Albanian gang boss. He's intense as hell and would be a perfect Ramzan Kadyrov for any future Ukraine war docudrama. It's a shame the Wallaces are all so bland.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:52
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BetterLekNextTime posted:I thought it was pretty good, especially compared to most recent teen supernatural shows. I don’t think the plot arc was surprising but it turned into a quest show so that’s pretty much to be expected. I liked it until the evil shapeshifter got used too much and it started dragging the show down. The idea that any character can be the evil shapeshifter can work to create tension but after too many such reveals it saps the energy out of the show as anything anyone does may actually be the shapeshifter.
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Feb 11, 2023 21:18
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Hughmoris posted:Just finished up the first three episodes of The Diplomat, and I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. The writing and pacing are tight, Kerri Russell is killing it and she has fantastic chemistry with her "husband" Rufus Sewell. So many other interesting characters as well. Even one scene bit parts feel fully fleshed out and serve a clear purpose.
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May 12, 2023 12:41
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