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DogsInSpace! posted:That is a really good point. I'm from a nice small town that mostly exists for people vacationing but I've seen quite a few genuinely lovely decaying small towns half boarded up even before COVID. I remember going on a trip in the beforetimes and visiting this one place that looked like something from the Last of Us: foggy windows with posters from 5-10 years before, vines growing and this grimy, sporey dirt baked into crevices. There were still a few families here and there but the nearest hospital was an hour away and even attempts to fix things just made it look even worse. Mare has some poorer parts but the town also has some parts that look fairly new and shiny that, like you said, don't quite capture the bleak hopelessness. drat.... now I'm never going to unsee that. This captures my main complaint with the show. It seems like they were swinging for something edgy and raw but the intensity was lost to a committee somewhere down the line. I'm a little surprised HBO made this, because the production values are a little more in-line with what Sky or the BBC would produce. This is much closer to Broadchurch than True Detective, but it's now shaken down to a pretty bog-standard "whodunnit" complete with your purposefully misdirecting casting. Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce are both doing better American accents than most Americas as usual. It's fine when I was expecting maybe a little bit of Twin Peaks or some more delicious strange fiction. It's competent in what it's doing, it's just not swinging for the fences or taking any risk and will likely peter out in a luke-warm and forgettable way. Ultimately I came for Jean Smart and I will finish the season for Jean Smart.
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May 18, 2021 23:06
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I looked into the production of this show, and apparently Gavin O'Connor (Warrior, The Accountant, The Way Back) created the show and was set to direct before Craig Zobel took over. Craig Zobel has directed a smattering of TV episodes, but nothing consistent until this show. He's much younger and less experienced, and has mostly a comedy corpus. He did help create Homestar Runner, which I enjoyed years ago. I believe I have found the crux of my complaint, and can now only resign myself to wondering what could have been.
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May 19, 2021 16:23
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When Jim stole Pam from Roy, we should have seen this coming. Put yourself in Roy's shoes, a simple though passionate man. You've got a sweet shipping job in the recession, you're punching up with a new engagement, the American dream is becoming yours against all odds. You can practically taste the water skis. Enter Jim Halpert. A snake-in-the-grass failure with 0 muscle mass who has nothing better to do all day than crack wise and steal your girl. Jim did Roy raw, bending a man well past the point of breaking. Roy was plunged into a shadow world, a photographic negative of a man, unable to put trust in a cruel duplicitous system he became lost in the grey Pennsylvania fog where there is no truth and everything is permitted. Torn up bars. Assault. Divorce. Knocking up teenagers then 86'-ing them when things got too real. Halpert strikes again. Roy never stood a loving chance. TheOmegaWalrus fucked around with this message at 12:29 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 12:25
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I got to the second to last episode and just called it quits. Under different direction this could have been prestige television but it's just so formulaic and by-the-numbers. The show barely had enough steam for one season. I'd be very surprised if there's any follow-up to this.
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Jun 1, 2021 19:10
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