Without intending to, you've finally convinced me that I need to watch The West Wing. I have duly added the first season to my birthday list.
Isn't Whithouse doing an episode for Doctor Who series five? After Being Human I'm really very excited about it, despite his two previous Whoniverse scripts being a bit flawed as you say.
Also, Lost streamlined itself somewhat and did lots of explaining in its fourth and fifth seasons - with the way the story is headed (and it IS definitely going somewhere) I don't think we're going to get an X-Files-style nosedive, but there's still a season left where it could all go horribly wrong!
West Wing is very good. The first three or four episodes are a bit uneven, but it very quickly hits its stride.
I'm not overly thrilled with the S5 writers, tbh. I do think Whithouse is good but not necessarily good-for-Who, but my hate-ons for Chibnall and Gatiss have not significantly diminished. Simon Nye and Richard Curtis I'm both prepared to wait and see what they come up with, but they don't strike me as a natural fit. Mainly, though, I allowed myself to listen to one too many Gaiman rumours and thus set my expectations sky high.
ERGH WHITE WEE-WEE.peeeeeeetJanuary 20 2010, 22:56:56 UTC
I've always suspected that the epic disappointment of t'X Files is where all this "they don't know where they're going with it" pessimism comes from. Because it isn't really that hard to figure out the various organisations / individuals who want a piece of the island and work out their backstories in a reasonably consistent fashion. You could sketch out the broad strokes in a couple of weeks. Granted, though, new BSG doesn't exactly generate optimism in that direction. That frustrates me particularly since it shouldn't have been at all difficult to plan out the big story of BSG by the end of the first season proper, since it was always more character oriented than Big Picture. They just didn't bother, and it ended up a bit of a mess.
Re: ERGH WHITE WEE-WEE.ionlylurkhereJanuary 21 2010, 00:58:14 UTC
The spoilers I have seen recently do give me a bit of hope that Lost is heading in a good direction, but I have decided I am going to wait to see how fandom reacts to the end before committing to box sets or whatever. I lost faith quite a bit in S2, because it started really strongly on the back of all the "OMG hatch!" stuff, but then seemed to keep chucking in new groups of people I was supposed to care about at the expense of screen time for the characters I actually enjoyed watching.
I don't know what the hell was going on with BSG. I used to see Moore's name attached to some slice of Trek as a near-perfect guarantee of quality, but that whole thing just seemed to disappear up its own contrived theological speculation.
Elisabeth Moss is outstanding on Mad Men (especially in the most recent finale), so if you think you can deal with the sexism on the show, I highly recommend it.
Also, I did not realize Bonekickers was out on DVD, and now I need to decide if I love Adrian Lester enough to pay to have the box set shipped from overseas.
Do you love Adrian Lester x9000? That is not enough. Not even if you love him unto the edge of the observable universe is it enough. Bonekickers is BAD television, nonelvis. Bad bad bad television. Its only redeeming feature is being able to mock it with other people, and that has fallen by the wayside now that it's not in first run.
And, ha, I've literally just now realised where my distrust of Lost comes from. It all reminds me too much of the mess that the X Files conspiracy descended into.
Yes. yes, EXACTLY. This is why I stopped watching the show ages ago (and why I never bothered with the last couple seasons of X-Files, actually. Though that also had something to do with the fact that I was in college and suddenly had no time for tv).
I gave up on X-Files around S6, I think, though I did still buy the tapes of the mythology eps for a bit longer. (It was very strange, I don't know what it was like in the US but over here we got individual VHS releases of the big arc turning points. You could build up a collection entirely of muddled nonsense with none of the fun character stuff in between that made you care in the first place.)
But that's terrible! By S6 I'm pretty sure I was watching solely for the goofy one-off episodes. That's probably the tapes I would have bought, rather than the plot turning points. If they sold those individually? I have no idea if they did that in the U.S.
You are so right about Singing Detective. Fucking hell, that is an incredible piece of telly. I saw it when I was too small to really get it, and then I saw it again after he died, and I could count off all the ways it had influenced things I'd seen since, spookily (and still can - I was enjoying the Life On Mars-ness of Being Human this week, but that gear-shifting 'did I just see that? really?' traces back to Potter really) - but it still makes you sit up in your chair and goggle at how fresh it seems.
Virgin1 had that X-Files where the cockroaches walk over the screen on the other day. BRRRRRRRR.
it still makes you sit up in your chair and goggle at how fresh it seems
Yeah, that's exactly it, the weird/brilliant thing about Potter: the whole sort of televisual grammar he got started has become commonplace now, and yet watching the original source of it it's still strange and like nothing else you've ever seen, even though everything else is exactly like it because it's based on it. Genius.
I must see if his stuff is on DVD. I have a few worn out off-air tapes and such but no coherency about my approach to it.
Google Ads are telling me it's on dvd. TY, stalkery internets. :)
I've still never seen Pennies from Heaven! I remember finding Blackeyes interesting but flawed, and I think Cold Lazarus and... the other one suffered from him being totally unable to edit them as he would have done. And there must be others I'm forgetting. But damn, yes, I need to own that and rewatch it and replay the word-association scene over and over and over.
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Isn't Whithouse doing an episode for Doctor Who series five? After Being Human I'm really very excited about it, despite his two previous Whoniverse scripts being a bit flawed as you say.
Also, Lost streamlined itself somewhat and did lots of explaining in its fourth and fifth seasons - with the way the story is headed (and it IS definitely going somewhere) I don't think we're going to get an X-Files-style nosedive, but there's still a season left where it could all go horribly wrong!
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I'm not overly thrilled with the S5 writers, tbh. I do think Whithouse is good but not necessarily good-for-Who, but my hate-ons for Chibnall and Gatiss have not significantly diminished. Simon Nye and Richard Curtis I'm both prepared to wait and see what they come up with, but they don't strike me as a natural fit. Mainly, though, I allowed myself to listen to one too many Gaiman rumours and thus set my expectations sky high.
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I don't know what the hell was going on with BSG. I used to see Moore's name attached to some slice of Trek as a near-perfect guarantee of quality, but that whole thing just seemed to disappear up its own contrived theological speculation.
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Also, I did not realize Bonekickers was out on DVD, and now I need to decide if I love Adrian Lester enough to pay to have the box set shipped from overseas.
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Yes. yes, EXACTLY. This is why I stopped watching the show ages ago (and why I never bothered with the last couple seasons of X-Files, actually. Though that also had something to do with the fact that I was in college and suddenly had no time for tv).
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Virgin1 had that X-Files where the cockroaches walk over the screen on the other day. BRRRRRRRR.
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Yeah, that's exactly it, the weird/brilliant thing about Potter: the whole sort of televisual grammar he got started has become commonplace now, and yet watching the original source of it it's still strange and like nothing else you've ever seen, even though everything else is exactly like it because it's based on it. Genius.
I must see if his stuff is on DVD. I have a few worn out off-air tapes and such but no coherency about my approach to it.
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I've still never seen Pennies from Heaven! I remember finding Blackeyes interesting but flawed, and I think Cold Lazarus and... the other one suffered from him being totally unable to edit them as he would have done. And there must be others I'm forgetting. But damn, yes, I need to own that and rewatch it and replay the word-association scene over and over and over.
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