T.V. shows you've been watching

[SD83]

common everyone has at any given point seen a Friends episode. Its like saying "I havent watch Seinfield" lol

Never have either But then again, I never had my own TV (still technically haven't). Also, keep in mind, this is Germany. As far as I know, no one ever watched Seinfield (just looked it up to be sure and there you have it: aired from 95 to 96 and then again from 98, past 11pm) and I can't remember anyone talking about Friends either. Fresh Prince, maybe, a handful of others, sure... on the other hand, there are some series or shows which every single person I know has watched at some point and no one outside Germany has ever heard of them (in some cases, count yourself lucky, in some cases, not so much )

 

[Demiurge]

Never have either But then again, I never had my own TV (still technically haven't). Also, keep in mind, this is Germany. As far as I know, no one ever watched Seinfield (just looked it up to be sure and there you have it: aired from 95 to 96 and then again from 98, past 11pm) and I can't remember anyone talking about Friends either. Fresh Prince, maybe, a handful of others, sure... on the other hand, there are some series or shows which every single person I know has watched at some point and no one outside Germany has ever heard of them (in some cases, count yourself lucky, in some cases, not so much )

I guess it depends where you are. Both shows have been 'over' for a period of time longer than they actually ran but episodes still air every day in the US thanks to syndication... and there's Netflix and Hulu that carry them too.

On a related note, I started watching Veep and Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems ageless. Show's funny, too, and I needed something lighter after finishing Hannibal.

 

[Ralyks]

Probably going to get on Powers season 2 tonight.

 

[awake69]

Been watching Angie Tribeca with Rashida Jones. Think Police Squad/Naked Gun with a female lead. It's actually pretty funny IMO.

 

[MFB]

Just about to wrap up season 3 of It's Always Sunny. I know a lot of people (just about everyone actually) who's seen the show holds "Dayman" as the peak, but man, there's so much more in that season alone that's better than that.

Charlie as Serpico?
The Gang Dances Their Asses Off?
The introduction of the lawyer "nemesis"?

All gold.

 

[A-Branger]

just watched the second episode of the new Top Gear..... its not getting better :/ they did the classic 3 car challenge mini-special thing, but they bring a speciall guest (who I have no idea who he is and the why they bring that guy in)

and...... a big fat "meh" ...... they are trying to replicate the old stuff, but something is missing, the personalities of the 3 old main guys.

 

[extendedsolo]

This suggestion probably pertains more to Americans than non Americans. If any of you are even slightly interested in OJ Simpson, ESPN did a 5 part documentary on basically his life story. It's been receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews. They have been doing 30 for 30 which are sports documentaries in no uncertain terms, many of which show how sports stories transcend the sport itself. So many of them are basically the pinnacle of sports documentary film making. Made In America: The OJ Simpson Story completely passes and laps any of the previous documentaries they have done, and is probably one of the best documentaries in existence. I'm not trying to use hyperbole here, but it almost feels like a piece of history that future generations will look back on to get an understanding of what was going on at this time in America.

Some of it may not resonate that much with non Americans, but anyone who is an American will definitely feel it's importance. Even more so if you are old enough to have lived through it the first time.

I feel like Chuck Klosterman put it best.

When this eventually airs, it will be viewed as the greatest thing ESPN has ever produced. I almost can't believe how revelatory it is. [3]

— Chuck Klosterman (@CKlosterman)

 

[wankerness]

This suggestion probably pertains more to Americans than non Americans. If any of you are even slightly interested in OJ Simpson, ESPN did a 5 part documentary on basically his life story. It's been receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews. They have been doing 30 for 30 which are sports documentaries in no uncertain terms, many of which show how sports stories transcend the sport itself. So many of them are basically the pinnacle of sports documentary film making. Made In America: The OJ Simpson Story completely passes and laps any of the previous documentaries they have done, and is probably one of the best documentaries in existence. I'm not trying to use hyperbole here, but it almost feels like a piece of history that future generations will look back on to get an understanding of what was going on at this time in America.

Some of it may not resonate that much with non Americans, but anyone who is an American will definitely feel it's importance. Even more so if you are old enough to have lived through it the first time.

I feel like Chuck Klosterman put it best.

When this eventually airs, it will be viewed as the greatest thing ESPN has ever produced. I almost can't believe how revelatory it is. [3]

— Chuck Klosterman (@CKlosterman)

I feel really OJ'd out after that great American Crime Story series, but you've got me curious.

I just rewatched all of the US The Office. When it originally aired, I watched most of the episodes from S4-S6, some from S7, a couple from S8, and NONE from S9. I maintain my strong opinion that the first episode of S4 is the dividing line where the show nosedived in quality, but I realized this time that later episodes in S4 stand on a level with the first two seasons (particularly "The Deposition"). However, S5 and beyond are all a shadow of the show's former self. They quickly started doing cutesy bullsh.. which completely betrayed the first couple seasons (ex, Jim and Pam inviting all their coworkers to the wedding, and them all performing a dance routine). The later seasons get more and more toothless (with one or two exceptions, like the infamous "Scott's Tots"). Ellie Kemper's character is the only real saving grace of seasons 6 and on. The last season is slightly more interesting, where they tried to take a couple chances, but it remains far, far below the early seasons. Jim and Pam in s1-s3 are one of the greatest TV couples of all time, but I completely hated them well before the time S9 happened. Like, what the hell was Jim's company even supposed to do? Why would he be good at it? Why would they move to a city with no sports teams? Why is he such an oblivious idiot, and why is Pam such an immovable killjoy? I was actively hoping they'd get divorced in S9. I did love in S9 how Andy basically got written off the show, cause he became the single worst character on the show and took up the most time in about S4, while in S9 he disappears and when he comes back the writers seemed to hate him to and finally INTENTIONALLY made him the worst ever.

The last two episodes are good. They redeemed the characters for the most part. The very early work in episodes like the one Dwight got a concussion pays off in ways that were satisfying. The last episode's scene with Phyllis talking about Stanley is great.

Overall, if that series had ended after S3, it would be one of the best series of all time. I think I'll buy the DVD of S4 and consider a few of those episodes when rewatching episodes, but yeah, S2 and S3 are infinitely rewatchable and the rest is extremely weak (like, only slightly better than the average sitcom).

 

[extendedsolo]

I feel really OJ'd out after that great American Crime Story series, but you've got me curious.

It's worth it since they really delve into many different topics, whereas the show was more a story of OJ 1994- right after the trial. It was more a story of the chase/trial. This goes into many of the factors that influenced the outcome of the trial. Some of it was covered in the series, but SOOOO MUCCHHH new stuff that wasn't in the fiction/fact series.

The interviews with different people involved in the case also add another dimension. It also paints OJ in a completely different light than any documentary I have ever seen.

 

[Demiurge]

Stuff about The Office
.

I'm typically an OCD-level completist with things and even with bad TV, but with this show I went from really enjoying it to- a first- making the deliberate decision to stop watching it for the last two seasons (I did watch the finale) because it just got so bad.

I agree that there were no good stories to tell after Jim & Pam finally got together, and it suffered from the typical phenomenon with long-running shows: every character turning into a cartoon version of themselves.

The later seasons did give us Ellie Kemper, but they gave us "The Desperate Effort to Make Mindy Kaling a Thing".

 

[wankerness]

I'm typically an OCD-level completist with things and even with bad TV, but with this show I went from really enjoying it to- a first- making the deliberate decision to stop watching it for the last two seasons (I did watch the finale) because it just got so bad.

I agree that there were no good stories to tell after Jim & Pam finally got together, and it suffered from the typical phenomenon with long-running shows: every character turning into a cartoon version of themselves.

The later seasons did give us Ellie Kemper, but they gave us "The Desperate Effort to Make Mindy Kaling a Thing".

Mindy Kaling was completely intolerable starting with when they figured out what her character was in season 2. I found it really funny in the early seasons, though, since it seemed like you were supposed to find her unbelievably shallow and awful. That scene where Jim gets back to Scranton and she tells him all about Brad Pitt's baby and he goes "great...and what have you been up to?" and she goes I JUST TOLD YOU, that was perfect. It was a great example of a very real personality type.

However, when they tried to get us to follow her love triangle with Darryl and Ryan and the later one with that guy from Heroes, it was painful. Her character remained as thoughtless and terrible, but it was like the show wanted the audience to like her. And her writing got to be as bad as her character. Every episode she wrote in the later seasons was awful. She REALLY liked having characters do unfunny dance parties. I think she disappeared during season 8, which was one of the few good things about that season. I know she was not in season 9 besides the finale, anyway.

From what I've heard, her autobiography reveals her to be as unlikable in real life as she was on this show. She always comes off as very thin-skinned and unfunny in interviews. You couldn't get me to watch The Mindy Project without paying me to do so. I'm all for minorities and women getting a chance to write and believe in affirmative action on that front, but it's too bad she always gets held up as one of the most successful examples.

Now I'm watching season 2 of Community. I watched some episodes of seasons 1,2 and 3 while they aired, but was always perplexed as to how rabid the fanbase was for it on AV club. It still seems to have a rep as THE best comedy of all time over there, and people just quote it non-stop. I am finding it about the same as I always did. It's got a lot of clever jokes and ambitious episodes, but the characters and situations just aren't very involving. Shirley is one of the most annoying characters of all time. It's like a half-full style exercise. At least it gave us the Russos, who gave us the last two Captain America movies!

 

[Ibanezsam4]

Mindy Kaling... god dammit

all of your thoughts on her are spot on. my wife thinks she's funny and i think she is insufferable.

her whole act is embodying the worst thoughts material girls have and saying them out loud.

i get it, we all have horrible thoughts sometimes, we internalize it, we maybe chuckle for a second and think "wow, im a giant ***hole"

but we don't pour all those thoughts into one character and frame them as a protagonist! that's the villain in a high school comedy!

for the same reason i find aziz ansari in Parks and Rec annoying. he plays the male version of Mindy and all his dialog follows this pattern: "im a complete d**k, but i'm a minority male materialist with a texas accent *stupid grin at the camera, cut to scene*

 

[wankerness]

I liked Tom Haverford overall. I found him more endearing in his obnoxious-ness. He didn't remind me even remotely of anyone in real life, so that might have been part of it, but he also seemed so much more good-natured and he wasn't constantly being horrible to everyone else on the show. When he was rude, like while he was dating Rashida Jones, it was funny to me because it was just that his personality was so ridiculous that of course no other character could possibly be compatible with an ego his size. He didn't crave drama, it was all just a vain attempt to always be the coolest guy in the room. He is unlike any other character I can think of, and was a total cartoon character. He was the butt of every joke, but not really in a mean-spirited way. His character didn't seem to really be making fun of anything. Plus, Jean-Ralfio made him seem totally reasonable.

I kinda liked Aziz's show "Master of None" as well. His standup is completely lame and the show isn't half as intelligent as it wants to be, but his heart is in the right place. He seems like a legitimately well-intentioned, dorky guy.

Parks and Rec's third season is sort of like the second and third Office seasons - WAY, WAY better than everything afterwards. That show progressively turned into the relationships and babies show after that and seemed to be directed at moms that use Facebook. Ah well. It was always harmless, and I didn't feel betrayed like with The Office since I never was as attached.

 

[MFB]

All of Parks and Rec is pure genius, and in my eyes, its well above the Office even during the latter's peak. The later season of PaR just address the very realities of real life and what happens where one day you wake up and realize how crazy the past few years have been and how much things have changed; and that's what I loved about it. When they jump ahead for season 7, it connected with everything I'm going through.

I'm at the point in my life where my friends who are in relationships are now getting married, some already have kids, we're buying houses and go on to do crazy things that others look at and go "you're trusting that guy to do ________?" because we know the crazy sh!t he's done and the past - so it blows our mind where we've ended up and who we've become. Sadly, it also means the friends you make now are the final ones you tend to settle with and hopefully you don't fall out of touch with them because it just gets harder and harder to go back to how things used to be.

That's the beauty of what P&R became.

Shifting gears ie Community:

S3 is the last great season, 4 was garbage, 5 was OK, and 6 I had to remember to watch because it went from TV -> Hulu -> friggin' Yahoo! and no one thinks of Y! as a streaming service. No one.

 

[wankerness]

I couldn't stand watching Ben be Mr. Sensitive with Leslie. I just found it revolting. It triggered something primal in my stomach. Every time they had the romantic interlude with them (required in every episode) I felt ill. Leslie was a good character, but Ben became as compelling as the average housewife on a 50s sitcom. He just reeked of that wholesome nerd that you knew in college that got a girlfriend for the first time and they would like sit on each other's laps and kiss each other ALL THE TIME no matter where you guys were and it was just awkward and kind of gross. I still love the actor, though, for playing the polar opposite of that character in Stepbrothers.

April and Andy were funny at first, but then that relationship, too, started being used exclusively as "here's the romantic cute interlude with them, look at how in-love they are!!!" and it just got to be way too much when it was on top of Ben and Leslie AND Rashida Jones and Rob Lowe AND in the last season even frickin Ron Swanson got sucked into that humor quagmire. I mean, it was still far better than Modern Family doing the same thing, because the characters were good in the first place, but it felt like it was spinning its wheels the same way and like it was just taking victory laps.

The show never became BAD, it just became a show that felt like it was all about how much the writers love the characters, instead of a show that was about any of the characters being interesting or funny anymore. It felt like the Jim and Pam scenes from Season 4, ALL THE TIME!! Haha. Maybe if I was married and looking for validation I'd have enjoyed the later seasons more. It just started being less about enjoying entire episodes, and more about enjoying the five minutes or so of each episode where anything actually happened beyond our oh-so-irresistable couples going on a vacation or giving each other romantic presents or having a picnic. The minor bizarre supporting characters like Jam and Orin or Beaverton residents started being my favorite thing by the end.

I just ordered the DVD of Community Season 3, cause I did get a lot of laughs out of some episodes in Season 2. Shirley's still awful and her miss piggy voice and constant guilt-tripping makes her aggravating beyond belief, but there's some gold in there. Some of the "filmmaking" is really good, too, particularly that Dungeons and Dragons episode where it's mostly just them sitting around the table but maintains a breakneck pace in which you really do kinda visualize everything that's happening.

Time to start those OJ documentaries!

 

[Demiurge]

From what I've heard, her autobiography reveals her to be as unlikable in real life as she was on this show. She always comes off as very thin-skinned and unfunny in interviews. You couldn't get me to watch The Mindy Project without paying me to do so. I'm all for minorities and women getting a chance to write and believe in affirmative action on that front, but it's too bad she always gets held up as one of the most successful examples.

My wife loves Mindy Kaling, so alas I've seen the show. The "Project" part of the name is incredibly apt as it seems like a TV show that was inexplicably being filmed while in the development stage: major characters disappear completely, plots get abandoned at a whim, and it's just a mess. Almost as if her character from the office wrote a sitcom casting herself as a doctor, cribbing as many Liz Lemon food jokes as possible to fill time.

 

[wankerness]

I watched the first two episodes of the OJ ESPN documentary. They were really, really well-made, but I don't know yet if I really cared to learn that much about the guy. So far, in 3 hours, they establish the same thing the show did with a very small amount of dialogue about it: that he basically thought he was "above" being black, and that he made every attempt to distance himself from the black community. It does also present the black reaction to this, however, which was complex in that while civil rights leaders were dismayed at the way he only hung out with white people and seemed fine with being treated basically as a pet, they thought it was an incredible leap to have a black guy doing things that black people had never been able to do before (ex heading marketing campaigns directed at the entire country instead of just black people for Hertz/Chevrolet). There is a ton of footage of his college career, and a ton of footage from his big NFL year, all interspersed with great interviewees. It also gives a roughly equal amount of time to the civil rights situation in LA from 1960 and on, which was almost all news to me, and I'm sure is the point of this whole thing.

So far, I've gained some crazy respect for Jim Brown and the other athletes who supported Muhammad Ali with his Vietnam stance and the "black power" guys at the olympics. OJ just backed out of any support of the civil rights movement with some sort of statement like "I don't know enough about this to have anything to do with it, sorry" and continued ingratiating himself to the mainstream.

I liked that they had the two legendary scenes with him from The Naked Gun, and included all the Hertz ads and whatnot (I was totally unfamiliar with that). It does a great job of making clear exactly how famous the guy was.

It also goes to great lengths to make us understand that Nicole was a person, with lots of archival footage, interviews with family and friends, and 911 calls and photos of her battered. Truly rage-inducing stuff. As great as that miniseries was, it didn't have enough time to really make clear the humanity of the victims, although it didn't really make that its focus.

I'll probably try and get through part 3 tonight before watching Game of Thrones. This is one ambitious documentary!

 

[extendedsolo]

I watched the first two episodes of the OJ ESPN documentary. They were really, really well-made, but I don't know yet if I really cared to learn that much about the guy. So far, in 3 hours, they establish the same thing the show did with a very small amount of dialogue about it: that he basically thought he was "above" being black, and that he made every attempt to distance himself from the black community. It does also present the black reaction to this, however, which was complex in that while civil rights leaders were dismayed at the way he only hung out with white people and seemed fine with being treated basically as a pet, they thought it was an incredible leap to have a black guy doing things that black people had never been able to do before (ex heading marketing campaigns directed at the entire country instead of just black people for Hertz/Chevrolet). There is a ton of footage of his college career, and a ton of footage from his big NFL year, all interspersed with great interviewees. It also gives a roughly equal amount of time to the civil rights situation in LA from 1960 and on, which was almost all news to me, and I'm sure is the point of this whole thing.

So far, I've gained some crazy respect for Jim Brown and the other athletes who supported Muhammad Ali with his Vietnam stance and the "black power" guys at the olympics. OJ just backed out of any support of the civil rights movement with some sort of statement like "I don't know enough about this to have anything to do with it, sorry" and continued ingratiating himself to the mainstream.

I liked that they had the two legendary scenes with him from The Naked Gun, and included all the Hertz ads and whatnot (I was totally unfamiliar with that). It does a great job of making clear exactly how famous the guy was.

It also goes to great lengths to make us understand that Nicole was a person, with lots of archival footage, interviews with family and friends, and 911 calls and photos of her battered. Truly rage-inducing stuff. As great as that miniseries was, it didn't have enough time to really make clear the humanity of the victims, although it didn't really make that its focus.

I'll probably try and get through part 3 tonight before watching Game of Thrones. This is one ambitious documentary!

Keep everyone here updated. I think that episodes 3-4 really take off and it's pretty unsettling at some points. You haven't even gotten to the real rage inducing stuff. After watching it, I still can't believe he was found not guilty.

I'm not super interested in OJ the guy myself either, but I think some of the people who were interviewed do a good job of summarizing why it's such an interesting story.

 

[synrgy]

Wife and I - late as always - took to the series Parenthood recently. We're nearly done with the second season. Great show. Lotta heart. First episode has a few beat-for-beat scenes that clearly call back to the old movie on which the series is loosely based, but quickly departs from there. Cast full of actors I never particularly liked before, but really like here.

Maybe it's just a life stage thing, but I'm really digging it.

 

[wankerness]

Wife and I - late as always - took to the series Parenthood recently. We're nearly done with the second season. Great show. Lotta heart. First episode has a few beat-for-beat scenes that clearly call back to the old movie on which the series is loosely based, but quickly departs from there. Cast full of actors I never particularly liked before, but really like here.

Maybe it's just a life stage thing, but I'm really digging it.

I absolutely love that movie, despite not being a parent it really hit me emotionally. If the show follows it at all maybe I should check it out.