What are you currently watching? (May contain spoilers)

Oh god, I think I agree with geefe about all of this. Bounced off Parks, watched a series of Community and then was done (too repetitive), think Ted looks so mediocre I can't be arsed to give it a go despite the hype, etc

I'm dead inside aren't I

I think I started Community but only lasted a couple of episodes.

Everyone raves about so many of these then says the first 1-3 season can be written off. I don’t have the time man.


(fully aware I make that same argument for Seinfeld and most of the star trek series)

The only American comedy I can really think of liking is Curb. But as someone else said I think in this thread, it's basically got the cynicism of most British comedies.

Dougs is right again here.
Although Schitts Creek is almost entirely made by the 2 female leads whereas the father/son leads who get the plaudits are just playing themselves.

Such a shame AD couldn't keep the quality up, so good in it's prime.

Not written off - just some take time.for the characters to develop and find their feet. Seems especially common in comedies, as the writers and actors try new things to see why lands etc. Parks and Rec for instance - Leslie is the only character who is nailed from day one. The others all develop and grow

Community's seasons 1-3 are probably the best though. I wouldn't say it was repetitive either, given all the weird stuff it does. Though each character does have their tropes. It's usually smart enough to recognize them and either make fun of them or subvert them though... like then it starts taking the piss out of Jeff's inspiring speeches that fix everything in the earlier episodes.

Later seasons have some great one-off episodes, but it starts to progressively suffer from losing more and more core cast. Some of the replacements are good (i think they might even be from stuff like Parks & Rec), but it's just not the same.

I'm starting to have concerns about Foundation. Its a bit confusing and its not all that well written in places...or well acted. There was some voice over about how faith is like the sword of something or other and it was so cheesey and crap that it just stood out as wordy bollocks that someone thought sounded deep and meaningful but is the actual opposite.

I like Brother Day and Brother Dusk, but Brother Teen is just a confused mess that the other two seem to just be ignoring. I've no clue what the hell is happening with the Foundation lot. Mostly it seems to be people trying to get one over each other or have sex or walk up to things. I'm going to have to reread the books (which I remembered really enjoying) as I'm currently saying to my wife "I don't think that happened in the books" quite a lot as she's wondering why people are flying around to other planets when their exiled and we're trying to figure out which generation of Empire we're seeing.

We'll stick with it as its pretty and some of the Empire based actors are good, but I can't say I give much of a stuff about any of the exiled people at the moment.

I'm not a fan of The Expanse, but I'd recommend The Expanse on that basis, presuming you've also watched stuff like Farscape, or it's so old and low-budget you're just not going to.

It's a weird recommendation because I've got a lot of critiques of The Expanse, particularly that most of the acting is terrible. The male lead is easily the worst SF/fantasy lead not named Kevin Sorbo who I've ever seen. He's wooden-as-fuck, his cryface is ever-present and hilarious rather than moving, he has absolutely zero charisma (makes Sorbo look like Jack Nicholson or something by comparison), and in general he weakens every scene he's in. Several other actors are charming but can't act, and they get in some genuine big names/heavy hitters like David Strathairn and then utterly waste them by making them do ridiculous space-accents.

On top of that a lot of the dialogue is hilariously terrible clunkers so awful you can practically hear them hitting the floor after the actors say them. There are entire scenes where no-one says anything that isn't a cliche. Shit, sometimes that's like most of the scenes in an episode (or ones where stuff is like 50%+ cliches).

Sounds bad, right? It is.

But helping with this is that despite all the bad acting, a lot of the characters are pretty likeable and understandable - like really quite a few of them. One actress is so terrible it makes her character (who is kind of an idiot) even more likeable, honestly. The plot, whilst feeling like it's trying hard to be Game of Thrones in space, at least does so ridiculously better than Foundation (which is trying the same thing, totally ineptly). The plot also usually makes sense, after a fashion, rather than having countless obvious plotholes (I mean, there are plenty, but they reduce them to a non-distracting number unlike some SF shows). The politics, whilst made of SF cliches, are at least entertaining. 

And the setting is solid, as is the overall plot, and it does actually go somewhere, even if the pacing flags from time to time (S1 is much worse-paced than later seasons, note).

Plus the SFX and the space-physics and so on are pretty good. People will tell you it's hard SF which is a filthy lie, but it's harder than most TV SF.

And the main thing is, whilst it's not as good as Star Trek (maybe better than VOY/ENT), let alone Galactica (on a good day) or Firefly, it is still better than 95% of TV space SF (I would say Farscape is better but it's an acquired taste).

Is 4 the first Amazon production after the Netflix years?

The accents really are laughable though. Sometimes they don't even bother trying halfway through a sentence.

Naomi's attempt is the worst.

I found season 1 of The Expanse to start interestingly enough and get progressively more dull.
It was never downright terrible though, and a lot of people seem to like it, so it's probably worth a shot.

There's Babylon 5 free on imdbTV, but I think that was mentioned recently. Farscape is ace, but maybe you already saw that. Space - Above and Beyond doesn't seem to be available anywhere.

More recently, Killjoys was fun for at least a Season or two, though it did come across as a bit of a low budget clone in places. Main actress is good.
Dark Matter is the other similar SyFy space show, but I haven't seen that.

Yeah that's the sort of thing I'm talking about re: likeable characters. There are just a bunch of them, half of whom get offed during the series whilst annoying characters continue to live which isn't great, but she's great and not one of the offenders re: bad acting.

It just works a little better as a show than it really has any right to. I've read a lot of stuff on Gizmodo/io9 and so on where people try to rationalize it, but it's all bullshit, it's not succeeding because it's in any way actually high-quality or clever, and in fact, half the issue is the show is getting in its own way. I mean seriously like 20% of the runtime is just stuff that makes the show worse (hello Star Trek: Voyager - it's not something unique to The Expanse). Loads of conflicts are just ludicrously drawn-out.

But when it's good it's good. I suspect if we had more space SF on a few years ago it wouldn't have gone anywhere, but we didn't, and now we still don't have a whole lot.

I think Jared Harris does an ok job with the accents. Sounds a bit Seth Efrican, but I guess that's what it's meant to sound like? What do space people sound like anyway?

I dunno, that specific part of the show never really bothered me. But I guess if someone was trying (and failing) to do an Aussie accent on it, it might bother me more.