No, we don't, telly's shit. If a TV show is worth talking about a thread should be made. It's not a one off thing like a song or a game you tried.

>>23449
Oh I'm watching that too, so I can then progress to Ashes. I've already read the ending for Ashes on Wikipedia, it's fucking nuts.

Tyler can be a moralising arse at times. He got especially preachy about Hillsborough at the end of that football episode.

>>23450
Bore off.

New season of The Expanse.

>>23451
Having seen the ending of Ashes To Ashes many times, I have so unbelievably many questions about it. It really does destroy the fiction of the world set up in both Life on Mars AND Ashes to Ashes. It feels to me like the writers were told at the 11th hour that this was their last series and that they had to wrap things up NOW.

Expanse is back on. Going by the first episode it's a bit shit this season but I'm curious how they're going to get rid of the Martian Texan given the actor has gotten himself unpersoned.

Other than that I watched the Real Adam Smith documentary series recently. I should read his books at some point.

I re-watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet recently. It has held up quite well, which isn't terribly surprising given that it was written by Clement and La Frenais.

I'm not sure if it makes for comforting or disquieting viewing in 2020. It feels completely familiar yet also totally alien, like re-visiting your old primary school as an adult. The eighties were absolutely shit for a lot of people, but they also felt hopeful in a way that seems naive now.

When we talk about it being an "aspirational" decade we tend to think of yuppies in the City, but we forget about all of the working-class people who believed that they could build a better life for themselves through hard work and determination. Those hopes were largely fulfilled through the boom years of the 90s and early 00s, but that kind of hope seems almost childlike today.

Even before COVID, there was a general sense that upward mobility is dead and the best you can manage is to grimly hold on to your rung on the ladder, especially for young people. Life is unarguably better today than it was in the past, but it doesn't feel like it's getting better, which makes all the difference.

Maybe I'm just being sentimental.

>>23455
I like your analysis very much.

>>23454

I'm not fully caught up on the TV version so they might lean on him more, but at least for the books, I think Alex is, serendipitously, the only crewmember you could really replace in the story without taking huge sidesteps around story beats - his only real plot points are that he's really attached to/good at flying the roci, is divorced with a kid and becomes really good friends and resistance co-conspirator with Bobbie - they can easily wave him away as moving back to Mars or MIA and find a new hotshot pilot to easily replace him. You could even shoehorn Filip in there, rather than him just never being mentioned again after being almost the entire point of one whole book, though that might be a bit too complicated.

I'd also not really give a shit if they just shoved some other brown bloke with an accent in there and pretended nothing happened.

You should definitely read the books, they're just as good as the show, if not better, as they get the sense of scale of the whole thing a bit better in text. I also highly recommend going the audiobook route if you're into that, the bloke that reads them is fantastic.

>>23457

Also forgot about Peaches who is/was an accomplished pinnace pilot. Alex is really fucking replaceable, and further supports my real life view that pilots are boring bus drivers.

>>23455

It's a great show. I watched it when I was younger after I heard it was really funny, and thinking it would be a sitcom like Only Fools and Horses or the like, I found it disappointing.

Watching it as an adult though, it really is great.

I like your analysis, and whilst I can't fully relate as I'm 29 so I wasn't around in the 80s, this show along with others does give off that sense of optimism. Barry's story sums it up the most; grafting away abroad for a bit, being sensible and sending money home each week, to then return, start your own business and buy a fairly large house all by yourself. Seems magical, or maybe I'm a lazy twat who knows.

I'm watching shitloads of South Park at the minute. I need a bit of background noise when I'm working but it has to be something I've seen so many times that I don't have to pay attention to it. Before this I worked my way through Futurama and Malcolm in the Middle, interspersed with films like The Mummy and Big Trouble in Little China for the same reason.

>>23449
The ending was so disappointing

>>23460
Can you tell me where the hell I can stream Malcolm in the Middle?

>>23462
All 4.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/malcolm-in-the-middle

>>23453
>>23449
Ladchaps, theres a new series set in that universe on the way.
Will be set across the timelines and involve everyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/03/life-on-mars-creator-third-final-series-in-works-bbc

>>23464
No I feel like I'm a timewarp. Or a flipping coma.

>>23464
It'll be interesting if they even try and resolve the stories of the characters, and of course they are all 10-15 years older now, so I wonder how they'll get around that.

That and the "mostly in an alternate present" -- they'll have to do some interesting writing if they want Simm and Hawes in that - they are both dead and in 'heaven' according to the ending of Ashes to Ashes.

>>23460

South Park is still a really fun watch, even the newer ones (although the format has changed quite a bit and it does suffer from being too topical). There is a really comfy charm to the older episodes though. One of my sort of autistic Winter traditions is to get warm and comfortable and boot up a PS1 emulator and have the first three seasons on in the background as I get good and drunk.

The earlier eps are surprisingly tame looking at them now.

Christ I've got fuck all to do.

Just finished Ashes to Ashes, and whilst I could ask dozens of questions about the ending, one thing I missed the first time I watched through was the fact they tried for a Miami Vice moment by using In The Air Tonight over a melancholy scene not once but twice, and it doesn't really work either time.

>>23451

He has a point this shitey bollocks general threads is the lead in our water supply.

>>23463
No good I'm afraid, I'm watching it with a non-native speaker and need subtitles, and Channel 4's are notoriously pisspoor.

>>23464

Well that's bound to be shit, innit.

I've been binging Parks and Recreation lately. Light-hearted sitcoms have been keeping me going this year and I'm a bureaucrat by profession so it's fun.

Before that it was That 70s Show but I got annoyed when they continued the show after graduation and had to make all kind of dumbass reasons to keep the plot going. If there's one thing Americans can't do it's know when to stop.

I've been watching videos on YouTube of people melting metal stuff down. Particularly BigstackD in Australia.

So I barely even noticed a fifth series of pic related came out earlier this year, but I do seem to remember someone on here saying it was rubbish, which I really don't agree with. I think episode five was pretty rough going, but besides that and a single gag in episode two I enjoyed the whole thing. The whole show's all on iPlayer still if you're interested.

I'd have sworn blind there was already a Inside No. 9 thread on here, but I was clearly mistaken and my tiny review of the series five doesn't warrant one on it's own.

>>23475
Apart from the Misdirection episode I thought series five was a bit flat and below par. My favourite is probably Zanzibar.

Okay the first couple episodes of WandaVision were fun. Shame they couldn't just stick around for awhile longer in 1950s TVland as it's a fun setting and I hate Marvel capeshit.

>>23477
>1950s TVland

I have been rewatching the Twilight Zone. Every time I do it's just so jarring to see people chugging on cigs like chimneys and depictions of drinking and driving like nothing's wrong.

>>23478
It really is a tragically underused setting and I'd happily watch something that's self-aware with an underlying sinister tone. All the doctors being heavy smokers and separate beds for married couples are things that were deadly serious back then but hilarious now.

I'd like a VR game where you play as a 1950s tv family trying to climb to the top of the social totem pole (much of the charm of the original Sims I guess) without getting caught out and lot's of sidequests about savings cats from trees and other forms of non-danger. If you don't play along though the studio lights turn off, the music cuts and
all the townspeople come and rip you to shreds which turns it into a 'how long can I survive' horror with exploration elements.

>>23478
> I have been rewatching the Twilight Zone. Every time I do it's just so jarring to see people chugging on cigs like chimneys and depictions of drinking and driving like nothing's wrong.

I've been having a similar reaction when watching anything made pre-pandemic. Something in my head goes "no, that's wrong!" whenever someone shares a drink with someone or touches their mouth after picking something up off the floor and not washing their hands in between. We humans are a weird lot.

Also some bastard decided to release the new episodes of Disenchantment on Netflix at around 4am instead of 9am so I almost ended up in a very bad situation. Luckily I was able to turn the telly off after just the first episode otherwise I wouldn't have got any kip at all.

>>23479

Could it also have a psychobilly influenced soundtrack and be called "And None Of Them Knew They Were Robots"?

>>23479
There's a brief element of that in the intro to Saints Row IV, and I guess with a less American twinge, We Happy Few.

I would also wager that playing a VR game in B&W would also get very tiring very quickly.

>>23482
Now I Googled that and all I got was a short-lived thrash band from Leeds. Is it a quote from something or are you just trying to drum up attention to your old band?

>>23483

No, it was unrelated, I think it might be a song by some other band but it's just a phrase I somehow have stuck in my head knocking around. It's tied to images of like, 1950s housewives from those Trueman Show style adverts, only their eyes go red because they're robots. But they don't know they're robots.

As for psychobilly, it's just because my missus put The Meteors on the other day and I realised it's a genre of music I have a very strong stereotype idea of, mentally, when I think of 50s/60s Americana. But I can't think of any examples of contemporary 1950s music that actually sounds anything like it. I like stuff like that in period settings, kind of anachronistic but fitting.

We Brits are always slightly dour about it when people make un-subtle reductive pastiches of our culture (like We Happy Few) but I'd happily play the 50s American suburbia equivalent of that.

>>23477

Who's playing the blonde housewife in E2? She's the spitting image of Madeline Kahn.
I just realised she's Anya from Buffy. She really has the mannerisms of Madeline Kahn here, it's bizarre.

>>23482
My mental image was all the subtle light and lounge that the 1950s had multiple genres of - exactly like the Sims loading screens.

>>23483
I was thinking back to Fallout 3 where you go into a simulation of the 1950s in a child's body. It's touched upon everywhere but you rarely see anyone go all out on it like Pleasantville did.

>I would also wager that playing a VR game in B&W would also get very tiring very quickly.

Would be funny to see the reaction as people start dreaming and thinking in monochrome though.

>>23486
Funny you should say that - I played Tranquility Lane in VR when I played Fallout 3 using VorpX. I had to change it to colour because there's also a massive bloom effect with the tranquility lane 'weather' in Fallout 3; it's like your retinas are being stabbed with a poker.

Don't get me started on Vault 112 and what a massive missed opportunity it was. Hell, it could be a game all of itself.

Oh, there's also a 50s american TV pastiche in VR that I can't remember the name of, but it's an on-rails (literally) shooter because your hands are guns and in this world everyone's hands are guns. UpIsNotJump did a review on it.

>>23481
Clearly either the producer or Groening fucking loves mid-2000s British comedy, since we've got all the voices now. Matt Berry, Noel Fielding, and now Richard Ayoade. I'm just waiting for Mitchell and Webb and Simon Pegg.

>>23489

It's weird but other than Matt Berry I don't immediately recognise the others' voices despite being very much familiar with their bodies of work.

>>23490

Maybe pay less attention to their bodies of work and more to their voices of work? Pervert.

>>23491

How dare you kink-shame me in this way.

Just watched this episode. I know attitudes were different back in the early 1960s but.... Christ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fugitive_(The_Twilight_Zone)

>>23493
The link includes the closing bracket. Thanks brian.

>>23493
Well he's not really an old nonce, he's a dashing young king from another planet, you bigot!.

>>23493
I didn't read any noncery there. Did you think Amidala was a nonce when she meets a boy Anakin Skywalker and ends up shagging him as an adult?

>>23496
Well I'm just guessing what otherlad was talking about. Maybe there was just lots of smoking.

>>23496
I've never seen a star war so I don't know.

There's a line at the beginning, though:
>"If you're so magic, why can't you fix my leg?"
"Then you'd be able to get a young boyfriend"

Also, the "handsome man" he's revealed to be is still about 30.

>>23496

Amidala was meant to be young teens too in the first one wasn't she?

Mind you I suppose it's tradition after the twincest in the originals.

>>23496
Amidala didn't kidnap Anakin and spend a decade grooming him to become the king of Naboo, in fairness. Indeed from what I recall the two basically seemed incompatible in every way and she was simply the first woman Anakin had seen who wasn't his mum. Why do you think C3PO was so heavily queer coded? Because that robot was literally coded queer. Think about it.

>>23500
I'm intrigued by your theory of the prequal trilogy being the story of Anakin's repressed homosexuality and his lashing out at the world. The dots all join up so well from the monastic anti-sexual repression of the Jedi to Palpatine being a bit of a noncey old man.

As for the Twilight Zone episode I just put it down to being a bad episode. There's different attitudes of the time at work but you can also see reflections of classic fairytale themes involving Prince Charming rescuing the Cinderella - and which young girls probably like (not that I would know of course). It might've been a stronger story if the original draft was in a half-hour format as I suspect what we have is two half-formed ideas stuck together.

>>23500
>kidnap
>spend a decade grooming him
Neither of which is implied in the plot summary, if you read the same one I did. Maybe you just wish there was noncery in it because that's what they were all like back then. Only a matter of time before fuckin' Rod Serling is exposed as worse than Jim'll eh.

Watching the Amazon show The Man In The High Castle, which has little to do with the original book other than setting and character names (although they don't match their book counterparts).

The most interesting thing is it was clearly edited as in Internet TV Show. Each episode is a) designed to be watched quite closely together -- there are no re-establishing shots, you get about 10 seconds of the last episode usually before it continues completely dry; and b) the intro sequence is the best part of 90 seconds long, which seems to be like it was intended to be skipped.

The intro sequence does need an award for slowest human performance of a song, though. Christ it drags. Also it's the Dad's Army intro, complete with triangle-headed lines moving across a map.

Simpsons quiz show with Nick Frost and some other 90's channel 4 people. It's quite good.

>>23798

Fuck me, how depressing.

>>23798

Something about seeing adverts I remember from my youth distinctly gives me the fear.

>>23798
My favourite part of these uploads is that they leave the adverts in so you can look at life in 2004 and how different things are. I don't remember all the advertising HMV did on albums - I bet we would've had a /101/.

>>23801

There are whole compilations of old ads on YouTube. I once spent a whole night with my missus going back in time a year at a time to see how far back we remember the adverts.

I think TV ads are a fascinating cultural snapshot, being on the pulse of what people are into at any given moment is what makes the most effective marketing, so they make for a pretty accurate reflection of society at the time. Just look at those ones, digital cameras were still a thing!

Of course due to not owning a TV, I haven't seen an advert since I moved out of my mum and dad's, meaning I have absolutely no idea what the last decade of TV advertising has been like.

>>23801
>I don't remember all the advertising HMV did on albums

Those Zutons songs weren't half as annoying as I remembered them to be.

>>23802
The best bit for me is seeing the old prices. Sure you could buy a house back then but white goods took the absolute piss.

>>23804
That reminds me, one of the buildings at my uni could only really be described as a "shit time machine" -- miles of corridors lined with unused lockers. Often I'd go to the nigh-abandoned upper floors and open random lockers. I found this offers pamphlet for a supermarket from 1977.

At inflation, it works out about a 7x multiplier ok the prices. Could you imagine a chocolate orange costing nearly £4? The cheapest bottle of shit wine being almost £8? The other pages were like that too, I'll post if people are interested. It's mad to think how much mass manufacturing has brought the prices of things down in relative terms.

>>23805

That's chocolate orange(s), plural. The weights of the other stuff seems pretty bulky for the price too, seing as most of it is a quid for a full pound of chocolate. I don't know how much pounds are in weight because I was born in colour, but they don't seem all that bad.

If current economic trends continue I think we're all going to have to get used to paying more for our shit anyway, because everyone is due ten years of backdated payrise and the EU slaves flexible workforce have fucked off.

>>23806

A pound is 453 grams.

£26 for a bottle of Gordons is wild, it's no wonder we're all binge drinking maniacs these days.

>>23806
>>23807
It being an old-fashioned style shop, do you reckon you could walk in and say "pound and half of chocolate orange, ta", and they'd measure it out for you, breaking one in half to satisfy the request if need be?

>>23805
>Prices subject to government change

Sign of the times right there.

Here's the rest of it.
Seems things were sold in bigger boxes back in't day.

A kilo of frozen green beans for £3.50 though? Ouch. I've just bought the same for £1. A ham joint is about £2.50/lb these days, and gammon the same.

>>23488
The American Dream

>>23805 Scotsmac?
That's something I'd never seen. A quick search suggests I've been lucky. Sounds like a fine drink.
https://www.goodfoodrevolution.com/scotsmac-aka-bams-dram/

>>23810
Top Deck Lemonade & Lager or Lager Shandy at eleven and a half pence per can, definitely brings back memories. Thought I was a proper hard lad at 10 years old (buying and) drinking it. Not that hard to wonder where my functional alcoholism started.

>>23810

The seam in the middle of this image is upsetting me immensely. I tried to fix it in photoshop, but there is a slight torque in it, so the seam isn't running exactly on the square. There also appears to be a couple of mm missing which is most apparent on the middle Santa.

Why did you do this to me lad?

>>23820
Oh, it's only the beginning. I've got a few more sneaky surprises for you.

>>23821
Oh you cunt.

>>23820
>>23822

I'm not >>23821, but unfortunately I made that image many a year ago and don't know if I still have the originals. Will have a look later.

Just watched The Tomorrow War, it's fun in a dumb blockbuster sense. You really have to turn your brain off through right from the start with its shots of Theresa May and Gordon Brown plus the infuriating military tactics but the aliens and combat gives it a nice 90s videogame style.

Though I'm not being funny but, fuck me this film has a lot of black people in it. Not in some racialist sense like there's just a wise-cracking black sidekick but almost every character in this movie is played by a black person outside of the protagonist and his family. There's an impossible amount of black people in this movie, no Asians or anything else even in the background, it's like they set an AI to run the diversity at Amazon and it's gone off the rails.

Hang on, we need a conclave to decide something NotARacistButLad just blundered into: is this thread for TV shows only or films as well? I had assumed the former and as of this moment I've never been wrong about anything ever.

>>23825
If we had a separate movie and tv show thread then it will just get confusing for the hidden gems thread.

>>23826
Be that as it may, if you'd read my post to its end you'd see I've never been wrong, so it seems we're at an impasse.

>>23824

It's pretty easy to forget that "black people" are only about 15% of the united states population.

I'm just waiting for the diversified Silmarillion series they're doing. What might be cool would be if they used the space granted by the sparse writing about Harad to explore the meetings of different cultures, considering it'll be about as canon to the setting as my arse they might as well make the most of it, but they'll probably turn half the numenoreans brown or something. Groan.

>>23824
>>23828
Maybe the aliens hit the majority-white areas first.

>>23828
I remember a small controversy a few months back where it was pointed out the LOTR casting had yet to show any East Asians. I hope it's just mistaken given, yeah, Harad would obviously be a bit of a crossroad with near and far being middle eastern to black by the respective description but would obviously also be more like the Eurasian steppe in my mind.

>>23829
It actually shows today and the future where the entire old world is gone. It would've been an interesting touch if they showed a subtly more "Latino" future rather the future being a carbon copy of the past but it's not the kind of movie to have detail.

Seriously, someone watch the movie and back me up on this, casting completely forgot what diversity means. Part of me suspects it was a deliberate decision because it was done to capitalise on the climate of last year and now looks outdated as Asians representation has become more vocal.

>>23829

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWO1pkHgrBM

>>23828

I know it's not really the same but the Witcher Netflix adaptation chucked in a few black people who clearly wouldn't have been black in a fictionalised fantasy eastern europe based world, but it felt fine and worked fine. I think if you're not actively looking to complain about it, a black elf isn't really as odd as, well, an elf in the first place.

Wait fuck this isn't the 1996 adaptation of the novel this is some American race bullshit. Thandiwe Newton hasn't aged a day in the past twenty years.

I found a French sci-fi series called Missions on iPlayer. All the episodes are on there with the plot heavily inspired by sci-fi like 2001 about a mission to Mars. It's pretty good so far despite being on a shoe-string budget.

>>23892
"You want me to pin a medal on a guy named Saddam! Give yourself a raise!"

>>23894
I liked that bit of characterisation as it was him who wanted to pin the medal, the other guy was talking him out of it. Well written and well played piece of characterisation.

This show appears to be an Aussie version of The Thick of It. It's definitely better than the American version.

>>23896
There's a follow-up series to that.

I watched the latest Clarkson/Grand Tour series; during the last episode they used this, reminding me how great it is, and now I have it on repeat all day.

>>23898
It's the sort of tune that makes you want to pick up a guitar and sing.

>>23899
Makes me want to drive through Las Venturas while listening to K-DST.

People like Jack Thompson decried the violence of the GTA games but they really should've been praising them for cultivating great musical taste in the kids that played them.

>>23950

Yeah if there's one thing the GTA games have always had, it's been an outstanding soundtrack. VC and SA were full of classic hits, but it really impressed me how IV and V had some impressive deep cuts you'd never expect to hear in a videogame.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIBa5vcDO6o

My jaw dropped when this came on driving around Liberty City the first time.

>>23951
Everyone forgets Chris Conner's original music for the first GTA, which was also exceptional.

>>23952
I can't forget the GTA 1 soundtrack, I used to listen to the CD with it all on including the police radio which, as far as I can tell, is just the full-length recording of police radio that every TV show made since uses clips from in any police scne.

It's on par with that one very specific hinge-creaking sound that every TV show also uses whenever someone opens a door.

5 George K
5 George K

>>23952
Craig Conner.

Been watching the Sopranos.

One editing thing that REALLY stands out to me is the audio mix - they leave in Tony's laboured, heavy, breathing; the clanking of cutlery on plates, chewing noises.

The shot-shot editing is also really... primitive? I can't really explain it but it feels like there's very little exploration or flair in it, especially for a Prestige Drama .

>>24011
I like it. Especially when his breathing gets heavier, or he starts scarping plates faster as he gets more agitated.

>>24011
I dunno, I really like The Sopranos and it still stands up to being watched multiple times now - the audio is definitely intentional.

>>24012
>>24013

Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's an oversight; it's clearly intentional.