tv_talk | Speak Up Saturday

I watched all of Plur1bus. I had previously watched the first two episodes, but then was waiting for the rest to be available, so I restarted from the beginning. Really great show -- looking forward to season two. There's a nice interview with the show's star, Rhea Seehorn in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/dec/26/rhea-seehorn-interview-making-pluribus) -- it might contain spoilers for some (I never know what people will consider spoilers), so read at your own risk.

I made another attempt at starting another show, The Iris Affair, but fared no better this time. The first time, I dozed off during episode one and woke up partway through ep 2. And this time, I dozed off again during ep 1, so maybe that's just the universe's way of telling me not to bother with this one? Or else to start watching it earlier in the day? Anyway, I may give it a pass and try something else, like The Copenhagen Test, which just dropped (on Netflix I think?). Other than that, I've watched a few xmas specials e.g. the All Creatures Great and Small xmas special, the Would I Lie to You xmas episode, etc.

What I am looking forward to is a new series of The Traitors UK, which starts on New Year's Day, as does a new series of The Night Manager, which you may or may not recall as the first series aired 10 years ago. The first series starred Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. Hiddleston is back, Laurie is not.

Edited 2025-12-27 18:43 (UTC)

I am looking forward to seeing the new Night Manager season as well since it's not based on a book, unlike the original. Debicki is also not returning though Olivia Colman is. I'm hoping she has a larger role.

Colman is also back. The Guardian had a bit of a preview article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/dec/19/the-night-manager-series-2-bbc

The War Between the Land and the Sea I tend to watch and enjoy most of Russell T. Davies' work and this was almost the exception. I'd really liked Years and Years and I'd read a review that said the new show was comparable. It was. Comparable in depressingness. I'd hoped for some of the magic (goofy situations, deep emotions) of the Syfy channel good old days. I can't say I recommend it, and I won't be rewatching.

Heated Rivalry Me and the rest of the internet. I'm an avid reader of gay romance books and was excited to watch a show based on a book I'd read. The show was great! Really hit the emotional highs and plot of the book. I hadn't realized how much I skipped the sex scenes in the books and I closed my asexual eyes quite frequently. I will absolutely be watching S2. Recommended!

Edited 2025-12-27 18:07 (UTC)

Heh, yes, it looks like the fandom for Heated Rivalry is just booming.

We finished Pluribus last night, which wow, two super stubborn, prickly, suspicious, paranoid people pushing all of each other's buttons! Also finished Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born which was excellent; loved it (and there's a great fic for it in Yuletide). And I finished Knight Flower, also delightful and with tons of female characters being awesome in different ways.

And we finished season 3 of Dark Winds. (Clearly a week for finishing All The Things, lol.)

What we've started: the new episodes of Stranger Things. (It isn't quite holding my interest, but I'm happy to doodle in front of it.) A rewatch (for me) of Korean horror drama The Guest (though I don't know if I can actually stand the horror on a rewatch; the first time through, the mystery kind of mitigated the suffering).

We're definitely in the market for a fun, good-natured scifi show or dramedy we can sink our teeth into. Something along the lines of Farscape or The Peripheral or the first few seasons of Resident Alien -- or a light detective show like Republic of Doyle or Deadloch. (As a datapoint, we gave up on Killjoys because of all the torture.)

On my own, I'm watching While You Were Sleeping (Kdrama, rewatch).

Edited (formatting typo) 2025-12-27 21:50 (UTC)

I know what you mean, I also finished a lot of stuff this week!

Does it leave you feeling a bit adrift? (I remembered, after I commented here, to go check out the comm rec posts. :-)

No but that's because I'm always rotating among streaming services. So I finished a lot because I was going through the rest of my Apple watchlist, and have now started on my Disney/Hulu one. I'll be starting Netflix soon and will pick up on (or start) on a whole new list.

Ha, that must help.

Does it leave you feeling a bit adrift?

I often feel that way once I've finished a series, especially if I really enjoyed it. Even if I have a bunch of other things lined up waiting to be watched, I find it really difficult to start in on them -- like I'm almost afraid to because I won't enjoy them as much as the show I just finished?

However, if it's a show that was OK, but I was mostly just trying to get it done (e.g. didn't love it, but didn't dislike it enough to DNF it), I don't have that problem because it means I can then move on to something that I want to watch more.

Yes, exactly. I just finished some things that I was really engaged with and loved a lot, and that always makes the next thing feel a little bit like a letdown.

or a light detective show

Have you watched The After Party, which is on Apple? Only two series of it, sadly. I've heard/read good things about The Outlaws (BBC -- not sure what it might be streaming on, if anything), but I've never personally watched it. It's more about a gang of misfits who find money (a crime thriller comedy), not so much a detective show, but it got a second series that aired recently in the UK, and is from the same team behind The Office UK. The cast includes Christopher Walken.

Thanks for the recs! And ooh, you mentioning The Outlaws reminds me that I meant to try the movie Deep Cover. :-)

I'm not sure if you've already watched it, but The Residence was a pretty entertaining detective show.

We have already seen that, thanks. And actually, it doesn't have to be a detective show. That was the easiest genre to think of, but an adventure show of some kind would be great, too. Hm. (I just got HBO -- I should have a poke around. :D)

Have you watched Renegade Nell on Disney+? Sadly cancelled after only one season, but I thought it was very charming and fun.

If you spy any hidden HBO gems, please mention them! Germany will finally get HBO in January, so I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Ooh, I'll check it out. Thanks!

So far, most of what I've tagged on Neon is stuff I've already seen (We Are Lady Parts, The Pitt, Los Espookys, Mrs Davis, Mrs Maisel), but there's bound to be more. I'll report back! :-)

It seemed to me that Nell had been cancelled but good to know, as I kept it in my watchlist after finishing it.

A lot of stuff watched this past week! Keeping up with Jeopardy, and started watching Name That Tune.
A lot of things were background viewing. Saw a few movies via Apple, such as Fly Me to the Moon. Along with The Beanie Bubble it had some good parts for women. I realized I quite enjoy movies and documentaries about business developments. Most have been about tech or finance, so this one was a very different spin. I liked the idea behind Moon but not the tiresome romance aspect. Would have been a much more interesting film focused solely on Scarlett Johanson's character.

Watched the documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial. I can't say I learned much about the case that I didn't already know. They did speak with witnesses, police officers and the prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as some psychiatrists. It seemed to take the opinion that Chapman hurt himself by pleading guilty instead of the insanity defense given that he appeared to have mental issues. And as a result of public opinion he's being denied parole when others like Hinckley (who did pursue the defense and got treatment for his schizophrenia) were released.

Saw various nature shows. Born to be Wild was my favorite, focusing on some really adorable, though endangered, animals. The lynx babies were the cutest. Saw two others regarding dolphins and sharks and the way many dolphins and porpoises showed evidence of shark attacks. Neither was very interesting – I was reminded of one positive change in terms of streaming-first shows (as opposed to shows formerly made for broadcast or cable). They don't tend to have the same annoying recaps after commercial breaks, either because they're not watched with ads, or because they're not watched live. So they're not constantly trying to update people who have just tuned in.

My last show watched on Apple was Chief of War. Was very interested to learn about the Hawaiian history of that time period, and intrigued that they decided to write it (largely) in native Hawaiian. However the show was somewhat depressing and very alpha male and quite violent. I'd probably watch a S2 but it wasn't a favorite.

Turned to my Disney/Hulu watchlist and saw all of George Washington Black which was created as a 1 season show. It had some good moments but it felt very disjointed. The first half seemed fairly historical given this was before the Civil War. But then it's like it veered into a fantasy sort of outcome, with all sorts of endings tied up in a bow. I think it would be a good YA show but it was neither fish nor fowl for me.
Saw a pair of shows re: Frozen. One was the stage adaptation of the first film. It reminded me how much I enjoy seeing theater productions on TV and how there aren't enough of them. The movie's not a favorite of mine, but I was curious to see how they'd make things work. The musical production was good.

The second was a fairly long documentary, Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2. It was very interesting, I think I'll post more about that separately.

Also caught up on High Potential (US), and have started All's Fair and Brilliant Minds.

Totally forgot that I watched most of Smoke on Apple. I say "most" because I watched the first three episodes and the last one, and just the recaps for the rest. It was an interesting show, but a pretty down one. The depressing storylines got to me. The final moments of the show were a small twist in terms of how our perspective shifts a bit, but for the last few episodes it seemed pretty clear where we were headed.

Yeah, we stalled out on Chief of War for the reasons you state. We had been plugging away, and then I had technical difficulties with my Apple account, and by the time they were solved, picking up the show again felt like a chore. (I wanted so much to like it more than I did. /o\)

Glad it wasn't just me.

I haven't watched anything because of the Christmas Rush, but I plan on watching Takashi Miike's show Connect this week---a horror detective show he made in Korea a couple years ago. Somehow this totally passed me by, despite Miike being one of my favourite working filmmakers.

I also recently got Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation and the complete Private Life of a Masterpiece series on DVD, so the next few weeks will probably consist mostly of watching old BBC documentaries!

Nothing coming out at the moment has really grabbed me, and nothing set for release in the next couple months looks like it will either. It may be a year of mopping up the big shows from the last few decades that I really should have watched by now---it might even be time for a X-Files rewatch with the wife (who has never seen it!)

Edited 2025-12-28 10:59 (UTC)

Not much time this week what with traveling to see family and spending a lot of time on trains or catching up on sleep.

But I did watch another ep of Love on the Turquoise Land, and the lore got somewhat less ridiculous with the discovery of some scientific explanations of the vampires' history. Still makes no sense if you're expecting *actual science*, but at least it explains how they have actually gained sentience over the last twenty years as opposed to having had it all along, so... phew, some moral quandaries avoided.

I also watched the last two episodes of Heated Rivalry, and omg the Internet is right about this show, it's nigh perfect. I did enjoy all of it, including the sex scenes, and the last two episodes just had so much romantic payoff omg. I love it and I want more of it/more like it. A friend of mine has been posting links to articles and press tour interviews with the two leads, and I'm enjoying all of that, too. I'll just link you there: https://machinistm.dreamwidth.org/tag/tv:+heated+rivalry

Two more episodes of Our Times, the 90s retro cdrama with Wu Lei and Hou Minghao, and I really am enjoying the retroness of it all, especially the way the cut scenes are interspersed with actual old footage from Chinese cities, e.g. the construction of the tower in Shanghai. The only downside is that the show triggers my embarrassment squick (they are so incompetent as computer salesmen omg!), so I have to go through it slowly with many breaks.

What else: three more episodes of Nothing But You in the watchalong, and I'm very happy about that, too.

I feel like everyone has watched and talked about Heated Rivalry's finale by now. I don't have a lot to add I guess. I really liked it. After the rest of the season spanned an entire decade, it was nice to have a slower episode. The fact that it doesn't have an open ending is also great. Nobody could have predicted that the show would do well, so it's nice that this could easily be a series finale, too.

I finished S3 of Stranger Things and that season was more what I expected from the show in general, especially the action-packed finale. For the first time, the show did this typical thing of changing a lot in the finale (to shake things up!?) and now it takes time to get the gang back together, although you already know that this is what's going to happen. I like that they added Robin and, in opposite to Billy and Max earlier, she was actual important. I love her friendship with Steve. Generally I really like Steve now. He changed a lot more after S1 than the others. It's weird that his friends from S1 were never shown again, but it never really made sense that he and Nancy dated when these were the people he hung out with.
Currently, four episodes into S4 and I'm sick of the teenage drama. They dialed that way up. 1. Why did Eleven need to lie to Mike? Surely they could have gotten at the exact same point (her being in police custody) without her lying to Mike about having friends. And why we she do that in the first place if she knows that Mike wants to visit her? 2. Lucas desperately trying to be one of the "cool" basketball players. I guess I just don't like the way it was written. He was clearly still spending time with the others, so it felt like he was making them unnecessarily angry? They clearly didn't want to be cool and preferred being friends...
The vibes of S4 are different again. It seems more like a horror/ghost story now. They even comment on it in-universe.

The Thursday Murder Club is the only movie I managed to watch. It was fun, not everything made sense, but I wouldn't mind another one.

Good to know about Thursday Murder as I enjoyed the books and would like to see what they did with it.

The cast is great! I haven't read the book(s), but apparently some things were changed.

As another datapoint, I've read the books, and the movie didn't work for me at all.

Loved the Pluribus finale! The opening scene was an absolute killer.

Among other things, I'm currently watching I Dol I and growing increasingly frustrated at this show's stupidity. Look, it's about a fangirl lawyer defending her personal K-pop fave against a false murder charge, so I'm not expecting excellence... But. The prosecutor is FL's petty childhood bully, with nothing to make him even remotely sympathetic. Our 30+ year-old FL is a lifelong single and, naturally, she's shocked and devastated that her fave may have had a girlfriend in the past... even though he denied it in the press?! And here I thought the show might make a point about healthy-ish parasocial relationships! It's your job defending him, girl, get your head out of your own ass!

I also watched the first episodes of Just a Bit Espers, The Apothecary Diaries, and Ca$hero, but none of those shows wowed me.

Watched the first half of Death of a Unicorn... and thought it was bad.

Looking forward to:
- Bridgerton (I'm always watching the first episode and never finish the season.)
- January K-drama releases: Can This Love Be Translated? (Hong Sisters), Undercover Miss Hong (PSH + Go Kyung-pyo), Positively Yours (pregnancy after a chaebol one-night-stand)

Edited 2025-12-30 18:33 (UTC)

Speak Up Saturday

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject