Skip Navigation
15 comments

  • Just started the Nautilus TV show, the prequel to 20000 leagues under the sea. It's giving me Black Sails vibes in the best way

    • I loved this show! Watched it a month ago or so. Another reference point I'd give is an underwater version of Firefly or Farscape: a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold on the run in a ship that's not quite qualified for what they're up against. For more Farscape-ism, it was shot in Australia and the cast are mostly from there and pretending not to be.

      The production was kind of a mess: the show was ordered by Disney+ but dropped again before it became available to stream, so where it's available to watch in any given country is a crapshoot. AMC+ in the US and Canada, Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Stan in Australia. Given the awkward production history, I suspect it will remain a single-season show (hello again, Firefly).

      For people who don't like a series that ends abruptly, I'll give some very generic "vibe" spoilers: I thought it was a perfectly satisfying ending, especially given the show is a prequel to the original novel, so we know or can find out where the story is going. There are absolutely some plot threads left untied which would be followed up in a hypothetical season 2, but personally I didn't leave the series frustrated by them.

      It's only a 10-episode show, so it's a very easy watch. I'd love it if they got the opportunity to make more, but I had a ton of fun either way.

  • I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.

    Poker Face is simply the best time I've had watching TV in recent memory. It's currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It's not "premium TV" in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it's very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it's mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson's Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.

    The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people's involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, "I'm not exactly sure, but that's not really the point." She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week's guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they're able to cast big in every episode. There's at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.

    I'm always impressed that they're consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn't just walk into a scene and say "I did not commit any murders recently" and set off Cale's ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.

    Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don't necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don't really want to give the impression that they're not, either. It's kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of "premium TV", but I can't fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.

    No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it's Peacock's biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.

    Murderbot was also pretty fun. It's a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It's a pretty different take on the "android learns how to be human" trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn't adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it's mostly just accepted as part of his nature.

    My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren't enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don't have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don't know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.

    Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I'm thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don't think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.

    Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I'm 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I'll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.

  • The Rings of Power, Season 2.

    I’m all caught up, and honestly I liked it. There was a hell of a lot to cram into 8 episodes, but I thought it was still fun. At the very least it’s a very beautiful show.

    • I really enjoyed the dwarfs and hobbits. Lots of fun stuff.

      • Same! I liked that we got to see their backstory fleshed out some more. Regarding the hobbits:

        I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know just how much is left on the table, but season 3 feels like it may be a good place for the series to end given what’s been covered already.

  • Dexter Resurrection starts tomorrow with the first 2 episodes, I'm pretty excited for that. It has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes right now with 21 reviews, apparently that's based on the first 4 episodes.

15 comments