selkie
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Posts posted by selkie
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Yeah, constantly propping up an emotionally insecure person has to be exhausting, even if you're on the payroll.
So no Wills and Kate today. I thought they looked oddly tense when the camera panned to them during the Murray match. Hopefully it's not another Charles and Di situation where they're bored and miserable two years into the marriage.
Wills, Kate, and Harry reappeared for the ceremonial start of the Tour de France (on UK soil) today and all seemed to be in a pretty cheerful mood.
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The cameras typically leave it up to the announcers to discuss the sights. I guess Phil was too caught up in doing his 'things to watch for' talk that he didn't consult the magic and hugely comprehensive research book he makes for all the Grand Tour races he covers.
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S Never watched Chicago Hope or Boston Public, but now we've arrived at my point: I suspect The Practice might break the mold. I don't remember manic or quirky on that show, I just remember a lot of serious over-emoting. Does that count as overwrought?
The Practice is the only DEK show I've enjoyed. Haven't been able to make it through an episode of Boston Legal or Ally McBeal, and ended up watching ER instead of Chicago Hope.
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How many of us have watched a show we otherwise would have had no interest in, just because it had a LGBorT character?
A big reason why I stuck with United States of Tara was because of Marshall's storyline, and his trying not to fit in the neat little box that people would want to put him in because they'd see and hear him and stereotype. And yeah, that included him having sex with a female classmate a few times before deciding that was a bad idea for him. I know some people didn't like that plot but it seemed consistent with his character.
I also dug his sibling relationship with the ditzy but occasionally brilliant Kate- they could get snarky as heck with each other, but when a crisis was afoot, they were always there for each other. I just wish they'd written the adults as well as the kids on the show because it seemed like they could have done so much more with Toni Collette, who was game for anything.
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I hope Serena checks into hospital to make sure that she's not dealing with a dangerous medical condition. She's not my favorite player, but I don't wish her ill, and she's had some other scary health issues in the past that make me look at her wobblies today with additional concern.
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I don't know if anyone remembers a show on CBS called Threshold, I was really bummed when that one was cancelled so quickly
I also remember pre-GOT Peter Dinklage as a misanthropic languages expert in that one, and felt like they were just hitting stride with the show when it got cancelled.
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Reaper reminded me of Brimstone from the late 90s- cop named Ezekiel Stone kills his wife's rapist, dies a few months later and finds himself in hell because of the murder, and is offered a deal with the Devil that if he can help the Devil recpature 113 souls that staged a jailbreak from Earth, he'll get a second try at life and the chance for redemption. It only lasted 13 episodes before Fox cancelled it, and I think would have done better a few years later like Supernatural did.
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My opinion is that Lindelof and Cuse had some things figured out from the beginning--like the closing shot of the series would be Jack's eye closing--and a rough sketch of some other ideas--like the Others--but not every single frigging detail because how they could they? Things happen and have to be adjusted for, like actors leaving unexpectedly or having a growth spurt. However, it's also my opinion that they were much, much too sensitive to viewer reactions and made regrettable choices because they over-reacted.
It's possible, but you've got to be utterly OCD and in a place where you've got the creative freedom to get it all mapped out with minimal network interference, character trap doors and all. Babylon 5 largely works in this regard- even with the mess about whether there was oging to be a season five and Claudia Chistian's unplanned departure from the show, there are still plenty of places where season one was clearly setting up events of seasons 3-5, both the big stuff, like what happened to Babylon 4 and the Vir & Mondo prophecies, and a whole bunch of little things that turned out to foreshadow important things. ("I've been having these cramps" was presented as a joke at first, but turned out to be an important note about just how human Delenn's reproductive system was getting.)
But that show took a very specific series of events, and a very specific show creator and runner to take detail to that level, and it's not going to be commonly repeated, even in shows that have fairly tight serial plotlines.
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I loved the first four seasons of Fringe, but the fifth season, while not fitting in the horrible category, left me so bored with it I never bothered to watch the finale. The first four season- both the monster of the week episodes and the red v. blue universe arc- were great and unpredictable storytelling. Walter v. Walter was a great rivalry with both Walters trying to do what they thought was best for their worlds. And then there was season five and the Observers, who had been wonderful when they were lightly used and morally ambigious, were utterly clunky when they morphed into heavy villains, the plots went the wat of a Fugutive/John Christopher's Tripods/War of the world pastiche, and the really low budget they had for the last season left them with not enough interesting and gross f/x and too much wandering around in abandoned warehouses.
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Crichton would also be on my list, especially when he realizes he's changed too much and Earth has changed too much for him to go home again, even if it was safe for him to do so.
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There have apparently been a couple of near attempts in getting Dragonriders of Pern onto the small screen, including one that almost made it to casting before Anne McCaffrey, who had a producer role, pulled the plug because the network (I think it was the WB) wanted to make it a teen soap opera with dragons. Given how much better the FX is these days, I'd love to see someone else try to make a go of the universe while remaining more faithful to the feel of the books.
If you want soap opera, and can find the right lead actor for it, I'd love to see Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan saga as a series. There's a lot of room in Miles' Dendarii years where you could fill in gaps in the book canon. The problem is the lead- Miles is short (somewhere around 4"10") and twentysomething through much of the series, so Peter Dinkledge is too old if they're looking for a name, and the actor needs to be able to pull off Miles in full manic creative phase.
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I'll go for the obvious here and say the Doctor from Doctor Who. Recasting the role every few years became a feature instead of a bug.
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Ben Aaronovich's 'Rivers of London' series has been optioned for television. Since Aaronovich has been a Who scriptwriter, I wouldn't be surprised if the books were a little bit written with tv in mind. Here's hoping the series makes it because he just makes modern London come alive so wonderfully.
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I've tried to come up with a list of size 10 white actresses* who get regular work, and get as far as 1) Merritt Wever and 2) Lena Dunham before drawing a total blank on who else to include. There's a whole spectrum of women between size 0 and Melissa McCarthy, and you'd never know it from American television
* Black actresses are allowed to have more than one body type it seems, even if outside of Shondaland, anyone who is bigger gets shoved into the 'sassy' or comedic sidekick roles.
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Speaking of secondhand embarrassment, any show where the cop/crime fighter is in his 60s and he always physically defeats the young 20/30ish criminal. I'm no ageist, but looking back and thinking about how Barnaby Jones, Canon, and the Equalizer always managed to defeat the bad guys and maybe ended up with only a minor scratch or small gash on their foreheads. lol I did live for those shows.
Though if he had enough lead time, Robert McCall did outsource a fair amount of the hpysical stuff and grunt work to Mickey.
Speaking of The Equalizer, Denzel Washington is starring in a movie remake. I'm not entirely opposed to it, but worry the writing won't be good enough to update McCall's Cold War burnout to similar 21st century themes.
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The opening credit sequences for Babylon 5 are probably a little unique in that they started out as massive expository devices and then got...extremely...dramatic (and enigmatic/confusing as hell if you didn't watch the show).
The one that still gets me is Susan Ivanova's "The Babylon project was our last best hope for peace. It failed. But in the year of the shadow war, it became something greater, our last best hope for victory."
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From the derivative but worked well file, ESPN used the Joan Jett cover of the Mary Tyler Moore Show them song at one point for its NCAA women's basketball tournament coverage, and I really like it as a rock song:
Few songs say '1980s' as strongly to me as the Miami Vice theme. The music was so crucial to the show, and they needed a strong theme to not get swamped by the songs within the episode:
Underrates instrumental- My So-Called Life, which manages to capture the mood of Angela trying to figure so many things out (and dang, Jared Leto was also so very young then)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KsqDCPKA2w
Among the reality shows, I also love The Amazing Race theme because it manages to tell the story of frantic travellers trying to desparately get from place to place and overcome the odds.
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I agree with Dexter and House as made for this thread, with House losing it all in the mental hospital eposides.
Southland- first two short seasons were brilliant gritty cop drama that were very well-researched. I know the budget got cut big time for the TNT-produced eipsodes, but what killed the show for me was that they went through multiple sets of showrunners, each of who took the characters one step further away from what made them interesting to begin with, and by the end of the season you were wondering just who these people were and why you should care about them anymore. And what they did to Cooper at the end seemed to be a big F.U. to the fans as well as being totally WTF?
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Come chat about Phil, Paul, Bobke, and the greatest spectacle in all of sports as skinny guys fling themselves up and down mountains and through barbed wire fences.
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Videos of my cats, who apparently have been watching Maru videos when I'm out of the house:
The Siamese girl is Sumi; the little black cat is Kage, alternately known as Happy Fun Cat for his cheerful personality. Kage was about 5-6 months old in the videos, and is much bigger now.
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Shows That: Died Before Their Time, Never Got A Fair Shot, Or Were Ahead Of Their Time
in Everything Else TV
IIRC, Blood Ties was getting pretty good ratings, but new management at Lifetime wanted to take the network in a different direction, and the Canadian side of production couldn't find a new dance partner to get back needed funding after Lifetime dropped it.