iggysaurus

I’ve watched a few episodes. Not sure I’m going to continue. It’s oddly boring, for all the hype and the initial shock of seeing so many strangers’ genitals up close. They all say the same thing - “Seeing someone naked lets you find out who they really are.” Does it though? Bodies are just bodies. Not the sum total of who we are. Also, despite there being diversity in terms of race and sexual orientation, everyone is basically an attractive young person. If they include an overweight person in the lineup, that person always gets eliminated first (despite the contestant usually saying something initially complimentary about their curves or their “dad bod” as the case may be). It’s quite predictable in that way. Do they ever end up having people over 40 in later seasons? Everything I’ve seen is quite samey. I can’t relate to it myself. But it is entertaining to a degree.

How many episodes are left? I’m about ready to just take this off my watch list because I’m struggling so hard to care about any of them. This show had such promise but every storyline is so cliche and predictable, it’s almost painful. A show can be earnest/heartfelt (see Friday Night Lights) without being so damn boring and trite. I feel like it’s written by someone Edward’s age who has no actual life experience and is just imagining what grown up people would probably act like. 😂

I was super interested in this show at first but it’s losing me now. Like everyone else said, why introduce new characters so late when there’s already too many to keep up with? Plus some of the dialog and acting is just bad. This might be mean, but I don’t really like kid characters in general. Edward is ok, but I can’t get myself to care about his drama with Shay and the other girl. I felt like I was watching a bad tween show. The way the brother’s mysterious gf appeared at the museum with her hair blowing glamorously, and Shay’s obvious jealousy…whatever. They’re 12! I don’t care about a triangle between 12 year olds. And again, the acting isn’t great. I know you have to cut some slack for kid actors, but that’s part of why I don’t really want to watch a major storyline about some kids’ drama. Adriana and Kojo are so predictable and cliche. It’s so obvious where that storyline is going and it just makes me impatient. The only one I care about is Connie Britton. The whole show should just be about her, losing her husband in a plane crash and then trying to piece together who he really was. That alone would make for a good show and would be enough to fill 10 episodes if they gave it the depth it deserves.

I LOVE Shota! I hope he wins the whole thing. And I’d love to try his food someday.

I’m in the camp who disliked Maria all along and was glad she finally left. She just seemed to have a massive chip on her shoulder and a weirdly passive aggressive attitude the whole season. As if she somehow has always had it harder than literally every human on earth. I’m not fond of Jamie either. The cutesy noises are grating. I’m sure she’s a nice person but as a TV personality, I am not a fan. A couple people mentioned that Gabe’s misconduct charge might not be a big deal because we don’t know if it was sexual in nature. Why would that make it okay? If he was found to have, say, embezzled huge amounts of money from a restaurant he worked at, or flouted food safety protocols to an extent that people died or something (just to think of 2 random hypothetical examples of misconduct), that would still be bad and make me not exactly want to root for him to win Top Chef. YMMV of course.

ITA about the upspeak, vocal fry, and pounds of makeup on the hosts! Is this what we're supposed to aspire to? I like the premise of the show, and I believe both the hosts are very skilled, but they act so fake. The way they gush over the patients and call them "cutie" like they're children is also off-putting. If I went to a doctor and they treated me like that, I'd be out of there. It'd be like if Jonathan Van Ness was your doctor - "OMG hi cutie! Are we doing a little baby bit of surgery on you today hunny?" (I actually love JVN, but don't want doctors that act like that.) Also agree about the soft lighting and makeup in the "after" shots. High quality, skillfully applied makeup (the kind used by TV makeup artists, like here) can make a person look dramatically different all on its own. So even if they had nothing done surgically or cosmetically (whatever you call Jamie's treatments), they'd still look 75% better in the after shots with all that makeup. Overall, while I have been enjoying the show, it obviously shows a very "LA" approach to beauty. It would be nice to see a show like this that was a bit more realistic and not trying so hard to be huggy-positive-inspiring-feelgood-airbrushed.

They didn’t include the father and son who made the snail in the judging, and they also didn’t judge (or even introduce) at least 2 other pairs. I guess the editing chose to focus only on the top and bottom contestants, but I didn’t like that - I prefer when they at least briefly show all the competitors’ work, like they do on GBBO.

I thought this was weird too, partly because Tripp was the father of Mike, who was best friends with Adam's son, right? So not only did Adam's kids lose their mom in a violent way, but their best friend's dad was also shot and killed, and their classmate Olivia's dad is charged with multiple murders. That's a lot of trauma/murder for a group of young kids to be exposed to all at once. And yet they all seemed just fine after only 6 months.

Yeah, it seems like there's never much individual episode discussion on these shows that drop all at once on Netflix. Most people just watch the whole thing and then comment on the last episode thread. I love being able to binge an entire series rather than wait for new episodes week to week, but I do miss being able to read more discussion on individual episodes as they happen. People tend to analyze and speculate a lot more when there's a week of waiting between each episode!

I liked this a lot and will gladly binge any Harlan Coben show, but I feel like it suffered a little from too many plotlines. I read an article that said the book this is based on doesn't include any of the stuff about the teenagers (the rave, alpaca, Dante's accident, Daisy spiking Mike's joint with PCP, etc.). Harlan's 25 yr old daughter wrote that part and they worked it in with everything else. I feel like you can kinda tell that it was shoehorned in, because they didn't resolve all of those aspects as completely as they could have. I called The Stranger being that guy's daughter. When he told that story about how he killed his wife because she was going to take away their child, "Chris," I noticed he never referred to the gender of the child. So that stuck out to me as something that would probably be significant, and I thought, I bet the Stranger is Chris, his child. Sure enough, she was. But from then on, any time she was referred to by name (by her dad, or in the closed captions) it was Chrissy or Christina. So him calling her "Chris" in his initial telling of the story seemed like a deliberate way to be vague about the child because you don't even know if he's talking about a boy or girl at that point.

Thanks for the info on plus size male models - that's interesting! However, from the one article linked above, it sounds like it's based more on the guys being extremely tall and "brawny," rather than any of them just being pudgy or fat. So it still seems like a bit of a different standard compared to the plus size female model trend. It's great if designers can make clothes that work for all sizes. I just think the concept of this challenge was strange - having ALL the female models be plus sized (in more of the pudgy sense), while all the men were rail thin and buffed, and the fact that this approach was chosen for the underwear challenge specifically. Not that I wanted to see doughy men wearing underwear. I'm overweight myself and I don't particularly want to see other overweight people of any gender modeling underwear/bondage gear or whatever. That's just me though.

I’m glad Ferrari and Kiki are finally gone. They were in the bottom almost every single challenge. And despite their dramatic outburst in the last judging, I don’t think racism had anything to do with it. I don’t doubt they’ve encountered racism/obstacles in real life, but on this show, most of the judges (and most of the contestants, come to think of it) are people of color. Or at least a good portion are. It doesn’t seem like a case of anyone underestimating them because of their race. In fact I think they used that issue to manipulate the results of the last episode to keep themselves from going home. The reality is, they just made bad decisions (mainly Kiki, with her insistence on raw edges in the last challenge and no underwire in this one). Their designs were the least successful. Bye!

This! “All body types” only applies to women apparently. I can’t help but think that this decision was made because the primary audience for this type of show is women and gay men, and therefore the female models should/can be “relatable” but the male models need to be visually appealing to that demographic. Men are still supposed to be eye candy in this industry because of who the audience is. Do any plus size male models even exist? Is that even a thing? I’ve never seen any.

I agree that Elizabeth wouldn't have wanted to be "ordinary" in that sense. But I do believe she would've liked to be "just" aristocratic, and NOT be queen. There is a middle ground there. Yes she wanted the perks of being wealthy (most of us would probably like that!) but just not the heavy burden of being the actual queen. I know there are lots of people who are upper crust British society, or maybe even minor royals, who can do whatever they want in life because they aren't in the spotlight 24/7. They can choose their partners, their careers, AND have expensive hobbies like raising horses or flying planes. I think that is what Elizabeth would've liked. Saying she wished she could have the freedom to do what she wanted doesn't mean she necessarily wished to be working class or poor. Regarding Phillip (in answer to many of the posts here), he does seem out of touch and ungrateful, but I think the point is that wealth and status don't automatically make people feel fulfilled or content. I don't fault him for feeling like this (well, not entirely) because it is human nature to question the meaning of life and to feel dissatisfied with it all sometimes, no matter how fortunate you are. In fact I think the more privileged a person is, the more likely they are to be unhappy. (Think of all the child stars who are totally messed up by fame.) It's a great paradox - those who don't have wealth (which is the majority of us) tend to feel like anyone who does have it should spend their entire life appreciating it and feeling grateful and humble. But that's easier said than done. It's like "the grass is always greener" no matter what our station in life. Case in point: Phillip and the astronauts. He was dazzled by their achievement and wanted them to live up to some impossible ideal in his head, while to them they were just doing their jobs. Meanwhile, they were dazzled by being in the palace and hearing about royal life, which to him is boring and just his everyday life. Both idealized the other type of life. Neither one is perfect in reality.

I just feel like they didn't mention Luke enough. It was only in the 1st episode that they even mentioned him once, wasn't it? It seems like in real life, they would've all been saying how weird it is to reunite and be filming the show without one very major element of the original show. Nobody from "the network" was shown mentioning him missing either. I get that they couldn't focus on that the whole time, but still, just seems like such a major element from the original series was Luke (and Dylan/Brenda, Dylan/Kelly etc) and they acted like he was never there, aside from the shout-out in the first episode. He was my favorite cast member from the beginning, so it's hard for me to get over seeing any sort of reunion without him.