one of those annoying overly-indie-feeling things where all the characters are f*cked up and EvErYbOdY's JuSs TrYiN' tO gEt By AnD mUdDlE ThRoUgH lIfE
the child actors get out of this alright though
Big Leo-Pointing-at-the-TV meme reactions whenever they mention national parks or the Roosevelts like I'm watching the KBCU come together or somethin
This show's quality really ended up matching the British Empire's trajectory
what a damn fine cast
Sam Worthington gives maybe his best performance, the series plays around with the audience's perception of his character and he 100% nails what's asked of him to play into that (mis)perception. skimmed some interviews he gave on the Avatar 2 press tour about the fast fame he found after Avatar 1 and the roles he got after that and it's nice to see him in something really meaty he could sink his teeth into and he totally rises to the occasion
Wyatt Russell is an actor I find hard to take seriously in a dramatic roles because I love love love him so much as Dudley from Lodge 49 and I can only see him as a likeable surfer bro-type person (he's Goldie Hawn's son!) but DAMN he also rises to the occasion and makes his character so menacing, great stuff and I'm partial to Lodge 49 but this also may challenge it for Wyatt's best performance
Watched Denise Gough in Andor and thought she was absolutely wonderful there (that whole damn cast deserves all the nominations from all the awards ceremonies) so it was certainly a pivot watching her in more of a kowtowed role (loved seeing her fiercer side come out at the end)
I'll be honest, I thought Daisy Edgar-Jones was the lesser of the Normal People pair but only because Pauls Mescal's performance was so damn powerful and I'm a sucker for silent-but-deeper-emotions-underneath types but between this and the commercial success of Crawdads she's definitely on her way up. Like everyone else, she gave everything this role asked of her
Andrew Garfield reliably good, just keep giving me 1 Andrew Garfield man-struggling-with-his-deeply-held-faith role per decade and I'll be satisfied
Billy Howle made you feel for Allen so much and Gil Birmingham played off of Garfield so well as his partner and when he goes off on Garfield in the last episode it definitely felt pent-up and earned after six episodes of largely biting his tongue
solid writing that takes a serious approach to the religion thanks to Dustin Lance Black's Mormon upbringing and while it clearly comes down hard on blind faith and fundamentalism and the secrets and protectionism that places the religion over the individual's well-being, it's much more fleshed-out than the typical one-note 'religion bad mmkay' takes that often come out of Hollywood
this show is the epitome of constantly being this close to being good
I'll never understand this being categorized as a comedy even in the age of dark dramedies blurring the lines
Jane the Virgin petitioning the Emmys to be considered a comedy? Understandable
Shameless as a comedy? Dark moments but overall a comedy
Poker Face as a one-hour crime comedy? Hell yeah
Barry? Barely by the end, but still
But I will never ever ever understand The Bear as comedy
most overrated show in the history of television
went from a cheesy forced and contrived show carried by its performances to a series of shitty afterschool specials whose ambitions completely outstripped its ability
odd-numbered seasons :thumbsup:
even-numbered seasons :thumbsdown:
Really enjoy the cast top to bottom and promising first episode but over half of the season over and it's just...meandering? The episodes quickly started to feel like aimless discursions
Could live with the going-nowhere-slowly plot but that the character explorations are very shallow and surface deep
BBC really gonna make a 2-hour documentary about ethnic tensions b/t muslims and hindus in India w/o a mention of UK's historical role in the Pakistan-India partition based on ethnic/religious lines? :eyes:
I'm a sucker for a geopolitical spy/espionage show and there's enough cleverness and generally intelligent/competent characters to make the lapses in intelligence/competence and/or contrived writing that much more annoying
Extremely obvious by the end of the 5th episodes what the whole deal is
Can we also not have any more cop/spy shows with a spouse whose sole purpose is to be upset about their cop/intelligence agent spouse not spending enough time at home?
season 1 - charming and delightful
season 2 - charming and delightful
season 3 - why am i not enjoying this as much?
season 4 - I now recognize the Denmark as a territory wholly under the authority and administration of Greenland
We're all disappointed by the 3rd episode but I'm still thankful Dolly Wells got a lead role and absolutely crushed it
amazing how many generally above-average actors all simultaneously hit their limits in selling extremely-below-average writing
Started off strong with an enticing first episode but petered out quickly with its last two.
The problem with these mystery sci-fi/fantasy type shows is the answer is almost always never fully satisfactory to everybody, and if it goes the route of 'well there's really no answer, hope you enjoyed the journey!' then the journey better've been worth it
Nina Gold coming for her 5th Casting Director Emmy
The tragic story of a man who just wanted to build his model city in some damn peace
Silicon Valley-lite, starts off very shaky but becomes very watchable by the end. Would've gladly watched a 2nd season had there been one
What if Veep but kind of mediocre but still watchable for political junkies
this should be mandatory viewing in every Driver's Ed class
Season 1: Edge-of-your-seat, pulse-pounding, very-bingeable geopolitical thriller
Season 2: Decent but loses much of its need to watch the next episode NOW quality
Season 3: ugh
not on the level of Raising Hope or Pramface but generally pretty enjoyable even if Olly's character is such a pill
doesn't quite cohere in the end but much too distracted by Rojas's sweaty biceps to care
Given how off-putting I find Sean Penn irl and having yet to watch anything starring Julia Roberts that makes me understand why she was so big in the '90s, I didn't come into this with high expectations thinking it'd probably be a one-and-done. My low expectations were consistently surpassed with this becoming a reliably enjoy watch each week.
While it felt like this show was sold as starring Penn & Roberts, it's very much an ensemble show and what an ensemble it is, a uniformly strong cast from lead characters to the smaller roles. Penn & Roberts are very good in their roles (I've seen some scathing headlines about Roberts but I thought she was more than fine).
Dan Stevens is serviceable and occasionally pretty good in a line delivery.
The reliably good Betty Gilpin, Martha Kelly, and Alison Tolman are reliably good with Kelly bringing her deadpan goodness and Tolman, as usual, making a case for her to get more screentime in any project she's a part of.
Stevens & Gilpin make their opposites attract relationship work instead of coming off as contrived which could've easily been the case
Shea Whigham as Gordon Liddy is chewing up scenery like he's a gd termite, going for broke and sucking the air out of most scenes he's in and which would not work nearly as well in the hands of a different actor and it's a hoot to watch. Get this man an Emmy asap
Nat Faxon and Patton Oswald, though normally comedic actors, do well in their handful of appearances (without me expecting a punchline at the end of their dialogue)
Chris's Bauer and Messina also bring characteristically good work to screen
The actress who played Gale(/Gail?) in the one episode where the FBI agents were sitting in a car trying to intimidate her husband into cooperating was amazing and made the absolute most out of her 3 minutes of screentime
Darby Camp was good as the Mitchells' young daughter, making me worry about her future the same way as I did for the daughter from FX's Fosse/Verdon
Historical political shows often either collapse on their own sense of self-importance or end up too dry and didactic, the good ones make it feel like you're watching news unfold before your eyes in real time: the sense of opening a newspaper (/twitter/news home page) and getting the drip drip drip of a story piece by piece from different angles, still unsure of the fuller picture, that you're living through history and Gaslit does that and does it well.
Framing Watergate through Martha MItchell's story and the romance of John & Mo Dean is an interesting angle to take and it very well might've been a mistake but Roberts is compelling and watchable as Martha and the chemistry between Stevens and Gilpin is good, making the opposites-attract of their relationship believable (and root for-able) and both those things go a long way in making the show work.
i am once again asking Melissa McCarthy to divorce ben falcone
doesn't seem like this miniseries is liked around these parts (I like it more with each passing episode) but the mockumentary + unreliable narrator(s) combination is very apt to tell the story of angelyne
watching this for the first time 2 years after it finished and I'm astonished/disappointed Eliza Coupe didn't star in 100 action-comedies after this series. In a just universe Eliza Coupe is starring in better versions of Ryan Reynolds movies
Hayley deserved all the awards for this role (at least the ones that didn't go to Jessie Buckley for Fargo s4) and I am not ready for Chris Miles to be playing dad roles
thought this would be a show i'd dump after 1 episode based on lukewarm reviews but man this was so much better than the reviews lead me to believe, kept waiting for it to go off quality-wise but it never did. you can quibble about how explicitly gory it needed to be given it was based on true events with real victims and at what point it slips into exploitative territory but that didn't really bother me (understandable if it did others)
Jessica Biel - best acting I've seen from her, never expected much from her acting-wise and she really surpassed my low expectations
Melanie Lynskey - reliably good, easily switching from oh-god-I-hate-these-type-of-people to feeling bad for her and back again
Pablo Schreiber - daddyJolly Green Jizzface Jonads Jonah Ryan - dude was so nice as a dad
Justin Timberlake - his appearance was mad distracting
directing & editing on point too
still in disbelief casting just went with the current most famous black actress to play michelle obama instead of an actress who actually resembles her in any way shape or form and then hair & make-up just threw a michelle obama bob on her and called it a day