It really, really, realllly gets close to fully disproving the idea that repetition is comedy - think how Archer does things but instead of obscure references to literature its references to Canada and some questionable hockey lingo with next to no evolution to the repeated joke - and I think if these were 10 or, god forbid, 20 episode seasons I would not like it at all because of that, but criticism of the subjectivity of Canadian humor aside, good god does this show know how to shoot a fuckin' hockey scene. All of the hockey is filmed great, but there are three or four hockey scenes in this that are more goosebumps inducing and cinematic than anything you have ever seen in any other medium.
There is an alternate reality where the prequel trilogy was actually Episode 1: Revenge of the Sith, Episode 2: A Two Hour Cut of the Obi-Wan Miniseries, and then Episode 3: Rogue One, and in that alternate reality we probably have world peace, flying cars, and universal health care. Instead we have a mostly average and stretched out Obi-Wan miniseries, too much Star Wars, and no Jobs or Cash. I might have lost the analogy there at the end.
This is the most 'true crime podcast' documentary of all the true crime documentaries and I mean that in as strong a pejorative way as possible. One of the most exploitative structures I've seen in one of these. If this was a fictional series structured in this way and with this tone I would think it was written exclusively by people who saw that "ok murder muffins we got a real oopy goopy spoopy story for you today" anti-true crime genre tweet and decided to turn that attitude into an entire show. But its not fictionalized, which just makes it even worse to do it this way. It's so bad that, if we lived in a world where the average person had actual media literacy, it would kill the genre as a whole.
Absolutely hilarious to me that the very goofy super entertaining openly melodramatic cowboy soap opera has become a culture war talking point for the kind of insufferably tedious people that spend all their time on Twitter virtue signaling about how much they hate virtue signaling instead of spending time with their grandkids or something.
Yellowstone is purely ridiculous in its plotting, completely removed from the reality of modern ranching in a microcosm and 'western' politics as a macrocosm, and incredibly fun because of it - especially Kelly Reilly and Wes Bentley who 100% realize what kind of show they are in and what kind of performances it needs - but good lord, the absolute irony of its most ardent and passionate fanboys who take it way too seriously being the kind of fake cowboys that the show itself considers its internal enemy is so delicious that it actually makes the show better in of itself. Newsflash, if you think Yellowstone is owning the libs or whatever I can guarantee you are closer to the try hard out of towners in the valley desperate for 'authenticity' and cosplaying in their cowboy hats than you are to the Duttons, the same way most people who think they are Ricks are really Jerrys.
The first three seasons are all good and get better the more over the top they get, but season four seems to be running out of steam, most likely because almost half of the running time was used as backdoor pilots for at least three spin offs which we all know is the signal of a show stretched too thin, but as long as they resist some of the more obvious pitfalls due to it catapulting into the mass audience it should stay solid.
For fans of Deadwood, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, and Passions.
"The only people a superhero can save are the people he sides with."
An entire review of the Fate/Stay Night anime adaptation can be boiled down to a single sentence; Shirou Emiya fucking sucks.
Seinen anime can easily be tanked by a terrible lead, and Fate/Stay Night is obviously no exception. The burden of Shirou Emiya is like wearing a full suit of armor while trying to go for a swim, no matter how strong a swimmer you are there is no chance of you keeping your head above the water. And no matter how good some of Fate/Stay Night's individual parts may be, it can't be saved when Emiya is constantly dragging it down. Then again, if you strapped Shirou in a suit of armor and tried to drown him he would inexplicably survive anyway since he is already wearing impenetrable and indestructible plot armor. Dude catches more certain death than Rasputin and just shrugs it off while being one of the most consistently stupid, selfish, and unlikable characters around. And that is his final form! At no point does he improve, learn anything, or develop.
The Emiyalbatross is a double shame, because Fate/Stay Night is a fantastic concept at its core. In the story, the Holy Grail appears every so often and some of the mightiest heroes in the history of our world are summoned to fight for their human masters in order to gain control of it. This leads to some really fun battles and great character designs that, if it weren't for the massive amount of missteps, would have been enough to make this an easy recommendation. Some missteps are on Studio DEEN's part due to how drab a lot of the animation gets outside of the battles, but most come as the plot is further revealed in the second half of the anime when the pace slows down considerably and twists are dumped on the viewer in some very unconvincing ways. Unconvincing twists are nothing new in anime, but when so much of Fate/Stay Night's second half revolves around the "romance" between Sabre and Shirou, oh boy does that second half drag.
The nature of Fate/Stay Night also works against itself. Considering it starts off in a hole by being an adaptation of one of those visual novels but with all the sex scenes removed - which leads to some painfully awkward scenes like "the place where the threesome probably went" and "the place where awful Shirou probably makes Excalibur puns while guilting Sabre into sex because he is just the worst" - it is just too much for the anime to recover from thanks to how truly terrible Shirou is as protagonist. I think I'm being generous by giving this an average score, but I don't think saying so is as controversial an opinion as it would have been when this was at the height of its popularity. The far superior, and completely Shirou-less, Fate/Zero did a lot to overshadow Fate/Stay Night while shining a light on its shortcomings.
WATCH if you have a unique form of blindness that renders you incapable of seeing any of Shirou's scenes. DON'T WATCH if you can just Youtube the two opening themes because they are pretty solidly the best part of every episode.
The worst protagonist since that waifish dude they had play King Arthur in Camelot.