^^ Just crappy fan art, but still. Fun stuff. Though also not fun.

I'm not sure if these rumors are true, but it's what the show-runners are feeding the masses on Twitter.

I still say a modern Cthulhu story needs to be told on AHS. In fact I think I suggested a pretty Fucking goddamn good storyboard idea for how such a thing might go down in this very thread some time ago. There's really no American horror without Lovecraft. So any attempt to summarize American horror MUST have a Lovecraft element, or be forever incomplete.

I actually flew down to Rio to see it:)

What the fuck is this show anyway?

When it first came out the print ads made me think it was going to be about a crazy clown with some kind of pathology. But I guess not so much?

You can see how much Batman-think governs my day-to-day life.

Baskets is a deeply sad and funny analysis of dysfunction told through the character of Baskets the Clown (Galifianakis) his mom (Louie Anderson) and his twin brother (Galifianakis).

just finished season 2 of halt and catch fire, which was pretty great. it's funny to see the birth of the intertubes in retrospective and i find the whole thing strangely adrenaline-inducing.

this carried over from the movies thread, more apropos here.

I think the Sopranos was the best tv show ever. Disputed by another. Please share thoughts? Certainly not Breaking Bad or The Wire, I hope....

i liked sopranos a lot and i remember staying up 18 hours watching one episode after another till i could barely keep my eyes open

BUT

the wire for me, maybe. the wire was too much!

i mean sopranos great and all but... i got tired of it by the end

ah shit so many good ones and each for a different purpose

the first 3 seasons of the west wing were just so good! before sorkin had to quit it. and also-- buffy. ha ha ha ha. buffy! but seriously.

anyway sopranos was crazy yeah no doubt. as for "best ever" it gets a little tricky because one starts to split hairs.

the one tv show that has "moved" me the most was the wire though. principally because it provided me with a model of reality that i didn't grasp before it. juking the stats! and so much more.... yeah. sopranos was a fiction, the wire was a master fucking class on how the world really operates.

plus the wire had omar little. and brother mouzone! hell the fuck no. wire wins. sorry. now i got partisan ha ha haha. yeah. early jimmy mcnulty and bunk moreland also awesome. and yeah in sopranos there's silvio and paulie but... there's also that shitty kid and the annoying daughter to bring things down and fucking moltesanti could be such a fucking whiny pest. and his girlfriend... too many annoying people in sopranos, ha ha ha. that sister! ugh...

the thing is that while sopranos had the smarts to look beyond the individual into the family system, and show how the sickness was handed down through generations, wire had the mega-huevos to tackle society as a whole in a way that hasn't been done since... i don't fucking now. on tv never before i think? the wire was a novel.

I've still never seen the Wire and I just lost HBO because I'm (sigh) cutting back on non-essentials. :(

I've seen a Wire episode here and there, but never really dug into it. I think a lot of people would share your opinion that it's the greatest show of all time though. Whenever I tell someone I haven't seen it, they look at me like I just shat my pants in public.

Rolling Stone recently came out with a list of the 50 greatest television shows of all time, and yep, Sopranos was #1. So I think yours is a very popular opinion among critics.

I myself would not call it the greatest of all time. I feel like it's more of a Kobe than a Michael, if you know what I mean. It started so strong, and hit some just obscenely great highs along the way, and I actually think it ended on a really strong note as well, but some of the seasons got bogged down a bit by some really fucking depraved audience mind game shit that I personally didn't dig. Like when Tony was recovering from being shot, and you started to see him as a victim, almost feel sorry for him, until he goes and beats the living pulp out of his bodyguard just to show his goomba friends that he's still tough n' stuff. That was horrifying to me.

I think the Sopranos missed out on a few golden opportunities. All those moments when Tony's staring out at his empire, watching it thrive or crumble or whatever, and we as audience members are wondering, "What is that? Is that remorse? Is that sadness? Does he get it?" All of those moments were ultimately wasted because there was never an answer. Not a firm one. And in that sense, the character never grew, and in the end lead his own family to the fucking slaughter like lambs (at least, that's what I got from the "Don't Stop" ending of the final episode... 'twas no happy ending, not to this guy. Things went black unexpectedly for a fucking REASON.)

There's no denying it was a great show. A tremendous show. But I don't like being toyed with as a viewer... not in that way. I don't like laughing at Pauly's dumb hijinks one minute, and then watching him do something absolutely terrible the next. Yes, it's moral ambiguity and I'm fine with that, but I feel that Sopranos was missing a "true north," so to speak. There was no redemption in that story.

I'm not sure I'd say Breaking Bad is the best ever, but at least it had a true north. It had a conscience, and there was resolution at the end. It was also more engrossing from a filmmaking perspective, and I think the filming techniques were more advanced and the story was more centralized. The ending was painful and parts of it were extremely hard to watch, but I think it has a leg up on Sopranos when it comes to direction and cinematography, tension and release, and, sorry, but overall performance quality as well.

If I had to name my personal favorite tv show of all time though, you guys would laugh at because you're a bunch of high-brow fucks. ;)

Anyway, in drama, it's probably LOST. Say what you will about LOST -- it may not have the cursing or sex -- but it was a goddamn gripping show and I think that show really kicked off the era of "prestige television."

Not sure that's my favorite, but it's up there.

Also up there:

Arrested Development
Twin Peaks
Breaking Bad
Doctor Who (mostly the '04-present era)
Seinfeld (This is as great a show for comedies as Sopranos or Breaking Bad is for drama, and should be held at the same level.$

Fuck. I dunno.

Just nobody say Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. Not that anyone would, but... y'know... just don't.

The Wire did have a lot of good things in it. Jimmy, his black partner and the other black detective who made the dollhouse furniture were NOT well written characters. Just way way overdone, McDonalds burgers left in the warming oven for 3 or 4 days bad, stale. It kind of ruined the series for me in a lot of ways.

I looked at a couple of "greatest" web sites, and the Simpsons was mentioned. I haven't watched a whole lot of it, but with the Wiggins, Burns and Smithers, damn, that's not far from the top at least....

he was a monster with no remorse whatsoever, any regret he ever had was regret that he failed to kill someone before they screwed him.

right. that's what a certain key character (trying to avoid spoilers, though the show is now ancient) eventually figures out.

what's interesting though is his kid. i don't like him as a character, but as a device, when he starts having the same pains/symptoms as his dad had when he was young... fuck yeah. that's how it gets handed down, philip larkin.


whaaaat! bunk and lester and jimmy were great, dammit. ah ha ha ha. i had so much fun with them. you're of course free to dislike them just as i had a blast watching them.

simpsons... yeah it's more of an institution and i haven't watched them literally in decades. i did like futurama a lot though.

it is very hard to determine a greatest show. so many types of shows. these are my picks based on 43 years of TV watching.

farce - Night Court
classic sit-com - I Love Lucy
modern sit-com - Seinfeld
anthology/magazine type show - CBS Sunday Morning
adult animated show - Simpsons
children's science show - 3...2...1... Contact
cop procedural - Hill Street Blues/NYPD Blue (tie)
drama - Sopranos/Breaking Bad
special place in my heart - WKRP in Cincinnatti
period show - Peaky Blinders

I think Taboo is a whole lot better than Peaky Blinders.

I have not seen Taboo, but Peaky was dope.

and for other good period shows,

Boardwalk, This is England, Blackadder

I found Boardwalk interminably dull. my wife loves it.

star trek, tng and ds9 also among my top ones

voyager and enterprise... not so much ha ha ha

could rewatch the whole original series right now-- or ds9, even better

ferengis are hilarious

My fave trek is DS9, but I grew up idolizing Spock in the OG.

My fave UK comedy is Peep Show. I have see the whole thing at least 5 times.

TABOO IS FUCKING INCREDIBLE.

i tried watching peep show but couldn't stand the fuckers or anybody in it for that matter.

haven't seen peeky blinders or taboo but will line up for the near future

also-- buffy! buffy rules

I think that's a kind of a shallow read actually. I think there's more going on than that. I think Tony had a conscience, he just fought like hell against it. I think he did feel regret, remorse, and then threw himself into more of the same monstrous bullshit so he didn't have to feel it anymore. I don't think he was a sociopath exactly. I think he was the personification of macho male values. I think he considered his own conscience to be a weakness; a mental illness that needed to be treated.

And in the end, yeah, he never made any progress, but I think there was struggle within the character. If there wasn't, then the show was not as good as I thought it was.

Inhuman monsters are easy. It's the human ones... the morally grey ones... the ones dogged by doubt or compulsion or some other markedly human emotion that are the most interesting. Just straight psychopaths with no mystery don't play anymore.

(Incidentally, this is yet another reason why Ledger's chaos incarnate, murky, elemental Joker absolutely murders Nicholson's motivationless, whatever, fuck-you-im-a-bad-guy Joker, pisses on his corpse and dances a little jig while he shakes his dick off.... You don't look at Nicholson and wonder what his character is thinking. You don't care. Ledger grabs you by the chin and holds a knife to our throats and dares us to wager a guess.)




Ah! Exquisite!!

and speaking of period pieces-- the x-files. so 90s! ha ha ha. but bad jokes aside, that was a great show.

no and yes and no again.

sure that's a simplistic view, but the issue of his conscience is very much in question throughout most of the show.

this is why he gets dumped-- sh eventually solves the mystery

Yo! Same here, both counts.

Say more words!

League of Gentlemen

Are you guys watching the new Orange is the New Black season?

I think a decent argument could be made for this being one of the best shows out there right now. It's had its ups and downs, but this season has been STRONG.

im about to catch up w/ the previous season so please no spoilers

recently started watching EMPIRE (first season) and it's weirdly cheesy addictive. like nacho-flavored doritos. i really lie the way the scenes cut into one another without a hint of a fucking pause. there's never any setup or dénouément. it's probably the way of the future.

also a thing called "the librarians" - my wife hates it because it's jampacked with music. like-- a continuous score through every fucking scene. i hate that too but i get distracted w/ the mythological quotations and shtit like that.. i don't really watch it though. it plays while i do paperwork. has the oklahoma guy from angel and the old mystique.

American Gods season finale was dope. They really did a great job, since Gaiman was exec producer, to flesh out the book for a TV series. Highly recommended.

Oh it's over?

Ok, now I can finally do the trial offer and binge that shut. Haha. I actually don't know if it works like that because ... Starz? Really? Ugh. But I'm going to try.

HUGE fan of the book, so I'm pumped to hear that you're into it.

thanks-- and good to know. will add to list

Hey Rob!

WATCHMEN TV show reportedly in the works from HBO, Lindelof

okay. so i moved this from the movie thread to here because my brain was malconnecting

so... maybe

american tv borrows/buys a lot from british comedies. from... what was it called, man about the house... to... the office... to... what's the name of this one, hm, oh yes, shameless-- which i saw recently and was hilarious (haven't seen the american version yet)

i did like the american office better though, mostly because of dwight schrutte

but yea

problem is, here we don't get to see a lot of say, french, or spanish, or hungarian tv around here. so it's hard to compare with europe as a whole.

as i was saying some of the big shows are international coproductions-- game of thrones for example. also some smaller shows like borgia or marco polo or the tudors. (i like borgia better than the borgias. the borgias has a "better" cast but borgia is way more fun). oh shit, who/where makes VIKINGS? i fucking love that show.

there's a lot of good stuff out there. right now i'm watching "arn, the knight templar" and i'm glad i didn't return it. almost didn't survive the swedish dialogue + mandatory subtitles cuz i often like to do other shit with tv shows-- so, like, when i'm busy, i don't have time to "watch movies" but i can handle some teevee while i organize lists and do light online research and stuff like that.

but anyway tell me a bit about better european tv than american because i'm infinitely curious.

About to FINALLY watch episode 1 of American Gods.

Jesus, the wait has been... well, long. Like, really long.

Just finished OITNB's most recent season (5?) and it was probably the best in recent memory. Maybe the best since the first? I don't know. But goddamn good.

Also, Better Call Saul has become my most looked-forward-to show. As far as what I've seen, it's the best thing currently on television. Unless Taboo gets another season.

TABOO!! Ohmygoooood

I need to watch this current season of better call saul