Anyone Watching A Good Tv Show?

[saturdaygig]

As with a lot of shows Stevo. STICK WITH IT

I don't think Walking Dead is a 'stick with it' at all. The first three or four shows are the best, so if you don't like them there's nothing to be stuck with.

[mjmooney]

Bert and Dickie on BBC1 last night.

Shameless gungo-ho Olympic feelgood stuff, and basically "Chariots of Fire-Lite", but I enjoyed it. And I never knew about Burnell/Bushnell, clearly the Redgrave and Pinsent of their era.

[VillaForever1970]

I had a look on wiki and it seems the viewers increase every season with it which can't be a bad thing.

On the subject of viewers (probably one for Levi), Mad Men seems to get around 2m or so on average per episode, whilst Walking Dead seems to be around 6.5m - is Mad Men not watched by a tonne or has The Walking Dead just got absurdly high ratings?

Its because americans love zombies getting shot and dont know a decent well written, well acted series if they ate it at McDonalds.

Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Wire are the 3 greatest tv series ever to be made imo. Closely followed bye The Sopranos.

If your not into investing in characters over episodes and series though you wont enjoy. As the odd episode will crop up where not much 'seems' to happen, but you learn further and develop a better understanding of sometimes just one character.

But the quality of writing and acting is top top notch stuff.

Ignore viewing figures and box offices though, they mean naff all. Transformers 2 for example is one of the most successful films ever for box office takings.

[BOF]

I'm smelling a slight whiff of snobby The Walking Dead is engrossing and tense with a good cast and I think it's well-enough written. I also agree on Breaking Bad and The Wire. They are the 2 best shows I've ever seen. But no-one will tell me Mad Men is anything but a slick high-budget ultra-dull soap-opera. I have tried and failed to watch it. "Not much seems to happen" sums up every episode of it that I've ever seen and I was given the first 2 series as a 'present'.

[kurtsimonw]

Yeah I got through more of Mad Men and it's not for me at all. It's obviously well written, but that's not enough for me to enjoy something. I can appreciate it for what it is, but I'm still bored watching it. The 2nd season of The Walking Dead has some very slow paces episodes where not alot happens, but they're still more interesting than anything Mad Men has thrown up for me.

On The Walking Dead, wish I hadn't watched all the trailers and stuff, gone and spoiled it for myself a bit.

[Zhan_Zhuang]

Yeah that's a good way to sum it up.

I didn't hate it, I just didn't think it was worth spending my time watching over other things.

But then again, I watch Jersey Shore, so what the **** do I know?

That's brain-dead TV right there...I was about to interject but alas the comment above has redeemed the debate towards the favour of Walking Dead.

Seriously though parts of Walking Dead are good and well-scripted with a few twists along the way. The first half season of Season 2 I thought it very boring but the last half was well worth hanging in there for.

The Sopranos is by far the best TV show i've seen; it's halfway through the last season on SKY Atlantic HD at the moment and I have no idea what i'm going to do without it. I missed it first time around as bizarrely I thought it would be rubbish, how wrong could one be!

[Stevo985]

One thing the walking dead CERTAINLY was NOT, is well scripted. That's the main reason I didn't like it. The dialogue (and the acting in general) is just ridiculous.

I can see why people like it for the storyline, the plot and the action. But to me well scripted means the dialogue, and that's just appalling.

But it's all about opinions isn't it? Like there are plenty people here who don't like Mad Men. I loved it. I go along that it's slow paced, but that doesn't stop it being great. The Wire was slow paced and it's the best TV series ever made (imo of course)

Season 5 of Mad Men was a masterpiece.

[kurtsimonw]

I've shockingly never seen a single episode of The Wire. I really should give it a watch over the summer.

[mjmooney]

The only thing that puts me off things like Mad Men is that I just KNOW I would be constantly nitpicking little anachronisms - "They wouldn't have said THAT in 1960", and so on.

As with Bert and Dickie last night. For the second time in a matter of months a drama set in the past (the other one was "Birdsong") had someone responding to the question "How are you?" with the response "I'm good". Aaaaarrrggghhh!!!

It's a modern usage that I hate, and simply did not exist until about ten years ago, max.

The correct response was (and IS, IMO) "I'm very well, thank you".

I gloomily await a new drama with some Victorian person saying "Yeah, no..."

[BOF]

The only thing that puts me off things like Mad Men is that I just KNOW I would be constantly nitpicking little anachronisms - "They wouldn't have said THAT in 1960", and so on.

It should appeal to you then because one of the main selling points of the show and the thing it focuses hugely on is getting everything absolutely spot on from that time. There are slip-ups but from those in the know, they are very very few and far between.

[BOF]

Oh and you'd love the dialogue in Spartacus : Blood and Sand then Mike. It's particularly of the time.

[mjmooney]

The only thing that puts me off things like Mad Men is that I just KNOW I would be constantly nitpicking little anachronisms - "They wouldn't have said THAT in 1960", and so on.

It should appeal to you then because one of the main selling points of the show and the thing it focuses hugely on is getting everything absolutely spot on from that time. There are slip-ups but from those in the know, they are very very few and far between.

Hmmm, perhaps. That recent one-off thing about David Bailey and Mary Quant claimed to have been meticulously researched, but it was absolutely full of little mistakes. Shouldn't piss me off, but it does (hey, THERE'S an idea for a thread...)

[mjmooney]

Oh and you'd love the dialogue in Spartacus : Blood and Sand then Mike. It's particularly of the time.

In TV/film, as with historical novels, there is a point where the whole "authentic speech" thing flip-flops.

As far back as (let's say) the 17th century, I like them to be as true to historical speech patterns as possible.

Earlier than that, it just gets impractical - mediaeval characters speaking Chaucerian Middle English is a bit beyond most of us, so they may as well go for modern speech in a 'neutralised' form (i.e. no 21st C slang, etc.)

Then again...

Sebastiane is a 1976 film written and directed by Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress. It portrays the events of the life of Saint Sebastian, including his iconic martyrdom by arrows. The film, which was aimed at a homosexual audience, was controversial for the homoeroticism portrayed between the soldiers. It is significant for being the first film to be entirely recorded accurately in Latin, which went as far as the translation of some dialogue into vulgar Latin.

And I've seen it. :oops:

[CrackpotForeigner]

Jupiter's cock, what are you waiting for?

Edit: this remark makes most sense if you've seen Spartacus Blood and Sand(als) and misread, as I did, MJM's post above thinking he HADN'T seen that somewhat iffy-sounding Sebastian thing.

[Eames]

Bert and Dickie on BBC1 last night.

Shameless gungo-ho Olympic feelgood stuff, and basically "Chariots of Fire-Lite", but I enjoyed it. And I never knew about Burnell/Bushnell, clearly the Redgrave and Pinsent of their era.

I had no intention of watching it, but was totally hooked after 5 minutes. Total fluffy nonsense but very very watchable.

[saturdaygig]

IBut no-one will tell me Mad Men is anything but a slick high-budget ultra-dull soap-opera. I have tried and failed to watch it. "Not much seems to happen" sums up every episode of it that I've ever seen and I was given the first 2 series as a 'present'.

I totally agree. But so many people love it...its a mystery to me.

[leviramsey]

The only thing that puts me off things like Mad Men is that I just KNOW I would be constantly nitpicking little anachronisms - "They wouldn't have said THAT in 1960", and so on.

It should appeal to you then because one of the main selling points of the show and the thing it focuses hugely on is getting everything absolutely spot on from that time. There are slip-ups but from those in the know, they are very very few and far between.

Not to mention that, especially when it comes to the language usages of more-or-less Eastern Establishment folks in the early-/mid-'60s, I'm not necessarily sure how much experience Mike would necessarily have to pick out the anachronisms.

(I keep meaning to try to get my dad (born 1942, somewhat Eastern Establishment) into Mad Men and to find out how accurate he thinks it is...)

There's a blog that deconstructs the costuming and set design and looks for anachronisms; they rarely if ever find them. Example from this past season

It’s interesting that Ken still wears a hat. Young men of the time had abandoned them in droves in the wake of JFK’s hatlessness. He’s young, but he’s still a somewhat conservative country boy at heart.

There’s little to be analyzed in this scene, but it provides a nice snapshot of the different styles the SCDP men trade in. Don’s suits, like Pete’s, are almost always a solid color and both men tend toward solid-colored ties. Bert’s suits are big and loose, in the manner of old men, and he never wears a neck tie; always a bow tie. Lane sports waistcoats, plaids and tweeds. Roger is always in pinstripes or grey suits and he also favors vests, which were not considered particularly stylish at the time. In Lane’s case his vest indicates his foreign-ness and in Roger’s it indicates his early middle age. We’ve said it before: Roger has probably been going to the exact same tailor to get his suits made since he was a little boy and it’s probably where his father’s suits were made as well.

It’s notable that Trudy’s silhouette here isn’t the latest in 1966 styles. Shirtwaist dresses were still being worn a good ten years from this point by housewives at home, but this kind of cupcake silhouette went out of style several years before. Contrast this with the stylish Trudy and Pete who were childless and lived in a well-appointed Manhattan apartment. She got the baby and the house in the suburbs she always wanted, so things like being up on the latest fashions no longer interest her.

...You can’t not notice her body under the clothes and everything about them indicates her youth in contrast to the other women in the episode. She’s almost literally dewy. She’s also, because Pete and Trudy live in an upper middle class section of Connecticut, preppy and (to use a word we’d never normally use) wholesome in a way the clothes worn by the kids outside the Stones concert a couple episodes back weren’t. Those kids were outer-borough, she’s pure New England bedroom community.

[i only include this pic because of the outcry over Don Draper wearing something as unstylish as that... except that this absolutely was de rigeur for upper-middle-class WASP going out to the country; I have uncles who, a quarter-century (we Ramseys are not renowned for our fashion sense!) later, would wear something like this to a dinner party at Tuppenny Tower. And that's probably the most amazing thing about how accurate Mad Men is: the stuff that doesn't seem accurate is accurate in the specific context of the show --LR]

(and a few of the costuming and set design hints picked up on by T&L bore fruit...)

On Mad Men, it's a somewhat limited appeal show... I think, being about the pinnacle of American WASP power, it may well be most resonant with those who are WASPy.

[Stevo985]

Hooray!

A super long Levi post that I was actually interested in. I think that makes two

Forgive my ignorance though, what's WASP?

[GarethRDR]

World Aquanaut Security Patrol.

[Zhan_Zhuang]

One thing the walking dead CERTAINLY was NOT, is well scripted. That's the main reason I didn't like it. The dialogue (and the acting in general) is just ridiculous.

I can see why people like it for the storyline, the plot and the action. But to me well scripted means the dialogue, and that's just appalling.

But it's all about opinions isn't it? Like there are plenty people here who don't like Mad Men. I loved it. I go along that it's slow paced, but that doesn't stop it being great. The Wire was slow paced and it's the best TV series ever made (imo of course)

Season 5 of Mad Men was a masterpiece.

I beg to differ and considering you had not watched the series in its entirety forming a sound argument on this matter is rather ironic.

However, to fill you in some of the characters in the story have severe psychological issues as reflected by the circumstances they find themselves in. As a result some characters are very troubled and hence difficult to read initially by their words (well-scripted) and inevitably by their actions.

Furthermore, at its most philosophical there are many debates as to the morality of the situation and the actions and intended or unforeseen consequences of the characters. Again like the psychologial aspects the philosophy and ethics of the situation are often fleshed out through dialogue which I personally thought was well-scripted.

Personally I thought there was some interesting social commentaries flagged up by the script which one can pick up on. Sure it's a Zombie TV programme and it is possible to disengage the brain also aswell as picking up the deeper meaning.