Friday open thread: 5+1
Jan. 19th, 2024 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Until ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge is over, I'm going to piggyback on their prompts and use them for my own each Friday. Today's prompt is:
Choose Your Challenge: we will give you the challenge of making a list (who doesn't love lists?!?) and then you get to choose what list to make.
Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.
I can never resist making a 'five things' list into a 'five times she did, and one time she didn't' list, so that's what I've done here. Feel free to use my own list topic, or make your own 5 (+1) things list in the comments.
1. I always list Veronica Mars as the answer to this question. This show — a pastiche of noirish detective fiction, set in a California high school, with an emphasis on both class (and extreme inequalities), small town politics and classroom politics, with a generally excellent cast with excellent chemistry with one another, and fabulously quippy dialogue, executed flawlessly — is one of my very favourites: but with a catch. Its first season is one of my favourite pieces of TV storytelling — it's close to perfect (some early 2000s issues with race and gender aside), it's complete and self-contained — and subsequent seasons and a movie never really reach the same heights. There are moments that I enjoy in all of the later seasons, but the seasons themselves are ultimately unnecessary, and in many cases undermine what made the first season so magical to begin with.
2. The Musketeers (BBC), an extremely loose retelling of Dumas's novel. It's got a pretty cast, the first season is light-hearted, swashbuckling good fun, and Peter Capaldi is a fantastic scenery-chewing villain whose antagonism with our heroes works really well, because he's opposed to them personally, but all of them ultimately are working towards the same goal, and periodically have to work grudgingly together. And then Capaldi got cast as the Doctor, his replacement was awful, and it became a much, much darker show, instead of the silly, tropey action adventure of the first season.
3. Broadchurch. This British prestige crime drama was televisual gold — critically acclaimed, popular with viewers, and telling an interesting story that looked with fresh eyes at the old trope of a crime taking place in a picturesque, close-knit small town, and cracking the town's facade wide open in a way that exposes everyone's secrets and makes everyone culpable. The denouement was devastating, it completed the story perfectly, and nothing more really needed to be said ... and then the showrunners made two more seasons.
4. Being Human (British original version), a wonderful miniseries about a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost living as housemates and muddling along with problems both supernatural and mundane, designed as a kind of metaphor for the trials and tribulations of life as a Millennial in the early 2000s. There were some dark moments, but it was a cosy kind of show, and although the characters had flaws, they felt like fundamentally decent people — or people who had the potential to be decent if they made an effort. After the first season, the show took a turn to the melodramatic, ramped up the angst, and made some characterisation decisions that fundamentally changed what the show was about ... which I hated.
5. Pretty Little Liars. This was another take on the 'picturesque small town is ruptured by the death/disappearance of a beautiful teenage girl, and this crime destabilises everything and somehow implicates everyone' subgenre, with Twin Peaks being its obvious ancestor. It did two things really well: it made this a story about the (then novel) digital lives of teenagers taking place largely outside of adult awareness (the quartet of teenage girl central characters are being harassed via text messages about their supposed involvement in their friend's disappearance by an unknown bully who knows all their secrets and vulnerabilities), and although it was incredibly soapy and melodramatic, it took seriously the lives, friendships and sexuality of teenage girls and made these the heart of the story. At its best, the show was extraordinary — a similar blend of complex, serialised television with long arcs with decent payoffs, good chemistry between most of the main cast, and an ability to mix humour, ridiculous situations, and heart-wrenching emotion to Buffy at its best. The first few seasons leading up to the reveal of the identity of the girls' digital bully are really accomplished writing, and among my favourite TV shows of all times. And then the show decided to keep going, introducing new antagonists and increasingly convoluted justifications for these new anonymous bullies to be bullying the four girls, ultimately degenerating into repellent transphobia such that I cannot recommend the show in its entirety.
And the one show that was cruelly cancelled too soon? Always, and forever Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was wonderful, and deserved so much more!
What about you?
snowflake_challenge is over, I'm going to piggyback on their prompts and use them for my own each Friday. Today's prompt is: Choose Your Challenge: we will give you the challenge of making a list (who doesn't love lists?!?) and then you get to choose what list to make.
Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.
I can never resist making a 'five things' list into a 'five times she did, and one time she didn't' list, so that's what I've done here. Feel free to use my own list topic, or make your own 5 (+1) things list in the comments.
1. I always list Veronica Mars as the answer to this question. This show — a pastiche of noirish detective fiction, set in a California high school, with an emphasis on both class (and extreme inequalities), small town politics and classroom politics, with a generally excellent cast with excellent chemistry with one another, and fabulously quippy dialogue, executed flawlessly — is one of my very favourites: but with a catch. Its first season is one of my favourite pieces of TV storytelling — it's close to perfect (some early 2000s issues with race and gender aside), it's complete and self-contained — and subsequent seasons and a movie never really reach the same heights. There are moments that I enjoy in all of the later seasons, but the seasons themselves are ultimately unnecessary, and in many cases undermine what made the first season so magical to begin with.
2. The Musketeers (BBC), an extremely loose retelling of Dumas's novel. It's got a pretty cast, the first season is light-hearted, swashbuckling good fun, and Peter Capaldi is a fantastic scenery-chewing villain whose antagonism with our heroes works really well, because he's opposed to them personally, but all of them ultimately are working towards the same goal, and periodically have to work grudgingly together. And then Capaldi got cast as the Doctor, his replacement was awful, and it became a much, much darker show, instead of the silly, tropey action adventure of the first season.
3. Broadchurch. This British prestige crime drama was televisual gold — critically acclaimed, popular with viewers, and telling an interesting story that looked with fresh eyes at the old trope of a crime taking place in a picturesque, close-knit small town, and cracking the town's facade wide open in a way that exposes everyone's secrets and makes everyone culpable. The denouement was devastating, it completed the story perfectly, and nothing more really needed to be said ... and then the showrunners made two more seasons.
4. Being Human (British original version), a wonderful miniseries about a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost living as housemates and muddling along with problems both supernatural and mundane, designed as a kind of metaphor for the trials and tribulations of life as a Millennial in the early 2000s. There were some dark moments, but it was a cosy kind of show, and although the characters had flaws, they felt like fundamentally decent people — or people who had the potential to be decent if they made an effort. After the first season, the show took a turn to the melodramatic, ramped up the angst, and made some characterisation decisions that fundamentally changed what the show was about ... which I hated.
5. Pretty Little Liars. This was another take on the 'picturesque small town is ruptured by the death/disappearance of a beautiful teenage girl, and this crime destabilises everything and somehow implicates everyone' subgenre, with Twin Peaks being its obvious ancestor. It did two things really well: it made this a story about the (then novel) digital lives of teenagers taking place largely outside of adult awareness (the quartet of teenage girl central characters are being harassed via text messages about their supposed involvement in their friend's disappearance by an unknown bully who knows all their secrets and vulnerabilities), and although it was incredibly soapy and melodramatic, it took seriously the lives, friendships and sexuality of teenage girls and made these the heart of the story. At its best, the show was extraordinary — a similar blend of complex, serialised television with long arcs with decent payoffs, good chemistry between most of the main cast, and an ability to mix humour, ridiculous situations, and heart-wrenching emotion to Buffy at its best. The first few seasons leading up to the reveal of the identity of the girls' digital bully are really accomplished writing, and among my favourite TV shows of all times. And then the show decided to keep going, introducing new antagonists and increasingly convoluted justifications for these new anonymous bullies to be bullying the four girls, ultimately degenerating into repellent transphobia such that I cannot recommend the show in its entirety.
And the one show that was cruelly cancelled too soon? Always, and forever Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was wonderful, and deserved so much more!
What about you?
season, season, season ack...
Date: 2024-01-19 06:45 pm (UTC)Also! Cowboy Bebop (the original anime) was a single season, twenty-six eps. It's perfect.
For number three, while Amazon might renew Deadloch, the one season we've had is wonderful. I don't think I want more.
To round out the five things list (though these didn't stick to one season:)
American Vandal & Stranger Things
Re: season, season, season ack...
Date: 2024-01-20 03:44 pm (UTC)I think I feel the same as you about Deadloch, and I definitely feel the same way about Stranger Things. I'm still watching it, for the sake of completeness, but I had assumed the previous season would be the last, and was honestly disappointed when I realised it was going to end on another cliffhanger, and that it wasn't going to end.