Television, drug of the nation

Anyone watch Love Death + Robots? I sort of only dipped into that here and there and need to go back to it to extend the BM-style fix.

One episode that my brother really pestered me to watch - and which I did end up absolutely loving - is ‘Bad Travelling’

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20192968/

Love Death + Robots

All amazing.

It's the bingeyist of TV.

I'm looking forward to the next season, so that I am forced to start from S01E01 again.

Black Mirror tho.

I'm not sure what I'm missing, but I haven't sat through one episode without being very meh.

To the point I rarely watch more than 10 minutes if it's on.

The Bear Season 2 is here, already feeling stressed.

I’ve not heard of this. Will add it to my list

Just finished it last night, the christmas episode is like a distilled anxiety firehose to the face.

overall I think I enjoyed this series more than S1 some excellent tv in there.

the christmas episode is like a distilled anxiety firehose to the face.

10 minutes in and I am trying breathing exercises.

Ah not for a month right?

Tried The Night Agent after seeing its creator lauded in a story but found it a bad attempt at something like Homeland with cliched storyline and hammy acting

I felt like I was the only person who thought it was a predictable pile of shit.

You probably ducked out at the right time, it only gets worse!

right now in international waters, if you are a pirate.

I am watching the whole 2017 PBS series about the Vietnam War to educate myself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series) . 17 hours and it moves along at quite a clip. The lead up to the war is included, so there's masses to cover, what with French colonization, the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's death, the civil rights movement and so on.

I don't think I'll be able to enjoy Vietnam war films any more. Johnson's lies and the false premises for US escalation are so jarring. Johnson only sent US forces into combat to get elected. Otherwise North Vietnam might have won the war by '67.

Watched that a while back and it seemed well done, but I'm generally suspicious of how Ken Burns covers a subject. His Civil War documentary series was full of Lost Cause bullshit.

That said, most of the criticism for the Vietnam series seems to have come from veterans who supported the war and thought there were too many voices from Americans opposing the war and in particular veterans who became protestors. Bao Ninh, one of the North Vietnamese Army veterans who pops up quite often over the series, said he was happy with the result. He was quite salty about various things during the documentary (including Tim O'Brien, also interviewed for the series), so he would probably have been quite blunt if he'd found fault.

I bought his novel on the war, The Sorrow of War, years ago and reread it after watching the series. Can recommend it if you want to read an account of the whole mess from a perspective we don't usually get over here.

Is there an Israel/Palestine version of this series? I’ve not got enough knowledge on the situation and would like to know more.

I never got around to Vietnam, but I thought the Ken Burns Prohibition and The War films were both excellent.

Recently read this astonishing, at times horrifying Vietnam book, which is a collection of nameless anecdotes on a series of aspects of being called up, fighting and returning.

1 Attachment

From Ken Burns, no. Nor really anything like that on PBS; they have a two-part documentary that is much less ambitious, races through the period from the League of Nations mandate through to the Arab-Israeli wars. It isn't something that's going to generate letters of complaint from Evangelist Christian congressmen.

It's a lot easier to make a documentary about Vietnam because it ended 50 years ago. Israel/Palestine continues to be a burning issue. I don't know of anything made in any country on this subject on the same scale as the Vietnam series. I don't know when if ever it would be possible to make such a series in the U.S.

The Sorrow of War

Thanks, I must do that. I read Tim O'Brien's book years ago. In the past I was much too accepting of the narrative that commies are bad, perhaps because of The Killing Fields. Now, although nearly all communist regimes have no legitimacy in my eyes because they lock up their critics, I can see that embracing communism is a logical reaction to colonialism. Maybe Vietnam and Laos now have 'good' communist regimes...I have no idea.

Ah, that's not the kind of perspective I meant. It's an NVA veteran's fictional account of his experience (very well written), not a political book.

Good news everyone!

https://collider.com/futurama-reboot-trailer/

(only it'll obviously be rubbish, but there's always hope...)

To shreds, you say?

Deadloch
Tasmania based, serial killer comedy. Six episodes in of the eight and really enjoying it.
Very dark and very funny.

Amazon prime

Series 3 of The Witcher is not as bad as the previous season. Low bar there, of course, because season 2 was fucking terrible. There are good bits but the storytelling is still mostly shabby, while not as all over the place as 2.

Bit of a shame. The books are not bad for what they are, while CDPR, by the time of Witcher 3, were doing some of the best storytelling in current video games. Meanwhile, the TV show aspires to be GoT but often sinks to a bad Xena clone. All that said, the most recent episode (ep 5) might be the best since the beginning - which just leaves me thinking "Why churn out 4 episodes of 'meh to OK' - and the stream of shit that was season 2 - if you can do this?".

I struggle with how they've messed this up.

They had everything they need for a solid series with a story to follow. Or even just a 'monster of the week' one off stories approach.

Instead they've made an absolute mess of it.