Unpopular TV Opinions You Hold

I've said it before and I'll say it again there is something morally repugnant about protesting the casting of a an actual minority woman because it is homophobic, when the gay couple is actually a straight dude who is either married or has a girlfriend in most iterations and an asexual sociopath. Due a lot of the current adaptations play into the homoerotic subtext. Oh yes. I mean the last Guy Ritchie movie could have been subtitled Game of Poses that look Sexual. But does that mean that they are an actual gay couple that are being straight washed? NO.

I think most people can see right through that "homophobic" nonsense? At least I can see that mostly it's just a convenient excuse to spout racist and sexist drivel. Also agree that what the BBC version and the RDJ movies are doing isn't in any way progressive, the "jokes" are rather highly problematic. Though I did think the BBC version thankfully toned it down in the second season and John isn't protesting and acting all that offended anymore when people think they're a couple. I hope they cut that stuff out completely in the third season.

ETA: I actually thought that what the girlfriends were saying, what Adler was saying, that John stopped being all "no homo" once Adler called him out, was an acknowledgement of what they had created with their shenanigans: That John is prioritizing Sherlock over his girlfriends. That they're each other's most important relationship. They're calling it "friendship", but IMO there was in-show the implicit acknowledgement that their emotional connection might go beyond that. I don't think all of that was played for laughs, certainly not what Adler said, and John dismissing all his girlfriends for Sherlock was just shown to be the reality of the situation. Of course they might screw all of that up again in the third season since TPTB don't have a good track record with these things...but I read the second season as an implicit acknowledgement (even if it's only admitting that their co-dependence and very close friendship makes it perfectly understandable that people may think they're a couple) of what they had inadvertedly created with all their "jokes".

See, I thought the second season of Sherlock was worse to be honest. There was John's girlfriend going "Sherlock Holmes is a lucky man", Irene Adler saying John was in love with Sherlock and tons of "We're not a couple" jokes. I felt like Moffat and crew took what fandom was saying and pounded it into the ground. But I also feel that way about the second Ritchie movie too.

And that just bugged me. It was distracting from the plot and served nothing other than an in joke. I think that what would be better is if you were going to do this, it wasn't a game of gay chicken, but a real relationship. Or just focus on the cases. Leave the slashing up to the fans.

Girls for me.

My kind of odd point of view is that I recognise a lot of my own experience through the girls and appreciate the gutsiness of the enterprise (and I kind of like Lena Dunham, even if I wish she'd not act and not tweet ever). But. The acting is so poor to be nonexistent (the transatlantic hipster is especially abominable and the only regulars actually acting at all are the people playing the ridiculously OTT Shosanna and Charlie) and the writing really inconsistent. Some good, ballsy ideas and impressive emotional bareness does not a great show make.

The show is clearly written to have reflect the lives of real women in a real place in time, in opposition to for example the fantasy of Sex and the City (the pilot of which actually had a Once Upon a Time parable) Girls deserves the scrutiny for how it deals with social and class issues that SATC vaulted over. So I think a lot of the these-people-live-in-a-homogenic-bubble commentary is valid and wouldn't fly in other Western cosmopolitan capitals like London where you real mixes in friendship groups - maybe it's an American thing? Plus the reaction to the criticism from Apatow (condescendingly dismissive) and the script editor who used to write for Vice ("I'm so offended that Precious didn't represent my experience!") didn't help but kudos to Dunham to taking responsibility directly.

So while I appreciate Girls, it is probably my least favourite out of the three nominal Girls shows, including the equally racially uneasy 2 Broke Girls, because they manage to be more stable in reaching their artistic goals.

So, for the past few months I've been doing an early-aughts Space Opera re-watch. Farscape held up quite nicely, even though the first season still plays a bit roughly. If anything, Season 3 was much stronger than it had been in my memory. Next I watched Star Trek: Enterprise, which to my pleasant surprise held up better than I thought it would. The first two seasons are still plagued with the Temporal Cold War nonsense and a fair amount of fruit-basketing, but the worldbuilding and pacing of the Season 3 Xindi Arc (aka the Season of Shit Just Got Real) worked pretty well, especially in the back half of the season. Season 4 was a lot of fun as well, though in my opinion that was despite it's reliance on continuity-porn rather than due to it. I'm about 2/3rd through Firefly right now, and that's very solid stuff.

However.

In theory, I should watch Battlestar Galactica next. But, frankly, my pleasant memories of that show have curdled like milk left in a sauna. All I'm remembering is meandering arc-plots and dire standalones and piss-poor worldbuilding. Am I wrong there?

In theory, I should watch Battlestar Galactica next. But, frankly, my pleasant memories of that show have curdled like milk left in a sauna. All I'm remembering is meandering arc-plots and dire standalones and piss-poor worldbuilding. Am I wrong there?

I don't think so. In September, I watched BSG for the first time in a three-week orgy of a new Netflix subscription. It had a lot of flaws but as a whole I liked it. However, I do remember thinking to myself after some super slow episodes, "Man, as a weekly episode this would have sucked." Razor and the season on New Caprica was soooo bad and slow respectively.

It got good again toward the end but by the end all I wanted to see was Athena and Helo making out alive and Gaius getting killed. I hated him from episode one and he never, ever got his comeuppance. I was so bummed.

BSG is the single biggest disappointment that I've ever dealt with on television. What a brilliant start, what a horrible middle and end. They went downhill more dramatically than even Heroes.

Do you guys know Alan Sepinwall ? He just self-pubbed a book about I think 12 shows that he felt really revolutionized the tv universe and because he's a pretty well-respected critic has a ton of interviews with a bunch of execs and creators about their shows. BSG is included as is Lost, which is my "single biggest disappointment that I've ever dealt with on television" as Eris put it. It's fascinating, if a little male-skewing and halfway through, I would highly recommend it!

BSG is the single biggest disappointment that I've ever dealt with on television.

The show that fills this slot for me is Angel. I would argue that S2 of AtS was the best and most consistent season of any season in the Jossverse, and that's including BtVS which is my number one favorite tv show of all time. It had great characterization, fun but important one-off eps, and a FANTASTIC season long arc. Until... the last episode of the season which set the stage for what I thought was a horrible end for the series. (See topic: Unpopular Opinions)

Why? Fuckin' Fred, man. I hated Fred. HATED. Fred/Gunn made me hate Gunn who I loved until Fred. And then there was the mess that was Angel/Cordelia and that Champion nonsense because Buffy was dead. And then Cordelia was Mary Sue'd then Evilized and ruined with Cordy/Connor which sucked so much I was glad when it was revealed she was EVIL and would have to die. And that made me sad because I loved Cordelia so so much. Oh, and then there was Dark Wes who everybody loved but I HATED because there's dark and then there's making a woman shit in a bucket and screwing your girlfriend while she's dressed up as your infantile ex. Lilah was too good for him. AND THEN Spike came back after a perfectly good heroic death on BtVS and proceeded to completely rip to shreds the mythology on both shows but I was so WHATEVER by that point because Fred was now Blue Man Fred aka Illyria and UGH. (And I just remembered that I still to this day have not seen the season finale of S4 of AtS because blixie and I made up our own ending and didn't want the actual show to ruin it.)

So yeah. So many UO about AtS. And still so so bitter and disappointed.

I'm giving you a standing ovation right now.

What's funny is that I LOVED Amy Acker on Dollhouse, yet she was one of the major factors that made the latter half of Angel unwatchable.

I've been catching up on Modern Family, and y'all, I really can't stand Cam or Mitch anymore. I'm hard-pressed to see why they even like each other. Mitch is always condescending and rude, and Cam is always easily offended and shrieky. I enjoyed them in the first season, but they're both ruined for me. I still like the show, mostly for Phil and Alex.

I have the opposite memory failure with BSG. I know that when I was watching it, I was frequently annoyed by its choices, but now that it's been a few years, everything has smoothed out into pleasant memory.

BreezyK, is the book significantly different from his blog? I do really like his work but wasn't it sure if it was worth a read since I feel like I already know his opinions on the shows mentioned.

Eris Rising wrote:BSG is the single biggest disappointment that I've ever dealt with on television. What a brilliant start, what a horrible middle and end. They went downhill more dramatically than even Heroes.

Anything falling off faster than Heroes would disprove Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation.

Eris Rising wrote:BSG is the single biggest disappointment that I've ever dealt with on television. What a brilliant start, what a horrible middle and end. They went downhill more dramatically than even Heroes.

I completely agree! I actually liked it right up through the Razor movie, but after that it was so awful and so frustrating for me to watch that I literally could not watch an entire episode in one sitting. I had to break it up into 15 minute chunks that I watched over four days. So disappointing.

I was expecting Baltar to survive because he was a weasel but it made me all eye rolly how they wanted me to feel bad for him.

I thought season 4 was doing really well and was recovering from the crappy 3 season until poor Gaeta had to die because the rebels didn't want to mingle with the ROBOTS WHO CAUSED THE APOCALYPSE. It wasn't a 100 years later. The robots DESTROYED THEIR PLANETS AND KILLED EVERYONE ABOUT 4 OR 5 YEARS BEFORE WHAT THE HELL. ugh still frustrating.

And Kara just poofing into air what the friggin hell.

And Adama just turned into such a friggin ass at the end.

I may have more anger about that finale that I thought.

So, for the past few months I've been doing an early-aughts Space Opera re-watch. Farscape held up quite nicely, even though the first season still plays a bit roughly.

I rewatched a bit of that recently. I thought it held up well too, but Ben Browder was not as good an actor as I remember him being. I guess the hotness blinded me a little. Claudia Black and Wayne Pygram were still brilliant as ever though.

(And I just remembered that I still to this day have not seen the season finale of S4 of AtS because blixie and I made up our own ending and didn't want the actual show to ruin it.)

OMG Skip Explains it All broke me, only our live chats got me through it.

As for BSG I never thought it was any good in the first place. I pretty much only ever watched it because it had pretty people shot beautifully, otherwise dumb as dirt. But not fun dumb like JJ Abrahms, more insufferable self serious dumb. I was blackmailed by love of Boomer/Helo into sticking with it til the end to ensure they were not separated. I basically rooted for the Cylons to annihilated the fleet because I hated everyone not Helo, but the time S2 was over.

I really loved early BSG when I first started watching it, but the idea of watching any of it again feels completely exhausting. I can't tell if later seasons soured my opinion on the show as a whole, or if it never really was as good as I thought it was.

I think I just can't deal with shows that have no humor, and BSG is soooooo ponderous and dreary. The first season at least had Gaius Baltar and Ellen Tigh making me laugh sometimes, but then Ellen became a super-important special being and Gaius became a HERO somehow, and fuck that shit. The only arc I really loved from beginning to end was Boomer's.

queenofdenile wrote:
I think I just can't deal with shows that have no humor, and BSG is soooooo ponderous and dreary.

Why I prefer the 70's Buck Rogers to the 70's BSG: a sense of fun, disco, spandex and a casting director that had to be an enormous skeve.

choubetcha, I'm finding it somewhat different than his blog because the thesis of the book is that there is something exciting happening in tv RIGHT NOW (has been going on, I guess, since the late 90s) and it consists of a lot of interviews with executives and creatives about the process of getting those shows on the air and how they STAYED on the air.

I like it because it's covering a lot of shows that I didn't ever watch, (like Oz, Deadwood and The Shield) as well as some that I did/do and loved (Buffy, FNL, Mad Men). But in a more holistic way than how he can cover them on his blog, kind of telling the full story of the creation of each show. The full list of shows covered are: Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy, 24, BSG, FNL, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. (It was only $6.99 for my Kindle, which I felt was a pretty good deal, given how much I have loved his blog for years!)

I'm loving all the Helo love here, because all I wanted was for Helo and Athena to be together and happy in the end. Did not give one shit about any of the other characters.

Aww. I'll be the odd duck. I loved BSG, and I am one of the few who loved the ending. (I loved the ending of Lost too, so clearly I'm a sucker for squishy metaphysical epicness.) I'm currently (slowly) rewatching the whole series with my parents -- I knew it would be up my stepdad's alley, and my mom is along for the ride. My stepdad is geeked out over all the political stuff.

I agree it went off the rails a little, but I thought it hit more than it missed. I think I am pretty forgiving of TV shows losing their shit because the bar was set reeeeal low for me with X-Files.

I also liked Helo and Athena, but my real ship was Bill and the prez 4-eva.

Never cared for one instant about Baltar and Six. Or about Baltar in general. For me he is one of the biggest wastes of screen time ever. I was tired of him in the pilot and I never stopped feeling weary every time he was onscreen. My parents, watching, are having the same reaction: they keep expecting him to be killed off, and he just. never. gets. killed. off. After like, two episodes my stepdad was like "oh, this guy CAN'T last much longer" and I was thinking "SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGHHHHHHHHHHH, he makes it to the finale. And you have no idea of the hours and hours of Baltar plots we're going to have to sit through before then."

But other than Baltar I love the show. Even Six occasionally got semi-interesting. Also this time through I have a weird, possibly Stockholmy thing for Leoben.

It would almost be further proof, Instant Monkeys, that you and I are the same person except for your Baltar comments.

Because I'll be the *real* odd duck out and say that I loved the character of Gaius Baltar. Which isn't to say I approved of his choices, just that I believed them for the character and I loved watching it. Baltar was the only character over the course of the show where I didn't say, "FUCK, that character's ruined for me now" at some point. Every other character at some point did something that I thought broke them beyond repair - though that turned out to almost never be entirely true. But Baltar, being broken from the outset, intrigued me with his desire for goodness and redemption being at odds with major personality disorders that kneecapped his every attempt to do something genuine.

I loved the BSG ending too, Instant Monkeys, and I'm also pretty tolerant of metaphysical squishyness. (That said, I haven't rewatched and am a little scared to because it was so grim; there were stretches where I was like "I just want something good to happen to someone! Anyone!)

I loved BSG up to the last season, and then I just sort of...wandered away. I still haven't seen that last 3 eps, but I'm okay with that somehow. I enjoyed the show, and I'll probably watch it again someday. And yes to all the Helo love, although I suspect the character couldn't have taken more plot time than it got without me burning out on it. But I can understand not liking it, as it is awfully bleak most of the times. Their intro is one of my favorites though, with the lovely otherworldly singing then the intense drumming.

OK, some of the several things that bugged me about BSG:

1. The Reset Slide: Instead of the Trek "Reset Button", where everything went back to normal at the end of an episode, BSG had the Reset Slide: the appearance of big, long-term changes that creep back to the old status quo. At the beginning of the series, Adama is the Commander, Tigh is his XO, Baltar is the weaselly genius who is just helpful enough to keep his own neck, Starbuck is a loose cannon pilot, Apollo is a straight-shooter with daddy issues, and Roslin is the president dying of cancer. After four seasons of revelations, resignations, reinventions and reincarnations, they're all still in the same basic place.

2. The Stupid, Stupid General Populace: Humanity is beyond decimated. Near extinction. A rag-tag fleet on the run from Cylon death. And yet the general populace seems to act like cruise patrons who are annoyed that the buffet ran out of shrimp. The Cloud Nine still operates as a luxury liner. There is apparently, a 1:1000 ratio of journalists to general populace. Despite the apparent personnel shortage to keep the fleet operating there are large groups of refugees with nowhere to go and nothing to do. And when people to get assigned to do things like process ore or something, they whine how they're supposed to be grad students and shouldn't have to do menial labor. DID YOU NOT NOTICE THE ROBOT APOCALYPSE?

3. Black Market, and What It Says About Piss Poor Worldbuilding: I'll admit, Black Market is low-hanging fruit, but is says SO MUCH about the "we haven't really put much thought into this" attitude behind the scenes. I can accept that there is a black market and shady guys, but we are talking about a population the size of Harrisburg, PA with ZERO opportunity for import, export, smuggling or population influx. CLOSED SYSTEM. So closed there is a white board noting the population TO THE PERSON. And yet we're to believe within this system there is a thriving CHILD SEX SLAVE RING? That there is ample opportunity for CHILDREN to FALL THROUGH THE CRACKS and VANISH, and no one really notices, despite the fact that children are so precious that Roslin bans abortion. That Roslin, former school teacher and caretaker of the Whiteboard, doesn't have her eye laser-focused on children's welfare? That there are enough WEALTHY PEDOPHILES after the ROBOT APOCALYPSE that running a child slave sex ring is actually a viable business choice? What, was there a NAMBLA convention on the Cloud Nine when the Cylons hit? That the Black Market Boss (and this ties back to number two) seems to think he's a Man of Power who can dictate terms to Apollo and not a petty fool, sitting in the bowels of an unarmed ship, utterly dependent on the good graces of the Galactica.

I'm suddenly worried for the children of Harrisburg, PA now.