TV Shows

[Luther Lansfeld]

Been watching through Season 5 and 6 of the Simpsons. Good times. Probably my favorite episode so far is Treehouse of Horror V. The Flanders-as-ruler-of-the-world bit was particularly excellent.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Hi-diddly-ho, slaverinos!

[Sierra]

That's definitely my favorite Halloween episode.

[Niji]

Once Upon a Time: all caught up and stoked for the new season to this weekend! Big fan of frozen so pretty stoked about elsa; both parts of last season were incredible but the acting from Peter Pan just blew me away.

Supernatural: pure guilty pleasure, all caught up and itching for next week's season premiere

The Flash: saw the pilot hoh that tornado wrangling!!! Very stoked, nice seeing cameo by the 80s/90s cast actors from the last few flash stuff

Gotham: great, GREAT premiere, so depressing and dark, ohh Ms Smith I like where this is going, I do not think the actor for Gordon fits at all but he does portray the character satisfactorily

Steven Universe: what is this I don't even; I love it. Such an.. ADHD show like meeee, garnet and amethyst are pretty amazing for entirely different reasons!


Adventure time: yep, just gets more awesome every single episode, we are already in the googleplex area of exponential increasement. The revelation about Jake was particularly facisnating. This show keeps me going, still not seen every episode.

Been rewatching a lot of Venture Bros, the laughs and feels and nostalgia shocking identical to first 3 watches of series! That's staying power!! Orpheus, Helper, Ghost Robot, Brock, Dr Ms My Wife, Sphinx Commander, The Monarch, I could go on and on.

Penny Dreadful: don't want to spoiler this one as it's just intense and a quick season to watch! Loved it.

The Strain: plays out like watching a graphic novel, slow and paced yet intense and dramatic moments in every chapter(episode). Really hate Eph, hope his character is killed joffery style! HOPE HIS SON GETS TURNED TOO cause that would be a great twist, or in general if the master wins! Some of the heroes are REALLY unlikable! Russian Rat Catcher guy is hella boss though.

Mahou Koukou no Rettosai: hmnn this is... overwhelming, I am not just whelmed. Lead character is crazy cool and his character is told from the right perspective speaking from that human turned unfeeling positive sociopath(redundant with previous terms I know), so rarely portrayed in fiction despite its truth in television. Most of the Mages are portrayed properly as extremely high powered SEIGE WEAPONS, something almost never portrayed accurately about Mages, the techno wizardry yet still users of ancient magic(relics and stuff) is incredibly cool and logical. Main character is absurdly OP from a precision/destructive view point(both of then) but pretty much the rest of the cast is either precision or AOE seige weapons so it's pretty cool, heavy political and good insight into that unique Japanese cultural perspective on things. Great to see how a sociopath/limited "psychopathy" works in a high context collectivist culture instead of individualist culture. And explains why America is just soooo bad a place to be if you have even a slightly different brain than the norm! From a different perspective if I looked at this show from a high-context culture native viewpoint this show would be pretty damn average if not for the heavy technical speech and high-thought comedy. From that viewpoint it's probably only a B grade show, but since I'm not innately that viewpoint it's a fat whopping A+ as it appeals well to my intellectual side, something I have only had happen twice before via an entertainment source!

[Hunter Sopko]

Been watching through Season 5 and 6 of the Simpsons. Good times. Probably my favorite episode so far is Treehouse of Horror V. The Flanders-as-ruler-of-the-world bit was particularly excellent.

Indeed. All three of the ones in that episode are amazing. This is indeed a disturbing universe...

[Cmdr_King]

Firefly- So guys did you know there's this show?  Made by some comic book writer and a dude who did a few episodes of star trek I think.  It's like, if someone took the original pitch for TOS really really literally, and then populated it with mostly really hot guys and occasionally crazy ladies.  The crazy lady makes the show in some ways.  Like it's almost always good, but the show really needs that crazy lady to balance out how pragmatic everyone else is.  Y'can't shoot every problem, juts 95% of them.

There's a lot of really specific choices here that're pretty neat.  Like space is always just bgm.  There's some little inconsistencies in the setting, like fluctuating scarcity.  I guess that would just be variance from planet to planet.

Oh well.  Serenity should come in the mail next week.  Then I can fly me to the moon and pray among the stars.

[superaielman]

Been watching through Season 5 and 6 of the Simpsons. Good times. Probably my favorite episode so far is Treehouse of Horror V. The Flanders-as-ruler-of-the-world bit was particularly excellent.

Watched some of season 4 today at Ciddy's. Not as big on the monorail episode as everyone else (Still good!) but man has that show aged super well.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I'm about a third through Season 8 (we skipped 7, because we decided to only buy three of them and decided on 5/6/8), and it's pretty good so far.  I love the third part of the Treehouse of Horror, and the James Bond villain spoof You Only Move Twice is fucking fabulous. Nothing since has quite compared, but it's still been good fun.

[The Duck]

Been watching through Season 5 and 6 of the Simpsons. Good times. Probably my favorite episode so far is Treehouse of Horror V. The Flanders-as-ruler-of-the-world bit was particularly excellent.

Watched some of season 4 today at Ciddy's. Not as big on the monorail episode as everyone else (Still good!) but man has that show aged super well.

I love the early seasons of the Simpsons but after talking to kids in their late teens/early twenties, I don't know if it will have real staying power for younger generations. There are universal situations and lines that are still hilarious to anyone and the early seasons hit sincere, emotional beats very well without being cloying. The first batch of Simpsons writers were also enamored with 50s style Hollywood showbiz jokes (especially Conan) that were already antiquated back then. I grew up with it so I'll always hold it in high esteem, though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

The part about the old Hollywood references is very true (they all went over my head as a teenager, they... mostly still do now). Beyond that, as someone who has also talked to kids/young adults about it... yeah obviously the show isn't super-relevant now, but it's still more relevant than any, say, 1970's TV show was in the 90's, which would be the equivalent (I guess MASH would be the closest).

Anyway obviously I am doing this Simpsons rewatch now, it is pretty fun to do. I watched the show religiously in high school and it's interesting to re-watch the episodes as an adult. Season 5 was good, 6 was just outstanding and is almost surely my favourite overall. Early in S8 so far, I don't think it's as strong but does have the aforementioned strong episodes Ciato noted. I think my favourite episode of the ones we've watched is Lisa On Ice, least favourite... possibly one of the S5 ones, or Bart vs. Australia.

[Sierra]

Elfboy, please, disparaging Bart vs. Australia is a bootable offense!

[Dark Holy Elf]

See I may have thought things like that were kinda funny when I was younger. Now... no. The Simpsons is so good at taking no prisoners and making fun of everything, which is one of the things I love about it. It will sometimes say very nasty things about institutions, countries, you name it, but it's hard to argue about the truth (exaggerated or no) that it's getting at when it does so. So, it smacks of bad writing that at a certain point it just had to start making weird shit up about Australia. The first half or so of the episode is pretty good (nonsense about toilet flush direction being tied to your hemisphere aside) but the weird attempt to portray Australia as barbaric and the bizarre morality surrounding the booting was a bit painful to watch as an adult.

[Cmdr_King]

It was the Simpsons trying to be relevant in as safe a way as possible, so small wonder it's the most dated episode these days.

[Sierra]

I guess I can see disliking it as a gimmicky episode of the sort that later came to dominate the show's storylines? Because the below is something I very much nodded in agreement with--

There are universal situations and lines that are still hilarious to anyone and the early seasons hit sincere, emotional beats very well without being cloying.

--as being the heart of the quality seasons which seemed a point increasingly forgotten as the show got on in years. But I can forgive the occasional ridiculous premise in a mostly grounded season much more readily than I can the later seasons' mostly ridiculous episodes with the occasional reasonable premise, and anyway way too many individual lines in that episode land for me. "I know those words, but that sign makes no sense." "I see you've played knifey-spooney before." "That's a strange name. I would've called it a chozwozzer!" "It's not like in cartoons. There's a lot more mucus." "Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap SIR!" Bart's "apology" is also characteristically American to about the same degree the episode cares about being an accurate depiction of Australia, which amuses me.

(The frog thing is actually pretty much real, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia)

[Grefter]

It isn't just Cane Toads that happened with either.

That said, not much of a fan of the episode either.   As something that is mostly joking about how American media saw Australia at the time, it dates it something crazy because it is essentially just a big episode parodying Crocodile Dundee which was already pretty shitty to begin with.   They also missed some crazy good opportunities such as the fact that we had literally voted to be lead by our best Drinker for over a decade.   Also not enough people called Bruce.  Also a huge space called The Simpson Desert and no jokes at all.

Pretty much it went to of its way to cater for an American audience so they would get the jokes instead of being particularly insightful on a topic they probably weren't going to revisit.  The joke could have been about any country other the fact that we had three shitty movies come out starring one (shitty) dude in the prior decade. Not exactly Simpsons on its A game.

[Dark Holy Elf]

The cane toad thing is true but not very funny, even in a "it's funny 'cause it's true" way.

"I know those words, but that sign makes no sense." "I see you've played knifey-spooney before." "That's a strange name. I would've called it a chozwozzer!" "It's not like in cartoons. There's a lot more mucus." "Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap SIR!"

See, most of these are indeed good (I especially like the last, as Homer getting comeuppance for being annoying is something which never gets old. I also loved the Rand McNally line, and the bit where Bart phones a South American dictator, and the coffee/beer sequence) but... well. There isn't a single Simpsons episode from its strongest seasons which I can't come up with half a dozen good lines from, minimum. It's a good show with some sharp writing! But yeah, the overarching plot of the episode is weak, and though it has quite a number of good jokes (as usual), it also has a surprisingly high number which are weird/dated/feel like they were written by someone with no grasp of the subject material.

I hadn't even thought of it being more similar to some later season Simpsons episodes (which like many people I'm much less of a fan of) but yeah that's actually quite true.

[Sierra]

I kind of wonder thinking about it now whether the broadness of the episode could've been influenced (consciously or otherwise) by backlash against the much more direct laceration of of New Orleans* in A Streetcar Named Marge, which I watched this past weekend and which I think I recall reading that the citizens of New Orleans did not receive with good humor.

It wasn't until some years after watching that that I learned A Streetcar Named Desire was in fact not originally a musical, but a movie and before that a play, and not until many years later that I discovered how incredibly, hilariously inappropriate that last song is. And for all that the focus is naturally on Marge's play, I think Maggie's Great Escape sequence is probably still my favorite movie homage The Simpsons ever did (that it occurs in the Ayn Rand School for Tots is just a bonus).

(*"Home of pirates, drunks and whores / tacky, overpriced souvenir stores." And it's so catchy!)

[DjinnAndTonic]

Agents of SHIELD: ugh this show makes me happy. I know I shouldn't like it because the internet tells me it's slow and plodding and that Whedon loves his Buffyspeak too much, but I just genuinely like all of these characters and their drama could carry the whole season without even a mention of Thor.

The fact that they mention Thor just makes it awesome.

[The Duck]

I did find Bart vs Australia funny but it and a few other episodes mark a departure where the Simpsons start going "big." One thing that Matt Groening says in commentaries (yes I listen to those) is that he thinks the show is best when it is grounded and centered around the characterization of the family. Originally, the show skewered American culture and the safe, toothless sitcoms of the time. It could get zany but ultimately, many of the plots were about the dynamics of a family unit that is dysfunctional but whose members ultimately love each other (speaking to my previous thing about the show being able to elicit emotion, like with Lisa's Substitute and Lisa's Wedding). Later episodes lose this kind of focus, going for bigger plots, like going to another country, going to space, etc. The show started to bring in celebrities to voice themselves, in some cases just to have a celebrity voice. These led to some funny episodes and moments but ultimately something was lost there.

[AndrewRogue]

Legend of Korra, Book 4: This was more or less how the Book 1 -> 2 transition needed to go. Fantastic.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Ned Flanders, I mock your value system. You also appear foolish in the eyes of others!

That episode isn't perfect but that part was fucking hilarious.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Past instances in which I professed to like you were fraudulent!

[Hunter Sopko]

I engaged in intercourse with your spouse or significant other.... now THATS psychology!

[Sierra]

It's a really uneven episode but I at least like the awesome shoddiness of the new Flanders residence. "I wouldn't take that down. It's a load-bearing poster."

The actual character development is the sort I tend to file under Discontinuity (much like Imposter Skinner, though to a much lesser degree).

[AndrewRogue]

Korra Balance, Episode 2: Well. I'm depressed now. Pretty fucking great two episodes so far. Ash is right that they are doing end of episode stingers really hard this time, but this shit is pretty hype.