Black Bird was great.
Black Bird was great.
The first two (of eight) are out and then, I believe, it is one every Friday until completion.Originally Posted by Yevrah
I watched We Own This City over the course of last week and thought it was fairly good. It felt a little bit like "spot The Wire cast member" at times, and some of Bernthal's acting was a bit over the top for me, but other than that I mostly enjoyed it.
Watched the first episode of Rings of Power this morning. Just a whole mess of meh, with absolute turkey written all over it.
A billion pounds well spent then.
Aside from Better Call Saul are there actually any decent spin offs? I can't think of any. Certainly not from the Fantasy genre.
Frasier.
I'm Alan Partridge. You could make a case for that counting. Maybe throw Brass Eye into the mix on that logic.
The Fast Show.
Boston Legal.
Eastenders did a flashback episode and the lad who played teenage Phil Mitchell is like his clone.
Speaking of spin-off's, the third episode of House of the Dragon was really good I thought. Damon Targaryen is an absolute lad.
I caught the start of that this evening flicking around and the flashback kept me watching. They couldn’t have got closer had they gone back in time and got the actor as a kid.
This Rings of Power fallout is getting tasty, think this might be the one that genuinely ends up with some nasty repercussions.
What’s the fallout? Any links etc?
I just read this:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...f-power-so-far
But I've no idea. What are nasty repercussions?
Well, I suspect the inexperienced and hardly battle hardened actors involved (who’ve been absolutely thrown under the bus by Amazon during the PR phase and for the show itself, as it’s bad) are going to get an increasing amount of hate online to the point where something that we’ve not really seen before may happen. Not entirely sure what that may look like, but if the current standard keeps up there's no way it's lasting five seasons for a start.
It looks like the straw that may break the camels back in that you can’t just hire a diverse cast of actors and think that’s enough to make the show good when you couple it with boring storylines, cringetastic dialogue and then cry racism and trolling when people point out it’s a bit shit. There will absolutely be some of that, as idiots will idiot, but they'd have been drowned out quite comfortably if the show was any good.
Is it actually 'diverse'? I've only seen shots of black characters rather than a diverse group of races. Your first point is probably wrong in that case. They aren't pulling the plug on anything once they've made a massive show of all the black people in it. Not unless Bezos wants the FBI kicking his door in.
The people who made and star in it say it's diverse.... It costs $60m an episode (having seen the first not really sure why), so I doubt even Bezos would continue that for long if no one's watching it.
Lenny Henry as a proto hobbit sounds lolworthy enough to have a watch of.
Actors/luvvies inhabit a world where making something diverse is either more important than making something good, or they might even think that the two come to the same thing. It's not the same world that the viewers live in, alas.
That’s absolutely the case - the cast have been pushing the diverse angle so much in their interviews in the lead up to its release that I genuinely don’t think they recognise what business they’re in anymore.
The people mad about a hobbit being black are way worse than any Hollywood luvvie. Get a grip.
I've missed all of this apparently other than people saying it's pretty but boring and the slice of the racism stuff I've seen via Neil Gaiman on Twitter pointing out to cranks that the source material literally describes the pre-hobbits as having brown skin and the one in particular who replied going YEAH ER WELL MAYBE TOLKIEN JUST MEANT THEY'RE TANNED FROM WORKING ON FARMS????
That said that article suggests they all have mad Irish accents too unless the Harfoots aren't the ones I thought they were.
"Pretty but boring" does seem to be the Amazon fantasy TV show theme though. I liked WOT well enough but would struggle to really give it a hard recommendation for that same reason.
It's like they watched Game of Thrones but only the middle 70% of every series.
This is the problem though, it’s a misrepresentation to claim that people are mad because a hobbit is black. Sure there are some who are, but for the vast majority they’re mad because something they cared about has been turned into a bland and boring tv show and they’ve been told they’re wrong for thinking it’s shit by the critics and racist for thinking it’s shit by the makers.
Like Nigel from Eastenders in The Pianist, it's an appalling piece of casting. Any remaining hope of one being immersed in a fantasy land after the snorefest opening is ripped away from you when he turns up on screen and you mind instantly smiles and starts to wonder how he's been, if he's still friends with Dawn French and whether any of the streaming platforms have Chef! on them.
You could live with the brown proto-Hobbits, although, given the context, the book could just mean swarthy rather than Lenny Henry. It would work either way. There aren't any black elves though, wounding seventeen orcs and killing one, so make your mind up.
If I have any problem with that at all it’s not the specifics of who they cast, more the overarching principle the makers had that the show should reflect the World today. If that’s what you want to do, have some balls, take a risk and make something else.
I was going to say hopefully one of the repercussions of this will be big studios making original shows and films instead of adaptstions and spin-offs since people inevitably just get annoyed at them for whatever reason and they can't be arsed with the backlash.
It probably won't happen, as I'm sure for the majority of these extended universes or whatever you want to call them there are enough people out there to lap them up, but one can hope.
It's not that anyone should be mad about black hobbits, it's that the people making it think that the fact of having black hobbits makes it good.
On that note the stuff that Sophia Nomvete (who plays a black female dwarf) has been saying in the press tours is genuinely insane and was what first alerted me to the shit storm brewing here. You’d be forgiven for thinking from her words alone that this boring and badly written tv show is having as much impact on race relations as South Africa winning the rugby World Cup did, from its casting alone.
I feel for here really as unless she’s gone rogue Amazon have obviously put her up to it and she clearly speaks with passion, but it’s so unbelievably deluded it’s hard to work out how the hell something like that gets signed off.
Thats an absurd take. They don't think it 'makes it good'. They didn't cast a black hobbit and go 'well the scripts dog shit and the CGI looks like toilet but fuck me have we got a bunch of different skin tone, Emmys here we come.'
They genuinely do. Just have a look at some of the PR for it.
It makes it ‘better’ in some sense of things. it doesn’t make it good. It’s a PR point. They’re trying to get good PR. That’s the point. Would you like them to say the black people make it worse?
Surely when promoting something you highlight what makes it good to attract people to it, in this case and admittedly only from what I've seen (but I've seen a fair bit now) they're promoting the diversity aspect of it beyond anything else. Ergo, that's what they think makes it good. If you agree that's the angle they've gone for then I can't see how you can come to any other conclusion.
It's almost like they think it's a superficial way they can get the most attention on it. Not that they think it defines the project. You know, the whole point of a PR campaign.
Look at the end of the day, anyone pissing and moaning about LOTR ‘going woke’ is a giant fucking loser.
But the words and frequency with which they’re using them clearly indicate that they think it does define the project. Now they could be lying and setting up the actors to say that to get the maximum exposure, but that’s a pretty nutbag strategy if the underlying product is as bad as it appears to be so far.
And from the string of absolute wank we’ve seen in regards to old/pre-existing IP reboots/sequels there’s a pretty clear trend that suggests the makers do think that’s enough to hang a project on.
'We need something superficial to draw attention to our billion dollar version of a universally loved...'
Diversity of cast (among a million other things) is a selling point, how is that a shock to anyone in this day and age?
People moan yet still watch, so they will keep making them.
I do not think that it is a selling point. More of an 'if I don't do it I will get in trouble' type of thing.
Show is great. Angry racists and Tolkien wankers is also great. Can't wait for the next episode.
What's it even about anyway, the Silmarillion is the only thing of any substance that hasn't already been adapted (and whichever Tolkein is left has never been keen to flog the rights to it).
LOTR series is bad mainly because it is boring. Diversity hires are lol but more distracting than anything, Lenny Henry the main offender. I was over GOT but watching both new GOT wipes the floor with LOTR, because it stacks it's roster with likeable cunts. Binary good and evil is more cartoonish, and mysterious magic men aren't that mysterious in a world that is full of magic and monsters. My main feeling about LOTR so far is just 'meh'.
I imagine Lenny Henry is only jarring to us because he's Lenny Henry, the bloke from Comic Relief. The yanks and the rest of the world presumably don't have a fucking clue who he is. Hasn't he done Shakespeare and stuff? He's probably at least somewhat qualified, in terms of acting chops, for a minor role in the show.
He’s absolutely qualified for a bit part, problem is as I said above is that he’s immediately recognisable as Lenny Henry to almost everyone in one of Amazon’s biggest markets and he’s nowhere near good enough an actor to make you forget that.
Presumably at one stage Amazon had an idea of the importance of this IP or else they wouldn’t have spent hundreds of billions of dollars obtaining it, but they absolutely forgot when making that decision.
The UK is in fact one of Amazon's biggest markets.
EDIT: lol deleted it. The confidence as well.
I forgot that Asian markets don't count. My bad.
Our population may be a lot lower than elsewhere but I didn't even need to check to know we're obviously one of its biggest markets, every single cunt who lives here has a subscription and we love spending money on absolute shite we don't need. Repeatedly.
I just finished a rewatch of Breaking Bad and that final season is brutal.
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