Author Topic: New TV Season  (Read 5374 times)

0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #30 on: November 22, 2017, 04:20:06 pm »
Ok.  Forgive me if I forget and ask again.

Offline JMT

  • Administrator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3462
  • Location: Waterhen, Manitoba
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #31 on: November 22, 2017, 06:33:20 pm »
Ok.  Forgive me if I forget and ask again.

Old age?

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #32 on: November 22, 2017, 06:58:23 pm »
YES.  Uh.  What ?  ???

Offline JMT

  • Administrator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3462
  • Location: Waterhen, Manitoba
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #33 on: November 23, 2017, 08:07:29 am »
YES.  Uh.  What ?  ???

You know I’m just giving you a hard time, I hope?

Offline cybercoma

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 2956
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #34 on: November 23, 2017, 08:15:44 am »
You know I’m just giving you a hard time, I hope?
I don't think he knows. You should feel guilty preying on an old, senile fuddy duddy like MH. You monster.

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #35 on: November 23, 2017, 07:25:11 pm »
 ???

Offline cybercoma

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 2956
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #36 on: November 23, 2017, 07:53:51 pm »
See! Look how confused he is. Poor guy.

Offline wilber

  • Administrator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9096
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #37 on: November 23, 2017, 07:58:44 pm »
Really glad Speechless got another year. Great cast centred around a real cerebral palsy victim and excellent writing. Minnie Driver is a hoot.
« Last Edit: November 23, 2017, 08:02:08 pm by wilber »
"Never trust a man without a single redeeming vice" WSC

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #38 on: January 04, 2019, 05:25:08 am »
Stuff on my TV of late I can recommend:

The Kominsky Method

- Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas as two aging guys in Hollywood on the periphery of the showbiz industry.  Light humour and great acting and sensitivity.

Zen Dairies of Garry Shandling

- Fantastic exploration of how this comedian incorporated a Zen approach to his art and life

Escape at Dannemora

- Ben Stiller (?!?) directs Patricia Arquette and Paul Dario and Benicio Del Toro chronicling a 3-week prison escape from northern New York state.  Prison escapes are usually more gripping than this, but the details are still interesting and Stiller takes a real 'Auteur's' approach to this at times

Tales from the Tour Bus S2

- Mike Judge has made a fantastically entertaining cartoon documenting FUNK.  Yes, it sounds strange but it's great and the interviews are wonderful.

 

Offline kimmy

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 5026
  • Location: Kim City BC
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #39 on: January 05, 2019, 11:34:13 am »
- Ben Stiller (?!?) directs

Ben Stiller has a pretty long list of directing credits. Including Tropic Thunder, an underappreciated work of true genius.

 -k
Paris - London - New York - Kim City

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #40 on: January 05, 2019, 01:25:42 pm »
I didn't know that either.  This was not badly directed.

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #41 on: January 15, 2019, 05:43:05 am »
Three shows on the go now and it's ALL ABOUT TV TV TV ALL WINTER LONG

That, and walks, and eating.  It's all we do.

Show #1

Marvellous Mrs. Maisel


Ok, it's watchable and the idea is good but why do people like this now ?  The lead actress isn't even Jewish ?  What ?  And the anachronisms make me jump off the sofa and swear.  Mrs. Maisel's lesbian manager in two lines of dialogue uses the term 'overkill' (which wasn't in use in the 1950s, and I think came out of the Vietnam war) and 'freaks me out' (1980s).  Mrs. Maisel would be sent to prison long-term for what she says on stage.  And men don't HUG in the 1950s.

Show #2
Counterpart

The best Spy TV Show ever, hell it's better than movies.  But the plot is a little too clever, and when it's done I will look up the plot holes.  I'm dazzled by it, by JK Simmons and all the cast, but I think they trick us by putting too much in for us to catch the mistakes.

Show #3
Letterkenny

Probably my favourite Canadian TV show.   So many catchphrases, so much wry clever, so much observation.  Love it. 

Tell me you're watching it and you love it.

Offline kimmy

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 5026
  • Location: Kim City BC
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #42 on: March 04, 2019, 01:45:36 am »
Anybody ever watch the series "Bones"?  It was based on a series of books by Kathy Reich about a forensic anthropologist who helps an FBI agent solve murders.  It ran for 13 seasons from 2005 to 2017 and starred Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz.    A legal battle over the show just cost Fox Television a $179 million settlement awarded by an arbitrator.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-rocked-by-179-million-bones-ruling-lying-cheating-reprehensible-studio-fraud-1190346

The gist of the story is that Reich, Boreanaz, and Deschanel, along with producer Barry Josephson, were called "profit participants", meaning that their contracts with the show gave them a cut of profits from the show, including resale of broadcast rights, digital streaming rights, and so on.  But Fox sold the broadcast rights to, essentially, itself-- Fox Broadcasting, its foreign affiliates, and its digital streaming platform, Hulu-- at a price of pennies on the dollar. Essentially, Fox was building equity in Hulu and creating profits for other Fox-owned enterprises by giving away assets from Fox Television and ripping off Reich, Deschanel, Boreanaz, and Josephson in the process.

An ethically challenged person might suppose that Fox was being clever here, but the profit participants had language in their contracts to protect against exactly this possibility. If Fox Television sold the show to other Fox enterprises, the price had to be at a fair market value.  The arbitrator found that not only did Fox Television not get fair market value for the show, they didn't even attempt to find out what fair market value was:

Quote
In arbitration, Fox attempted to justify the low license fees that Fox Broadcasting, Hulu and Fox’s foreign affiliates were paying its studio division for rights to air the series.

“Bones was a middling show with middling ratings,” wrote Fox’s lawyers in an opening brief, adding that a higher fee from the $2 million per episode paid would have led to the show’s cancellation.

As Lichtman discovered in the course of the arbitration, though, Fox’s studio executives were never really interested in finding out the series’ fair market value.

“We were not allowed to get that information from the network,” testified Walden, who at the time ran the Fox studio but not Fox Broadcasting, when asked about the possibility of finding out what the network paid for similar shows in their middle seasons.

Given that the profit participants had self-dealing protection in their contracts that “deals must be as good as marketplace deals,” the arbitrator found Walden's lack of knowledge to be “either shocking if true, or disingenuous if false,” adding, “Interestingly, both Ms. Walden and Mr. Newman testified that they engaged in tough negotiations and fought for the [Profit] Participants. However, the evidence belies these assertions. How could they fight if they were not properly armed with the requisite information? What negotiations were there if the information mandated by the contract was not examined, called for or even investigated?”

There's more to the story, but that was the interesting part to me. And there's potentially more of this out there:

Quote
It's highly unlikely that Bones was the only series licensed to Hulu under possibly fishy economic auspices. The ruling amounts to the opening of a Pandora’s box for attorneys in the entertainment industry. It also raises the prospect that licensing content may suddenly become a whole lot more expensive for Hulu should other profit participants in Hollywood make their own challenges.

 -k
Paris - London - New York - Kim City

Online Michael Hardner

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 12431
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #43 on: March 04, 2019, 05:59:58 am »
Oh, the point is always to reduce the wages for the little guy.  Having been at the target end of that, it's not fun.  But such is life.

Artists, farmers, workers unite.  It works. 

I just watched the Letterkenny Valentimes Special and I felt it was starting to get a little tired.  The word play aspect of the dialogue is fun - maybe even for a few seasons - but I am starting to tire of it.

Also watching Crashing with Pete Holmes.  Not sure why, I think I am just invested now.

Also watching High Maintenance, which is starting to get a little familiar also.

Aaaand... I just finished Fargo Season 3.  That was great but I needed a shower after every episode.  Also one of the all time best villains in V.M. Varga.

Offline kimmy

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 5026
  • Location: Kim City BC
Re: New TV Season
« Reply #44 on: March 04, 2019, 09:55:47 am »
I watched the premier of Whiskey Cavalier last week. It was ok, in a generic network TV sort of way.  It's about an FBI agent (Scott Foley) who clashes with a CIA operative (Lauren Cohen) over custody of a captured suspect... needless to say they end up having to work together to find the MacGuffin and uncovering a bigger mystery that will take a whole season to solve. It's lightweight, but the charisma of the two leads makes it watchable.

 -k
Paris - London - New York - Kim City