One of the major problems with TV that I’ve noticed is that you can have a great premise and great starting season, then the show gets cancelled for some stupid reason. I often find movies to have higher quality than TV. What do you think?
One of the major problems with TV that I’ve noticed is that you can have a great premise and great starting season, then the show gets cancelled for some stupid reason. I often find movies to have higher quality than TV. What do you think?
I find the opposite. Good TV series tend to have much, much higher quality story telling than even good movies, mostly because a movie is the length of a short story.
Care to share? I’m a bit bored.
My favorite example is still The Wire (or even before that Twin Peaks).
A more recent example is Dark.
The Wire is really not what I’d enjoy watching. I got to the point where the cop and the gang had some confrontation and the cop was intructed by his superior to lie and claim that he “feared for his life”. At that point I just fucking can’t continue watching. Too real for my liking. I want to watch tv for escapism, not to be reminded how shitty real life is.
I get that, I had to stop watching Handmaid’s Tale for similar reasons. Not directly because it was too real, but because it made me too angry, I was shivering from anger.
For recommendations, it would be good if you could give a hint of genres you enjoy. Dark is certainly a great show, but also very dense and can easily be confusing (I’d always recommend watching it with the help of the official site which has an episode selector so it never shows information you haven’t seen yet. I almost skipped it because in my mind German shows = bad, it took Netflix marketing, raving fans, and my wife to give it a chance ;)
For a very different show, I could recommend Night Sky. A very slow, scifi-ish show that uses the backdrop to explore the relationship of an elderly couple. It’s a wrapped-up single-season show.
More lighthearted with a bad-ish first season (of seven): Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It was the one reason I watched the horrible marvel movies because they played between seasons and were relevant to the story.
For shows that are in the general “Wire” region of quality, but without the darkness: The Americans or The Sopranos. One is about undercover russian spies living in the US, one about an Italian mafia family in the US. Both have grittiness, but also humor, and are loved by critics and audience alike.
The Americans was boring af. Stopped watching early on.
I already finished Dark, I loved it, although the “You can’t change fate” type of theme is a bit annoying. I watched 12 Monkeys (the TV show, not movie) which is anothet time-travel series and the atmosphere was not as dark (pun intended), and much more “chill” to watch.
The genres I like are: Science-Fiction, Alt-History, Political (but not too “real”)
I liked watching:
The Magicians The Expanse The Good Place For All Mankind Man in the High Castle (it was dark, but alt-history isn't really realistic so it wasn't that horrifying to watch) Travelers 12 Monkeys (TV, not the movie) Game of Thrones (minus season 8, that doesn't exist for me) Breaking Bad Designated Survivor Kingdom (the Netflix Original that's in Korean) FringeSome movies I liked were:
Terminator 2 Interstellar The Martian 1917 Dunkirk Back to the Future 1-3 Star Wars 1-6 12 Angry Men PrimerHeh, quite some overlap. I watched and liked all shows you mentioned, besides Kingdom (I rarely watch non-English shows) and The Good Place (I don’t like comedy). For movies, I loved Interstellar, and I liked Primer :) 12 Monkeys is good, but had a lot of writing issues with movie-sized plot holes.
The Americans certainly requires being invested in the characters, it’s very focused on them and their development.
Based on that list, my main recommendation would be Continuum (Cyberpunk-ish time travel show playing in the now). For more space-based scifi: Dark Matter (canceled too early, so unfinished; band of misfits brought together by chance, amnesia) and Killjoys (bounty hunter team, interstellar conspiracy; moves from pretty small-scoped to huge; finished)
Some recent series I have enjoyed are Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Foundation, Wednesday and The Mandalorian.
Some older ones I would recommend are Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek DS9, Community, The Good Place,
Out of all of those I would say Babylon 5 has the best long term story and character development in a way that just isn’t possible in something that is as short as a movie (especially the characters Londo and G’Kar).