I want to give some advice: Don't judge it by its first few episodes. When I first checked it out, the basic setup seemed rather inane and I stopped watching.
Then, a couple years later, I needed something to watch during long exercise sessions and I checked it out again. It was getting much more interesting by the end of the first season.
And every season got better and richer. By the very end, I experienced it as actually deep, especially in the way the Keri Russell character unexpectedly evolves. It was a real pleasure and I'm very glad I had the chance to enjoy it. Recommended!
I had initially ignored the show because they had cast Keri Russell which I had assumed to be a total light weight. So I missed it the first few years and then I realized after its fourth renewal - gee maybe its good - and well - I was completely wrong. She was amazing. The show was terrific. But I'm a sucker for 80s cold war dramatics.
Keri Russell a lightweight? I’m curious what gave you that impression as I’ve always thought of her as an excellent actress. Probably missing out on The Diplomat too if you like political intrigue at all.
A.k.a. "Le bureau des légendes": criminally underrated. Was available to view in Australia on SBS On Demand, where I serendipitously encountered it. It is right up there with the best of John LeCarré's film and television adaptations: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "Smiley's People", "The Little Drummer Girl", etc.
As another semi-obscure “spy” series check out the british production _The Sandbaggers_. Very lecarre-esque story that reflected the inanity and stakes of the cold war, written by a RN officer.
I don't understand why people like these shows, there isn't a proper story just things that happen that are essentially discarded at the beginning of the next season. There is never any real 3rd-act/resolution.
No. Every season ends on a cliffhanger that seems critical to the story and then is quickly resolved as if it were some minor point in the first episode of the subsequent season. This is the nature of this type of episodic television that runs for an indeterminate time and therefore has no real overarching story (but pretends to) like soap operas do.
I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.
Riverdale is that thing you hate but made the primary characteristic of the show. Especially past season 1.
They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.
I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.
Lost would like to have a word. I rented the 6-season DVD set to watch while recovering from an injury and the ONLY good thing about that show was that the first time through you had to wait a week between episodes.
Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.
Riverdale features a character whose (incest-having? Probably.) brother is murdered, who becomes a leader of a bow-wielding vigilante club of women (this is not the only vigilante club in the show, mind you), whose grandmother becomes inhabited by the undying spirit of an ancient witch (also this character is herself a witch), whose family estate was built on a mine full of ghosts and also the mine contains lots of palladium which her Russian spy parents try to use to build a bomb (oh also she kills her dad and burns the mansion down early in the show but it’s fine, they just rebuild it and also there are alternate universe shenanigans), who gains fire-based superpowers and destroys a comet, who keeps her dead taxidermied brother around in a shrine-room (when he’s not alive again for whatever reason)… and that’s like 20% of the insane shit that happens with that character who is not even a main character. There are characters with way weirder sets of events in their biography. Also she’s in high school and a cheerleader, because why not? I think maybe she saves one of her lovers from the afterlife, too.
It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.
I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.
I don't think they're confused about episodic vs. serialized shows; they're talking about the plot structure of serialized shows often having a change of direction at every season boundary instead of resolution of the existing plot threads. That sort of meandering never-concluding plot can be annoying. One way to avoid that pitfall is by staying episodic, (Old Trek,) another is to wrap up each season and start from a relatively blank slate on the next, as if the seasons are episodes. (The Wire.) I think a third is to have all the story structure written in advance, as with a book adaptation, so there is a real through-line.
Yes I shouldn't have used the word episodic. The problem with your third solution is that it seems to be difficult to do with the current way TV series are financed and produced: You can't commit to multiple seasons at the outset and you also want to have an arbitrary number of episodes depending on how well the show is doing (milk more episodes if the show is doing well). There is also incentive to create cliffhangers so that subsequent seasons can be produced.
There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.
I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.
I have to mention Babylon 5 here, I don't think anything is as complete in terms of a 5 year, 110 episode plot. Note; don't read up on the plot, it's actually self-destructive.
> "Keri Russell a lightweight? ... Probably missing out on The Diplomat too if you like political intrigue at all."
I have a running theory that The Americans and The Diplomat are in fact set in the same universe. Keri Russell is still playing the same character, a deep-cover Russian agent, and now she has infiltrated the upper echelons of the US government...
Incidentally, and I realize the appeal for the show is significantly less if you aren’t a teenage girl (as I was when I watched it), but Felicity is excellent and she’s excellent in it. Like, beyond excellent. Like, there was the acting all the other WB actresses were doing in the late 90s/early 2000s and then there was what she was doing.
If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.
Everything I see her in, her acting style to me resembles a lifeless cardboard cutout. I get that that’s “the point” of the Americans, but if that’s all she’s bringing, something’s not working here. And in the diplomat it seemed exactly the same. Lifeless acting, and it seemed a lot of her personality was expressed by other characters because she wasn’t doing it herself.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
This is a very interesting way to watch a show. It feels almost illegal or wrong to me, lol. I'm one of those people who won't completely finish reading the end of a book series or game (witcher 3 easy example) because I'll like a show/game so much I don't want it to end.
I'll go through this list and start from episode 1, though, so I appreciate the list of good shows!
skipping succession episodes is insane, i'm sorry. it had a niche following but the entire series is a work of art in every aspect. i don't think i can point to a single episode that was "wasted".
Exactly my experience. Many years ago I watched perhaps 3-4 episodes and stopped. I recently finished the entire series and by the end I was binging it in the most traditional sense, watching multiple episodes a day, telling myself I'd watch the last 20 minutes of this episode in bed and end up watching 2 more after that, etc.
It's a fantastic show and while there are certainly some smaller arcs that could have been written better as is the case with any long-running show, especially one made for cable, it doesn't spend the two seasons completely destroying its reputation like most do. It ended at just the right time.
Agreed. I learned this with Black Sails (first few episodes were huh?) and it evolved into something awesome. The Americans as well. I think that’s usually the case with shows that are trying something new and haven’t quite got the formula down. First season of Star Trek was a freak show of theater that somehow, worked. Thrived. And blossomed. Let’s just pray Bob Igor doesn’t get his hands on the franchise.
I now follow this advice with all shows. I’ll give it a full season to see if they develop something I’m interested in following.
Black Sails in particular evolved with the writers' historical knowledge of real pirates as they moved from made up nonsense they read to actual research.
The best thing about the show is how stories constantly take unexpected turns. It will sometimes seem like they’re setting some big thing up and then suddenly the characters are caught completely off guard and the show makes a hard left. It might sound contrived the way I’m explaining it, but it all makes perfect sense in the way the show unfolds.
This doesn't filter out the series that start off strong with no contingency plan to get picked up, then they get signed to 2+ more seasons, go "ah shoot we blew all our story ideas in season 1" and slow play 3 episodes worth of content for an entire season. So. many. like. this.
It does change season to season but the finale ... just talking about finale ... is at such a different level in tying up things that it elevates the entire season and the entire series. And of course the last few episodes leading to the finale tell a story so they eventually add value even though it may not be apparent when the season starts.
I've found the show because of a post on reddit listing TV critics ratings for TV shows, and this stood out as one of the few which were good from start to end.
We're at season 5 atm and up until this point, I can confirm the ratings.
...I just wish I could find that reddit post again. Can't remember if there were others good shows on it.
Then, a couple years later, I needed something to watch during long exercise sessions and I checked it out again. It was getting much more interesting by the end of the first season.
And every season got better and richer. By the very end, I experienced it as actually deep, especially in the way the Keri Russell character unexpectedly evolves. It was a real pleasure and I'm very glad I had the chance to enjoy it. Recommended!