What TV SHOWS are you watching?

*shakes fist at cloud

Shellhead wrote:

jason10mm wrote: TV show writing is fundamentally broken because modern writers don't understand the purpose of character in service to the story and just can't help but vomit up all sorts of dysfunction on screen.

I assume that tv writer rooms tend to skew young, and both Millennials and especially Gen Z seem obsessed with trauma and mental illness.

Yeah, I can't tell if it's just what the writers know or just everyone kind of made a collective decision to chase a specific type of narrative of internal psychological trauma and interpersonal relationships framed by dysfunctional personality conflict rather than a shared response to external issues. Genre TV has DEFINITELY gone this way, while I'm sure there are plenty of EMS, cop, and lawyer shows that still follow the classic pattern of quirky characters responding to episodic situations, in genre TV the focus on "wow, alien civilization, let's have a core of diverse but functional characters explore this strange phenomenon from a scientific POV with allegory about the human condition" is almost completely gone and it's straight up personal drama with just the set draping of a sci-fi premise to lure in an audience for a bait n'switch.

In an ironic twist, the only Doom Patrol member with actual mental health problems was known as Crazy Jane in the comics, but just Jane on this show.

I'm glad that I re-watched season one of Tokyo Vice. The final episode of the first season featured several intense cliffhangers, and season two hits the ground running. Every major character hits a new low, but the closing scene ends on a hopeful note.

They did a good job of balancing the need for closure on the current story arcs while leaving room open for a third season if it were to get approved, which I am hoping for.

I feel badly about something that happened while I was watching Tokyo Vice (s02 e02) last night. My big screen tv arbitrarily shifted a setting regarding screen size, causing the subtitles to be almost entirely cropped off at the bottom of the screen. It took me a bit to even notice, and my attempt to adjust it while the episode continued to stream wasn't working. Then there was a scene where there were a couple of Japanese characters talking and I didn't recognize either of them. I stopped the episode, did some more extensive tinkering with settings, and finally got the subtitles back in legible form, then re-started the episode. I was horrified to realize that the Japanese woman in that one scene was one of my favorite characters from first season, the editor at the Meicho.

When I was growing up in fairly diverse suburb on the North side of Indianapolis, I often noticed that racists seemed to have actual difficulty discerning the difference between two different members of a minority group. "They all look alike." I was proud that I never had that problem, because I was seeing everybody as actual individuals and not shallow stereotypes. This particular sort of blindness is a real thing:

www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210519-wh...sidentified-so-often

Upon reflection, I never found the male characters on Tokyo Vice to be hard to distinguish. Possibly because they were so distinctive in appearance, and possibly because much of the drama on this show focuses on male characters, like cops, reporters, and crime bosses. While there are a few important female characters, most of the women on the show are nameless extras or very minor characters who get a first name and a line or two. The show passes the Bechdel Test, but it wouldn't surprise if there had been an episode or two that fails that same test. So it came to pass that I failed to recognize a major female character, though the subtitles made it clear who she was the second time around. And it happened again, near the end of the same episode, when another female character of some significance in the first season reappeared. Am I a bit of a racist? Or is it the fault of the show for downplaying women? Or maybe a homogenous culture like Japan has an equally homogenous standard of beauty that all the women follow? Or maybe that two years have passed since the first season, and these women have changed? Troubling questions. Still a great show.

I don't think there is anything particularly deep about "folks from one culture/ethnicity can have difficultly distinguishing people from another culture/ethnicity". Humans operate largely off of pattern recognition and that software is programmed based on what you see around you. So in one culture/ethnicity you form pattern recognition off of traits within that group (for whites, it may be eye color, hair color, freckles, etc) but when then exposed to an unfamiliar group (japanese asians for example, where eye and [natural] hair color are very homogeneous) that pattern recognition fails until it can be trained through exposure. I'm sure other cultures use all sorts of other physical characteristics to distinguish their members that would fail when applied to hollywood casted white people who are all chosen due to a shared set of "wow, you sure are attractive" features such as gleaming white teeth, thin straight noses with a little upward tilt, low body fat, high cheekbones, etc.

Hell, even facial recognition software can get tripped up by this if the data set it was trained on isn't heterogeneous enough. Supposedly early versions of facial recognition on iphones would unlock for something like 1 out of 5 asian faces due to a very low diversity in the criteria used by the software. On TV its pretty important for costume/wardrobe and make-up to make sure actors can be easily distinguished. Thats also why characters tend to use names at an inordinately high frequency, to reinforce who is involved.

So I wouldn't beat yourself up too much for not recognizing a couple of peripheral characters across hours of a show. It's a failing of the show to not reintroduce low frequency characters a bit or make them more memorial if that is important to the story.

I guess I need to get on Tokyo Vice. I heard a long podcast about the guy the show is based on and it is interesting. Need to get on Shogun as well, which I hear is FANTASTIC, so I guess I will be training my asian actor database!

Fallout continues to be pretty good around ep5. They are teasing some major backstory vault shenanigans which are FAR more compelling than whatever nonsense the vault girl and armor guy are doing. Soooo many mystery boxes, and like a lot of this type of show, it's very hit or miss whether I give a shit about "whats in the chip!" versus "Whats behind the door!" versus "who does he work for?" versus "why did she know her mom?" so some threads resonate much more than others. I'm struggling to even care much for the feckless dog that casually switches masters, so that's kinda concerning 'cause pet sidekicks are usually a surefire win.

FWIW, I'm awful at recognizing faces regardless of race, age, or gender. I think I just never pay attention enough to what people actually look like.

ChristopherMD wrote: FWIW, I'm awful at recognizing faces regardless of race, age, or gender. I think I just never pay attention enough to what people actually look like.

I am awful about noticing what vehicles people drive. With the exception of my ex, I don't know what any of my family or friends are driving. Maybe this is a normal thing, but it seemed abnormal to people when I was living in Indianapolis.

Just a theory but I could see the subtitles themselves as being the biggest part of the issue. You are focusing on them more than the people actually talking, on account of not knowing Japanese, so it's perhaps harder to remember what voice goes with what person, etc. I don't know.

hotseatgames wrote: Just a theory but I could see the subtitles themselves as being the biggest part of the issue. You are focusing on them more than the people actually talking, on account of not knowing Japanese, so it's perhaps harder to remember what voice goes with what person, etc. I don't know.

That's a good theory. As long as a scene doesn't involve rapid-fire dialogue, I am very comfortable with quickly reading a subtitle and then looking at the actor's faces for reaction, expressions, etc. As I look back on that specific scene, the female character had previously only been shown either in a management role at work or a caretaker role at home, but this new scene showed her in bed with a romantic partner. Her hairstyle was different and her makeup was different, which makes sense because this was a new relationship. To your point, I realize now that she has a very distinctive accent when she is speaking English, but sounds very normal when speaking Japanese. Which is not quite what you meant, but is close.

L'Effondrement (The Collapse) - A French show where each 20-ish minute episode is like its own short film with different characters. But always dealing with a societal collapse that's happening; either before, during, or after. Like an episode follows a rich dude trying to get to his escape plane, while another follows some folks trying to join an existing group, etc. They're generally really good and worth watching if you're into post-apoc stuff.

ChristopherMD wrote: L'Effondrement (The Collapse) - A French show where each 20-ish minute episode is like its own short film with different characters. But always dealing with a societal collapse that's happening; either before, during, or after. Like an episode follows a rich dude trying to get to his escape plane, while another follows some folks trying to join an existing group, etc. They're generally really good and worth watching if you're into post-apoc stuff.

Where?

Finished Fallout. Overall a pretty good show, though I think it is actually a better adaptation of a certain other vault dwelling show. The overly complex backstory really detracted from current event momentum, the literal macguffin driving the "plot", such as it was, is forgotten for entire episodes. So don't watch it hoping for a particularly gripping tale of wasteland survival against all odds. Just enjoy the characters and embrace the wackiness.

A redditor put them up for download with subs. I don't think they stream in the US.

drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RXOOzIby...senZ8ZrppEiYfEqO-5ye

ChristopherMD wrote: L'Effondrement (The Collapse) - A French show where each 20-ish minute episode is like its own short film with different characters. But always dealing with a societal collapse that's happening; either before, during, or after. Like an episode follows a rich dude trying to get to his escape plane, while another follows some folks trying to join an existing group, etc. They're generally really good and worth watching if you're into post-apoc stuff.

That's on SBS here - I'll have to give it a go.