A trend which might also occur in the Netherlands now that you'll have
Netflix is that people are not watching TV series like they used to.
They are preferring to watch movies rather than invest in serials. It
is kinda throwing the entertainment industry into a state of shock. I
suspect the Netherlands has better broadband companies than the evil
doers that the US has running them. The US broadband companies HATE
Netflix.
I canceled HBO after "True Blood" finished it's season. "The Newsroom"
wasn't enough for me to keep paying $20 a month. And I only paid that
amount for the final month of "True Blood" though due to a promo deal.
My Comcast bill exploded to cover the final month. BTW, Comcast charges
in advance for services and then they pro-rate after you cancel so the
next bill is actually less because they have to refund. IOW, if you
think about how many millions of customers they have you realize how
much money they make in interest that way.
Last week in the mail was an Astround flier. They've been in a nearby
city for years and expanded to two others lately. The reason for the
flier is they are coming here. Unfortunately probably not soon enough
in my neighborhood to be a consideration when it boot Comcast on the 1st
since they are encrypting Basic Cable. Currently I have U-Verse for
broadband and landline and may just get their TV service. I'd love to
boot AT&T too. These companies are all monopolistic bandits.
"Breaking Bad" has been great. It raised the bar for TV series.
"Copper" didn't hold my interest enough to keep watching this season.
At that, contrary to opinion on FFL, I only like to watch so much TV a
week and so am a bit picky with that alloted time. I like 6 or 8 episode
series too instead of the US 13 episode rut.
BTW, definitely not a movie worth writing a review about but I found
"World War Z" a hokey piece of shit. It was available for rent
yesterday on BD so picked it up. I did get a kick out of the original
report of "zombies" coming from India calling them "rakshasas".
On 09/18/2013 01:20 AM, turquoiseb wrote:
As a fan of good television series, it's interesting for me to be
watching four of them end (two for the season, two forever) at the same
time. Sometimes in the harsh and pitiless world of TV, the creators of a
series don't even *get* to do a good ending to their series. The classic
example, of course, is Joss Whedon's "Firefly," which was cut down in
mid-first-season and which, if he hadn't been able to pull off the film
"Serenity" to finish things up gracefully, would have ended very badly
indeed.
Leading the "good endings race" so far IMO is, of course, "Breaking
Bad." That series has two more episodes to go, and is building up to
present the best ending of a long-running TV show in history.
At the same time, the Aaron Sorkin series "The Newsroom" broadcast its
last two-parter of the season last Sunday, and I thought they did a
pretty good job with it. Especially because it's still an open question
as to whether there will be a season 3. The reason is, for once, *not*
network caprice, but creator caprice. Sorkin is the sole writer, and he
simply may not choose to go forward with such a time commitment. I for
one hope he does, but he managed an ending to season 2 that play "double
purpose," in that it could easily stand as the ending of the whole
series if he chooses to bail.
Over on BBC America, there is only one more episode of "Copper" to go
for this season, and although the storytelling is more traditional and
not as cutting edge as "Breaking Bad," I think they're doing a pretty
good job of tying things up and leaving us waiting for the next season.
The acting, writing, and production have all been exemplary so far, and
I see no reason why they can't continue to be.
But at the end of the pack -- and a MAJOR disappointment -- comes
"Dexter. It's as if this series' creators are taking Dexter's "dark
passenger" and trying to give it a bleach job. Bleeeaah. As one critic
on IMDB put it, rather succinctly, if you check the stats, six of the
*lowest* rated episodes of the entire series have been during this last
season.
Sad. They've pissed away all the interest we once had in the characters
by (IMO) trying to come up with some namby-pamby ending that satisfies
everyone but without exposing Dexter to the kind of Ultimate Humiliation
and Disgrace that Walter White is going through. I suspect they're going
to find a way to either kill him off or let him get away without any
commupance for all his years as a serial killer, and that "safe path" is
taking away pretty much all of my interest in the series. At this point,
I'm just waiting for next Sunday so it'll be OVER, and I can stop
watching it.
And that's sorta the point of this rant. A good ending leaves you
wanting more. A bad ending doesn't.
