Quick HBO Reviews: Post Game of Thrones Edition

A year ago, watching the season finale of Game of Thrones with my wife, I watched Jon Snow knife his aunt/lover Daenerys, watch as a dragon flew Aunt Dani’s body to who knows where, watch a council of randos decide the future of the 7 (now 6) Kingdoms, and finally, in a case of Law & Order: King’s Landing Unit, see Jon Snow plead down regicide to exile.

Me: “Well that was nice, time to go to bed…”

Wife: “Noooooooooooo!”

Me: “Be sure and cancel HBO in the morning.”

In spite of the betrayal of my wife and millions of others at the hands of the Game of Thrones showrunners (she read the books, poor thing), she did not in fact, cancel HBO, in spite of my monthly requests for her to do so upon receiving the cable bill. So in the year since GoT went off the air, millions of HBO subscribers have wondered, “With Game of Thrones gone is HBO worth it?”  My response to my wife right after GoT wrapped was clear.

So a year later, we still have HBO. I’ve watched a couple of the shows the network has tossed up just to justify the fact that we’re paying for even more TV in an age in which we’re inundated with content from streaming services and already have more to watch than we have actual free time to do the watching.

Years and Years

From the time I saw a trailer for this BBC/HBO limited series, I knew that the only reason this show existed was because of, who else, Trump.

The show tracks a dysfunctional family in the UK over a series of decades in the future; a future created by Trump engaging in a nuclear attack because, of course he would. The show can be summarized as, in the future everyone is gay and refugees are good, with a few Black Mirror-like touches thrown in.

Rating: Garbage Pail

Euphoria

Compared to Euphoria, Years and Years is good, wholesome family fun.  One almost never finds a reason to use the word “degeneracy” in our degenerate times.  When everything’s degenerate, nothing is, but this show, yeah is degenerate. So naturally it’s renewed for season 2. If you’ve always felt that what television lacks are gym scenes with 20 or so wagging penises, this is the show for you.

Rating: Bleech

His Dark Materials

 

This fantasy show is based on series of books by Philip Pullman, which I admit, I don’t get.  I saw the movie, The Golden Compass; found it boring, and watched this TV treatment, and also found it boring. Verdict?  The show is true to the source material.

Rating: Zzzzzzz

 

Avenue 5

This is supposed to be a SF comedy.  Well, I guess technically It’s sort of science fiction, but the comedy is thin, unless you think a crowd of stupid people yelling at each other is funny. The premise is that in the near future, a space cruise ship, through a series of unfortunate events, goes off course and is not able to return to earth for 6 years.  Since the ship is filled with typical cruise ship passengers, every interaction between crew and passenger is both annoying and stupid. They even managed to stretch the Karen meme (I want to see the manager) for the entire season. Great cast, but they are totally wasted in this pay cable Love Boat in space.

Rating: Loud Screeching

Westworld (Season 3)

After the debacle of season 2, I had no intention on wasting any more time with Westworld.  I should have learned my lesson many JJ Abrams shows ago, but then I saw some of the trailers for season 3 and thought to myself, “man that looks pretty good.”

So they sucked me back in.

Well fool me once, shame on you JJ Abrams, but fool me a couple of times…then I have to own this one.  The first few episodes started off promising, as if the show was really going somewhere substantial, but the closer it got to a payoff, the quicker it degenerated into the typical JJ Abrams no-idea-where-this-is-going, so just have some good special effects.  Ultimately, little of this made sense, just like season 2.

Rating: Cruelly Disappointing

 

The Outsider

If there was one saving grace from the past year of HBO shows, it would be The Outsider.  Based on a Stephen King novel, this show starts in a small Georgia town as a local paragon of the community is accused of a brutal child murder only to have contradictory accounts showing he seemed to be in two places at once.  Great story; great cast, and satisfying conclusion.

But still, it doesn’t justify paying for HBO for an entire year.  So if it’s not obvious by now, this entire post is a passive aggressive plea to my wife to save us some money and cancel this darn thing.  You don’t even watch HBO!

‘Confederate’ TV Show: Commence the Triggering

This just in:

The end of “Game of Thrones” is on the horizon, but creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have already mapped out their next plan at HBO for when they officially depart Westeros.

HBO has given a series order to “Confederate,” a new drama that hails from Benioff and Weiss, Variety has learned. The show has no ties to “Game of Thrones” and is not one of the many potential prequels in development at the network.

“Confederate” chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone – freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

Production on “Confederate” will begin after the final season of “Game of Thrones.”

One the one hand, as a big fan of alternate history literature, I would like to see a show that takes on the South winning the Civil War.  It’s an issue that’s been done many times in books.  Writer and historian Harry Turtledove has written an entire series of books, the “Southern Victory” series that goes from the end of a southern victory in the Civil War to the end of an alternate World War II. So it could be fascinating.

But on the other hand…

There has been an incredible backlash on social media.

Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss say they were prepared for the backlash that greeted Wednesday’s announcement of their next TV project, HBO’s alternate-timeline drama Confederate, which imagines slavery as a modern-day institution.

I don’t believe that for a second.  I think they were genuinely caught by surprise.  Because of course, no matter how good a Social Justice Warrior you are, there is always someone further to the left who will be more than happy to institute a pogrom.  After all, we live in the era of #Dunkirksowhite.

So I don’t think the same premium network that took a medieval fantasy like Game of Thrones and made it into a girl power story of breaking the dragonglass ceiling and thinks Lena Dunham nudity is empowering is going to push ahead with a show that their peers oppose as a concept.  Sure, if the Duck Dynasty guys came out in opposition to this show, that might turn things around, but I think the desire to stay on the left side of the twitterverse will strangle this show in the cradle.

And that’s a shame, because this show could have, as they say, started a conversation.  Not a good one maybe, but since plenty on the left want to kick the South out of the union right now, it might be interesting to see what the world would have looked like if they had gotten their wish.

 

 

Actually Excited About ‘The Last Ship’

Mild spoilers…

With the wave of new shows coming out for the summer, in general I’m somewhat “blah” about the new prospects.  It takes a lot to get my anticipation of a new or returning show up these days.  It has to be on the order of The Walking Dead.  In fact, it pretty much has to be The Walking Dead.  Television just isn’t doing it for me as much anymore. Even if the show concepts are good, the execution usually stumbles.  Defiance came back for season two.  It’s on my DVR.  It was just in the OK category. A new show from Syfy Dominion premiered last week.  Don’t expect a review of it from me.  I’m not a skilled enough writer to fill an entire review with all of the adjectives to describe how stinko that show is.  OK there’s one…stinko.

Falling Skies, Under the Dome… I’ll watch them but I don’t think they’ll get me excited to watch television.  With no Walking Dead and no Game of Thrones on, TV is only just TV.

Or is it?

TNT’s The Last Ship debuted last Sunday night, and sitting down to watch it, I expected just another OK show, but this was more than OK.  This was great!  So great that on the commercial breaks I turned to my wife and said, “This is great!”  My wife, who mainly tuned in for Adam Baldwin, who plays the ship’s executive officer, agreed, “Yes, Adam Baldwin is great.”

The gist of the show is a guided missile destroyer, the USS Nathan James, is sent incommunicado to the Arctic on the twin missions of some Top Secret weapons testing and to ferry along two scientists to study birds.  Now, when you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous.  I can see either having a Top Secret weapons test or having scientists study birds, but not on the same mission. You might think that the Captain should have at least raised that question, but it apparently raises no red flags.  But then, the Captain is there just to look good.  Played by Eric Dane, who formerly played…what, Dr. McCreamy or something?  In some Young-Doctors-In-Love show, he seems to see nothing unusual in combining bird watching and highly classified missile testing.

So after the completion of bird watching/missile testing, the crew is excited to return home and restore contact with the outside world, but a sudden attack by Russian choppers makes them aware of how out of contact they’ve been for the past few months.  The Captain, via teleconference with the President (a different President then when he left) learns that almost 80% of the world population is dead, and that most governments are no longer functioning, including the Russians, and that the two scientists had known the whole time, since they were not there studying birds, but looking for a primordial version of the same virus that was decimating the planet.  With the a ship that has the two scientists who may have the information to make a cure for the virus, the course of the show is set; if they can survive long enough.

So the pilot did a good job of setting up the premise, although I do have a quibble.  The ship comes across a dead in the water Italian cruise ship.  Hoping to loot it for food and fuel (diesel doesn’t grow on trees) they send a small boarding party; who has a member exposed to the virus.  Now I think this plot point could have been handled better.  It would have been a good opportunity to show what sort of skipper the Captain is by how he would handle the situation.  Should he abandon the crewman, kill him, set up quarantine on the ship and bring him back on board?  All of those are tough calls, but instead the crewman decides to shoot himself, sparing the Captain from making any hard decisions. That was a dramatic moment lost in my opinion.  And I would be surprised if that situation doesn’t arise again and again in the series.  Not everyone is going to decide to instantly kill themselves.  Then what do you do?

Anyway, I’m apparently not the only one who liked the show.  The premiere episode garnered 5.3 million viewers, which is big for cable.  Let’s hope the excitement can continue.

 

 

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