Current Watching

[Simon G]

The wife has been hooked on Married at First Sight Australia - it's the trashiest of trashy TV, but I can't take my eyes off it when I'm in the room.

[Lang Spoon]

Same.

[Sits]

I missed Life on Mars first time around. Amazed it doesn't seem to be on any streaming platform in Australia.

Much better than the follow-up series Ashes to Ashes.

[Nocturnal Submission]

This is in 4K HDR on iPlayer, by the way, so if you have the TV for it be sure to watch it there rather than broadcast. Also, having watched the first episode, I'm not sure I grok what he's driving at with the name. There's some handwaving toward the anthropic principle at the beginning of the episode, and then at the end he tries to tie it to climate change, but it's all very slapdash. The only real thing tying the episode together was volcanoes, ie the episode title.

Is the HD broadcast version not 4K then and is the version of the programme available on catch up, rather than the iPlayer specifically, not 4K either?

[Ginger Yellow]

Is the HD broadcast version not 4K then and is the version of the programme available on catch up, rather than the iPlayer specifically, not 4K either?

There may be a 4K BBC channel on Freesat or Sky Q or whatever the cable equivalent is, but on Freeview nothing is 4K - hell, Film4 isn't even 720p. Not entirely sure how you're distinguishing catch-up from iPlayer (if you mean on Youview compatible boxes, I think that just pulls the iPlayer feed, but I don't know whether it pulls the 4K version), but you'll be able to tell if your TV gives the HDR symbol when it plays (you may also be able to pull up resolution info directly).

[Nocturnal Submission]

There may be a 4K BBC channel on Freesat or Sky Q or whatever the cable equivalent is, but on Freeview nothing is 4K - hell, Film4 isn't even 720p. Not entirely sure how you're distinguishing catch-up from iPlayer (if you mean on Youview compatible boxes, I think that just pulls the iPlayer feed, but I don't know whether it pulls the 4K version), but you'll be able to tell if your TV gives the HDR symbol when it plays (you may also be able to pull up resolution info directly).

Thanks. I've got SkyQ which on the channel listings gives me a non-HD BBC1 option, an HD BBC1 one and then access to recently transmitted BBC programmes via the Catch Up facility and access to a different selection it seems, via iPlayer, though the distinction might be in my mind rather than in reality. So, I wasn't sure if watching it on iPlayer would give me an even more superior picture to the one that I was seeing on the HD channel.

[Ginger Yellow]

A quick Google suggests no live TV (as opposed to sports and movies) is 4K on Sky Q (and anyway you'd need to enable the Ultra-HD add-on). I'm not sure about Catch Up, but I'd definitely use the iPlayer option to be sure. BBC broadcast HD is only 1080, and not HDR outside of a handful of experimental sports broadcasts.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Excellent. Thanks for all that. I'll report back.

[Simon G]

Much better than the follow-up series Ashes to Ashes.

I loved both series, but the issue I had with Ashes to Ashes was the constant hints that Sam Tyler may return in some way, shape or form (spoiler: he doesn't).

Ashes to Ashes also took itself more seriously than Life on Mars, which always had an undercurrent of humour to it.

[hobbes]

The Expanse season 5 is still delivering the goods.
Genuinely brilliant telly.

[Hot Pepsi]

These days a genuinely funny series is a worth anybody's downtime. Teenage Bounty Hunters on Netflix hits the spot. In a sentence, two sisters at an evangelical high school get part-time jobs working for a middle-aged black bounty hunter who runs a yogurt parlour, so they can pay for the repairs on their Dad's truck. Trust me, you'll laugh a lot.

I watched a bit of that but found it too unsettling, really. Not the crime part, but the oppressive, hypocritical toxic culture of schools like that.

Anyway, it got canceled. RIP

[Hot Pepsi]

The Expanse season 5 is still delivering the goods.
Genuinely brilliant telly.

Indeed.
Marcos is such a dick.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I watched a bit of that but found it too unsettling, really. Not the crime part, but the oppressive, hypocritical toxic culture of schools like that.

Anyway, it got canceled. RIP

But the latter is what's being satirised, though not in snarky way I admit. I think it hit some spots quite brilliantly. For instance the dialogue between sisters of a similar age, how they speak so quickly and finish each others sentences making it almost impossible for others to follow. I've run into it a couple of times in my life and my jaw dropped to the floor on both occasions. Another is the wide-angle close-up breakdown of these conversations, so the viewer knows what's going on. A clever, funny show and it's a great pity it's been canceled.

[Hot Pepsi]

Even satirized, it created anxiety.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I am sorry. Did you attend a school like that?

[Hot Pepsi]

I am sorry. Did you attend a school like that?

No, but I attend a country like that.

My school was a lot more like the schools in John Hughes films, but about 30% less wealthy. And we didn't have a tree in our library.

I liked the main characters a lot - never seen them in anything before. I was somewhat put off by the news that it wasn't going to continue. I hate getting into something and then get left hanging. But perhaps it resolves ok in the first and only season.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Maddie Phillips is from this burg, but I don't think I've seen her in anything either. I wonder why it was dumped? So far as being left hanging goes, I've only seen two episodes but there isn't yet a continuing plot thread to suggest that would be a problem.

[ursus arctos]

It may be because I went to uni with a number of people who literally went to high schools in which John Hughes films were shot, but I have always felt that they capture that particular millieu very well

[Hot Pepsi]

It may be because I went to uni with a number of people who literally went to high schools in which John Hughes films were shot, but I have always felt that they capture that particular millieu very well

Yeah, its New Trier, Evanston and maybe a few others.
The number of famous people who went to New Trier is staggering.* (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._School_alumni)
In the US, just because you went to a "public school" doesn't mean you don't have massive advantages.

My school wasn't entirely like that. The income disparity wasn't as wide and wasn't as high on the top end. And we had a pretty large subculture of self-described "hicks." They're rarely represented in classic teen films, unless it's some kind of Americana tragedy like Winters Bone.

But my school definitely looked and sounded like it does in those films - sans the tree in the library. The rows of metal lockers, the tile everywhere, the boring 1960s brick architecture that might generously be called "international style." The boredom punctuated by moments of anxiety and angst. The unearned douchebaggery of the football players. The way wanting the opposite gender to "like you" seemed to be in the subtext, if not the text, of every single interaction with anyone about anything. Nobody had to wear a uniform and what you wore, which often aligned to the kind of music you liked, designated which tribe you were in, although that sort of cafeteria balkanization was not as severe in reality as it is in films.

I alway imagined that I'd gone to a very high-pressure, high-privilege high school, and in the grand scheme of things I did, but then I went to college and met kids who'd gone to the magnet schools in New York or Jefferson in Northern Virginia and realized there was another level. And then I was in Boston and DC and met people who'd gone to fucking Eton and what not and realized there's a whole other level or two beyond that.


*I know somebody who taught there for a while. After realizing she wasn't cut out for teaching in underfunded city schools, she tried Northfield Mount Hermon and then New Trier. It drove her out of teaching.

[Hot Pepsi]

Maddie Phillips is from this burg, but I don't think I've seen her in anything either. I wonder why it was dumped? So far as being left hanging goes, I've only seen two episodes but there isn't yet a continuing plot thread to suggest that would be a problem.

For streaming services, especially Netflix, if the audience for something doesn't appear to be growing or have much hope of growth, it makes more sense to cancel it and start something new that might pull in new subscribers, or be a massive hit, than continue with something that has plateaued, even if it's doing relatively well.

Unless it's an absolute juggernaut - like Game of Thrones - in which case it may be primary or only reason a lot of the current subscribers are renewing. But even that had to end.

The upside, for creators and audiences, is that Netflix et al. never pull something in the middle of a season. If they run a show at all, they'll at least run the whole first series.

https://deadline.com/2020/10/teenage...on-1234591514/

[ursus arctos]

I think that New Trier had more kids in my class than any other public school.

More than Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Scarsdale, Boston Latin, Brookline, Shaker Heights, Grosse Pointe, either of the Great Necks, etc

[WOM]

Game of Thrones was HBO, though, wasn't it?

I've heard that 3 seasons is the make / break for Netflix. They have all the analytics, and if they renew beyond that, everyone wants a fat bump. Frankly, we just finished Orange Is The New Black, and it would have been far superior at 5 seasons instead of 7. The desire to stretch things out hurts more shows than it helps.

The Americans, I'll say it again, was one of those shows that I think more people should watch.

[Satchmo Distel]

"Ah, nice marmot"

Unbelievably, I had never seen The Big Lebowski until today.* What an absolute gem. Every performance perfect.

*Showtime extreme, whatever that is.

[Amor de Cosmos]

They other day I watched Mangrove, the first of the Little Axe series of films. It was fascinating, not only for the story and sequence of events, but it took place at exactly the time I moved to Notting Hill. The black residents of the Gate were still getting harassed when I left three years later. One of the last "events" I remember was the police trying to break into a day-care centre because "they had reason to believe drugs were being sold." Fortunately the day-care workers had the foresight to barricade themselves inside and the call the Evening Standard.

PC Frank Pulley, who features heavily in the film was notorious in Notting Hill, and not just among the black community. He was well known for planting drugs on teenagers, and for dodgy "stop and search" methods. At that time there was a local convention that if you saw anyone being questioned by the police, you'd always hang about to witness what was going on.

[Incandenza]

Watching Pretend It's a City on Netflix, Scorsese's documentary series about Fran Lebowitz. I realized that I knew who Lebowitz was, but had no idea why. She's gone from being a writer to being a character, the kind of person that only seems to be able to exist in New York. She's a grade-A crank, but very funny for the most part. The episodes are short, based around a central theme, and it's pretty much just clips of her from a sit-down conversation with Scorsese and someone else, clips from public appearances in theaters, and some old clips of her.

The real revelation for me is the Panorama of the City of New York, which she stands in in some parts. I had never heard of it before--it's at the Queens Museum, and was built in 1964 for the World's Fair. I definitely hope to see it in person some day.