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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 25, 2022 17:50:38 GMT
Also watched an episode of a different mystery show last night, “Mr. Monk and the Naked Man” (S6:E3) from Monk. I like Monk a lot, but I watch the show (as I do most TV I like) in dribs and drabs, so I still haven’t seen every episode. “Naked Man” was one of the ones I hadn’t seen, but I wanted to take a look because it was highly recommended by a commenter at that Ah Sweet Mystery! blog. It’s an excellent episode, comedy and mystery fitting neatly together. Tony Shalhoub’s performance is always first-rate, but here he gets some first-rate jokes to say (it only makes sense in context, but “I know…but when?” got a big laugh out of me). So, for that matter, does Traylor Howard (“Sweetheart, I can’t leave just now. Mr. Monk isn’t feeling very well: He saw a naked man today. I knew you’d understand”), a likable and funny actress whom I’ve always far preferred to first Monk assistant Bitty Schram. And the episode is a disguised whodunit: You think it’s a standard Monk where you know the killer early on (usually, with this show, at the midway point), but really the writers have been sneaking in clues to the real, unsuspected culprit. It’s like that Columbo episode that’s a secret whodunit, except this is better executed. That’s particularly clever even by Monk standards. My only major criticism is that the motive is impossible to deduce—but no matter, I still highly recommend this episode, one of Monk’s best. Kudos to writers Tom Gammill and Max Pross, whose other work I’m going to have to check out.
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Post by theravenking on Jan 25, 2022 22:11:57 GMT
“Christmas Party,” A Nero Wolfe Mystery, S1:E9. Lots of people love this show. I should be one of them—I love old mysteries, old New York atmosphere, and the 1940s and like the Nero Wolfe characters—but… I dunno. I find so many episodes just so dull. Part of the reason is that source-material author Rex Stout’s plots were generally weak; a few of the Wolfe novels and novellas have strong plots ( Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, and “Black Orchids” spring to mind), but in general Stout was one of the weakest puzzle-plotters of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction (roughly ’20s-late ’40s). Stout’s real strength was his dialogue, his witty repartee, and unfortunately many of the Nero Wolfe Mystery scripts lose that dialogue. Maury Chaykin, as Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton, as Archie Goodwin, give decent performances but don’t really look (and, in Chaykin’s case, sound) like the Stout characters. The supporting casts tend to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bad. And the episodes are just so blandly filmed, making a high-budgeted show look cheap. “Christmas Party,” the episode I watched tonight, exemplifies all of these flaws. Still, I keep watching from time to time in the hopes that I’ll see an episode I wholeheartedly like! I bought the complete dvd box set of this series a while ago, but have only watched the first two episodes and was less than thrilled by them. I found Timothy Hutton miscast as Archie Goodwin and didn't like the look and feel of the show at all.
There was a short-lived Italian Nero Wolfe series a few years back which although more of a spoof I enjoyed quite a lot. Although I must admit that I've never really been a Rex Stout fan and generally find his work far inferior to Christie or Carr.
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Post by theravenking on Jan 25, 2022 22:33:23 GMT
Watched some episodes of this HBO anthology series from the 1980s. What should I say? I think they were aiming for Twilight Zone quality, but this felt more like the later 90s series The Hunger in that it's very uneven, often cheap-looking and the plots are often way too obvious. It has several recognisable guest stars: Tom Skeritt, Harry Hamlin, Kirstie Alley, Ornella Muti, Franco Nero. Some episodes were directed by Philip Noyce and Paul Verhoeven did one too. Some episodes have a weird dream-like mood to them, perhaps meant to resemble a nightmare of sorts, but I found this confusing rather than appealing It has some violence and nudity but it's very tame compared to something like The New Outer Limits. Even with barely 30 minutes for an episode I found my mind wandering quite a few times. It's was ultimately too derivative and dull for my taste. Finally I'm not sure why it's called The Hitchhiker, since you never see the titular character, who introduces the episodes, doing any actual hitchhiking.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 25, 2022 22:34:08 GMT
Yeah, theravenking, I’m always expecting to find a Nero Wolfe episode I love, what with how beloved the show seems to be, but I keep being…less than thrilled by it, as you say. Re: Stout, I like Archie Goodwin as a character, but I always wish the books around him were more interesting. Mystery writer William L. DeAndrea later adapted the Archie character into his main sleuth, Matt Cobb, and I think DeAndrea was a better storyteller (though he doesn’t have the plot complexity of Carr and Christie either).
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Post by twothousandonemark on Feb 4, 2022 6:08:13 GMT
I've been dabbling with The X-Files 'Abduction' mythology set, casually over the past several weeks.
The show has aged, not in a bad way, just its pre-digital self is showing.
So many characters seem to have to drive over in a car to tell ppl something in person. Barely any mobile phones. I've yet to see anyone trade e-mails.
Some silly nitpicks - like Scully in DC calling Mulder who's on Martha's Vineyard to come back... & he returns same night? lols I'd have to assume he's flying there, his parents house. The last time I saw him do it, he was shell shocked from his father's death... that'd be a f'ing long dangerous drive in his shape.
I guess the mystique of the show remains for me - how it always felt, & still retains fairly enough, its sense of dramatic re-enactment. I think that's why it felt cool & serious alike. Alas, much of the show's crux seemed to share the 90's vibe of the future, what's next, what's coming, etc. It's 2022. 1995's future has already come & gone lols.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 9, 2022 20:19:36 GMT
I’ve been catching up with the latest season/series of Death in Paradise, which has been running for 11 years (!) now. It’s a fun show, but I can’t help thinking it jumped the shark a few seasons back. Every season has at least one above-average episode—usually written by creator Robert Thorogood—but so many episodes are, I hate to say it, Murder, She Wrote without Angela Lansbury or the guest stars. Thorogood intended the show for Ben Miller’s comic chops, and while the show had some excellent episodes after Miller left in Season 3 (the Season 4 opener, “Stab in the Dark,” is pretty great), it kind of lost its footing that early. Death in Paradise used to take risks; the pilot episode, for example, plays on the viewer’s expectations of TV pilots. But now the scripts are so formulaic that the show can go through multiple cast changes without affecting anything. Season 11 seems much the same way. Of the four episodes I’ve seen, the one about the skydivers (not written by Thorogood, curiously enough) is above average; the rest are so colorless and unmemorable. Even the skydiving one has plot flaws that Monk or Jonathan Creek or even this show in its early seasons would have polished out, but its central misdirection idea is clever. But the others… Whew, the one I watched last night (Episode 4, Florence undercover) is just plain terrible. And the comedy has gotten weaker and weaker too. Season 1’s “An Unhelpful Aid” has a weak mystery (stronger than the one I watched last night, though) but is redeemed by the comic pairing of Dwayne, Fidel, and Shirley Henderson as a distaff Insp. Clouseau. In the most recent seasons the jokes wouldn’t make it out of most shows’ writers’ rooms. In other words, I’ve had this impression for the last few seasons that the BBC thinks the show will do well no matter what and so the scripts are first drafts. Which is crazy to consider, but they truly seem like first drafts. Again, every once in a while an episode has a good idea—Season 7’s “Murder from Above” had a genuinely surprising solution—but it’s rare. And yet I’m still watching, in the hopes that I’ll see something as good as the first three episodes, which might not have been as complex as Jonathan Creek but were as good as Monk at its best. Heck, even just having Ben Miller back for a season would help.
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 23, 2022 15:33:40 GMT
I’ve been catching up with the latest season/series of Death in Paradise, which has been running for 11 years (!) now. Welp, I finished the season, and yeah, it’s not very good at all. Even the previous weak seasons had some O.K. things in them (Season 9’s “Switcheroo,” while not clued enough, has a good misdirection idea; Season 10’s “Chain Reaction,” while it has no shocking surprise, has some decent cluing, a well-written script, and interesting direction). The episode this season that comes closest to good is the skydiving one, which again has more and more flaws the more I think about it. The rest all blur together in blandness. Hoping that things improve next season. A few commenters online are saying next season may be the last one; I don’t know where they heard that.
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Post by taylorfirst1 on Mar 28, 2022 16:29:33 GMT
I finished re-watching "The Time Tunnel".
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Post by gspdude on Mar 29, 2022 11:29:43 GMT
Started Dark Shadows with E210 ( When Barnabas entered), I'm in the 900s now. The Original Outer Limits Saturday Night Live, just finished S1, not sure how far I'll go, but at least as far as Aykroid and Belushi.
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Post by theravenking on Mar 29, 2022 20:21:34 GMT
I've been watching Jonathan Creek. Just finished season 3 which had unfortunately the weakest plots so far. I had previously seen the special The Grinning Man which had a couple of good impossible mysteries but also really dragged in places.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Mar 29, 2022 20:54:42 GMT
Not a classic show but i did just finish the last season of Supergirl
Season 1-3 i id actually enjoy i thought they where ok.
But season 4-6 where really hard to get through. Even though i agree with the politics they try to force down people`s throat i just found it to be to much of it,
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 31, 2022 0:38:25 GMT
Trying to watch some kids’ show on HBO Max called Theodosia. It’s exactly the sort of Indiana Jones knockoff I like—turn-of-the-century teenage girl and friends have adventures exploring Egyptian tombs—but it just seems cheap, poorly acted, and terribly directed. As in, the direction is noticeably bad.
Also, nobody looks or sounds remotely turn-of-the-century; everyone sounds like you met them yesterday. Ehh. Too bad. Kids need a new Young Indiana Jones. (As for recent Indy ripoffs, albeit not for kids, I thought the Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider was surprisingly decent.)
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 25, 2022 17:54:45 GMT
I usually watch Monk on Sunday nights on MeTV. Neither of the two episodes MeTV (“Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan” and “Mr. Monk and the Rapper”) ran last night was particularly good, though as usual Traylor Howard got to show off how funny she is. (Why is she not in more things?) But “Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan,” which is written by Andy Breckman, reminded me of something I find odd about Monk: I think Breckman—the show’s creator—is by far its worst writer. I’m glancing through the episode list and I think I only like 2 of the 16 episodes Breckman wrote (and on one of those two, “Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike,” he had a cowriter). Maybe the pilot, too: It has a painfully obvious mystery, but it’s a decent comedy pilot. But Breckman also wrote some of the worst episodes, including the inexplicably but determinedly mean-spirited “Mr. Monk and the Red-Headed Stranger.” In which the culprit commits a murder, fakes blindness, and frames Willie Nelson—yet Breckman still wants us to see her as sympathetic and has Stottlemeyer defend her! Now, sitcom creators don’t always write the best episodes of their shows; many of the the writers Frasier hired, for example, wrote consistently funnier scripts than the show’s creators did. But Breckman seems not to have understood his own show from either a mystery or a comedy perspective. At its worst, Breckman’s joke-writing can be painful—one clichéd one-liner after another. Now, Monk is a very good show—solid mystery writer Hy Conrad scripted the same number of episodes as Breckman did, and a bunch of other writers also did good work. But I find it odd that freelancer Karl Schaefer (“Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect”), for example, understood this show’s plotting and characters better than the show’s creator did.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 28, 2022 2:35:42 GMT
I tried another episode of Agent Carter (2015-16). I should love this show—I love the ’40s and spy thrillers and like the Peggy Carter character and actress Hayley Atwell—but, ehh, I’ve given it a few chances and just can’t get into it at all. The acting is basic TV quality, the pacing is so slow, and the soft focus makes everything look like it was shot through multiple layers of vaseline. Worse, none of it feels authentically ’40s; even Dark City, which is set a sci-fi-infused ’40s, seems more convincing. So, for that matter, does Captain America: The First Avenger, where Atwell’s Carter made her film début. (The reason for that, I think, is that director Joe Johnston, who also helmed The Rocketeer, genuinely seems to love the era.) Here it’s like everyone’s playing dress up. Just too bad. On a positive note: I mentioned this before elsewhere, but I’ve been watching a lot of Gravity Falls (2012-16). It’s just such a good show, with such high-quality joke writing. Aspiring comedy writers should watch for lessons in structuring jokes that are, above all, rooted in character.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on May 23, 2022 21:56:40 GMT
I am watching the 90s sitcom Step by Step
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Post by Nalkarj on May 25, 2022 15:36:21 GMT
Rewatched Murder, She Wrote’s “Murder Takes the Bus” (S1:E18). As much as I sometimes make fun of Murder, She Wrote (“ Stabbed? I never said she was stabbed. How did you know she was stabbed? You must be the killer”), “Murder Takes the Bus” is one of the show’s best episodes—even, dare I say it, one of the best TV mysteries. It lacks the hyper-complexity of Jonathan Creek or Monk at its best, but the writers trick the audience into swallowing the red herrings, which most TV mysteries (or even MSW later on) would be happy to use and reuse as genuine solutions. I suspect that “Murder Takes the Bus” is one of a handful of MSW eps based on scripts intended for Ellery Queen’s scrapped second season. I’ve never seen a breakdown of which EQ scripts were turned into MSW scripts, but my guess is that this, “We’re Off to Kill the Wizard,” and the surprisingly complex “Trial by Error” are among them. (Season 6’s Angela Lansbury-less “The Grand Old Lady” is also almost certainly a scrapped EQ, though in that case it was just a matter of changing character names.) Adding to the EQ feel is the presence of David Wayne, EQ’s Inspector Queen, as a suspect. “Murder Takes the Bus” also has one of the neatest applications ever of a common solution in mystery books, the double bluff. Basically there is a suspect whom the reader is encouraged to see as too obvious. The solution reveals that this person is indeed the killer, usually through more complicated means than originally apparent. Mystery writers Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh specialized in this solution. While it’s common in books, though, I don’t see it that much on TV. But “Murder Takes the Bus” has a great, clever use of the trick. Just a good ep, with solid acting all around. Recommended.
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Post by Ass_E9 on May 29, 2022 16:25:01 GMT
Will soon watch a series called Man in a Suitcase (1967-68), of which I've never heard but which intrigued me due to it starring Richard Bradford, an actor whose performance I enjoyed in The Mean Season (1985).
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Post by divtal on May 30, 2022 0:03:14 GMT
"Rewatched Murder, She Wrote’s “Murder Takes the Bus” (S1:E18)."
I, too, am working my way through M,SW.
From season 4, I watched "Who Threw the Barbitals in Mrs. Fletcher's Chowder?"
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Post by Nalkarj on May 30, 2022 16:59:45 GMT
"Rewatched Murder, She Wrote’s “Murder Takes the Bus” (S1:E18)."
I, too, am working my way through M,SW. From season 4, I watched "Who Threw the Barbitals in Mrs. Fletcher's Chowder?" Gah, I don’t know if I’ve seen that one—whenever I hear the title, I confuse it with Season 2’s “Keep the Home Fries Burning,” which strikes me as an episode that could have been great (more Columbo-esque detective work than usual for this show) but lacks a great solution. What are your favorite eps? I’ve got to rewatch some from Season 1 again, I have some good memories of a bunch (the dog one still sticks in my mind, but that may be because of the silliness of the premise) but haven’t seen them in years. But the show does have some fine episodes and of course Lansbury is always wonderful.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jun 20, 2022 21:09:15 GMT
I’ve been watching a few episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997) through HBO Max. The question is, why am I watching this? Is it (A) a lifelong love of Superman, (B) a taste for goofiness, (C) a crush on Teri Hatcher, or (D) a liking for the sheer ’90s-ness of it? Or (E), all of the above? The answer is (E), all of the above, of course. I’ve liked the Big Blue Boy Scout and his supporting cast since I was a kid, though I’ve come to realize that genuinely good Superman stories are few and far between. Also, I do have a taste for goofiness and a liking for that ’90s vibe, and Teri Hatcher looks fantastic in this show. I don’t know if Hatcher is my favorite Lois Lane—Dana Delaney has the perfect voice in the animated series, which also came up with a great design for the character—but she’s high on the list. I’d seen some episodes of Lois & Clark before, and while it’s not a great or maybe even good show it’s fun at times. The writers are even capable of turning out a memorable line:Believe it or not, I’m sorta enjoying the episodes I’ve seen more than the animated series, which is also on HBO Max and is much better remembered these days. That show had so many great elements—the character and background designs, the voices and voice actors, this wonderful art-deco vibe—and so few examples of good writing. Many of the stories are just plain dull; I don’t think any of the episodes is as good as Batman: The Animated Series’s “Heart of Ice” or “Perchance to Dream” (or even a lesser-known ep like “House and Garden”). Not that the Lois & Clark eps I’ve seen have much better stories, but they do have lines like the above sprinkled throughout. If we have any fans here, I’d love some recommendations for this series.
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