The great TV Shows thread! (formerly THE WIRE)

[INCINER4TE]

My favorite shows are 24, LOST, Heroes, Fringe, X-Files. I get really hooked watching 24, it's an awesome show.

[Rotek]

saw it advertised- looks quite good. is that the one about the fake psychic investigator?

Uh, sort of. He used to be a fake psychic for a living, now he just assists the police with his insanely good observational skills, hypnosis and so on. It's more psychology than psychic. It's pretty good, actually, I'm quite surprised I like it if that makes sense!

[Rotek]

I finally got round to watching the last few ever episodes of The Shield tonight, so spoilers ahoy.

I thought that they ended it really well. I love, in a kinda sick way, that there wasn't a single major character who had a happy ending. Obviously with the Strike Team and their respective families, but littler things like Claudette revealing her illness was terminal, Dutch upset by this and the fact that he was accused of murder, Danny being out on her own, Billings not getting the money he wanted. And even smaller bits, like Julian clearly still having homosexual feelings (as we see when he and Tina drive past the two gay guys - it was very subtle, but well done) and Aceveda's mayoral campaign, to a degree, on the rocks. And the very last scene was brilliant, in my opinion. Some great silent acting by Michael Chiklis. It's always been the beauty of the show that you're on Vic's side even though, at the end of the day, he's a right bastard who's no better than the criminals he catches. His ultimate comeuppance is probably the worst fate that could have befallen him. All those emotions just seem to come out in the last scene, even though it's essentially just Vic sat in a chair. Brilliant.

Great series overall, one of my favourites, undoubtedly.

[TheBoyInGreen]

Band of Brothers is the best TV series ever.

[JellyDoodle]

Anyone watch The Mentalist, its a bloody great show.

I'm tempted to watch it simply because the name reminds me of alan partridge ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8tciBFpCI )

[meu02136]

Anyone watch The Mentalist, its a bloody great show.

I'm tempted to watch it simply because the name reminds me of alan partridge ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8tciBFpCI )

That's the first thing I thought of when I heard the title in the first advert I saw. But from the adverts it seems like it's just a rip-off of Derren Brown, except Derren Brown is real and more impressive.

[michaelarby]

I finally got round to watching the last few ever episodes of The Shield tonight, so spoilers ahoy.
Great series overall, one of my favourites, undoubtedly.

bought the dvd the other day- bout halfway through it now!

[RYAN WHITELAW]

Anyone watch The Mentalist, its a bloody great show.

I'm tempted to watch it simply because the name reminds me of alan partridge ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8tciBFpCI )

That's the first thing I thought of when I heard the title in the first advert I saw. But from the adverts it seems like it's just a rip-off of Derren Brown, except Derren Brown is real and more impressive.

[Andy Kurosaki]

The Wire can take some getting into. but i'm certainly glad i gave it a chance, once it got it's hooks into me i couldn't stop watching. I went through the last 4 or 5 episodes of series 4 all in one go,just had to know what happened next. About halfway through the final series now, interested to see how it pans out, though i've heard the ending doesn't do the rest of the show justice. I'll soon see for myself.

Final series of The Shield was absolutely exceptional, genius from start to finish. Certainly a hell of a lot better than The Sopranoes cop-out ending, that's for damn sure.

Thanks for the Battlestar advice guys, found the starter you mentioned, got it down on my lovefilm list so should get round to it soon. Going to also see if i can get into Star Trek at somepoint, having not watched any of it whatsoever.

[Bilge Rat]

I liked the idea of The Mentalist but I found that the show itself just did not hold my interest at all.

[RYAN WHITELAW]

is anybody watching this on sky 1 right now, its bloody brilliant, part 2 of 4 just starting, it would have been better suited as a full movie though.

80s gangsters and a complete nutjob as main character. amazing.

[Rotek]

I'm presuming you mean The Take

I've Sky+'d it. It looks really good, kinda like a British Sopranos, but it's probably nothing like it. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, of course!) I was caught watching that Iraq War thing with James Nesbitt on BBC1 with my parents. It's not very good

[RYAN WHITELAW]

yes i menat the take, lol

its really bloody good.

[SmallOfBooty]

Just watched Jpod the TV series written by Douglas Coupland, based on his book by the same name. The series rewrites some of the book's story lines but is essentially really true in spirit and feel to the original. I loved it and for those who don't know it follows the lives and loves of a bunch of coders at Neotronic Arts engaged in making a radical skate game with gore. Only for the new boss Steve to arrive ,who following his divorce, insists they insert a skating turtle into the game as he sees it as a way of bonding with his estranged son. There are fantastic disfunctional families, ballroom dancing Chinese gangsters, and dope growing suburban mum's.

Only word of warning is that the series seems to end abruptly on a cliffhanger. It appears that despite critical acclaim it got pulled by CBC, either with a final episode never aired, or the cliffhanger was in anticipation of the second series which hadn't been made.

[Rotek]

I watched the first couple of parts of The Take earlier. It's an interesting and very well made (well, minus a couple of dodgy edits, like when the guy got his head pushed through the telly) show, but I came away a bit disappointed, actually.

I think the biggest part is Freddie, the main character. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that Tom Hardy is a great actor, playing him brilliantly. Nothing wrong there. But the character himself...I think he's just too evil. Unrelatable. As a bit character, he'd work better, but given that the whole show is about him it just felt a bit like overkill. I'm much more interested in the younger guy, Jimmy I think his name is. He's a lot more realistic and relatable as a character, and I personally think his...I hate to call it 'plotline', because it's not really, but you know what I mean...is much more interesting than Freddie's. Freddie doesn't seem to be going anywhere - I sense hints of character development in Jimmy.

Think of The Sopranos. Stop! I know what you're thinking! 'You shouldn't compare all gangster shows to The Sopranos' blah blah, and that's fair enough, but there's a very close comparison here. About halfway through the run, *SOPRANOS SPOILERS!!!* Chris starts getting into the drugs and drinking heavily and all the rest of it. Basically everything Freddie does in The Take. But Chris still remains human all the way through the storyline. You care for him. *ENDS!!!* With Freddie, frankly, I couldn't give a shit.

it would have been better suited as a full movie though.

It's interesting you should say this though, Ryan. I actually think the show would have worked better in a more expanded form. As far as I can tell, the show seems to be following the book pretty closely (although I've not read it), though I think that something like a 13 part series would have given them a chance to flesh out the characters a bit more. I mean, all we really get from the show at the moment is that Freddie's a nutter. Why? With some reasoning and perhaps a bit of backstory, we might be able to work it out. It's been done millions of times before, but something like a 'fall from grace' would work well here - being in Ozzy's good books at the beginning and slowly spiralling downwards. You get nothing like that as it stands. I also think it might have been better had they done what Dexter did: use the book as a base and built around it. It skips forwards through time randomly too - it felt to me like we were missing a lot. In the first episode, it literally moved on 3 weeks in the space of a scene transition, with no note of what had happened except a throwaway line of dialogue.

Anyway, it seems like I've written an essay without realising it I do still like the show, but I think they've missed a trick. It could have been a lot better, and ultimately I think it's the main character who lets it down. The last two parts might be pretty good though