Stuff I'm watching now:
Westworld: I continue to be very bored of this show. A lot of people I know seem to like it and it obviously has a high production value, but I just don't like it much. I'm not caught up, but I have watched several episodes into season 2. I don't know why I still bother. Showhole, I guess?
Sharp Objects: I loved other HBO miniseries like
Big Little Lies and
The Night Of, so I'm giving this one a shot as well. There isn't much to see in the first episode. Mainly just setting up some characters and the small, very tight-knit town setting. Very, very slowly paced. Amy Adams is great.
Breaking Bad: Honestly, I've never seen even one second of an episode before this past weekend. I'm now finished with episodes 1 and 2 of the first season. So far so good! This is going to be a long row to hoe.
Other stuff I saw recently:
Abstentia: This one starts out with the fact that an FBI agent (Stana Katic of
Castle fame) has been missing and presumed dead for six years. Her widower (?) husband, also an FBI agent and raising their only child, has eventually moved on and remarried. Suddenly, he gets a call and someone, presumably her abductor, reveals she's still alive and she's rescued. She has many psychological issues related to her abduction. Her kid either doesn't know her or barely does and mostly ignores her. Her husband feels like he's betraying both his current and former wives whenever he's with the other one. I thought episode 2 was quite stupid and it didn't hook me at all. I'm probably done with this one.
Bosch: I have seen this in my Amazon Prime Video feed for awhile but never really heard anything about it until someone mentioned it being good a couple of months ago. It's about LAPD homicide detective, Harry Bosch, and each season is about solving a particular crime. Apparently it's similar in some ways to
The Wire, though I haven't seen that so I can't confirm. It's based on a series of books by Michael Connelly. My wife and I were hooked immediately and watched all four seasons in just a few weeks. The writing and direction can be a little off at times, but the acting is generally very good and the story is fantastic. Can't wait for season 5!
Various crime documentaries (
Making a Murderer,
The Staircase,
Evil Genius): I love this stuff! They are about real past crimes and their trials where, even today, there is no clear idea of what happened with any certainty. They are really easy to get into and the producers do a great job with the pacing and telling of the story. However, I'm very cognizant that the producers tend to inject their biases into them that can definitely influence your opinion on what happened. I tend to read about them after watching to get more information and other sides of the story. For example, MaM leaves out a bunch of important details that would probably change the viewers opinion. For
The Staircase...
I think an owl did it. Seriously.
: What a great show! It's a somewhat fictionalized story of the Columbian Medellin and Cali cartels, and the U.S. D.E.A.'s and the Columbia government's efforts against them. Seasons 1 and 2 focus on the Medellin cartel (almost exclusively Pablo Escobar) while season 3 focuses on the Cali cartel. It loses a little steam in the third season with the loss of one of the principal actors playing one of the DEA agents in seasons 1 and 2 and the switch in focus from the infamous Pablo Escobar to the lesser known Cali cartel and its principals. It's mostly in Spanish with subtitles.
Dark: This subtitled German show is not like anything I have ever seen. I can't really say anything without ruining various stuff, but it has a very... *ahem*... dark theme, the acting is fantastic, and the story is great. It can be a bit hard to follow.
Homeland: I never watched the first several seasons of this, and still haven't, but the last couple of seasons have been absolutely fantastic. It definitely injects aspects of the current political climate into various details in the show, but without making it anti-Trump or anything like that.
