Category: Direct Beam Comms

Direct Beam Comms #128

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Barry

The first season of the HBO series Barry ended last week and I’ll come right out and say it — Barry is the best new series of 2018 so far.

About a hitman of the same named played by Bill Hader, the character lives in Cleveland but winds up in Los Angeles to kill a wannabe actor who’s sleeping with a mob bosses wife. When the hit goes wrong and some of the bosses goons try and take out Barry but are gotten the better of, Barry ends up having to stay in L.A. to make up the hit but falls in with an acting class where he realizes he’d rather be an actor than a hit-man, even if he’s a much better hit-man than actor.

Barry
Barry

The tone of Barry is something that I don’t think I’ve seen before on TV, or even in the movies. At times the series is genuinely funny yet at other times it’s terrifying as Barry plies his trade or as others try and ply the same trade on him. The show never pulls its punches when it comes to the violence as it all feels very real, unlike what I would’ve expected Barry to be in what would seem to be a comedy. And the characters too range the gamut from mob underling NoHo (Anthony Carrigan) who’s got a man-crush on Barry but isn’t afraid to use a chainsaw in order to get his bosses way or acting class student Sally (Sarah Goldberg) who’s so self-centered she doesn’t realize how self-centered she is, even if Barry’s in love with her.

All throughout this first season I rooted for Barry. He’s a great, conflicted character who wants to move from his old murderous life but who’s uncle and manager (Stephen Root) won’t quite let him move on. But every time we think we know who Barry is he does something terrible. I don’t want to spoil things but Barry does things in the series that are so reprehensible that in any other show he’d be the bad guy. Barry is able to justify these things by telling himself that it’s all about him extracting himself from being a hit-man. Yet I think that it’s worth remembering that Barry’s a dangerous guy with a set of skills that includes murdering people and covering his tracks.

I almost feel like if Barry goes on a few more seasons, which I really hope it does, I’ll be rooting against Barry as much as I started out rooting for him.

Upfronts

Honestly, this year’s TV Upfronts was one of the most bland in memory. Coming out of the Upfronts last year there were eight network series that I was interested in checking out. This year there’s just three. For the most part, it seems as if the TV networks are going back to the old “standards” of multi-cam sitcoms, cop shows, lawyer shows and medical shows. The stuff that’s dominated TV screens for years now is going to dominate the networks even more in 2018.

The Passage
The Passage

I think the biggest thing to happen at the TV Upfronts actually happened a week before the Upfronts, with two shows Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Last Man Standing switching networks. Nine-Nine was a FOX show but next season will air on NBC and Last Man was cancelled by ABC but has found new life on FOX. This does happen with series from time time to time, the last time I remember it happening with scripted series was when Stargate moved from Showtime to The Sci-Fi Channel. It does make sense for Nine-Nine and Last Man to switch networks since in actuality even though Nine-Nine aired on FOX it was being produced by Universal Television, which is a subsidiary of NBC, and Last Man was being produced by 20th Century Fox. So by those series moving networks means a few more episodes of them for syndication and streaming which would mean a few more bucks for their production companies down the line.

The shows I’m looking forward to are, Roswell, New Mexico on The CW but only because I was a fan of the original Roswell series, Manifest on NBC that looks a whole lot like a take on Lost and the post-apocalyptic vampire drama The Passage on FOX that’s been in development for a few years but will finally make it to TV screens this fall.

And that’s about it. I was interested in checking out the Magnum P.I. reboot on CBS until I saw the trailer where apparently in the world of Thomas Magnum physics are optional, and the Murphy Brown continuation also on CBS looks interesting even if it’s been so long since the last time I’ve seen an episode of that show it feels like a lifetime ago.

I’ve been disappointed before in the past with a lot of the network TV fare and it looks like in 2018 and 2019 I’ll continue to be disappointed.

Movies

Bohemain Rhapsody movie trailer

Mission: Impossible – Fallout trailer

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Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #127

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

The Expanse

So SyFy channel cancelled the wonderful TV series The Expanse Friday and I have to admit that came as quite a shock to me. The show which has consistently been the most critically acclaimed series on the channel since Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorites on TV and this season in particular has been the strongest yet. For a channel that’s supposedly devoted to fans of science fiction, their slogan is “It’s a Fan Thing,” for them to cancel the best sci-fi show in years that the fans adore doesn’t make sense. 
Maybe SyFy was concerned airing something like The Expanse would make room for more airings of their crappy movies like the Sharknado franchise that for some reason people keep watching.

The ExpanseI should’ve known something was up last winter when SyFy didn’t promote The Expanse as heavily they did in years past. For Krypton we got loads of posters and a TV commercial every break promoting that show, for The Expanse there was one poster and just a single TV spot I can’t ever remember airing. I had to find it myself on YouTube.

Now that I think about it, it’s been a while since the last time a show I was into was cancelled like this. To be sure shows I liked have been cancelled in the past, but it seemed as if they either didn’t work from the start and didn’t get a second season, or they were cancelled but given one more season to wrap things up. For SyFy to kill this show in the middle of the third season, which I can only imagine is going to end on a bit of a cliffhanger with no end to the story in sight is extremely frustrating.

The ExpanseThe Expanse will join other shows that got cancelled after three seasons like Deadwood, Ash vs Evil Dead and a little show I don’t think many people have ever heard of called Star Trek that were all cancelled after year three.

The one hope for The Expanse is that some other network or streaming service will pick it up and to give it a few more seasons of life or at the very least give the creators of The Expanse a chance to finish the story. I can see this happening especially since sci-fi series are so popular these days and The Expanse already has a built in fanbase and critical acclaim.

I’ve written before about the dreck that SyFy currently airs and their cancellation of The Expanse only solidifies my low opinion of them. Their new series Nightfliers does look interesting, but it doesn’t start up until the fall and I’ll check that one out when it airs. But until then I don’t think I’ll be watching much of any thing on SyFy in the near future.

Upfronts

This weeks marks the beginning of the TV Upfronts, or when all the networks debut what new series they’ll be airing next fall/winter. For the series that are picked up this week it means a lot of work for show creators over the summer getting ready for their series to start airing this fall/winter. For those shows not picked up it probably means a long vacation in Hawaii for all involved before starting the process over again in a few months.

This week is an exciting time for me, it’s always cool to see what new shows I’ll be checking out in a few months and to start tracking them now.

One thing I’ve learned is that even if a show sounds interesting during the Upfronts, it doesn’t mean that it will actually be any good next fall. After the Upfronts last year I was really excited about shows like Ghosted, The Gifted, Inhumans and The Crossing. Yet after having actually watched a few episodes of them I quickly lost interest and moved onto other things.

The Orville
The Orville

But the opposite is true too. Last year at this time I was lukewarm over the Seth McFarlane sci-fi series The Orville, yet that show quickly became one of my favorites of this TV season and even made it to my “best of” list last year.

While I do get excited over the Upftonts, I honestly don’t watch too much network TV these days. I can only think of a handful of shows there that I watch, Roseanne, The Good Place, the mentioned The Orville… and that’s about it. And don’t get me started on the dreck that CBS airs years after year after year.

For the most part I get my entertainment from cable and streaming services. Those outlets don’t really have big Upfronts like the networks do and instead release series year round. So while I might get excited about some new sci-fi/horror/superhero show that’ll be airing on FOX in October, chances are when that time comes I’ll be much more interested in what’s airing on AMC, or FX or HBO.

Arrested Development season 5 teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXg2_yExgVY&feature=youtu.be

Movies

The Predator teaser trailer

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Direct Beam Comms #126

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Are TV season finales important now with streaming series? They still are somewhat important for shows that air on network or cable channels, even if people still watch those shows time-delayed on their DVR. But for streaming services, since viewers can watch the shows at their own pace, be it binging an entire season the night it premiers, doling out one episode a week at a time or even waiting months/years to start watching, no one is watching the finales at the same time. And while I love streaming series I feel a bit of a loss for shows that air there.

Stranger Things
Stranger Things

Let’s look a Stranger Things. The second season of that show premiered on October 24 of last year at midnight Pacific. By the time I was checking the news sites that morning there were already in-depth reviews for a good chunk of the season. And by the end of the day many sites had posted reviews of the finale. So, before most people even had a chance to start watching Stranger Things there were a few people already discussing the finale. I’d guess that by the end of the premiere weekend a good percentage of Stranger Things fans too had binged through the show and were done too.

But for people like me who were watching one episode a week it meant we weren’t finishing until sometime in late November/early December. And by that time most of the talk about the show was done. When I’d talk with friends who’d already binged the show I was met with, “Oh yeah, I think I remember that. It was so long ago… I’m not sure.”

So that collective discussion pop-culture fans used to have about shows mostly isn’t happening for streaming series since everyone’s finishing at different times. For a show like Stranger Things that debuted around Halloween I’d say talk about it online was pretty much over by the end of November.

Shows like Stranger Things don’t so much as have a finale as they do a spectacular, exciting launch and then after a few weeks they pretty much just go away from public consciousness. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just the reality of modern-day TV watching.

Westworld

Still, shared experience finales aren’t totally dead. Series that run on network or cable platforms air on a week-to-week basis. A show like Westworld can debut at the start of October and since viewers can’t binge it until the season’s complete they have to watch it week-to-week. So, as the first season of Westworld started winding down towards the end of November there was still excitement about the show online with viewers spending the week dissecting each episode and having theories about where the story was going and how things were going to end.

I know that for most people binging is the preferred way to watch TV. If you’re enjoying something why stop, why not plow through the story and find out how it ends? Which is true, but to me I’d rather savor the story for as long as possible. I think binging a show means you’re not catching the details, you’re not paying attention to what’s all happening and you don’t have time to digest what’s all going on in the story. You’re just going as fast as possible to make it to the end like a race car driver.

And it makes the finales of the shows less and less important. How can they be important when some people will be watching them a few hours after the series premiered while others might not be seeing it for months?

Comics

Robotech Archives: Macross Saga Volume 1

Robotech Archives: Macross Saga Volume 1
Robotech Archives: Macross Saga Volume 1

Titan Comics is set to republish the collection of Robotech comic books that originally ran in the 1980s and 1990s starting with Robotech Archives: Macross Saga Volume 1. Covering the first third of the Marcoss series originally published by First Comics, these editions are a, shall we say, “maybe buy” for me. I’m a huge fan of all things Robotech and I collected some of the original Robotech comics when I was a kid. I say “maybe buy” since I’m not sure if the comics are any good or not? I’m worried that I wouldn’t be buying the collection to read, but for the nostalgia factor alone and they’d just be another thing taking up room on a shelf somewhere.

Not that I haven’t done that many times before with many other things!

Movies

Ant Man and The Wasp trailer

Teen Titans GO! To the Movies trailer

The Reading List

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Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #125

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Westworld

It’s a great time to be alive if you’re a fan of sci-fi on TV. There’s such a wide variety of shows from The Orville to The Expanse that explore much of the same story territory yet are polar opposites in terms of tone as well as series like Black Mirror and Doctor Who to name a few. So, for one of the best series on TV a few years back Westworld to be as good as it was is ironic, since before it even premiered a lot of people, myself included, were ready to write it off before they’d even seen an episode.

Evan Rachel WoodWestworld was originally set to premiere back in 2015 but various problems on the set forced the delay until late in 2016. There were reports of parts being recast and at one point the entire production was shut down in order that series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy could catch up on scripts that had fallen behind. None of which is a good sign but I was still willing to check the series out when it premiered and am glad I did. The first season of Westworld is one of the finest seasons of television in the last few years and is one of the best sci-fi series out there these days.

Westworld takes place in a theme park of the same name in the future. This park is inhabited by robots dubbed “hosts” who live their lives within the bounds of the park thinking they’re real people really living in the wild west. Into Westworld comes the “guests,” real people who pay obnoxious sums of money to visit the park wherein they can do anything they want to the hosts. ANYTHING. But because the hosts are reset when they “die” and at regular intervals they don’t know all the horrors the guests do to them over and over again.

That is until one day after a software upgrade makes it so that some of the hosts do start remembering.

Jeffrey Wright
Jeffrey Wright

The question in the first season becomes at what point do you recognize that what you originally though were just automatons are a new form of life, and what happens when this new sentient life realize this too and wants to start living free of the horrors they’ve been enduring for decades?

What happens when start fighting to take back what’s theirs?

The first season of Westworld ended on a perfect beat, so much so that it the series would’ve ended there it would’ve been one of my favorite endings ever. Luckily, though, it wasn’t and the second season of Westworld premiered on HBO last Sunday.

The first season of the show played out in a non-linear fashion, with events taking place in its past as well as present and the second season does this too. This time it’s events from just after the conclusion of the first season up until a few weeks later.

If the first season ended with the “hosts” fighting back against their oppressors, in the second the “hosts” have totally rebelled and any software safeguards they once had that made harming the “guests,” or any living thing really, impossible are gone. And while the guests might like playing cowboys when they’re on vacation, they’re no match for the hosts who some of which are programmed to be killing machines and now practice their savage skills on living people.

Tessa Thompson
Tessa Thompson

But the park is still worth billions in its technology alone so Delos, the park’s owners, have come with a small army in order to secure their intellectual property. Which, ironically, they’re more concerned with their IP than for the people still left alive on Westworld on the run from the hosts.

It’s interesting to see just how the dynamics of Westworld have shifted between the seasons. In the first, host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) was a sweet farmer’s daughter who just happened to be the oldest host in the park. As the season progressed Dolores’ programming shifted and she slowly began to see what was really happening around her. Now, in the second, she’s changed to a murderer who, along with host Teddy (James Marsden), are hunting down all the guests they can find. And the characters who were the uncaring people of the first season who took their aggression out on the hosts when they weren’t treating them like slaves are on the run for their lives.

So who are we to root for in the second season of Westworld? Is it the Dolores and the hosts who are murdering people as fast as they can find them or will it be the host’s former oppressors now trying to stay one step on the run from their murderous creations?

Will we pull for Dr. Frankenstein or his monster this season?

Movies

Venom trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Poster of the Week

Deadpool 2 billboard

Direct Beam Comms #124

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

Movies

It seems like it was Christmas only yesterday, but the summer movie season starts this week. Traditionally, this movie season starts the first week of May, but because there’s so many movies out this summer Marvel decided to kick it off a week early with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on Friday.

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool
Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool

For the longest time it seemed as if one summer would have a bunch of movies I wanted to see but the next would only have a few. And this would alternate year to year. But nowadays, for the last few years at least, each summer is filled with movies I want to see. Too many for me to see in theaters so I have to pick and choose. While there are some movies I’m dying to see and will certainly see in theaters, I’m looking at you Deadpool 2 and Solo, others like Ant Man might be ones I wait to come out on home media.

Even waiting for a home media release doesn’t mean waiting very long. A movie like Black Panther that was released at the beginning of February is set to be released on digital download just three months later at the start of May. For some movies I can wait 90 days to check them out.

I remember too when all the talk about the summer movie season used to be that it was filled with remakes and sequels. That really hasn’t been mentioned for some time now since it seems as if practically every big-budget summer movie the last few years is a sequel or based on some other pre-existing property.

Which brings me to a curiosity of movies as of late.

A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place

Over the last few years the most interesting movies being released are low-budget horror films like Get Out and, while I haven’t seen it yet, A Quiet Place. These movies cost a relative pittance to make, reportedly A Quiet Place cost $17 million and Get Out just $5 but have been earning huge returns at the box office. $255 million for Get Out and, as of this writing, more than $100 million for A Quiet Place. While these movies aren’t making anything near the amounts of cash a Marvel movie does, so far Black Panther has made more than $675 million alone, those little horror movies aren’t nearly as big a risk for the studios to take in developing them. The budget for Black Panther was a reported $200 million which means only a huge movie studio like Disney can afford to make them. When the budget for a movie is between $5 and $17 million like those horror movies the risk is a lot less and can be taken by a smaller studio.

And too, if a movie that cost between $5 and $17 million to make flops at the box office it probably doesn’t mark the death knell of the studio that made it, while the flop of a $200 million dollar movie might.

This has happened before. Back in the 1960s movie studios were producing a lot of big-budget movies then too. Movies like Doctor Doolittle and Paint Your Wagon were big-budget flops that decade which nearly bankrupted the movie studios then.

I’m not saying that any of the big-budget movies this summer in any way are going to bankrupt any movie studios — billions in box office returns the last few years testify to that — but it is something to thing about. That the movies that are crowd pleasers today might be the same type of movies that are the flops of tomorrow when tastes change as they always do.

Solo: A Star Wars Story TV spot

Deadpool 2

TV

GLOW season 2 video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwVOmTImfLA

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