Category: TV

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

The Reading List

Cool Movie Posters of the Week

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

The Reading List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the week