Masters of the Air Pretty good so far. My great uncle Walt Austin was the top turret gunner, flight engineer, and crew chief on the Lucky Lee, a B-17 that was part of a USAAF unit called the "Bloody" 100th Bomb Group that is the subject matter of this show. They were known for flying extremely dangerous bombing missions in the lead up to D-Day. He went on 13 missions total. He was shot down during the first successful daylight bombing raid on Berlin on March 6, 1944. 69 B-17s went down during the battle. The nose of his plane was shot off by a FW-190. He managed to save the pilot and they parachuted to safety but were captured. It's interesting to see the part of the war he experienced in detail. That successful raid on Berlin was a huge turning point for the 8th Airforce so I'm expecting it to be featured on the show at some point. I found photos and several paintings of the Lucky Lee. A book called "Target Berlin" about the air battle that day has his plane on the cover. It was one of the few bombers that actually reached and bombed its target. My uncle is the guy crouching on the far left on the bottom row. He spent time in German POW camps and was tortured by the Gestapo for trying to escape.
I saw a trailer while watching another series and wondered if it would be worth watching. I'll probably try it later. I'm watching Gomorrah on Max. It's a series by the same crew that did ZeroZeroZero.
3 Body Problem I've heard the book is very good. I've only seen the first episode and it seems okay so far.
So Help Me Todd Comedy whodunit style show. It's not good. But it's also not bad. Which in the see of endless content seems great somehow...
I watched the entire first season of the Fallout series, and it was really good. Seems pretty much guaranteed they'll get at least a couple more seasons funded, maybe more. There were some minor quibbles with Hollywood physics and issues with lore inconsistencies, but that is really nitpicking compared to how many things were done right. I found it to be very worthy of some of the best aspects of the Fallout franchise and am eager for the next season. The photography and most of the effects look very good for a series, and the casting, particularly of the Lucy and Ghoul character, was superb. If you're skeptical, just watch the introductory sequence and Lucy's introduction at the beginning of the first episode. I was immediately hooked. Ella Purnell was damn near perfect in this role as a sheltered and naive yet determined vault dweller. Walton Goggins is exemplary in this series as well, also a huge favorite of the series, but I don't want to go into too much detail there because there is quite a lot going on with him. Unfortunately the third main character from the Brotherhood of Steel is a rather peculiar pick and oddly written, but the other two main characters were so good I'm not that worried about it. Definitely avoid spoilers and perhaps even trailers because there are a lot of very interesting twists involved that you may not be able to predict, which is a welcome change compared to most shows that feel like they've been copied and pasted from overused templates. There are bits of wokeness, primarily a birthing person in the Brotherhood of Steel, the last place I'd expect to find pronouns honored post nuclear apocalypse, but I've read Amazon may actually have woke quotas that have to be met to even create content there. It's not too preachy, so I can overlook it. There are a lot of very nice little touches regarding sound effects from the games and various easter eggs. It's also quite brutal at times and does an excellent job of walking that line between really dark humor and dire and dramatic circumstances. They even introduce Lucy with hobbies and activities that closely correspond to S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats near the beginning of the series corresponding to when you'd be selecting starting stats and designing your character. Highly recommended. This is probably going to be one of my favorite series of the year.
I watched the first episode of Fallout It clearly has a huge budget and faithfully recreates the aesthetic of the games. It starts off well enough, but if I'm being honest I was bored by the end of the first episode. Maybe it gets better. But it didn't really leave me caring if I saw more. And I'm someone who played the games, so I'm not sure how this series will go over with the average person who hasn't. My wife had already fallen asleep half way through the episode. It was kind of weirdly woke too. Like why was there a tranny in the Brotherhood of Steel? I'll keep watching. I can't really judge based on one episode. I've seen plenty of shows that took a few episodes to find their stride.
The first episode was definitely the longest, full movie length. There are a lot of twists in the story I found quite interesting, particularly regarding Lucy and the ghoul. Many things are not what they seem. I'm going to watch it at least twice. On IMDB, user ratings of the episodes range between 8.1 to 9.0, which is quite high. I'm sure most of those viewers are NOT hardcore Fallout video game fans. Some of the diehard Fallout fans are actually among the most critical of the show because it didn't follow lore in various ways. The birthing person was the main thing that was in your face in the whole series. I think there are a couple of gay grannies most people won't even notice. Curiously, Fallout 2 in 1998 was the first video game in history to include same sex marriages. I wouldn't think LGBT activism would be ideal following a nuclear apocalypse, though. Seems kind of important to reproduce as much as possible.
X-Men 97 I assumed this came out in 97 and then wondered why they were only releasing a few episode.(Spoiler: it's new) It's good if you like the X-men comics but nothing special aside from that. I never watched the original 92 - 97 series, but I know a lot of people liked it. I'm still bouncing between Shogun, 3 Body Problem, and Fallout.
I'll probably sit through Fallout at some point no matter what. I'm too old to get invested in my entertainment and rant about it. But sometimes I just don't see it coming... gay Faye Valentine cut me deep...
I've started Fallout. Watched the 1st episode and so far, so good. I'm really skeptical of these new takes on old themes too. I started watching Halo but quit when Master Chief took off his helmet. Why would they do that??
I ended up enjoying Fallout quite a bit. I think their decision to set it decades after the games was a wise one.
The fourth season of The Boys really fell off a cliff. They've continued to veer towards lame gross out/ shock value gore and went extremely partisan politically, which is such as shame given how it was so much more of an equal opportunity roaster across the political spectrum in the past. Two of the main characters look like they could have recast, one for extreme weight loss and the other from a Frankenstein disaster series of plastic surgeries that looks like it aged Erin Moriarty 20 years and maybe 10 of that being with heavy drinking and meth use. This started out being one of my favorite recent shows, but now it's barely worth watching.
Yeah it doesn't seem as good this season, but I've only seen a couple of episodes. My wife got grossed out by it and doesn't want to watch. The Herogasm from last season was hella funny, but the Human Centipede scene was just a random shock scene and stupid.
I hate watched the first 3 episodes of Season 2 of Rings of Power, Amazon's Lord of the Rings disaster. It's still comically awful. I'm amazed they'd spend so much for the rights to make it and then botch it this badly. Once again, the only standouts besides expensive special effects and decent music have been in Ema Horvath's bra:
Slow Horses Dark comedy spy show about a division of Mi5 where they dump all of the screwups and rejects. Gary Oldman is great in this. It has a good mix of comedy and action. I've been wanting a good spy show since The Americans ended, and this fills in nicely.
I've watched a couple of seasons of Slow Horses and have been impressed. Gary Oldman is really good at coming across as an apathetic inconsiderate degenerate bastard of a boss. Very entertaining.