> The article compares this show to Ted Lasso and I can definitely see that

It feels like every half hour on Apple is a riff on the Ted Lasso premise to a certain extent. Sad middle-aged man faces existential dread/some sort of crisis or trauma, everybody's quirky.

After he got Grogu back his goal was to get back in with the cult. During that journey he and Bo Katan discovered things about Mandalor and now the goal is to reunite all Mandalorians and take back the planet. All the while they're sowing seeds for the rise of the First Order.

The characters themselves may have not known this is where they were going but the show seems pretty direct in what they've been trying to accomplish this season to me.

The end of S2 was filmed long before those episodes aired and SNW was greenlit. Maybe they thought they had something special with the Pike crew but I think it was more to just get out of that era after a lot of the criticism from S1 and do something different. Bear in mind they had changed showrunners like twice by that point too. It was a soft reboot.

> Have a show with a mix of new and old characters.

That's exactly what Terry Matalas has been pushing. The Titan crew we're already starting to know with older characters popping up, maybe dealing with the politics of the alpha quadrant after all of this. Old characters can pop up as needed and they can go on their own new adventures too. Go to Bajor to deal with a trade dispute and Garak and Kira are there. Get orders from Admiral Janeway one episode. Have Geordi talk to his daughter sometimes. But not every week.

Please don't make Jack the captain, though? We already did the "plucky young ahole somehow becomes the captain over everyone more experienced than him" thing in ST09 and it made sense there, we don't need it here. I like Shaw as the stubborn damaged captain who's hands off, stays in his ready room or quarters when not needed so Commander Seven has most of the responsibility. Jack can be chief medical officer I guess. The other Laforge daughter can be in engineering.

Cut Netflix or whatever for a month and you'll actually save money.

I hate this saying so much. The show's literally never been bad and it's not even that plot driven so what are the odds that a show with no missteps suddenly crashes upon landing? And on the infinitesimal chance that it is bad, I'm not sure that necessarily means everything that came before it is bad. Plus it feels like continuously saying this about every show just sets up crazy high expectations and makes you feel disappointed in the end.

Like sure it needs to all be good for the show to wind up on the Rushmore of shows but the "land the plane" line has become so trite to me.

I liked the first one, not too high stakes but the characters seem interesting, I like Chris O'Dowd and it's weirdly refreshing to have an Apple show that isn't stuffed to the brims with big names.

However it seems like a pattern is starting to emerge from these half hour Apple shows. Main Guy is existentially sad, there's a trauma from before the show started that everyone's dealing with that slowly gets unfurled throughout the show and is making everybody like 20% weirder than they should be and making them act like they're in an early 2010 mumblecore indie movie.

I don't dislike it but there's at least three of them on right now (this, Shrinking and Ted Lasso, maybe Hello Tomorrow too) so it's a little odd. Like does that say more about where people are at in general that so many of this type of show gets greenlight or does it say something specifically about Tim Apple?

I don't know if it does or not, but what makes you think traditional cable audiences wouldn't matter? A large cable audience is much more valuable than a large streaming audience. People who are watching cable live and to a lesser extent on DVR/demand are captive and watching way more ads than people on streaming. networks still make a ton of money off ads even though cable subscriptions are eroding. Wiki says the series peaked around 12 million viewers (probably closer to 9-10 live when episodes aired). That 12 million pairs of eyeballs watching Tide and Toyota commercials. There is no other place where you can buy access to an audience like that.

I think they have a lot of great stuff but the seams are starting to show, it feels like they're casting bigger and bigger names to hide the faults of the scripts they decide to produce. Extrapolations is laughably bad.

I wish I could read the Three-Body Problem trilogy in Chinese. Ken Liu gets a lot of praise for his translation of the first book but I'm currently halfway through the second and I'm wondering if the translator made different choices cause it feels different.

Haven't watched the second yet but I liked the first one a lot. College campuses are an underused setting for shows/movies these days, it seems, and there's something that really engages me about how low the stakes are but how heightened the drama around it seems to be. Odenkirk is great and the supporting cast is full of under-appreciated actors. I also laughed out loud several times in the premiere. Perhaps the expectations were way too high being so near the end of BCS but that didn't affect it for me, I really enjoyed the pilot, will probably watch the second one tonight.

I mean, you're holding up two of the consensus best shows of all time vs. two that had a myriad of problems throughout their runs. BB & Sopranos were never bad. Dexter and LOST were probably in the same stratosphere at their best but Dexter has way more bad seasons than good and LOST probably as many not great as good (plus it aired on broadcast and suffered as a result of that as well). I don't even really agree that they're lost in the zeitgeist (Dexter just had a fairly successful revival and LOST never really left the conversation). Those other two definitely had more staying factor but, again, they're both top 5 consensus best of all time TV shows so, yeah, they're always going to be in the conversation.

> Season 3 of How to with John Wilson was said to be coming December 2022

So I didn't hallucinate this? Good to know I'm not crazy lol, I swore I read it would be coming then but couldn't find anything to confirm it.

>With all the internal shakeups and changing priorities behind the scenes at WBD, seems like the release calendar has been completely scrapped and is being reworked with whatever guidance the executives have put forth. Just hoping it isn’t studio brass low key purging the series slate.

I think the WBD shakeups are certainly a big factor here but there are other things at play. There's an impending writer's strike that will likely mean a huge hole in every network/streamer's schedule around this time next year, especially if it stretches on into months, so I kind of get the impression some outlets are starting to ration their finished shows a bit. Also last year there was a huge dump of shows in the spring and a lot of them got lost in the shuffle, perhaps they don't want a repeat of that as it's already starting to get pretty crowded with content over the next month or two.

If I had to bet, I'd say white House Plumbers comes on end of April/early May in the Monday slot after Perry Mason ends. Succession/Barry will be on Sundays through the end of May and there's no reason for them to double up on Monday shows too. Being halfway through Succession/Barry and ending with a promo for a star-studded show premiering the next night seems like good marketing to me.

Obviously don't know where you are but it appears to be on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in Canada and probably most of the rest of the world (where Hulu content usually goes).

But yeah, I echo most of the other comments, it's great. There is an aspect, at least for me, that enjoyed it because everyone was watching it at the same time and it felt like reliving the events of the OJ case on a weekly basis, even if you didn't originally live through it. I wonder if that would be lost on you if you're not aware about the case or since you're binging it on your own years later. But I don't think that really detracts from the performances or the drama of the show.

That being said I would maybe recommend watching the ESPN documentary first as others have suggested, it's really, really, good and goes through the entire case and OJ's live really well.

It's kind of hard to say, because the game is pretty expressly designed to be a narrative experience. The gameplay largely exists to serve the story, ratchet up tension, make you feel things about the characters and what they're doing. I think it becomes even more obvious watching the show, which largely did away with zombie and other combat encounters wherever it could. The very pretentious gaming term is "ludonarrative dissonance" and TLOU has very little of it outside of dying and healing. I think that translates better into a live action show than most other games. TLOU is uniquely adaptable in this regard.

But there are definitely lessons to be learned, like respecting the story and the vision and the point of the franchise/game you're adapting, and getting the creators involved as much as possible.

Old Beavis and Butthead was great and the perfect way to modernize the show.

OP didn't say bring it back for seven more seasons, they said it might be fun to do a handful of special episodes. Obviously if Julia/Armando had the itch and good ideas too. It doesn't necessarily have to be a cash grab.

I too am wary of how seemingly every new show has to be attached to an existing IP but I don't think a wholesale rejection of that makes sense either, especially when "new" stuff can also be "corporate bland mediocre" as well.

He's been beloved by smaller circles for a long time but he's turned into a huge star now. My mom knows who Pedro Pascal is now.

If it can be done properly I don't have a problem with bringing things back.

Also there was a new Armando show that just aired its second season and nobody liked it. The movie Julia did was poorly received too. New isn't necessarily better.

Waiting several months to watch the rest of something I've already started (especially while everybody's talking about it) seems worse to me?

Some of the Star Treks made more of an effort about. Voyager had a few extras who were around pretty much the entire series. Understandably, of course. I remember one guy even had his own wiki entry.

Ultimately as others have pointed out it's often a matter of logistics. Someone won't necessarily be available to do extra work for 6+ months of the year, for seven years. Certainly they wouldn't want to be paid the same for that entire time either.

Seems like it was really hard to get the cast back together and figure out everyone's filming schedule so I wouldn't bet on it. Everyone in the show has other things going on, Adam Scott in particular just took off with Severance too. They couldn't get Lizzy back (although the cast availability was always in issue with this show). But also I'm sure it's not too complicated to shoot since most episodes are a single location and I'm sure they'd like to try. Hopefully we get a handful of episodes every couple of years or something, maybe with some cast rotating in/out.

> reveal at the end

I know people are wary of this kind of thing but they pulled it off so perfectly and it really sets a great tone for the rest of the season.

I liked CODA but you're right, not the strongest year. I imagine it won by getting a lot of 2nd places. If I were voting I'd have ranked them:

1. Power of the Dog

2. Drive My Car

3. CODA

4. Licorice Pizza

5. West Side Story

6. Duen

7. Don't Look Up

8. King Richard

9. Nightmare Alley

10. Belfast

Although there are some other movies I liked more. Red Rocket, The Lost Daughter, The Worst Person in the World, After Yang would rank higher than most of those.