Just out of curiousity.... I never watched Riverdale, but it's on my "shows to binge on Netflix" list when I ever get to it. What made you stop watching it regularly?
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Just out of curiousity.... I never watched Riverdale, but it's on my "shows to binge on Netflix" list when I ever get to it. What made you stop watching it regularly?
What was fun about it in season 1 was that it balanced its Twin Peaks/noir-ish darkness with a lighter, more whimsical side that connected it to the comics it was based on, and that the lead characters managed to stay good and pure and heroic no matter how dark and awful their parents and authority figures got. But after the first season revolved around a murder mystery, I was afraid that the show would give into the temptation to try to top itself and add more violence and death and darkness each season, and that's exactly what's happened. In season 2, there were multiple murders and attempted murders, and the lead characters all started to become morally compromised and lose the things that made them admirable in season 1. And that's just gone further in season 3, to the point that the fun and whimsy are no longer there to balance the increasingly grim darkness and horror. It's just relentlessly grim and no longer feels fun.
Making it dark and grim for the sake of being dark and grim, instead of it being part of an actual storyline? If that's what you mean, then I get it and I'm less tempted to start watching it.
I don't know if I'd say that. The darkness is definitely built into the storylines -- we've got serial killers and evil cults and juvenile detention being portrayed like a hardcore prison movie -- and people who like that kind of storytelling more than I do might still find it enjoyable. The thing is, the creator/showrunner, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, made his mark doing comics that reimagined Archie characters in a hardcore-horror context, like Afterlife with Archie (basically The Walking Dead in Riverdale) and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. So he definitely prefers a dark take, and his work in that vein has been acclaimed. I'm just not personally a big fan of that sort of thing. I haven't checked out Netflix's Sabrina because it appears to be out-and-out horror with lots of gruesome imagery and that's just not a genre my squeamish little self is into. But it might be very satisfying for someone else.
One thing that I think is still consistent about Riverdale is that it's very self-aware of its own over-the-top nature. I mentioned how it depicted juvenile detention using the idioms of the prison movie genre, to the point that it had some surprising parallels with what Arrow was doing at the same time. It's always been a pastiche of a mix of things ranging from '80s teen movies to film noir to mob movies and so on, and it hasn't been afraid to play up the absurdity of approaching stories about high school teens filtered through such dark extremes. And that was fun for a while. But I just think it's lost some of the balance -- it's been focusing almost entirely on the darker elements that have always been part of it, but at the expense of the lighter, funnier stuff that used to be a sizeable part of it.
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The first season ends on a cliffhanger, but otherwise resolves it main plot thread in a thoroughly satisfying manner. I bailed on the show seven or so eps into S2 myself, would would still recommend the first season as a highly entertaining and totally unique miniseries.
Yeah, Riverdale season 1 was terrific, and it would've been great if they could've continued in that vein instead of going, "Well, we had a murder in season 1, so we need to top ourselves with a serial killer and a mob boss in season 2 and then a murder-suicide cult, a lethal prison fight club, and even more mob stuff in season 3." The detective element running through season 1 was great (and appropriately referential, since The Archies was one of the inspirations for Scooby-Doo), but detective stories don't have to be about murder, and I wish the writers had recognized that and eased back on the violence rather than ramping it up to more and more ridiculous extremes while the actual investigative element has grown muddy. For all its deliberate craziness, this is a show about high schoolers, and the murder of a classmate should be a unique and exceptional event that affects their lives even years after it happens. The one murder should've been enough. Piling on the deaths to the point where they become almost weekly occurrences has just cheapened the impact of season 1 in retrospect.
You say emotional immediacy, I say unconvincing melodrama that's either way too self conscious, or not nearly self conscious enough for me to feel invested in. Potato, tomato.
Aside from the pacing issues, I've also started to note some weird inconsistencies in the characterisations. They can't seem to decide whether Jefferson is an even tempered veteran hero, or a hot head ready to go rogue at the drop of a hat.
Whether Gambi is his surrogate father or just an old acquaintance who likes to spew exposition whenever the writers forget about the "show don't tell rule" which happens at least once or twice per episode.
They also can't seem to settle on any coherent role for Lynn at all other than "person who worries a lot", nor is it clear if Anissa has a life or not from one episode to the next and lets just say I'm glad Jennifer ran off because if she spent another episode moping around her room, talking to the "bad boy with a heart of gold" ex-boyfriend, I probably would have packed it in already.
And am I crazy, or is there a distinct lack of chemistry between literally *anyone* on this show? At least at their nadir the other CW/DC shows have actor/character chemistry to fall back on and I'm just not feeling any of that with BL.
Don't get me wrong, I want to enjoy it, I really do but at this point I'm really struggling to care about most of the characters and none of the myriad story threads (please just pick ONE already!) have really grabbed me.
To give an example; you could probably cut out all of Lynn's scenes trying to help the kids on ice this season so far and I probably wouldn't have even noticed anything was amiss.
Damn...I really didn't think I had that much to say about the show until I started typing. Looks like I have more issues with it than even I realised!
I suppose I should have specified "US/Canadian genre shows in recent memory that I've actually watched and/or am aware of." And sweet Mother Hydra! is Power Rangers really still going? I'm a little old to have been caught by that craze, so my awareness of thinly disguised toy 30 min commercials post 1995 is pretty vague.
It's weird, but I seem to keep forgetting about the X-Files until someone brings it up...then promptly forget about it again 5 mins later. It was one of my favourite shows back in the 90's too...until the later season where I lost interest and stopped watching. I sense a pattern here!
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100% agreement. Its on a class level with that right mix of its comic origins and the needs of an adapted drama that's only rivalled by The Punisher and Daredevil where modern day superhero TV is concerned. The Arrowverse shows are nowhere near that level and certainly not any consistent basis.
Well, it was "cancelled" 9 years ago, but then it came back a year later and it's been going on ever since. Although its basis Super Sentai has been running continuously in Japan since 1975.
I haven't seen it but I get the impression it's essentially a live action Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets.
Yes, to an extent. While Gatchaman was a product of the superhero boom inspired by the debut of Shotaro Ishinomori's Kamen Rider the year before, it was also an influence on Ishinomori's creation of the Sentai format for Toei a few years later, built around a color-coded team of helmeted superheroes. Super Sentai later folded in the giant robot vs. giant monster element that had debuted in Toei's bizarrely inauthentic Spider-Man live-action series. Toei also produced the animated GoLion, which was dubbed into English as Voltron, and which introduced the idea of five individual robot/vehicles combining into a larger giant robot, which was then adopted by Super Sentai. Previous seasons had had only a single giant robot or one that combined from just two pieces.
ShoutFactoryTV's free streaming site has just begun showing Choujin Sentai Jetman, which was the last Sentai season before they began adapting them into Power Rangers, and which was a direct homage to Gatchaman in its avian theme. It's one of the most acclaimed Sentai seasons for its rich character drama.
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^ Man, during my otaku phase I freaking loved both Gatchaman and tokusatsu shows like Ultraman and Super Sentai (in the original Japanese with subs, natch, because I'm nothing if not a good geek purist).
Science Ninja Team Gatchaman is a longtime favorite, both in its original form and yes, even as the American-ized Battle of the Planets. The plots and occasional adult themes were so unlike anything in animation on North American TV, and to this day is still on a class level above a good majority of Western-created cartoons.
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As an Anime fan, I liked "Science Ninja Team Gatchaman" uncut with subs, but the Sandy Frank version with 7-Zark-7, ugh.
I always laughed when they had the various mechanized creatures destroying whole installations and/or major cites that Zark was always there saying stuff like: "It's a good thing we managed to evacuate everyone just before the attack, and NO ONE was hurt..."
(Yeah, right.) And "Voltron" when compared to the original "Go Lion" it was taken from was just as bad in that regard as well.
Yes, you are crazy. The characters, especially the family, seem VERY real to me, and the interactions are excellent. They seem more natural, than, say the pairing of Oliver & Felicity.
You have SOME valid points, but I will address that at another time.
Well, you have a point about the R2-D2 rip aka 7-Zark-7.
Oooh. There's a lot of Voltron/lion fans who think its the next best thing to air and water, and go overboard about celebrating / defending it. Personally, the "vehicle Voltron" series was far more interesting/entertaining than the lion/fantasy version.
True.
Yeah, like dubbing a lead character's death scene with a line that he was just going off to the "space hospital," which really clashed with the anguished drama of the characters' expressions. (They poked fun at that line in an episode of Voltron: Legendary Defender, the much better reboot on Netflix.)
The Super Sentai/Power Rangers divide is similar, with the American version leaving out most of the human deaths from the Japanese version (although blowing up rubber-suited monsters is still fine). Like changing the green candle burning down the last days in Burai's life to the green candle burning down the last days before Tommy loses his powers and has to stop being a Ranger (until he comes back as a different Ranger later on). Although there have been some Power Rangers seasons that pushed the envelope more, or were more faithful to the Sentai.
Then again, Super Sentai has a bad habit of doing big episodes where an exceptionally powerful monster/villain smashes the city to rubble clear to the horizon, yet it's perfectly intact again an episode or two later -- or even a couple of scenes later in the most recent example. And large-scale death tolls tend to be implied or mentioned only in passing, and main character deaths often end up getting reversed for the happy ending of the season, since it's still a kids' show. But it's interesting how much less afraid Japanese kids' shows are to go for really intense drama and scares and life-or-death stakes that American kids' shows tend to shy away from.
^ There's a brilliant horror manga called The Drifting Classroom that was serialized in Japan in a shonen anthology (the category targeted toward adolescent boys). Over here it was rated "MA," slapped with warning labels, and shrink-wrapped in stores.
It's weird, but I seem to keep forgetting about the X-Files until someone brings it up...then promptly forget about it again 5 mins later. It was one of my favourite shows back in the 90's too...until the later season where I lost interest and stopped watching. I sense a pattern here!
There have been 1 or 2 shows that actually got decent final seasons. I don't know what they are though.