Given my nerdery and the fact that I am on the Autism Spectrum, several people that I know intimately have told me that they think I would enjoy The Big Bang Theory, but I have little desire to actually watch the series.
I also wanted to continue enjoying Game of Thrones, but the way the creators ended the series made doing so impossible, and so I now have no interest in ever returning to that property or its setting (which is sad and deeply disappointing).
I was pressured a lot to watch TBBT. I remember my parents were obsessed with it and most of my maths class (including the teacher) would crack jokes about it. Then around 2013-14ish I very suddenly lost interest and I think the rest of them did as well. From what I recall I had originally liked the series because of all the sci-fi stuff in it but in later seasons as the main cast got paired up it devolved into being just another generic sitcom.
The current string of British mini-series dealing with the War of the Roses and early Tudor times should have been ideal for me. Unfortunately they were Phillipa Gregory adaptions, and not only can't that woman write (imo), but the adaptions are even worse than the books themselves.
She seems to be a
particular unfavourite of a lot of
reviewers.
The Cousins' War series is a bit strange for me because while they have a great many faults I remember (and rewatch) them a lot more than I do other, technically superior series. I guess it's the historical equivalent of
Voyager in that way. I also find it intriguing that such a brief series has enough of a devoted fandom to
keep putting music videos out even years later.
Agreed. It's quite an achievement for the series to have dominated as strongly as it did to then so rapidly evaporate from popular culture. Season 8 left such a bad taste in my mouth it's soured the re-watch value of the entire series - haven't watched an episode since the finale in 2019.
Don't worry about House of Cards. The first few seasons are good, but then it declines as the story threads are stretched thin and never get resolved. The ending was a massive disappointment.
As someone who never watched the series or read any of the corresponding books I was aggravated by how much everybody around me kept going on about them (even worse than
Breaking Bad) and using GoT as the benchmark by which to identify every actor and evaluate all other programming. It was particularly annoying that in the comments sections of certain YouTube channels I followed the posters would seek to cram in an irrelevant reference at every opportunity.
Then, come 2020, it all very suddenly disappeared. Having dominated popular culture for about a decade, suddenly the show was so despised that nobody would admit to ever having watched it. In April Chris Whitty gave a
Gresham lecture about COVID-19. He talked about how transmission of flu-like diseases changes with the seasons and, in a rare case of him making a joke, said "It's not just in
Game of Thrones that winter's always coming."* In 2019 that quip would have been perfectly in keeping with contemporary culture but in 2020 it was as cringe-worthy as if he'd referenced
On The Buses.
My favourite part of this phenomenon is watching YouTube clips from LOTR and seeing the comment sections filled with the anguished cries from disappointed Thronies about how Helm's Deep was so much better a battle than Winterfell.
They should have simply ended it at season 5. Because it was clear they had no idea/had no intention to close out the story threads properly. I felt the final season didn't do much at all in terms of closure.
I don't think so, if you go by the British version, which they did during the first 3 seasons. The whole premise is about someone coming into power, and then having it all come down amid controversy and investigation, hence the show's title. But in this version, they never followed through on that. His undoing in the British version is the reporter's killing and his subsequent coverup and the investigations into it. But in this version, the investigations never led anywhere and any of the plot threads related to it all faded away and were seldom mentioned again, even in the finale.
I watched the British version in 2014 but didn't realise until much later that there was an American version out. I never bothered watching that but many of my classmates did. There have been quite a lot of US remakes of British series over the years and I wondered why this one was such a big hit - including back in Britain - when the majority flop. I think it's because most of the remakes are just carbon copies of the original without an understanding of why the original worked. That couldn't be done with HoC because the US political system is too different for the plot to be transferable - Urquhart/Underwood's rise to power in the first season might just about work but the plot of the second (the prime minister having a war of words with the king) couldn't happen in a country where the head of state and head of government are the same person, nor could the third season (trying to beat a predecessor's tenure record) happen when there are strict term limits.
*Or something like that, I can't be bothered to watch the whole thing again to check.
