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HBO orders Joss Whedon ‘The Nevers’ to series

Angel could never figure out for more than ten minutes what it was supposed to be, and the writing was rarely really clever. It was probably the most conventional Mutant Enemy show. Boreanaz was wooden.

Cordelia is why I really liked Angel a lot, well her and Boreanaz together really; he is pretty wooden though. But Cordy is why I really enjoyed it, seeing her grow and change, and why Season 4 was so bitterly disappointing.

I'd sooner believe that you saw a unicron :lol:

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Sesame Street is scripted and airs first run episodes on HBO. Admittedly, Big Bird's lack of clothing, doesn't seem pointless...:rolleyes:
 
Sesame Street is scripted and airs first run episodes on HBO. Admittedly, Big Bird's lack of clothing, doesn't seem pointless...:rolleyes:

Yeah, because if there is one way most people would described Seasame Street, its as a "scripted drama" :rolleyes:. But, before someone decides to go full pedant, I guess I'll start saying "adult scripted drama" so that there is no "confusion".
 
I like Angel, I think it's a good show, but I may never watch it again. I think the reason I can't quite motivate myself to watch it is that there was one more degree of ridiculousness than Buffy but not quite the same emotional realness Buffy had to balance it out. Like, Buffy had a lot of ridiculous storylines, but Buffy, Willow and Giles were always capable of having captivating emotional moments whenever the situation demanded it, and it balanced out the ridiculousness perfectly. Angel didn't really have anyone who could do that.

Also, some of the storylines had one more degree of ridiculousness than Buffy, but tried to be dark and serious about it, without actors who could tread the line between ridiculous and seriously emotional.

Those are really good points, but what bugged me the most was that while everyone kept saying that Angel was a hero, he betrayed all his friends at one time or another. He was totally self centered in what he wanted and how he went about trying to get it. I don't know if it was poorly written or if Boreanaz wasn't up to the acting required.
 
Those are really good points, but what bugged me the most was that while everyone kept saying that Angel was a hero, he betrayed all his friends at one time or another. He was totally self centered in what he wanted and how he went about trying to get it. I don't know if it was poorly written or if Boreanaz wasn't up to the acting required.

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment of the character. He certainly made a lot of bad decisions, but how many times did he really make selfish ones? He held a grudge against Wesley but that's kind of understandable considering he kidnapped his child which resulted in him getting thrown into another dimension with a vampire hunter sworn to kill him. And in season 5 he was a moron to try to actually use WRH to do good. I don't think he was selfish, but he was very emotional, very prideful, and those led him to make bad decisions. And I liked that aspect of the show.

My biggest criticism of the show is that a lot of the storylines, as some writers might say, "Put a hat on a hat". Took something inherently ridiculous and made it more ridiculous, but tried to do it with a dark, serious tone.
 
To be fair, I do believe someone could find Unicron before they'd find a scripted drama without pointless nudity on HBO :lol:
The nudity in Westworld has a point. It was meant to completely dehumanize the hosts, then as the show focused on humanizing them, the nudity showed how little the staff thought of them. It conjures images of points where humans are treated this way. They even store them nude, which as the show goes on becomes increasingly awful to see until one episode brings out the tragedy of the situation. You'll notice that hosts like Maeve was always covered by the time she was growing self-aware and as the engineers working on her realized that she was as well. The show even reversed the roles in season two with a human having to strip nude in front of hosts.
 
A lot of HBO shows have more nudity when they need, but that's on top of mostly excellent writing and high production values. It's flippant to call it 'borderline porn'. It takes more than seeing skin to be porn, for it to be porn, the skin has to be the main point of watching.
 
A lot of HBO shows have more nudity when they need, but that's on top of mostly excellent writing and high production values. It's flippant to call it 'borderline porn'. It takes more than seeing skin to be porn, for it to be porn, the skin has to be the main point of watching.

I agree. Even I think they overdo it at times but I understand why they do it. It is not just about selling sex. It's about making a statement that they are edgy and cutting edge and doing things you can't do anywhere else on tv. You know they have that slogan. "It's not Tv. It's HBO." Of course this also has meant that they have basically opened the door for other netwroks to follow so they can't say they fully own this idea, anymore. Still even with competition that nudity is still something that even places like Netflix and FX and AMC still won't go to so it still has some value towards selling the idea they are still the King of edgy and sophisticated tv and daring and willing to take chances that even these other now respected places won't go to.

Jason
 
The nudity in Westworld has a point. It was meant to completely dehumanize the hosts, then as the show focused on humanizing them, the nudity showed how little the staff thought of them. It conjures images of points where humans are treated this way. They even store them nude, which as the show goes on becomes increasingly awful to see until one episode brings out the tragedy of the situation. You'll notice that hosts like Maeve was always covered by the time she was growing self-aware and as the engineers working on her realized that she was as well. The show even reversed the roles in season two with a human having to strip nude in front of hosts.

Well, this just comes down to personal taste. I don't really accept nudity as having a real point, outside of maybe some kind of non fiction documentary type thing. Also, having seen 4-5 episodes of the first season of Westworld, the nudity certainly didn't make it better and vague artsy reasons for it aren't what I'd call it having a "point". Maybe if it had spent some of its budget on writers who were capable of writing something that isn't slower then a lobotomized snail, its interesting premise would have actually been done justice (heck, just taking the money from the stupid, fucked up orgy scene to pay Anthony Hopkins to be in more scenes would have improved the show a lot).

HBO has nudity because it needs to act like its somehow more important then basic cable. Its the same reason that Showtime forced Stargate SG-1 to have nudity, where its so obviously shoehorned in its hilarious (I've read that the SG-1 Producer even objected to the nudity but Showtime forced it). Its a different company, but the same principal.

Now, based on the artsy nudity reasoning you gave I'm sure the Westworld people wanted nudity in their show, but it still all comes down to wanting to pretend that having nudity makes a show more "mature" or any different then shows produced by, say, FOX or any other basic cable channel, when its all basically the same except HBO gets to show more blood and borderline porn. HBO and channels like it are just trying to be "edgy" in the same way angsty 13 year olds try to be edgy. Its not just Premium Cable, though. netflix has a HUGE problem with some of its shows (just hearing about what that weird Matrix-Director run show on netflix did is enough to almost give me a stroke, even Game of thrones doesn't seem to have done some of that freaky shit), but netflix also produces things for people who want actual stories and not something they could get for free with a quick google search.

That said, John Oliver is funny and he gets to say "fuck", so HBO as that, at least. Its not much, but its something. Anyway, when it comes down to it I would be interested in a Whedon show, even after his bad behavior, but like I said the last thing I want is a Whedon made porn series, so I doubt I'll even try the first episode of this show.

Still even with competition that nudity is still something that even places like Netflix and FX and AMC still won't go to

Based on the reviews I've read, Netflix's sense8 puts HBO to shame when it comes to shocking "edgy" nudity content. Certainly worse then anything I've heard shows like Westworld doing, and probably worse then even GoT.
 
Sense8 isn't shocking unless you just can't handle seeing the human body, it's not even lewd. All of the sex scenes are depicted as expressions of love. The whole show is about celebrating love.

Well, either numerous reviews and discussions about it online were lying, or we just have very, very different standards about what is shocking/lewd (that's probably the case). As someone who loathes Game of Thrones, I'd watch that entire show before I'd watch 10 minutes of Sense8 and would see much less fucked up shit in GoT. But, who cares. I was actually just being fair and saying that online services can match premium channels when it comes to doing disgusting bullshit to be edgy, and that Netflix actually has a show worse then any of HBO's stuff that I know of. But, to be fair to Netflix's show, at least JMS and the Matrix Directors had done at least one good thing each (V for Vendetta for the Matrix people and B5 obviously for JMS) before going full freaky edgelord. GoT is run by one guy who barely did anything before it, and one of the Co-Writers of X-Men Origins Wolverine.

In the end they're both disturbing shows you couldn't pay me to watch, and I just used them as examples of the kind of things that make this Whedon project something I'm not interested in.
 
I thought Glenn Quinn was fired because he was a drug addict, not because he had possible a bad influence at David Boreanaz
I thought he ODed between seasons, and that was why he didn't come back.
To be fair, I do believe someone could find Unicron before they'd find a scripted drama without pointless nudity on HBO :lol:
There actually are quite a few episodes of both True Blood and The Sopranos without nudity. I think at the first season of Westworld had at least a couple without any.
I actually noticed a kind of funny trend of True Blood, the seasons always started out with tons of sex and nudity, but as they went on and the stories got more in depth there got to be less and less, to the point that there were usually a few episodes later in the season that had none at all.
Still even with competition that nudity is still something that even places like Netflix
Actually Netflix's shows have just as much nudity as the premium cable channels do.
 
Frankly ever great show on tv today we like, owe's part of it's success to what they did and also getting a little lucky that people really liked the "Soprano's."
Yeah, about as "lucky" as any network that happens to broadcast or stream one of the most groundbreaking and overall greatest TV one hour dramas of all time.
 
Queer people having sex is disturbing to certain minds. But comparing it to rape and claiming it's worse is just disgusting and bordering on bigoted.

What? Who is talking about LGBTQ+ sex scenes? I'm talking about things like (to paraphrase one thing I read removing the more explicit language) "dripping sex toys". That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, among other things. There is also apparently simulated births, which to me is also grosser then GoT fake sex but its not the same thing obviously. That's the stuff I find freakier then the standard HBO fake sex.

I don't want to see anyone have sex, real or fake. I mean, if you put a gun to my head I'd go for heterosexual fake sex in a show over the alternatives, but the other stuff isn't what I'd label more disturbing then heterosexual fake sex or the standard GoT stuff. I definitely didn't mean that Sense8 is more disturbing because of sex issues related to non-hetrerosexual characters. It didn't even occur to me to think about that, or I would have made myself more clear.

In the end, while I'd much rather watch GoT over Sense8 if I had to (atleast GoT has Dragons, Peter Dinklage and from what I can tell good action scenes) the reason I put S8 below it is definitely not down to anything involving non-heterosexual characters. In the end I think they're both horrible things I'd never willingly watch, but I want the reasons for that to be clear.
 
After the first time I went through Angel, I mentioned to my daughter that I thought Boreanaz did a pretty good job in the role. She didn't say anything but gave me some serious side eye. Angel was a dark, brooding character who never wore his emotions on his sleeve, and Boreanaz pulled that off quite well. But off hand, I can think of a couple of times when he was asked to do more and did just that.

I'm thinking of the episode where Angel had to pretend to be "Joe Don", the "Rat Pack" vamp with the Jersey accent. He played those scenes flawlessly. Also, the scene where Angel flew into a rage and tries to kill Wesley. In those scenes Boreanaz, IMO, comes across as just what he he should be, a man who is taking revenge on the man who stupidly cost him his son. I'm sure there are other noteworthy scenes, just can't think of them now.

I think Boreanaz had much more ability as an actor, than what was required. He just wasn't required to do that much.
 
What? Who is talking about LGBTQ+ sex scenes? I'm talking about things like (to paraphrase one thing I read removing the more explicit language) "dripping sex toys". That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, among other things. There is also apparently simulated births, which to me is also grosser then GoT fake sex but its not the same thing obviously. That's the stuff I find freakier then the standard HBO fake sex.

I don't want to see anyone have sex, real or fake. I mean, if you put a gun to my head I'd go for heterosexual fake sex in a show over the alternatives, but the other stuff isn't what I'd label more disturbing then heterosexual fake sex or the standard GoT stuff. I definitely didn't mean that Sense8 is more disturbing because of sex issues related to non-hetrerosexual characters. It didn't even occur to me to think about that, or I would have made myself more clear.

In the end, while I'd much rather watch GoT over Sense8 if I had to (atleast GoT has Dragons, Peter Dinklage and from what I can tell good action scenes) the reason I put S8 below it is definitely not down to anything involving non-heterosexual characters. In the end I think they're both horrible things I'd never willingly watch, but I want the reasons for that to be clear.
That's a shockingly low bar for what one considers disturbing.

Yes, there's a dripping strap-on dildo shown on the floor. You're supposed to put lube on them, which would cause them to drip. I'm not sure how that's disturbing in any way though, they didn't show penetration. The alien's drool from the alien films is made from lube, you've likely seen lube used countless times in film. Also the birth scenes are shot beautifully. Maybe you should actually watch something before declaring it disturbing. You seem to be basing it entirely on your own imagination rather than what is actually depicted on screen. There's nothing in the show that couldn't be shown in a R rated film.
 
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