Hidden Gems of Netflix's Watch Instantly

BadKen wrote:

Just watched my favorite episode of Travelers: 17 Minutes. SOOOO GOOOOD!

Love the wibbly wobbly timey wimey ones.

I think I watched the first two episodes when it first came out and some other show/season started and it totally fell off my radar. Picked it up again about a week ago when somebody here mentioned it and OMG, I'm hooked. That said, 17 minutes was probably my least favorite... about halfway through, it started to become a bit predictable and I just wanted it to end.

Regardless, fantastic show. There's been a lot of other sci-fi shows that I've been totally hooked on for the first season or two that just lost my interest - Continuum is probably the closest to Travelers that I recall falling off of. I hope Travelers continues to have some chops!

I really enjoyed Sex Education. Gillian Anderson is great as always, but the rest of the cast was also really good.

muttonchop wrote:

I really enjoyed Sex Education. Gillian Anderson is great as always, but the rest of the cast was also really good.

I've heard good things. I think it's on the list, although who knows when we'll get to it. Hopefully before the baby is old enough to understand it.

muttonchop wrote:

I really enjoyed Sex Education. Gillian Anderson is great as always, but the rest of the cast was also really good.

Yeah, I went in with muted expectations. It's clear that they gave Gillian Anderson high billing for name recognition, because she's one of the more minor characters. That said, this show did a really great job of making every character, no matter how minor, feel like an actual character. There were a few cliches early on that had me worried - the main character's best friend is a gay black kid (what is up with this trend of the black men on shows being gay?), and early on in the episode you get some almost gratuitous toplessness; there is a tough girl with a bad reputation, and a group of mean rich kids almost ripped out of Heathers, but I'm really glad I pushed through that.

BadKen wrote:

Just watched my favorite episode of Travelers: 17 Minutes. SOOOO GOOOOD!

Love the wibbly wobbly timey wimey ones.

It's funny because that episode actually irritated the heck out of me.

Spoiler:

It wasn't the premise (which was great), I just didn't think they did a great job of summarizing the same conversations that had already happened and showed too much of the same scene again. They eventually got better, but it was annoying to me....

muttonchop wrote:

I really enjoyed Sex Education. Gillian Anderson is great as always, but the rest of the cast was also really good.

I enjoyed it as well. I like that they are not-so-subtly pointing out how incredibly crappy modern school-based sex education is, and that kids need good advice too (and obviously NOT from a peer).

Phades wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Just watched my favorite episode of Travelers: 17 Minutes. SOOOO GOOOOD!

Love the wibbly wobbly timey wimey ones.

It's funny because that episode actually irritated the heck out of me.

Spoiler:

It wasn't the premise (which was great), I just didn't think they did a great job of summarizing the same conversations that had already happened and showed too much of the same scene again. They eventually got better, but it was annoying to me....

Agree 100%, way too much repetition! Also,

Spoiler:

if they can beam multiple travelers into a host, why don't they just do that whenever a mission is failed? And the eventual solution, beaming into the truck driver, seemed morally suspect as he only died due to their previous meddling with the timeline.

slazev wrote:

Is that the show with the "**ck Batman" line? That's actually good?

Yes, very good.We're now six episodes in and I think this might turn out, along with season 1 of Legion, as the best superhero-series to date.

ComfortZone wrote:

Agree 100%, way too much repetition! Also,

Spoiler:

if they can beam multiple travelers into a host, why don't they just do that whenever a mission is failed? And the eventual solution, beaming into the truck driver, seemed morally suspect as he only died due to their previous meddling with the timeline.

I won't spoiler this part because its just general Travelers logic talk. Travelling into someone who was going to die because of something the Travelers or the Director did is sh*tty but the fact is that in the current timeline at that point, that person was going to die and from a binary 'is candidate' or 'is not candidate' view that puts them in the former.

As far as putting a new traveler in an old one when a mission fails to rescue it, look at it from the perspective of someone in the future who has that power. You toss someone back, they fail their mission and because you're in the future you can now see the complete results of that failure for however many years between the failure and your time. You can now decide. Is success so critical that you remove two of your limited resources (Travelers operating in the past and living consciousnesses in the here-and-now)?

Another thing is that the mission in 17 Minutes is super crucial. The Director is willing to go out on a limb because its very existence is threatened. The Director is the Hail Mary for humanity in the future. Without it, we will be extinct.

Regarding the repetitiveness in the episode, each time a scene repeats, it is subtly different. Either the action or the dialogue changes a little bit each time. I think this editing choice is intended to show the effect of the ripples in spacetime caused by the extreme methods employed by the Director. The "ripples" having been established as the reason that Travelers can't go back earlier than the last Traveler.

Also, the Faction in a later episode specifically points out the moral ambiguity of overwriting a candidate whose death was caused by the actions of the Director. I thought that was kind of cool that the showrunners recognized that and didn't just handwave it away.

Price hikes are coming again, up another $2 a month. Not sure how long I will hang on, they keep dropping stuff I want to watch and replacing it with self made shows most of which I have no interest in.

Ugh. Well, I suppose this Golden Globe award winning content has to be paid for somehow.

This is not a Netflix gem, but I recently started looking at stuff on TubiTV. I have absolutely no idea how long it'll last, but it's been around for four years now and has some decent stuff. It's an ad-supported platform which is a curious circle to have traversed but the ads aren't onerous.

Late to the party... She-Ra IS amazing!

Stumbled across this article today talking about how people are up in arms that Netflix used actual footage of a deadly disaster in Travelers and Bird Box. I'm really over this craze of scrubbing the uncomfortable and ugly parts from our history so we can all live in a Rated-G world. Life is not pretty. A lot of people are not good. Death happens.

https://gizmodo.com/netflix-criticiz...

And it also just so happens that we interact and view the world based on our breadth of experience. Artists - including TV show writers - are going to write about the good, the bad, and the ugly things they have encountered and witnessed. It really doesn't matter if their writing is a fiction or not. On the same note, our children are going to view the world based on the same observations. Why in the hell would you want to set your kids up for life with the expectation that the world is a safe place when the reality is they may die before they even get there?!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we need to live our lives in fear; I'm actually a "the glass is 95% full" kind of guy. I generally get over my anger and pain quickly and I put it in my rearview mirror where it belongs. BUT I also think we need to be realistic and pretending certain events didn't happen and deleting their memory from our history and arts is a mistake and a tragedy of its own.

Huh, I honestly thought that every disaster/post-apocalypse/etc. movie used real footage during the inevitable montage of disaster footage shown.

vypre wrote:

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we need to live our lives in fear; I'm actually a "the glass is 95% full" kind of guy. I generally get over my anger and pain quickly and I put it in my rearview mirror where it belongs. BUT I also think we need to be realistic and pretending certain events didn't happen and deleting their memory from our history and arts is a mistake and a tragedy of its own.

This is a distinctly American bent toward story telling. If you watch stories from other countries they don't always end on a happy note or shy away from disasters. They're more realistic in their views than trying to be uplifting. While uncomfortable there's a LOT of territory that can be explored in those moments. Sadly the movie complex in the US is all about the money than actually telling stories.

The issue here is (or at least should be) that Netflix is profiting from footage of real disasters. They're saving money by inserting images and footage of real peoples' suffering rather than creating their own.

firesloth wrote:

The issue here is (or at least should be) that Netflix is profiting from footage of real disasters. They're saving money by inserting images and footage of real peoples' suffering rather than creating their own.

I would say that might be true if:

a.) the movie is not a documentary.

AND

b.) a large amount of the episode/film was derived from real disaster footage. In the case of 'Travelers', the actual disaster footage in question was shown as a news report on a TV in the background.

So, yeah. I, personally, don't think that scenario really applies here.

I don't see what the big deal is, unless the "stock footage" company wasn't paying for the rights to the content in the first place. I've seen plenty of television, film and even video games re-use generic footage of riots or explosions in a different context. Maybe if they showed a clear picture of an actual victim of an accident and suggested that person committed suicide because they saw the Birdbox monster or whatever you could argue it was in poor taste.

muraii wrote:
Eleima wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:
muraii wrote:

I am perplexed, perplexed, that Grace and Frankie has persisted.

My wife likes it. *shrug*

You guys aren’t the target audience.

Oh, for sure. I like Jane Fonda and especially Lily Tomlin (and especially especially June Diane Raphael), and I love the premise and plot points. (I’ve watched two seasons at least.) But some of the performances feel so wooden that it would seem even the audience for whom it’s made would find it hard to get into.

I feel this way about Dark Matter and Z Nation and </scorpion> too, which fall closer to my wheelhouse. And I’m surprised in hindsight that Numb3rs lasted at all let alone as long as it did, despite being a (bad) math nerd.

Which is to say I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose.

Eh, zombie movies frequently use real disaster footage in their inevitable montage where the news covers the outbreak. Military/police violently suppressing protests/riots, mass suicide aftermath, war footage, it's nothing Hollywood hasn't been doing for years.

FFS, Travelers depicts 9/11 from street level, and shows an airplane crashing into the WTC. Maybe it's CGI, I don't know, but where's the outrage over that?

I figured that's what the comments were about before checking into the article. I guess the difference is that it's depicting 911, not using 911 footage to depict some fictional event.

Not saying I get it though. Hard to put myself in the shoes of someone directly affected by an event like that.

Look who makes an appearance in the new Carmen Sandiego:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxPPsNDUcAEQ6bQ.jpg)

I'm enjoying the show. I'm not sure why I have nostalgia for the old show - I don't think I saw much of it as a kid but I'm certain I played the Commodore 64 game. I do remember the 'Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego' gameshow (and theme song) pretty vividly.

Fyre is a decent enough documentary to play in the background. Lots of on-the-ground footage thanks to the whole thing being a social media clusterf*ck.

Trigger Warning with Killer Mike is pretty good. It’s a little uneven and I question the authenticity of some of the events in some episodes, but it’s entertaining and thought provoking.
Each episode sees Mike taking on a different project- from trying to help a street gang start a soda bottling company to trying to make learning fun by creating porn that teaches simple trade skills. In the first episode Mike tries to “live black” for three days- only using entirely black-produced goods and patronizing only black-owned businesses. By the end of the three days he’s starving and sleeping on park benches.

Carmen Sandiego has one of the worst Australian accents ever in a TV show. Worse than Chidi’s girlfriend in The Good Place S3. Other than that it’s pretty cool.

Roke wrote:

Look who makes an appearance in the new Carmen Sandiego:

I didn't know Shawn knew Idi Amin and Alfred Pennyworth.