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*** Official TV Thread ***

The are so many amazing themes running through that show i just can not understand how someone does not love it, it opens your mind to what is wrong with the war on drugs, the politics of a city, the state of the press, the way the police have to get arrest numbers rather then catch the real criminals, the decay of the working class. It has everything anyone could ever want from a t.v. show and should be studied by students instead of shakespeare.

+1
 
HBO Launches Masters Of The Air

From Tom Hanks & Steven Spielberg

He might not be heading towards the Robopocalypse as fast as we all thought, but Steven Spielberg is not a man to rest for long. And some of the time spent not shooting rampaging robots will be taken up executive producing a third World War II miniseries with Tom Hanks for HBO. This time, the pair is planning Masters Of The Air.

Following on from Band Of Brothers and 2010’s The Pacific, it appears we won’t have to wait nine years for another Spielberg/Hanks war joint. Nope, this time out they’re interested in the enlisted men of the Eighth Air Force, known colloquially as the Mighty Eighth.

The pair has the rights to Donald L Miller’s book Masters Of The Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought The Air War Against Nazi Germany, which follows the Mighty Eighth as they carried out bombing runs in France and Germany and engaged in air to air combat. The Eighth survives to this day as a key US fighting force.

It’s early days for the project: HBO is developing the idea along with Spielberg and Hanks, but it’ll be a while before we see it. Hopefully some of the regular collaborators on the last two miniseries –including Graham Yost, who now runs Justified – will sign on quickly now the props are beginning to spin.

hmm...Sounds like that could be interesting.
 
I am enjoying Breaking bad - half way through second season and its getting grittier FINALLY.

I do though expect it to get better judging by what others have said on here - dont disappoint now.
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/

:ross:

85,000 opinions

Average: 9.5

Crack head

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Gotta admit BB is more addictive than Meth itself haha... its definitely compelling and you can see where its going though i.e. the guy will rise and rise may well get caught I dont know and dont wanna know.

What has been enjoyable is how he has progressed and kept this dual life.
 
Gotta admit BB is more addictive than Meth itself haha... its definitely compelling and you can see where its going though i.e. the guy will rise and rise may well get caught I dont know and dont wanna know.

What has been enjoyable is how he has progressed and kept this dual life.

The character development in BB is some of the finest ever put on to the small screen. It's not just Walt though, it's Jesse, Walt's wife, Mike etc etc. There's a level of pragmatism in these characters which allows them to challenge their personal ethics and beliefs. Haven't seen s.5 yet so no spoilers please!
 
Im a little dissapointed with BB so far (4 eps in to S2) tbh - the premise is great, but im struggling to buy in to it, don't think many of the characters are believable at this point and are a little flat, the secondary storylines are all pretty boring as well - the sister is annoyingly brick
 
Im a little dissapointed with BB so far (4 eps in to S2) tbh - the premise is great, but im struggling to buy in to it, don't think many of the characters are believable at this point and are a little flat, the secondary storylines are all pretty boring as well - the sister is annoyingly brick

Wait. Just wait. It speeds up midway through series 3. The characters develop, and the flat characters you have become used to are needed to contrast who the characters become. Well worth the patience
 
I've tried to watch The Wire on numerous occasions as I figured so many people can't be wrong, but I just can't get into it. It's too boring. I'm thinking of giving it one moe try but part of me thinks what's the point if I'm not enjoying it?

Now Breaking Bad on the other hand more than lives up to the hype and gets better and better every season which is rare for any tv show. Possibly the greatest drama of all time alongside The Sopranos.

Dexter is my favourite though and Michael C Hall doesn't get anywhere near as much credit as he should do for making that character so likeable, even though he's creepy and does morally questionable things.

Another show I've got into recently is The Walking Dead. Very addictive! I'd advise anyone to watch it, especially if you like post apocalyptic type stuff as I do. The show has broken cable tv ratings records in the U.S. and the audience keeps growing.
 
Im a little dissapointed with BB so far (4 eps in to S2) tbh - the premise is great, but im struggling to buy in to it, don't think many of the characters are believable at this point and are a little flat, the secondary storylines are all pretty boring as well - the sister is annoyingly brick

I am watching the last episode in season two and its a great four or five episodes after the fourth or fifth episode. It does get better
 
Another show I've got into recently is The Walking Dead. Very addictive! I'd advise anyone to watch it, especially if you like post apocalyptic type stuff as I do. The show has broken cable tv ratings records in the U.S. and the audience keeps growing.

yes, watched all of these before Christmas and thought it was great, 2nd and 3rd seasons especially
 
Over the past 5 or so days I have been watching Homeland from Episode 1 to the close of season 2, having drawn the late shift with the little one, I have got in around 4 episodes a night.

I am so glad that I missed season 1 as both seasons ended up being the same story line really.

And what a fudging show it was. Each episode just flew by with me moving onto the next before the credits had finished. Great watching without the adverts too 40min episodes made it great Season 1 DLed (Great on Ipad with Headphones). Throughout the whole 2 seasons you don't know what the fudge is happening really, what to believe, an absolutely fantastic viewing. I miss Spooks, so happy Homeland fills that void somewhat.

How the fudge Channel 4 got this show I don't know. Fox make it, which is part of News International so I am surprised its not on Sky Atlantic.

Highly recommend to watch if you watch it back to back like I did. =D>
 
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Breaking bad was epic, however i can't bring myself to start the third season.. i am not sure why..




Tried watching the Wire once, would rather chew my own arm off. Did not want.
 
Breaking bad was epic, however i can't bring myself to start the third season.. i am not sure why..




Tried watching the Wire once, would rather chew my own arm off. Did not want.

I've started the third season yesterday. You can tell where its going and its getting much grittier.

I like it a lot.
 
I've started the third season yesterday. You can tell where its going and its getting much grittier.

I like it a lot.

Anyone who is struggling with the Wire I urge you to persevere. The first season from memory takes a while to get into not least being able to understand what they are talking about. but as it goes on it becomes some of the best tv ever made. the characters like mcnulty, omar etc just keep on developing as well. i remember really enjoying season 2 which some people say is the worst but i dont agree.

keep on going with it is my advice.
 
I've started the third season yesterday. You can tell where its going and its getting much grittier.

I like it a lot.

Hear hear.

You've got to stick with it for the long haul and you'll get the pay off.

Good Interview with David Simon;

http://www.vice.com/read/david-simon-280-v16n12

Excerpts:

Right. So I’ve always been curious about the way a season of The Wire would be structured before shooting. Can you outline, even really roughly, the process of scriptwriting?
There would be a series of planning sessions. First, at the beginning of every season, we did a sort of retreat with the main writers, the guys who were going to be on staff the whole year. We’d discuss what we were trying to say, but we were really having a current-events/ideology/political argument. The writers didn’t all think the same. We weren’t in lockstep on the issues of the day, whether it was the drug war or public education or the media. So we had to discuss the issue as an issue first. Never mind the characters, never mind plot.

A lot of the people who came to write for The Wire were not from a traditional TV-writing background.
If there’s anything that distinguishes The Wire from a lot of the serialized drama you see, it was that the writers were not from television. None of us grew up thinking we wanted to get to Hollywood and write a TV show or a movie. Ed [Burns] was a cop, and then he was a schoolteacher. There were journalists on the writing staff. There were novelists. There were playwrights, too. Everyone began somewhere else.

That probably made all the difference.
Well, we weren’t cynical about having been given ten, 12, 13 hours—whatever we had for any season from HBO. All of that was an incredible gift. The Godfather narrative, even including the third film, the weak one, is like… what? Nine hours?

Yeah, about nine hours.
And look how much story they were able to tell. We were getting more than that for each season. So goddamn it, you better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them. So if they like x, give them more of x. If they don’t like y, don’t do as much y.


Right. Between seasons of a lot of hit shows, adjustments will be made that are clearly based on network notes about what’s perceived to be most popular with viewers.
We never had that dynamic in our heads. What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?” And that’s a journalistic impulse. That was coming from the Wire writers who were journalists and, to an extent, the novelists who wrote for the show who write in a realistic framework, like researched fiction. People like Pelecanos, Price, and Lehane.

Those three guys seemed to have the perfect backgrounds to bring a lot of valuable stuff to The Wire.
It wasn’t like we were putting Isaac Bashevis Singer on staff. I love his stuff, but we were looking for novelists who were doing researched fiction, and particularly in an urban environment. I’m also not mistaking The Wire for journalism. I have too much respect for journalism to make such a statement. But the impulse, the initial impulse behind doing the show? It was the same reason somebody sits down to write an editorial or an op-ed.

To make a statement or to sound an alarm.
Yeah: “brick’s going wrong. Here’s where I think it’s going wrong. Here’s what I think might make it right.” That impulse was the same in The Wire writing room as it would be at the editorial board of a good newspaper.

“Good” being the operative word there. I don’t want to reduce The Wire to one big theme, but would you say that a major thrust of the series was the idea of institutions versus individuals?
Yeah, that permeated it. One of the things we were saying was that reform was becoming more and more problematic as moneyed interests—capitalism, which is sort of the ultimate Olympian GHod—become more entrenched in the postmodern world. Reform becomes more and more problematic because the status quo is arranged in such a way as to maximize profit and to exalt profit—particularly short-term profit—over long-term societal benefit and/or human beings.

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It's deeper than a Wam-Bam, catch the bad guys in an hour type TV show and after seeing all the series' and how all the elements interlock it really is worth it imo.
 
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