Author:
Dell
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Date:
8/22/2022 3:23:29 PM
Subject:
RE: I'm like 3 years late on this but The Boys is
I'm as tired of Marvel culture as much as the next overexposed customer. But with The Boys, the super-people are actually (lol) drunks, addicts, psychopaths, and serial dolphin rapists. They're impossibly shitty people corrupted by celebrity and ratings-culture. The show is about a team of broken people trying to take them down. It's a pretty refreshing antidote to Marvel and DC's take, even if the show isn't perfect. I'm not trying to hype it up or anything, but I haven't had much attention span for television lately because so much of it feels like an obligation, and it was nice to find something that kept my interest.
Sim, quoting you here: "My experience with these has been almost uniformly bad. There are exceptions, e.g., The Sopranos, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, Black Sails, Game of Thrones, etc. But for every one of these, there are dozens of bottle rockets that gain a little altitude, start on a predictably bad flight path, and fizzle. They have a first good episode or two, and then they try to stretch what should not be stretched because they don't know quite what to do. I used to think they fired the good writers and hired cheaper ones, but now I think that they hire good writers to take the creators' seminal ideas and shape them into a couple of compelling episodes. After that, the creators step in and try to write/direct their own material, and they're not professional enough to carry it off."
haha, I'd actually say that the shows you listed, as good as they are, aren't exceptions but examples. The first season of the Sopranos was good, then it got repetitive. Deadwood had a remarkable first and second season, but the third season focused on extraneous characters like Odell and had a weak ending. (The Deadwood movie was fantastic, though. I don't know how Ian McShane isn't considered one of the greatest living actors.) Boardwalk Empire had the same problem the Sopranos did, where past every season but the first, the anti-hero protagonist deals with marriage problems and the Villain of the Season. Prestige TV from the last couple decades had some great production values and incredible acting, but you're right, the writing started strong but got weaker as it went on. (Hell, even season five of The Wire went bad.) A lot of shows would be better as a one-season series (Stranger Things is a good example), but of course it's impossible for TV producers to leave money on the table. So what we get is 17 seasons of The Walking Dead.
