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[TV] MARCH 2016 DISCUSSION THREAD


RIPPA

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"American Crime" wrapped up Wednesday.

That's actually a poor choice of words since nothing got "wrapped up" - no resolution to the main story at all. I'm not a big fan of ambiguous endings. It often is a copout used when actually resolving a story is too hard. I think, to some degree, that's what happened here. No good way to end the story so just...don't.

I also didn't like that the show never once mentioned self-defense for Taylor in the shooting. He was LEAVING when Wes grabbed him and threatened to kill him. He had every reason to believe that threat was credible, thus self-defense.

Great show and I'm sad the season is over already. Can't wait for season 3!

I was a little underwhelmed by this season; it didn't hit the emotional extremes of season 1. It was still a show that I looked forward to every week, though.

 

 

I didn't mind them not clarifying what happened to Taylor that night, since the rape is almost incidental to the aftermath.  But, yeah, I would have preferred a more definite ending at the end.  No character got closure or turned a corner.  Nearly every character is left up in the air, at least emotionally.  I would have preferred to get a sense that at least a couple of the main characters had come to terms with the situation(s) and were ready to move on, or at least begin to deal with events.  No one seems to be able to do that here. 

 

Beyond that, it seemed unnecessary to leave the "who released the medical records" question hanging.

 

I was really disinterested in anything involving Sebastian, the hacker with the bad mustache.  By the finale, I was checking email whenever he was onscreen.

 

Great show, though.  Wife and I were hooked almost immediately.  If there's a season 3, Huffman and Hutton better be back.  I'd like to see Hope Davis get a bigger role next season too.

 

I haven't seen Season 1 yet.  Just went to Amazon to buy s1 on DVD and apparently there isn't a s1 DVD set.  We can still watch the show (Amazon has streaming rights, apparently), but we'd prefer to buy the DVD.  Disappointing. 

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The People vs. OJ is quite silly, focuses too much on the Kardashians and is somewhat miscast in places...but, you know, it's turned into a hell of a TV show.

 

It's an intriguing look at what happens when normal(ish) people unwittingly get thrust into the spotlight. And the sad thing is? None of them ever really got passed it. One way or another, it defined them all.  On both sides. 

 

Like, poor Marcia. It's almost impossible not to feel bad for her watching this.

 

And I'm one of the ones who thinks she quite badly fucked up the case. 

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The People vs. OJ is quite silly, focuses too much on the Kardashians and is somewhat miscast in places...but, you know, it's turned into a hell of a TV show.

 

It's an intriguing look at what happens when normal(ish) people unwittingly get thrust into the spotlight. And the sad thing is? None of them ever really got passed it. One way or another, it defined them all.  On both sides. 

 

Like, poor Marcia. It's almost impossible not to feel bad for her watching this.

 

And I'm one of the ones who thinks she quite badly fucked up the case. 

 

Has anything come out that's really been BAD about the OJ case?

 

When you have material that good, and characters that wild - it's pretty much impossible to mess up a tv show about it.

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Nope. Hell, didn't the creators want to end it like six years ago?

 

Yep.  Eric Kripke - the creator and original showrunner - intended it to run five seasons and he left the show after season 5.  It's been rumored to be in it's last season for three or four years now - and every year, the CW renews it.

 

I don't make much of an effort to keep current with it, but I do binge watch it every so often so I end up catching up.  It's... kinda mediocre, imo.  I usually don't enjoy the monster of the week eps. The mythology eps tend to hold my attention, but they have a tendency to spin storylines out for multiple seasons without any satisfactory payoff.  Generally, the show has gotten good at running in place.

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Ditto. I fully expected it to get cancelled; I mean, it's pretty much the lowest-rated show on the CW, even though it deserves the polar opposite of that. I'm still just stunned that the "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" chick has an entire broadcast TV show devoted to doing her bizarre geek-fueled metanarrative musical numbers about crippling neurosis and chronic personality disorders. I think I've watched "I'm The Villain In My Own Story" from the last episode maybe a dozen times over now, it's just absolutely brilliant and hilarious shit.

Two long decades after it kick-started the entire HBO one-hour-drama genre, I'm watching Oz for the first time. It's pretty damn good, exceptionally well acted, and surprisingly not-wholly-nihilistic for a gritty cable show about maximum security prison. But the most interesting part is just watching HBO's original dramatic prototype trying to figure out the whole tone and style of storytelling which would come to dominate the hour-long programs on that network. Oz is a bit goofier and more flamboyantly melodramatic than the later dramas would be; all those segments where Harold Perrineau is narrating the show from his weird spinning glass cube are certainly not the type of thing you'd come to expect from HBO, it's more like a 90s indy film combined with off-off-Broadway performance art. And holy shit, but J.K. Simmons is the man on this show. He plays the most despicable character in the entire cast, but does it with such effortless and creepy charm that he's immediately the head-and-shoulders-above standout in a really competitive ensemble cast.

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My life is riven with coincidences. You just mention Oz and I just saw Simmons on Botchamania. I come here to talk about buying Tales from the Crypt, Season One yesterday and Tales from the Hood came on right after I finished watching it last night. And for some reason they're remaking Tales from the Crypt when the garish revisions of the original stories need to go nowhere near M. Night whatever. 

 

Man, that first one. William Sadler is right up there with J.K. Simmons as character actor great at playing detestable villain. They came in hard with the first episode and the next five had way more humor; it was like they realized that THAT level of darkness wasn't gonna play. 

 

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The People vs. OJ is quite silly, focuses too much on the Kardashians and is somewhat miscast in places...but, you know, it's turned into a hell of a TV show.

 

It's an intriguing look at what happens when normal(ish) people unwittingly get thrust into the spotlight. And the sad thing is? None of them ever really got passed it. One way or another, it defined them all.  On both sides. 

 

Like, poor Marcia. It's almost impossible not to feel bad for her watching this.

 

And I'm one of the ones who thinks she quite badly fucked up the case. 

 

Has anything come out that's really been BAD about the OJ case?

 

 

 

Not sure who said it but I remember one great quote about the OJ thing: "Never have so many smart people looked so bad, for so little."

 

With the exception of (obviously) the families of the two victims, every single person came out of this looking either inept or just plain corrupt.

 

It was a hideous media circus that ruined everyone involved with it. Oh, and in the end: OJ screwed himself and ended up in jail anyway. So what was this all for?

 

A lot of lives got wrecked and disrupted irrevocably because of this, beyond just the victims. The genius of the TV show is that it recognizes this. 

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I think they're trying to say that the OJ case was both the birth of the current media celebrity obsession era (the fact that the TV network cut away from the NBA finals to show the low speed car chase and all), and the birth of the cynical anti-celebrity media snark era where it was no longer to be assumed that just because someone was rich and famous it made them an unquestionable paragon of virtue. They opened with Rodney King and the LA Riots to establish that white America had only just realised the level of racism within the police force... The idea that you can draw a line and say this was pre-OJ America, this is post-OJ America and they are two different places. And I think sticking the Kardashian kids in front of the camera at every opportunity is playing into that, because they're a symptom of that. The whole Kim Kardashian thing started because there was an obsession with celebrity sex tapes (because of Pamela Anderson's, and then Paris Hilton's), but there weren't really any more. Then Kim K's appeared, and it was "That's OJ's lawyer's daughter!" "She doesn't look like Johnny Cochran's daughter?" "His other lawyer." "Robert Shapiro's daughter?" "His other other lawyer." "F Lee Bailey?" "Other other other." "Alan Dershowitz?" "Other." "How many fucking lawyers did he have?"

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 I think a prevailing theme of the show is that the Kardashian kids became so obsessed with fame because of the trial and this partly led to all the reality TV wackiness.

 

Granted, it seems a bit too Freudian. And obvious.

 

But it's not an idea you can ever quite dismiss.

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Someone on some websites summed it up for me really well: "it was twenty years ago and I'm still sick of it."

 

Eh, the OJ case was intriguing. In an Othello meets Jerry Springer type-way.

 

There were too many interesting personalities involved for it to not be fascinating. 

 

That they got a good TV show out of all the wreckage says a lot. 

 

Bullshit, yeah. But compelling bullshit, nonetheless. 

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A girl i work with is about to watch the "Ozymandias" episode of Breaking Bad over the weekend...... i can't wait to see the results of her soul being crushed on Monday morning.

UPDATE:She has lost faith in everything.

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