Recommended viewing?

[ffutures]

OK... Heroes, BSG, and Veronica Mars are all over. Blood Ties is on hiatus until later in the year. I'm watching Dr. Who as it airs, is there anything else I should be watching?

Someone suggested Painkiller Jane, and I've looked at the episodes they've shown, but haven't been very impressed - looks like a cross between Captain Scarlet and NCIS with vaguely defined "evil mutants" (who mostly seem to be very small scale evil) as the bad guys.

Any other recommendations?

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Have I by any chance missed Blood Ties being picked up on British TV, or are you watching it webly (something of which I've never got the hang)?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

A bittorrent or two might have accidentally found their way to my computer, but I couldn't possibly comment...

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Did you give The Dresden Files a look?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes - OK but I preferred the books, and on hiatus until next year? Or is it autumn?

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure if you'd seen the shows or not, and I'm with you -- I prefer the books. White Night was excellent.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Still waiting for the paperback on that one.

[thedivinegoat.livejournal.com]

Have you watched any Numb3rs?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Think I saw one episode and wasn't terribly interested.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OTOH I just noticed that the Dexter DVD will be out in august and looks reasonably cheap. Yay!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

And Eureka in July!

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Kim Possible & Avatar: The Last Airbender.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I don't think that either is quite my sort of thing, but thanks for the suggestions.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Having read your fanfic, I think you'd really like Kim Possible. It is like an animated Buffy without all the icky blood.

As far as Avatar goes, that's what I thought too... until I watched one. Both of 'em are only 20 minute investments of your time each, so you really should try one episode of each.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've seen the Kim Possible movie - it was OK but I didn't exactly fall in love with the concept. OK, I'll give Avatar a shot.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

Look for Charlie Jade and Regenesis. The former is about three realities and a guy who travels between them. Not your normal TV and takes a couple of episodes to warm up. The latter has two seasons under its belt, is about a North American Bioterror Research/Response team and has some damn good character development and story lines.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - Charlie Jade certainly sounds interesting. I'm not sure the terrorism thing does but I'll take a look.

[w00hoo.livejournal.com]

I've been watching Supernatural on ITV from episode 1 last year and it ticks a lot of boxes for me. Some of the plot lines are a bit too 'this weeks urban myth' but I like the way a lot of the dialogue is written and the over arching plot is keeping me interested. Negatives, I've heard people comment on the acting not being great, but that's obviously something I'm not overly sensitive to (unless we're talking the guy who played Anakin/Darth in the 'second' two movies). The background plot may just be a 'keep watching/making this' tease rather than something with a predetermined end point (ala Buffy's absolute season arcs). Apparently they've got funding to film a third season.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

For some reason Supernatural leaves me cold, no idea why.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

cruising through your entries - I agree on this. I think it's because the plotlines are so incredibly derivative. Not that much of scifi/fantasy isn't, but, well, there are only so many "homages" a show can do before I think it's just ripping off. The few episodes I tried to watch were rehashes of Buffy, Xfiles and many other things I'd already seen.

[alasdair1076.livejournal.com]

A couple;

-The Unit-David Mamet and Shaun Ryan's series about everyday Delta Force folk. Despite the astoundingly macho premise it's actually an unusually subdued, bleak little series with a jet black streak of humour and a phenomenal cast. There's an interesting parallel between the way the Unit itself is led by Jonas Blane (The always excellent Denis Haysbert) and how their wives are led by his own wife Molly (Regina Taylor). If you watch no others, 'Exposure' at least is worth your time. Set on the annual 'Day of the Dead' weekend where the Unit remember the fallen, it flashes between Blane telling the son of a friend what really happened to his father and Unit newbie Bob Brown in an honest to God farce plot that's actually funny.

-Cold Case-Series 3 of this has actually been really good, and surprisingly ambitious. They seem to have calmed down on the 'woman in a man's world' thing, turned it into far more of an ensemble piece and the end result is at times, phenomenal. There's a couple of real emotional gut punches in there, as well as some really cool 'gimmick' cases, including a depression era murder and the murder of a post-war female journalist.

-The Sandbaggers-Gloriously low budget and unpleasant ITV cold war drama series from the '70s. Roy Marsden stars as the head of the Sandbaggers, the special section of British Intelligence charged with the really unpleasant and deniable jobs. A clear precursor to The West Wing in terms of setting (Upwards of ninety percent of any given episode is Marsden talking to someone) and unflinchingly dark.

Oh and another recommendation for Regenesis. The first season in particular is a cheerfully uncompromising show about the cutting edge of biology and what happens when you step beyond that edge. Big ideas presented pragmatically and well.

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

"Oh and another recommendation for Regenesis. The first season in particular is a cheerfully uncompromising show about the cutting edge of biology and what happens when you step beyond that edge. Big ideas presented pragmatically and well."

I'm not sure it was always consistent in that respect.

I mean, you're presented with a baby designed to be a carrier for a deadly disease, living proof that *somebody* has developed radically advanced genetic engineering, and you tell the mother that there's *no* chance of a cure *ever* being developed (while the child, presumably, is reared in a bubble similar to those used for people with inherited immune deficiencies)? Really? Not in ten years, or even twenty? When the baby herself is living proof that the science and medicine involved are progressing rapidly?

Now, if they had said to the mother simply that there was no guarantee, that there was always the possibility that the problem would prove as intractable as cancer or the common cold, and she'd responded in the same way to that, that would have made sense to me.

[alasdair1076.livejournal.com]

That's a fair point actually. It's just about explainable by the main character's tendency to be over dramatic but it is one of the show's weaker points.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I saw The Sandbaggers first time around - someone mentioned it was on DVD a few months ago, I'll have to take a look.