telly wot is not dr who, shock horror

[usuallyhats]

I have been watching some things other than Dr Who recently.

- Pushing Daisies, which I've actually just given up on due to it being twee and irritating, especially that voiceover, argh. Very disappointing what with Bryan Fuller also being responsible for the marvellous Dead Like Me (which I have nearly seen all the way to the end of, in the right order too! This is quite rare) but it just had this air of "look how quirky we are" which was rather annoying.

- Lovefilm sent me the first disc of Battlestar Galactica S3, which I am watching right now. Sometimes I think BSG is really good but it tends to go in waves whereby it gradually annoys me more and more until I am just on the point of giving up, when suddenly it gets good again. At the moment I am chiefly watching the Ellen/Tigh storyline and thinking how fab it would have been if the genders had been switched. This way it is a bit clichéd. Oh but now Gaeta is having a scene, yay! Also the octagons annoy me, partly because they are my least favourite shape (I find them sinister), mostly because they make no sense. They don't even tesselate! Every time I see an octagonal bit of paper I can't help thinking "why did you cut the corners off of that perfectly good rectangle? What did you do with the corners?" On the other hand it all looks really good and I still have lots of leftover goodwill from the miniseries, which I loved greatly.

- Now, positivity! Lovefilm also sent me Adam Adamant Lives! which is all kinds of stylish and fun (though I am eager to find out if they can get through an entire episode without using the Montage of Unconsciousness). And they sent me the first two episodes of Hornblower which has many shiny things like tall ships and heroics and lots of actors I vaguely or completely recognise and satisfying villain comeuppances and a wide variety of splendid hats. The straw one from episode two is my favourite so far. As well as being rather fine in its own right, Ioan Gruffudd also wears it terribly well.

Comments

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

That sounds exactly how I felt about BSG. I wanted so bad to like it, and it just kept annoying me and annoying me. And then it'd do something awesome and I'd forgive it, and it'd start annoying me all over again. Sigh. I eventually did give up around S3, but I'm gonna try to finish it off now, I think. @_@


I'm sad you didn't like Pushing Daisies though. It is a bit over quirky, but I think it's cute.

[usuallyhats]

I wish BSG would be annoying or be great, not both, heh. But I think I still like it enough to keep going though.

Pushing Daisies had its moments, and I quite liked Chuck, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. Plus there would be bits when I'd think, "hey, this is just like Dead Like Me except... not as good. I should watch DLM instead." Which didn't help.

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Awwww. I love Dead Like Me, and although I could see some similarities, I thought it was different enough to enjoy. And, I loved all the characters (Ned, Chuck, Emerson, Olive) so even if the stories were a bit farfetched, I didn't mind. Turns out strong characters are much more required for my enjoyment than strong plot.

BSG lacks much of both. Character I want to love but can't, and plost I want to make sense but don't, ahahaahaha. I hope you do perserve. There are definitely some great moments, and I do want to watch it all. I just got too frustrated watching it live and having to wait for it week to week. So now that it's almost over I can catch up a bit more easily.

Needs moar Blake's 7, imo. XD

[usuallyhats]

The Pushing Daisies characters never really grabbed me like the Dead Like Me ones did, that was definitely a factor.

I like a lot of the BSG characters, but don't really love any of them. I get it in four episode chunks on DVD, definitely better than one a week!

Needs moar Blake's 7, imo. XD
This is a universal truth. *eyes lovefilm hopefully*

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. That's how the B5 characters are for me. I just wasn't grabbed by any of them. I do think DLM is better/more interesting than PD, but I like both a lot. XD

I don't love any of the BSG characters overly, either. Though there are some I like a lot more. They're just not the main characters, which makes caring about their plight difficult; I tended to want Gaius and Six to win, ahahaha.


What is lovefilm? >_>

[usuallyhats]

I liked the B5 characters, some of them a lot, but I was never really fannish about them - I was happy with just what we saw on screen, I suppose.

Lovefilm's one of the British equivalents of Netflix, which we don't seem to have over here for some reason. I get a lot of my TV from there because I've only got the freeview channels, which is a fairly limited selection, so I end up watching things in odd bursts!

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

I find B5 and BSG filling me with the same sort of feeling about the main characters. I don't care at all about what happens to Sheridan, Ivanova, Delenn, Garibaldi, Franklin, etc. The only characters whose fates I really care about are Vir, Lennier, Londo and G'Kar. Which is really sad. I felt the same way with BSG. I didn't care at all about Lee, Kara, Adama, Tigh, Tyrol, Cally, etc. The characters I was interested in were Billy, Gaius, Gaeta, Six and, on occasion, Roslin. It's just sad when all of the main characters could die and I wouldn't care.


And I didn't know about lovefilm! That's kinda cool. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I can point you to B7 downloads, if that's an option for you.

[ghost2.livejournal.com]

I didn't care for Pushing Daisies either. It seems like just about everyone who's seen it likes it, but it did not work for me. The pilot was okay, not as good as I'd heard it was, not nearly, but not terrible. The following two episodes scared me away. They were dull and I almost fell asleep. I tried to watch two later episodes and was so bored again that I quit. The show felt quirky for the sake of being quirky, and it was so utterly precious in places that I wanted to vomit.

I quit BSG some time ago. Probably late season 2 or early 3, though it's hard to remember. Just plain lost interest.

[usuallyhats]

Unfortunately the laptop I'm using at the moment is 5 1/2 years old, so downloading isn't really an option, but thanks anyway! And I do kind of like the random element of renting tv - always thinking "so, what am I going to be watching this week?"

With B5 and BSG I get the feeling that the characters and the world are very set, very defined, so they don't really engage my imagination that much, even the ones I liked the best.

[usuallyhats]

The show felt quirky for the sake of being quirky

Yes, that's exactly it - it didn't feel organic, like it had grown out of the characters and their situation, but more like it had been imposed from outside.