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[lemon10]

Slowly watching my way through taskmaster (season 9 now), and I have to say Rhod back on season 7 really bugged me.

Like he just starts annoying, but pretty soon he goes into creepy then really creepy. And he just stole the entire dynamic of the show and would never stop being obnoxious. And he just kept going.

When James got angry at him and said the scoring of an episode was unfair because Rhod was the taskmaster's personal friend he was wrong. But he was right in that it felt like the only reason he was still on the show and wasn't kicked off was because he *was* his friend.

(And it does seem like James getting pissed off about scoring had an impact. In season 8 they were noticeably more generous with scoring (eg. 3 fives instead of a 5,4,3).
---
After doing a bit of research (interview) about it after the season it turns out that due to how its filmed they do all the tasks before any of the theater stuff. So going into it he didn't know how the show worked or that Greg was the one doing all the scoring so he just insulted him the entire time in the tasks so he had to keep it up for the whole season.
Which fine, makes it a little less obnoxious in one way.
But it also means that he was too lazy to even watch a single part of a single episode. If he had spent five minutes doing that before working on the show for like 6 months then he wouldn't have spent all that time just to lose when probably would have won otherwise.
But it probably isn't him being lazy, its worse, its him being unprofessional.

[hector13]

He’s a comedian and it’s a comedy show :p James getting annoyed with Rhod is funny, as well as wholly justified, and quite frankly Rhod has some flashes of brilliance in it too, so there was no reason to kick him off.

I mean, they win a gold plated head of Greg Davies (I think it looks more like Rich Hall, personally) which isn’t particularly prestigious. Rhod failing made it entertaining, and Rhod spending 10 minutes with his head in his hands before coming up with something brilliant was also entertaining.

[lemon10]

He’s a comedian and it’s a comedy show :p James getting annoyed with Rhod is funny, as well as wholly justified, and quite frankly Rhod has some flashes of brilliance in it too, so there was no reason to kick him off.

I mean, they win a gold plated head of Greg Davies (I think it looks more like Rich Hall, personally) which isn’t particularly prestigious. Rhod failing made it entertaining, and Rhod spending 10 minutes with his head in his hands before coming up with something brilliant was also entertaining.

Well, not kick him off, but at least telling him to knock it off.
Or for him to realize once they started the theater bits to change what items he sent in.
...
Yes yes, he thought it was funny, but he really didn't need to commit to it this hard when he had no clue what was going on.
---
And people do care about winning. They spend a lot of time doing some of the longer events spread out over six months of time. They get competitive so they can say they won. I know if I got on I would be totally 100% into winning.
Rhod even cared about winning once he got to a task,

Rhod spending 10 minutes with his head in his hands before coming up with something brilliant was also entertaining.

Rhod was brilliant. If he hadn't known the taskmaster and went into it like a normal gameshow he would have 100% won.
He did seem to have some anger issues though due to what he did to alex. Still, even with that he could have won.

[hector13]

From my experience of Rhod Gilbert, angry Welshman is his “character”.

[Folly]

Picard and Carnival Row each just started new seasons! Yay!


I've just finished the first season of That 90's Show. It's alright.

They've done a great job of re-capturing the general mood of the predecessor, That 70's Show. Returning to the same set with most of the old cast, along with a new generation who directly mirror the roles of the old generation, it's like they pick up right where they left off without missing a beat.

My main complaint is that the show is not particularly engaging. This pacing worked well for That 70's Show, whose weekly installments could be easily digested as a casual look at the lives of teens in a past generation. But That 90's Show dropped on a streaming service where episodes could be binged back to back, and there's just not enough excitement or intrigue to keep the show interesting while taking more than one installment at a time.
Also Ozzie, the spiritual successor to Fez, is just super annoying and I hate him.

Second season is already on the way. When it comes, I'll probably try to take it more slowly.

[hector13]

I watched the animated series of The Clone Wars recently, and it was pretty good after the first couple of season. Starts of real slow, but it gets good eventually, particularly into season 4 onward.

I also watched the Tales of the Jedi which outlines Count Dooku’s fall of the dark side (and had Ian McDiarmid reprise his role as Palpatine!) as well as Ahsoka Tano (one of the character’s introduced in the Clone Wars) being born and her people learning she’s force sensitive, as well as one bit of training that has significant relevance to a story arc in the Clone Wars, as well as what happens to her after the series finished.

All in all, it was quite enjoyable.

[brewer bob]

I've finally gathered the courage to try and watch the Rings of Power, and my god, this is absolutely the worst fantasy I've ever seen -- it's plain torture to get through each episode. And this is saying quite a lot since I love to watch shitty fantasy and chuckle to it. But this, this is just unbearable.

And it's not that they completely f* up Tolkien. It's just bad, bad, BAD in every sense possible.

[Robsoie]

Black Sails

If you remove the absurd amount of gratuitous and useless sex scenes (typical Startz production) it's a frankly really good pirate themed series.

 

[McTraveller]

I've finally gathered the courage to try and watch the Rings of Power, and my god, this is absolutely the worst fantasy I've ever seen -- it's plain torture to get through each episode. And this is saying quite a lot since I love to watch shitty fantasy and chuckle to it. But this, this is just unbearable.

And it's not that they completely f* up Tolkien. It's just bad, bad, BAD in every sense possible.

I didn't think it was that bad.  I thought it tolerable, with decent production quality.  I enjoyed the score, the scenery, most of the casting seemed ok - except for perhaps Isildur, that kid was kind of meh.

As for the story - well if you don't want a modification of the original content, read the books? I know that may sound condescending, but you have to accept that every adaptation is going to change something.

I wonder if this is a generational thing?  Also note that Tolkien has some interesting concepts in his works, but the writing itself really didn't strike me as all that great - easy to read, but not any kind of knock-your-socks-off stuff.  My take is that Tolkien was pop-culture of its day.

My final take: they didn't make as many egregious modifications as they did to Wheel of Time. 

[Robsoie]

Changes are often unavoidable in adaptations yes, but changes should still respect the source material.
Jackson on his 2 trilogies made changes here and there but overall the characters were still relatively faithfull to the originals.

While in Rings of Power (if you liked the source material of course as if you don't it's obvious it will not bother you)  it's hard to not be infuriated at how they wrote Galadriel.
In the source material, -at that time of the story- she's thousand year old, married to Celeborn and mother to a child (that will become Elrond's wife) and is the mightiest (even before the ring) and most exceptional of the elves, wisdom and power made into an elf.
On an interesting note she's so wise that she was also the only one that distrust completely "that guy" and the only one that does not get fooled by his lies, at all.

While in the tv series she's acting like a 20 years old that is struggling with her emotions, at least they kept her as a strong sword fighter, but the semi-romance with "that guy" that manipulate her so easily was really ridiculous.

That said the series had all the ingredients to be really great, the high budget is felt in the sceneries, backgrounds and effects that are often amazing and awe inspiring, the actors mostly play their scripts well and often look the part (i was worried on the elves after seeing the absolute shit that was Witcher Blood Origins, but fortunately they all look like those stern-looking elves as they should be).

But damn those characterisations changes ...

[Folly]

My biggest issue with Rings of Power, like Lord of the Rings before it, is the title. I go into these stories expecting magic rings that have ridiculous powers, and heroic figures abusing those powers to turn the tides of wars and influence nations. What I get instead is a story about a lame cursed ring of invisibility that barely even gets used, and then a prequel with a whole season that only barely mentions rings in the last 10 seconds of the final episode.

Aside from that, the palpable melodrama in RoP was taxing at times, but not as bad as LotR. I consider it a small step in the right direction.

[brewer bob]

As for the story - well if you don't want a modification of the original content, read the books? I know that may sound condescending, but you have to accept that every adaptation is going to change something.

I was expecting it not to follow the original content, so that's not at all the issue here. From the start I tried to get into a mindset that this is its own fantasy world and so on.

A tv series/movie is a very much different media than a book, so of course it has to be adapted. I'm happy if it doesn't follow the original story, but if it does not convey the mood or spirit of the source material at all, then that's a completely different thing. And this one fails in it even worse than the Jackson Hobbit trilogy.

Even if you think of the Rings of Power not happening at all in Middle-Earth (which is how I approached it -- or tried, at least), it's still just really awkward and embarrassing to look at.

This review sums pretty much what I thought about the series (contains spoilers):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2022/10/18/the-rings-of-power-season-1-review-amazons-arrogant-betrayal-of-the-lord-of-the-rings/?sh=70113a281839

And a quote from it:

Amazon’s “adaptation” is badly made TV with a nonsensical story built on wild coincidences, contrived plotlines and a blatant disregard for the various building blocks that make any story complete: Logical character choices, a sense of time and place, and narrative tension—not to mention an overly large cast of mostly forgettable and uncharismatic characters, some wholly made up for the show and others changed entirely as to be almost unrecognizable.

[McTraveller]

Have the writers of that review watched any TV in the past, oh, decade? It’s all contrived coincidences and bizarre character choices, relying on big-budget effects instead of anything else?

[Il Palazzo]

Even if that were true, it wouldn't make bad shows good.

[ChairmanPoo]

I didnt find it that bad. It was entertaining at least. The bait and switcheroo is probably my biggest complaint