Hi, friends! Happy Sunday! I hope you had good weekends. I did a bunch of yardwork, so my farmer tan is getting even stronger. Shrug.
I finished watching the Queen Charlotte series on Netflix, it was okay. I didn’t like it anywhere close to how much I liked seasons 1 and 2 of Bridgerton, and that’s because it wasn’t a romance. That’s my preferred reading genre, and the genre has basic rules for how story arcs work.
One of my great frustrations is that aside from shitty made for tv crap on Hallmark or whatever knockoff Hallmark channels exist, you don’t really see romances get made as movies or series. You get side plots, like Geralt and Yennifer in the Witcher, but then season 2 her character just devolves into “baby-crazy woman” so that took any joy out of it for me. Or we get shows that feature a relationship as a main element but then shit has to fall apart or they actually hate each other, someone murders someone, etc etc.
I guess the assumption is that romances are (1) mostly for women and (2) too predictable. (1) ewww it’s true we do have cooties, also people enjoy all sorts of movies so that’s a very limiting perspecitive. (2) so is every other fucking major genre. How many fucking superhero movies do we all sit through knowing that nope, Batman really isn’t going to die. Shit it took Marvel like 20 movies to kill off a few Avengers finally. We know Liam Neeson is going to murder all the bad guys and rescue the scared young white girl that’s been kidnapped or whatever. Etc etc.
So yes, I wish more romances got made as series or movies. Not chick lit, actual romances.
What genres, sports, etc do you wish were more commonly made into shows?
I think part of the problem with romances is the writers get way too formulaic, and there’s not enough drama for its own sake independent of the romance.
One series I really liked was the Before…. movies with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke that follow them through the years. You know Jesse and Celine from early on in the first movie, but the ways they change through the rest of the movies are still a surprise.
I don’t think there necessarily needs to be drama outside of the relationship, though? Like small-focused stories aren’t inherently bad. I say this as a romance reader who gets annoyed when suddenly there’s spies or secret plots from super bad guys or whatever, just write good characters!
I got nothing, I certainly enjoy a big action movie or scifi too, but those are also pretty damn formulaic.
Oh sure, it’s just if you’re trying to build convincing characters, say a rich civil engineer and a poor folk singer who works part time in a diner, you’d better nail those parts of their lives and all of the conflicts and complications that come with them.
If there’s an issue to work out between them, make it real and based on what they care about, not some silly misunderstanding. Build the world, even if it’s not spies and aliens.
Also I would love to watch some MLS games on regular TV. I would love to watch STL City SC play, but Apple TV got the exclusive contract and I’m not motivated to go sign up for yet another streaming service.
Just a channel filled with any good adult drama will do. AMC did for a while. HBO owned it for a long time till the ghouls at Discovery bought it.
I hate reality TV so I avoid it. If I want to see unlikeable people do really stupid shit that makes me miserable then I can sit in on a managers meeting at work.
And please no reruns of 80s shows. Most of them aren’t all that good either.
Yeah I think HBO is going to go to shit now, which sucks because they had some great stuff.
I don’t mind reality TV when it’s people doing stuff but not being shitbags. Like there’s a show on HBOMax that I’m watching where this farmer in Atlanta does super expensive landscaping projects so wealthy people can play at growing their own food. But it’s just glorified gardening with the tension being like “oh let’s move the chicken coop over there” and not people being assholes.
I’d really like to see another good low stakes hangout comedy/drama with a fun ensemble. Cheers, Lodge 49, Always Sunny… The kind of show where a mix of people with different outlooks connect and bicker and talk.
Oh, yes! The right comedic chemistry between the cast and those shows are golden. I loved New Girl for that reason, the dudes were so fucking hilarious together.
i could do with more space sci/fi that isnt star trek
specifically more like firefly or the expanse…or even battlestar gallactica
@farscythe Me too! It’s about time someone delivers more sci-fi.
Have you watched Dark Matter or Killjoys?
i have not seen either of those yet…tho…i think i caught snippets of dark matter when it aired on tv over here….usually the very end of an episode
i’ll go check them out…if i can…netflix only here
They are so old now…there may be other ways to source them. If you do that VPN thing, CW streams it for free.
I would like to see lightly fictionalized soap operas about members of Britain’s House of Lords from, say, the 1830s to 1914, when the whole system started falling apart.