To your point, if TLOUp2 ended at that moment and you had to wait years for the next game, gamers would have had the same exact reaction. A season of television has to be satisfying in its own right, and this season of TLOU just wasn't.
Yea this is fair! I played the game so I really enjoyed how the finale ended but if I didn't know what came next I would be so confused. I feel like they made the show for gamers and have failed to adapt some of the storytelling to TV so far.
Yeah I was stunned they followed same structure as the game. My assumption since the start of S1 was that they HAD to resequence the narrative of the second game, even though (in my opinion) that would neuter the power of the story.
Ending on a cliffhanger is always a roll of the dice. But they should have made season 2 at least 10 episodes to get the ball rolling on Abby's story. Even if this meant that s2 didn't come out until late 2025 or early 2026. It is better to release a complete season later than an incomplete one sooner. House of the Dragon season 2 is another example of this.
I'm fine with a cliffhanger but not a stupid one. Does anyone truly believe that a show is going to kill its two main leads in season 2? It was pretty insulting to our collective intelligence if they think that was an effective cliffhanger
I actually for a minute did have some hope that they would be bold enough to kill off Ellie at that point BECAUSE they had been willing to unexpectedly kill of Joel and because I didn't play the game. But then I immediately found out that it was just a fake out and I was disappointed and didn't find it an effective cliffhanger
In Dept Q the big house that ultimately gets trashed was built by my parents, converting a WW2 radar station in the early 2000s. Got on the phone to them immediately as the kids jaws hit the floor (they sold up in 2018 and moved to a nearby village) and the underwhelming reply I got was "oh, we don’t have Netflix, but we read about it in the local paper last year".
I normally agree with the majority of your reviews, but I don't think you are giving Nathan Fielder enough credit for what he accomplished this season on "The Rehearsal." While I agree that his style can be a bit undecipherable, his show is always bringing things to the table that no other show does. He may not have been able to directly cause real life changes in how pilots and co-pilots communicate, but he was successful in getting this important issue out in the open. He definitely is on to something that rectifying pilot communication could lead to less aircraft disasters.
But that subject is discussed in a LOT of documentaries, docu-series, and other reporting about air disasters. Fielder didn’t discover this, nor is he the first to try to publicize it.
That is probably true, but this is the first time that this subject has been brought to this wide of an audience. I watch a fair amount of airline disaster documentaries (e.g., Netflix one about the boeing crashes) and they usually only focus on the mechanical issues that led to the crash.
There's a full chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's OUTLIERS on the topic, focusing on cultural factors in pilot communication and in particular how Korean Air righted its operations. This was a mammoth bestselling book.
But why would he need to discover it/be the first to try to publicise it for it be worth a season? I’m sure a lot of people who don’t routinely research this topic were surprised to hear about it — myself included. It also seems to me like, as with interpersonal dynamics, this has been an interest of Fielder’s for a long time, and maybe that’s why and how he can keep himself so fully invested and give us an entire season and an amazing feat like this one.
There were more than a few laughs in the episode, but I mostly felt and thought a lot of things watching the finale, and have been thinking about it every day since I watched it. It didn’t make for a purely comedic experience, no, but I found it to be both earnest and entertaining in surprising ways. It also seems to be the closest we’ve got to seeing Fielder on the screen, rather than the Nathan persona, and though that was never a requirement nor expectation I had as a viewer, it certainly felt new and newly interesting.
I don’t care as much about the show being funny above all else as long as it remains so absurdly interesting that I don’t feel the word “interesting” covers how interesting it is. Fielder manages to make things that make me laugh hard and think hard and sometimes even, surprisingly, feel hard, and cry. To me that’s a lot, and much more than “just” being funny. (Not to downplay “just” being funny, of course.)
That Hacks finale was fine (definitely not the direction I expected) but Deborah's translator probably deserves an award for converting all of Deborah's material into jokes that would land in three different languages on the fly. She even got in a good ad lib.
I get that its based on a video game so the entire plot was pretty much baked in before they even started filming.
Having said that, I don't recall ever seeing a show quite misunderstand what people liked about the show and completely screw it up in such a unique way.
Pedro Pascal is amazing in that role, and to completely sideline him because they want to stay true to a video game is just bizarre to me. IMHO the best shows learn from what is working, abandon what isn't, and improve. Part of that is being able to switch from the plan, as it were. The fact that they would not change the plot, given the gold they had in Pascal and Ramsey, is super frustrating to me as a viewer.
Even if they didn't want to change the overall plot from the video game, there was 5 years from the end of S1 to the start of S2. They could've explored that five years more! There's lots of stories that could be told there!
I see your point, but surely one practical challenge is that Pascal initially signed on for the role with an understanding that his time commitment would be to appear in all of S1 and a few episodes of S2. Pascal's IMDB page lists quite a few other recent and upcoming projects, so it's an open question if he would have agreed to a bigger commitment to TLOU.
Season 2 of TLOU is just so bad it has me questioning whether season 1 was actually as good as I remember or was I just carried along by the amazing chemistry between Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey?
So many things were poorly done in this season and now we have to wait probably around two years or so for S3 so we can see the resolution to the schmuckbait (love that term, Alan) cliffhanger. It reminds me of a joke from Annie Hall. "The food here is so bad...and such small portions".
Watched the first two episodes of Adults and the whole plot with the blonde girl and her job/insurance made me way too anxious — I always had trouble with similar plots on Girls. Your review makes me at least want to see Charlie Cox on there, but damn!
Likewise, your article on The Better Sisters seems far more entertaining than the show itself. The only other note I had about the show was that not only is Kim Dickens working with a new generation of Milches, I had just rewatched Gone Girl and her character here seems to be the same “pointing out all the ways the character looks guilty” detective she played there. Gone Girl is still a pretty good movie/book, but it’s inspired an awful lot of thrillers that don’t have the same satirical bite, or do so in a way that’s less compelling/more drawn out.
My favorite part of Q Who? is the super weird Borg incubator that grew baby drones that they immediately hand waved away by the time they appeared next.
Maybe it was because the image of a sleeping baby loosely draped in those prosthetics was too creepy for those behind the scenes as well as those watching!
(Sorry I don’t have more to say about current events. I really need to start Poker Face)
Yeah, that and the high cost and difficult logistics involved of having a baby on set. I didn't stick with Picard but did any Star Trek series ever encounter Borg who don't look like assimilated humans? It would make sense that they "grew" Borg from babies, all the Borg look the same. 7 of 9 was evidence that didn't end up being canon but never the less.
Really would have liked Dept. Q if it had just been the investigators (Matthew Goode and company are wonderful.) , but was really put off by the kidnapping mystery. Much prefer the feature-length shows like Van der Valk or Vera. Perhaps a 9 episode season with 3, 3-episode mysteries. Created my own version by fast-forwarding through the yellowed-bathed bathysphere sections (like skipping Tom Bambadil when first reading Lord of the Rings).
I don’t think Hacks season 2 ended with them at odds. Deborah fired Ava but just to not hold Ava back.
Between seasons they kind of are at odds. Really they drifted apart and everything is ok by episode 2.
I mean… none of this disputes your opinion. Just that I think they always have their ups and downs… even if they don’t fully go at each other. Like the end of this season. I suspect next season will have it again! So prep yourself!
I'm enjoying Adults, but it really makes me pissed off at the modern TV industry. This is the exact kind of low-stakes show that should have seasons of 20ish episodes. It's popcorn, and there should be plenty of it. Doing this as 8 episode seasons just feels...meh
I didn't need this season of Hacks to end with Deborah and Ava at odds, but I did need it to, you know, actually do something. It felt like the entire episode was reverse engineered from its ending to connect to where we left off after last week's incredible climax. As good as the scene on the boat was, the entire affair left me feeling cold.
Thank you. That's exactly how I felt. Last week's episode was SO GOOD that it could have been the season finale, while this week felt very much like filler. I understand the creators' assertion that the show was never meant to be about late night, but I couldn't help wishing they'd given us a bit more. I would love to have seen Deborah fire Ava and look like a villain, only to learn she was secretly paying her via an old Hollywood Blacklist workaround.
Watched the first episode of Adults and I'm out. I live near where the show is supposed to take place and it's so clearly Toronto and not Queens I can't.
It can be unintentional funny though…I enjoyed Parenthood but it always hilarious when they would try to poorly pass SoCal locations as from the Bay Area (didn’t even try to hide the palm trees). The funniest one was using trying to use the UCLA entrance as the UC Berkeley campus.
I live in Minnesota, and during the initial "Little House on the Prairie" run we always laughed at the episodes that took place in the majestic mountains of Minnesota.
It's hard to turn off your brain and unsee something like that. The Last of Us S2 (and the game) literally changed Seattle's topography to fit some creative decisions. I have to keep telling myself the show takes place on an alternate Earth.
I would have liked more stories on Hacks about having a late-night show, but my guess is that every time the writers' room came up with an idea, someone said "Sanders did it."
Alan, I had the same reaction to And Just Like That. I’ve loved these characters for decades now, and have stayed with this iteration because the OG show was so good. But I think it’s time to move on. The original magic just isn’t there and I don’t even think a Samantha return could save this show.
To your point, if TLOUp2 ended at that moment and you had to wait years for the next game, gamers would have had the same exact reaction. A season of television has to be satisfying in its own right, and this season of TLOU just wasn't.
Yea this is fair! I played the game so I really enjoyed how the finale ended but if I didn't know what came next I would be so confused. I feel like they made the show for gamers and have failed to adapt some of the storytelling to TV so far.
Yeah I was stunned they followed same structure as the game. My assumption since the start of S1 was that they HAD to resequence the narrative of the second game, even though (in my opinion) that would neuter the power of the story.
Ending on a cliffhanger is always a roll of the dice. But they should have made season 2 at least 10 episodes to get the ball rolling on Abby's story. Even if this meant that s2 didn't come out until late 2025 or early 2026. It is better to release a complete season later than an incomplete one sooner. House of the Dragon season 2 is another example of this.
I'm fine with a cliffhanger but not a stupid one. Does anyone truly believe that a show is going to kill its two main leads in season 2? It was pretty insulting to our collective intelligence if they think that was an effective cliffhanger
I actually for a minute did have some hope that they would be bold enough to kill off Ellie at that point BECAUSE they had been willing to unexpectedly kill of Joel and because I didn't play the game. But then I immediately found out that it was just a fake out and I was disappointed and didn't find it an effective cliffhanger
In Dept Q the big house that ultimately gets trashed was built by my parents, converting a WW2 radar station in the early 2000s. Got on the phone to them immediately as the kids jaws hit the floor (they sold up in 2018 and moved to a nearby village) and the underwhelming reply I got was "oh, we don’t have Netflix, but we read about it in the local paper last year".
I normally agree with the majority of your reviews, but I don't think you are giving Nathan Fielder enough credit for what he accomplished this season on "The Rehearsal." While I agree that his style can be a bit undecipherable, his show is always bringing things to the table that no other show does. He may not have been able to directly cause real life changes in how pilots and co-pilots communicate, but he was successful in getting this important issue out in the open. He definitely is on to something that rectifying pilot communication could lead to less aircraft disasters.
But that subject is discussed in a LOT of documentaries, docu-series, and other reporting about air disasters. Fielder didn’t discover this, nor is he the first to try to publicize it.
That is probably true, but this is the first time that this subject has been brought to this wide of an audience. I watch a fair amount of airline disaster documentaries (e.g., Netflix one about the boeing crashes) and they usually only focus on the mechanical issues that led to the crash.
There's a full chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's OUTLIERS on the topic, focusing on cultural factors in pilot communication and in particular how Korean Air righted its operations. This was a mammoth bestselling book.
But why would he need to discover it/be the first to try to publicise it for it be worth a season? I’m sure a lot of people who don’t routinely research this topic were surprised to hear about it — myself included. It also seems to me like, as with interpersonal dynamics, this has been an interest of Fielder’s for a long time, and maybe that’s why and how he can keep himself so fully invested and give us an entire season and an amazing feat like this one.
There were more than a few laughs in the episode, but I mostly felt and thought a lot of things watching the finale, and have been thinking about it every day since I watched it. It didn’t make for a purely comedic experience, no, but I found it to be both earnest and entertaining in surprising ways. It also seems to be the closest we’ve got to seeing Fielder on the screen, rather than the Nathan persona, and though that was never a requirement nor expectation I had as a viewer, it certainly felt new and newly interesting.
I don’t care as much about the show being funny above all else as long as it remains so absurdly interesting that I don’t feel the word “interesting” covers how interesting it is. Fielder manages to make things that make me laugh hard and think hard and sometimes even, surprisingly, feel hard, and cry. To me that’s a lot, and much more than “just” being funny. (Not to downplay “just” being funny, of course.)
That Hacks finale was fine (definitely not the direction I expected) but Deborah's translator probably deserves an award for converting all of Deborah's material into jokes that would land in three different languages on the fly. She even got in a good ad lib.
Re: The Last of Us.
I get that its based on a video game so the entire plot was pretty much baked in before they even started filming.
Having said that, I don't recall ever seeing a show quite misunderstand what people liked about the show and completely screw it up in such a unique way.
Pedro Pascal is amazing in that role, and to completely sideline him because they want to stay true to a video game is just bizarre to me. IMHO the best shows learn from what is working, abandon what isn't, and improve. Part of that is being able to switch from the plan, as it were. The fact that they would not change the plot, given the gold they had in Pascal and Ramsey, is super frustrating to me as a viewer.
Even if they didn't want to change the overall plot from the video game, there was 5 years from the end of S1 to the start of S2. They could've explored that five years more! There's lots of stories that could be told there!
To further your point: the only really good episode of the season was the one that reunited Joel and Ellie!
I see your point, but surely one practical challenge is that Pascal initially signed on for the role with an understanding that his time commitment would be to appear in all of S1 and a few episodes of S2. Pascal's IMDB page lists quite a few other recent and upcoming projects, so it's an open question if he would have agreed to a bigger commitment to TLOU.
Season 2 of TLOU is just so bad it has me questioning whether season 1 was actually as good as I remember or was I just carried along by the amazing chemistry between Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey?
So many things were poorly done in this season and now we have to wait probably around two years or so for S3 so we can see the resolution to the schmuckbait (love that term, Alan) cliffhanger. It reminds me of a joke from Annie Hall. "The food here is so bad...and such small portions".
Watched the first two episodes of Adults and the whole plot with the blonde girl and her job/insurance made me way too anxious — I always had trouble with similar plots on Girls. Your review makes me at least want to see Charlie Cox on there, but damn!
Likewise, your article on The Better Sisters seems far more entertaining than the show itself. The only other note I had about the show was that not only is Kim Dickens working with a new generation of Milches, I had just rewatched Gone Girl and her character here seems to be the same “pointing out all the ways the character looks guilty” detective she played there. Gone Girl is still a pretty good movie/book, but it’s inspired an awful lot of thrillers that don’t have the same satirical bite, or do so in a way that’s less compelling/more drawn out.
My favorite part of Q Who? is the super weird Borg incubator that grew baby drones that they immediately hand waved away by the time they appeared next.
Maybe it was because the image of a sleeping baby loosely draped in those prosthetics was too creepy for those behind the scenes as well as those watching!
(Sorry I don’t have more to say about current events. I really need to start Poker Face)
Yeah, that and the high cost and difficult logistics involved of having a baby on set. I didn't stick with Picard but did any Star Trek series ever encounter Borg who don't look like assimilated humans? It would make sense that they "grew" Borg from babies, all the Borg look the same. 7 of 9 was evidence that didn't end up being canon but never the less.
Really would have liked Dept. Q if it had just been the investigators (Matthew Goode and company are wonderful.) , but was really put off by the kidnapping mystery. Much prefer the feature-length shows like Van der Valk or Vera. Perhaps a 9 episode season with 3, 3-episode mysteries. Created my own version by fast-forwarding through the yellowed-bathed bathysphere sections (like skipping Tom Bambadil when first reading Lord of the Rings).
I don’t think Hacks season 2 ended with them at odds. Deborah fired Ava but just to not hold Ava back.
Between seasons they kind of are at odds. Really they drifted apart and everything is ok by episode 2.
I mean… none of this disputes your opinion. Just that I think they always have their ups and downs… even if they don’t fully go at each other. Like the end of this season. I suspect next season will have it again! So prep yourself!
I'm enjoying Adults, but it really makes me pissed off at the modern TV industry. This is the exact kind of low-stakes show that should have seasons of 20ish episodes. It's popcorn, and there should be plenty of it. Doing this as 8 episode seasons just feels...meh
I didn't need this season of Hacks to end with Deborah and Ava at odds, but I did need it to, you know, actually do something. It felt like the entire episode was reverse engineered from its ending to connect to where we left off after last week's incredible climax. As good as the scene on the boat was, the entire affair left me feeling cold.
Thank you. That's exactly how I felt. Last week's episode was SO GOOD that it could have been the season finale, while this week felt very much like filler. I understand the creators' assertion that the show was never meant to be about late night, but I couldn't help wishing they'd given us a bit more. I would love to have seen Deborah fire Ava and look like a villain, only to learn she was secretly paying her via an old Hollywood Blacklist workaround.
Agree fully about The Last of Us. Thought it a weak set of episodes save for Eps. 2 and 6.
Watched the first episode of Adults and I'm out. I live near where the show is supposed to take place and it's so clearly Toronto and not Queens I can't.
What We Do in the Shadows filmed in Toronto! Seinfeld on an LA soundstage!
It can be unintentional funny though…I enjoyed Parenthood but it always hilarious when they would try to poorly pass SoCal locations as from the Bay Area (didn’t even try to hide the palm trees). The funniest one was using trying to use the UCLA entrance as the UC Berkeley campus.
I live in Minnesota, and during the initial "Little House on the Prairie" run we always laughed at the episodes that took place in the majestic mountains of Minnesota.
It's hard to turn off your brain and unsee something like that. The Last of Us S2 (and the game) literally changed Seattle's topography to fit some creative decisions. I have to keep telling myself the show takes place on an alternate Earth.
I would have liked more stories on Hacks about having a late-night show, but my guess is that every time the writers' room came up with an idea, someone said "Sanders did it."
Alan, I had the same reaction to And Just Like That. I’ve loved these characters for decades now, and have stayed with this iteration because the OG show was so good. But I think it’s time to move on. The original magic just isn’t there and I don’t even think a Samantha return could save this show.