What TV SHOWS are you watching?

Shellhead wrote: But I was drawn to the pub crawl and the trivia night, partly from nostalgia and partly out of recognition that Star Trek remains one of the most optimistic depictions of the future in all of entertainment.

Totally agree. And if that works for you, now or whenever, then it works for you. That's cool. Despite my disaffection, if someone said they were planning a Star Trek pub crawl in my area, I'd be all about it, especially if I could find a good Cardassian costume...

I've started re-watching Xena Warrior Princess. I forgot how bonkers this show actually was.

I'm continuing my complete (re)watch of Star Trek. I finished TNG a little while ago and just finished season 2 and 3 of Picard. Because I watched the complete DS9 run about 8 years ago, I was going to skip it and start Voyager. I was kind of excited for Voyager because I only saw the first few seasons when it originally aired. I even got a few episodes in before I just couldn't live with my decision to skip DS9 so here I am, halfway through season 1 of DS9 and not regretting my decision.
I'm also watching Lower Decks as it airs but I will definitely watch that from the beginning once I finish Voyager and Enterprise.
I do want to start Strange New Worlds and it might be something my wife will be interested in, so that'll probably get inserted here soon as well.

I’ve also been rewatching Trek. I finished TOS a couple of months ago, am midway through TAS. Next is TNG, then DS9. I stop there, though. I quit Trek with Voyager soon after it started, it was just so soulless and silly to me. I’ve seen some Lower Decks and enjoyed it.

I went ahead and signed up with Paramount Plus for all the Star Trek content. I have a couple of ideas about how to approach the viewing. One idea was to go in chronological order (not release date), so I would start with Enterprise. The other was to focus on what I have enjoyed recently, Strange New Worlds, by starting with the first appearance of the modern Pike on Discovery. Then I remembered hearing that Michelle Yeoh is in the first season of Discovery, and I've been a fan of hers for nearly 30 years. Then again, I heard that first season of Discovery has purple Klingons and, as Jason mentioned, a protagonist who gets thrown in the brig for mutiny.

The idea of struggling through a bad first season of Enterprise was daunting, so I went with Discovery and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, Michael Burnham is a kind of a bad person. She is arrogant, reckless, overconfident, and insubordinate. Then I realized that she shared all those traits with James T. Kirk, who probably set a Star Fleet record for violating the Prime Directive. She does commit mutiny, though with misguided good intentions, and her actions contribute significantly to the start of a war. But the writing is good, the acting is good, and the production values are amazing for a television show. Various elements of these early episodes remind me of the first Chris Pine Star Trek movie, and in a good way. I am three episodes in and hooked. I will probably never be a big fan of Michael Burnham, but I am reluctantly rooting for her now.

It's possible you don't need another show about a criminal with a private life and/or family problems, especially after Barry, Brassic, and the tons more we already have (even Stallone's brave but lesser effort Tulsa King), but I personally found Mr. Inbetween to be very much its own thing - funny, sometimes gruesome and very rewarding to watch. And just maybe my new favourite in that particular genre.

It's an Australian show with half-hour episodes, completed after three seasons with an actual ending. Probably a labour-of-love thing. Maybe I like it so much because of a certain revenge pron Robin Hood vibe known from flicks like Taken. Not all bad things that happen here happen to bad people, but if they decide to be dicks about it they usually have it coming.

In five days, I binge-watched the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. There are some aspects that bother me about it, but I consider it to be one of the finest seasons of Star Trek that I have seen. Of course, the ranking skews in favor of Discovery because most Star Trek shows had to stretch to fill up a season of 22 episodes, often with mostly standalone episodes. And Discovery had a big budget and amazing production values compared to most Star Trek shows, as well as actual character development.

I like the first few seasons of Discovery a lot more than most people. I think there's so much they wring out of having a non-human character in a command role in that show that the other series haven't managed to get at.

Well, we're five episodes into a new season of Rick and Morty and we finally got one that was worthwhile. Not sure why it took the writers this long to warm up and there were a lot of people thinking this season was going to crash and burn without co-creator Justin Roiland, but episode 5 may have put a lot of those fears to rest. I can't possibly talk about it in detail because spoilers abound, but there are huge developments to a long-running plot. Plus, a brief view into the Rick and Morty of the Prince universe (i.e. where everyone dresses and has hairstyles like Prince.)

Reflecting on season one of Discovery, it seems like there is a dichotomy at the core of Starfleet, possibly starting with how they train cadets in the Academy. Starfleet is structured like a military organization, with ranks, chain of command, armed ships, uniforms, etc. And it seems to be a successful and stable organization due to the discipline and teamwork of their people. But there seems to be strong strains of both idealism and individuality that sometimes undermine that discipline, often involving starship captains or high-ranking bridge officers. I pondered this issue many years ago, when I was pondering whether I should join the military to get the GI Bill benefit to pay for my college... could I take an obviously wrong order from an officer? Not like an obvious wrong order like executing civilians, but just a stupid order when I know a better way to do things. In Discovery, Captain Lorca makes a decent argument for why a commander on the battlefield might need to exercise his own judgment on the spot in spite of directives from higher up in the command chain. But that logic can go too far, like when Burnham assaulted her captain and attempted a mutiny. Anyway, it just makes me wonder about Starfleet's selection process and training. They clearly value intelligence and competence, but maybe end up with excessive insubordination.

Thats an interesting take, and as society in general moves farther and farther away from understanding military culture (currently something like 1% of the US pop serves and 70% of current recruits come from as military family themselves, so it is becoming a highly insular and INSULATED culture from America as a whole) post-WW2 then I think you will see Star Trek become less of a realistic military based organization and more of a dysfunctional academic or corporate based system as that is what the writers would be more familiar with. TOS was VERY military in culture, Kirk as Captain had incredible autonomy in action but he was steeply indoctrinated in a specific world-view shared by most of his crew and conflict was largely from non-Starfleet sources. TNG maintained this with a distinct softening of Starfleet values with characters like Wesley and Troy. DS9 was a great amalgam of military and civilian structures operating side by side. I think it started to go off the rails with Voyager where you had largely internal conflict, insubordination within the ship command structure, etc (though parts of this reach back to TOS, like Spock running off with Pike) and that has come to full fruition with Discovery and SNW, which feel more like a parody of military culture written by folks who watched war movies rather than writers who understood it from service themselves. Plus those shows are VERY driven by character flaws, internal discontentment, and intrateam conflict rather than fixing external problems.

I hope Trek can move past a military foundation entirely if they aren't going to have significant numbers (or any, for that matter) of veterans on the writing staff and working at all levels of production. Base the structure of Starfleet on NatGeo, the East India Company, Holland Cruise Lines or some other entity without war as a central job function so they can tell stories free of the need to adhere to some poorly understood chain of command structure.

I recently saw a meme that compared Kirk's TOS quarters (small and spartan) with Pike's SNW quarters (large and comfortable) and that had me pondering the different times in which their respective ships were built. Pike's ship was likely built before the war with the Klingons, so it was intended for exploration and hopefully friendly first contact, while Kirk's Enterprise looks much more like it was built during a war.

Nodens wrote: It's possible you don't need another show about a criminal with a private life and/or family problems, especially after Barry, Brassic, and the tons more we already have (even Stallone's brave but lesser effort Tulsa King), but I personally found Mr. Inbetween to be very much its own thing - funny, sometimes gruesome and very rewarding to watch. And just maybe my new favourite in that particular genre.

It's an Australian show with half-hour episodes, completed after three seasons with an actual ending. Probably a labour-of-love thing. Maybe I like it so much because of a certain revenge pron Robin Hood vibe known from flicks like Taken. Not all bad things that happen here happen to bad people, but if they decide to be dicks about it they usually have it coming.

I started this, based on your recommendation. I'm enjoying it, and was quite surprised to find that the guy who played Dewey Crowe on Justified is an Australian. He was such a convincing southern redneck!

Starfleet is similar to the US Coast Guard. It’s a military force when it needs to be, it’s a support force, a police force, a search and rescue force, a scientific investigation force.

n815e wrote: Starfleet is similar to the US Coast Guard. It’s a military force when it needs to be, it’s a support force, a police force, a search and rescue force, a scientific investigation force.

That makes sense. Still, consider what would happen if the Coast Guard had a captain who behaved like Kirk.