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It has a bunch of terrible recent Yelp reviews, mostly to do with the theater being run-down and the management disorganized. I couldn't find any articles about a particular scandal or anything though.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:43 PM on March 2, 2020

I suspected that the pizza box person mistyped and meant that the BOX was on top of the SINK.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:31 AM on January 30, 2020

All I know about this show is that it's been driving my friends on the 7 train insane, because Awkwafina recorded a set of special station announcements as a promo. It's the first time the MTA has done such a thing and the backlash is such that it might be the last.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:33 AM on January 23, 2020

I loved how Justin just casually brushed off discussing his level-up abilities. If you don't know the druid class there are some fun surprises coming up.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:01 PM on December 19, 2019

I definitely, definitely remember Justin saying he'd watched PB1 in a previous episode, but in this one he acted as if he'd never seen it. Did he manage to forget?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:58 PM on December 4, 2019

I haven't been watching this show but I leaned about this disaster from a folk song, The Aberfan Coal Tip Tragedy, which always makes me cry. I might watch this episode just for that reason. How many died in Aberfan/when the coal tip came rumbling down?/How many children will never grow old/and how many lives purchased how many tons of coal?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:41 AM on November 20, 2019

I hope some show-only people do comment in this thread because I'm really curious how it plays if you haven't read the books. Ii felt the pilot erred too far on the side of trying to explain stuff, which paradoxically might have been more confusing than not.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:03 PM on November 5, 2019

We were both confused by the daemons changing form each scene, and why only some people seemed to have them.

The daemon changing thing was weirdly handled, because they explained it twice but did it in a rushed way where it's no surprise people missed it:

In the scene where Lyra and Roger are playing in the crypt, they have a conversation about what form their daemons will eventually settle in. Later on, we see a scene where… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:22 AM on November 20, 2019

I want this to end with the Firbolg fomenting a communist revolution.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:04 PM on November 14, 2019

>Since then, she's installed a blue phone in the farm's field, and the bakery etc have sprung up around it

>>I don't know where this is coming from, it was not the impression I got.

I know where it came from: there was a fade from panning over the field at the couple's house to panning over Tulsa, where instead of one image fading into another, individual elements of the streetscape popped in one by one. I remember… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:45 AM on November 14, 2019

But this thing now with the monkey moving unnaturally far from his human, implying Mrs. C is a witch....? Really?

I could have sworn that detail was straight from the books, and that it was either stated or implied later that Mrs. Coulter had undergone the severing procedure. I also thought the ill effects were mainly experienced by children, and adults could tolerate it better. (But I last read the books years and years ago, so I don't remember… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:50 PM on November 12, 2019

Wikipedia sez: The golden monkey is shown to be capable of going much further from Mrs. Coulter than other dæmons are able to separate from their humans. How the golden monkey can go so far from Mrs. Coulter is not explained, Mrs. Coulter has not undergone any of the processes which enable other humans to achieve such separation.

There you have it, I suppose!
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:11 PM on November 12, 2019

I haven't caught the rest of this show yet, but I wanted to weigh in on how this pilot worked for me as a person who did read the comics but forgot just about every plot point from them.

As I read through this thread, I actually did remember a bunch of stuff which explained seemingly inexplicable moments in the show - the rain of squid, the bizarre otherworldly gentleman with the not-quite-human servants, etc - but if anything, I was a bit disappointed to be reminded of… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:47 PM on November 11, 2019

-This show has so much awkwardness that I have to watch half of it with my hands over my eyes.

-I thought this episode did an interesting job showing how our sexuality fucks us up at every age, with Eve, the old man from the nursing home, and Eve's dirtbag son. He in particular is terrible to watch, and I'm really nervous about where they're gonna go with him.

-I had no idea that this was based on a book by Tom Perotta, the same guy who wrote The… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:35 PM on November 11, 2019

I felt like there was a lot of awkward dialogue in this. Like someone took the first draft of the script, and circled everything meant to be mysterious and gradually revealed over time, and wrote "I don't get it! Make it clearer!" next to every circle.

I'll certainly keep watching because I love the books, but I hope it chills out with the overexplaining and just lets us live in this world.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:39 PM on November 4, 2019

Wulfhere - Overall it looks like they're playing around with the tech level of the world - the airships for example looked much more Earth-modern than I'd pictured. Actually the most striking design choice for me was the Gyptians' clothing, which wouldn't look at all out of place today. I'm curious how London will look, since after all, our modern Oxford's construction doesn't look a damn thing like modern London.

On the parallel worlds stuff, I'm still not sure how I… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:46 PM on November 7, 2019

Yeah they definitely say Justin is a druid at one point. I'm very pleased by that, because I was a druid the last time I played D&D. They're really fun because they pretty quickly gain the ability to transform into animals!

(Also Justin's voice is very close to the one he used in the Tolstoy's Bush bit from MBMBAM, which I found slightly distracting. "These are the names of my public hairs!")
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:24 PM on October 31, 2019

I wouldn't call this a disappointment exactly but so far Argo seems much closer to Clint's other characters than Justin's and Griffin's characters do to their other ones. I was hoping for as big a departure as Gandy Dancer was. But it's early days yet, plenty of time to differentiate him.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:50 AM on November 1, 2019

So witches have magic, and vampires are kinda stereotypically vampire-y (strong, fast, long-lived), and demons are . . . what, exactly? I suppose it's possible this was established in the first six episodes in a way that Singapore Air decided to edit out, but that seems unlikely, so I'm left wildly irritated that 1/3 of the supernatural creatures have had literally no job in the story so far.

This has been driving me bananas, but I'm hoping for a… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:18 AM on October 19, 2019

Holy shit this show. My patience for antihero shows is pretty thin these days, but I love Barry because 1. Barry himself feels like a real human being, and you can relate to how he became who he is, but 2. they keep showing us how his attempts at redemption fail because he refuses to take real responsibility for the things he's done.

I personally didn't like the way Breaking Bad ended because I felt like Walter White didn't deserve a heroic death - I wanted to see him… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:59 AM on October 18, 2019

Also, imo Fuches is in the running for most monstrous characters in television history.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:02 AM on October 18, 2019

This episode is full of amazing moments (even some that don’t include Noho Hank) but I’d like to call out Kirby Howell-Baptiste telling her life-changing story of seeing a horse in London and accidentally admitting that her uncle burned down her house with her mother in it.

Given the improvements we saw in the other students' stories, I wondered if the final version of that story was based on her accidentally revealing the house-burning story in… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:02 PM on October 18, 2019

I'm only halfway through but holy shit this show. So many things made me gasp and shriek! Like the moment where young Claudia tells her dad EXACTLY the same words old Claudia just used. Or the reveal that Elizabeth was the hardened post-apocalyptic leader. Or the horrible fate of Ulrich.

At this point (just finished the episode where Oldest Jonas sent Youngest Jonas into the time bubble thing - feels like a total trick btw) - I have absolutely NO idea which of the events… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:12 PM on September 26, 2019

Oh and one more thing: could Charlotte's mother be Franziska? Something about Noah's "she loved you... she still does" put that in my head. Fucked Up If True.

I suspect that a lot more people than we currently know of as of midseason) are their own ancestors, which could lead to all of them making the same choice Jonas did when he didn't bring Mikkel back from the 80s. Everyone invested in this dizzying loop because without it, none of them exist at all.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:16 PM on September 26, 2019

One thing that is very intriguing is that we never know what is supposed to happen and what is different. It seems like so far everything that has happened is part of the cycle and each action the characters take to change the future actually enables it to happen.

Yeah, I couldn't stop ruminating on that, because - is this show a rollicking time adventure where our heroes save the world, or is it a nihilist nightmare hell where no one is capable of… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:53 AM on October 16, 2019

The only ones I can think of that I really thought were great, though, were LMM, John Roderick, and Elsie Fisher.

I thought Jimmy Buffet was amazing, and not just because of the inherent joke of them getting Jimmy Buffet. Dude's hilarious. Also Griffin Newman - after his ep I binged the new The Tick and added his podcast to my feed.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:59 PM on October 14, 2019

I watched this in a high school history class. It made me WEEP and I don't think I could watch it again but I loved it, and the message it conveys. It makes me think of an anecdote from Man's Search for Meaning about a young woman who was dying in the same concentration camp with the author:

There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:52 PM on October 14, 2019

Wonderful, fabulous, perfect.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:58 PM on October 3, 2019

Guys the Space Worms song has been stuck in my head for two days
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:17 AM on October 5, 2019

Half the buses in New York City currently have advertisements for this show on their fronts, and the advertisements are just the word "EVIL" in huge capital letters with no context. It's unsettling to say the least.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:45 PM on September 27, 2019

I did not see Duck's ending coming and I loved it.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:00 PM on September 23, 2019

I also didn't connect quite as much with Amnesty, but I think that's a pretty typical trend for creative works - you make a thing that proves unexpectedly popular, and then rather than just trying to make a thing, like you did the first time, you also get caught up in figuring out 1. what made the first thing so popular and 2. how you can make something new and equally popular 3. without just doing a retread of what came before. So you lose some of the spontaneity and creativity that was part of… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:01 PM on September 24, 2019

On the subject of the actual plot of Amnesty - I was thinking about all the comments here/elsewhere about the fact that the Pine Guard seemed too focused on the Quell when it was clear there was a secondary thing going on. And I suspect that Griffin set up the structure in such a way that it didn't HAVE to happen that way, but then the boys were set on pursuing the Quell track so he just went with it, and deliberately didn't prompt them to not forget the second thing going on. I'm thinking… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:08 PM on September 24, 2019

Some other thoughts:

1. Probably my favorite thing about this whole arc was Billy. Not just as a character, but as a piece of the story. Based on that character's initial episodes, Billy was something that I'm pretty sure Griffin absolutely did not plan for at all. But then, not only did he find a way to make him integral to the final confrontation, he also trusted the players to take up that thread and run with it. And then they very much did,… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:40 PM on September 24, 2019

Ducknerva is definitely weird in many ways but I don't find it creepy because they didn't really have any sort of relationship when Duck was a kid. He met her a few times, blew her off, and didn't engage with her again until well into adulthood.

I have an aunt who is married to a man who taught at her high school and is maybe 20 years older than her - but they didn't reconnect and start dating until she was in her 50s and moved… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:57 PM on September 25, 2019

Griffin has a good sense of when to hang back and let others do the world building, something that based on their mini-shots I'm not sure Clint or Travis has.

To be fair, they each had just four episodes to tell a coherent story. I don't think we can assume anything about how they'd DM longer arcs based on the one-shots.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:39 PM on September 25, 2019

So, nobody else is gonna talk about the part where Billy summons Sephiroth to destroy the shield around the Deliberative Mind?

I am vaguely aware of who Sephiroth is but I never in a million years would have made that connection (though I saw a post about it afterward). I just shrugged it off as possibly a part of Griffin's mythos that hadn't had time to be fully explored.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:51 PM on September 26, 2019

Oh I need to read this! I read his About Writing last year and really enjoyed it, and I'm a huge fan of Joanna Russ who was a good friend of his and I think a somewhat similar writer style-wise.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:58 AM on September 6, 2019

I'm only at the point where the Kid has just left Tak's place and found the orchid back on his hand. Initial thoughts: I don't quite know what to make of all this so far, but I really appreciate the way that the writing forces me to slow down. I'm an extremely fast reader and sometimes I regret it, because I feel like it makes me miss some nuances. But with this book, it's often impossible for me to read "normally" - I'm forced to really focus on the prose itself, not just the story.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:55 PM on September 10, 2019

I should also note - unlike, it seems, a lot of people in this thread, I'm only in my early 30s, but my childhood exposure to SF was through my mom's old books, so I've read more 70s and 80s era SF than modern stuff. Reading SF from before I was born is like getting a peek at two different "other worlds" at once - a potential future, and a past that I'll never experience personally. I'm keeping that in mind as I read this. I'd love to hear from people who read it around when it came… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:25 PM on September 10, 2019

Still early going, but I must say, this is not an easy book to describe to a friend who asks "so what are you reading right now?" Like, dude, I'M not even sure.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:08 PM on September 18, 2019

I'm loving the occasional switches to first person, by the way. I already mentioned Joanna Russ but that's something she also played with a lot. It could turn out to mean something else but right now it feels like sort of a winking acknowledgment that the Kid is a proxy for Delaney, but then the switches back to third person deliberately undermine it - like "yeah this is KIND OF me but don't get ahead of yourself."
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:13 PM on September 18, 2019

I'm tickled by this quote from a 2010 article:

It’s like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome. It seems to have been written by an insane person in a tantric blurt of automatic writing.

When I mention this to Delany, he is pleased. It is, he says, exactly the effect he was going for.

The article goes on to say that Delaney essentially wrote the book the same way the Kid writes poetry, which is… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:35 PM on September 20, 2019

Yeah I have no idea if this movie was good, but seeing it in a packed college town theater the week it opened was awesome.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:50 AM on September 14, 2019

This show made me cry y'all.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:02 PM on September 13, 2019

I got lost a little in creating my updated mind map. Who is Bernd related to? (Bernd is the one who retired as plant chief in 1986.) We haven't seen him in 2019, I'm guessing he's dead. Helge (Peter's dad) is the one trying to warn everyone, right? Do we know who was creating the steampunk machine? Is the hooded guy Jonas' dad?

Very late to the party, but I just figured this out. As far as I can tell, up to this point in the series - as far as I've… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:58 AM on September 12, 2019

I know this is old as hell and I may be querying the void, but -

I can't figure out why Regina's husband (?) has the last name Tiedemann. In Germany is it more common for men to take their wives' last names? Because according to my bigass chart, it's Regina's side of the family that's named Tiedemann.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:08 AM on September 12, 2019

If you made a supercut of every time Griffin insisted an arc was ALMOST over this time, for real you guys!!, it would be fifteen minutes long.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:49 AM on September 12, 2019

I don't see Ruth & Russell as long term material because Russell is just a straightforward guy. It seems like Ruth needs a co-conspirator to be always up to something with her.

My roommate hadn't seen season 2 yet, so I watched it with her after finishing season 3, and honestly I'm not sure Ruth was ever that into Russell. She blows him off repeatedly, then goes to his apartment only after Sam tries to kiss her, at which… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:11 PM on August 26, 2019

Emmy Rae I think you're almost totally on point, but I'd say Debbie has Tamme's back becausr she respects her. She has ever since that dinner they had in season one. She definitely doesn't respect Ruth that way.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:34 PM on August 27, 2019