Television

Our Baby Diaper of God said:
I'm doing a rewatch of The Sopranos.

I was watching S03E07 in which Meadow's college dean takes Carmela to lunch to fundraise money. When Carmela tells Tony that they want $50K he says something along the lines of "those jew pricks are holding her hostage". Carmela corrects Tony that the dean is Italian and he responds "jews with better food".

As an Ashkenazi Jew, I am in 100% agreement that our food is trash (I won't throw the other two major divisions of the diaspora - Mizrahis and Sephardic - under the bus 'cause they have some lit food). I will say that we have a few killer dishes (there is a reason matzo ball soup litters diner menus in the northeast), but overall our food is bland and boring.

Anyway, it's been a long time since I'd watched Sopranos (and this is my first full rewatch besides seeing single episodes here and there throughout the years). I will say my lens of Carmela is different this time around. I think I was more sympathetic to her my first watching and all the B.S. she has to put up with from Tony (which she does, no doubt) and just how volatile and inept he is in his relationships. However, I am more critical of her this time. I think I am more tuned into her tacit complicity by enjoying the lifestyle and.....well, I don't know the right words....
If Tony wasn't Tony I would say "shrill" or "nagging" but I also don't sit easy using either of those descriptors. One, I think they are loaded with some misogyny and, two, it would be odd to say that she was nagging him about how many affairs he has, etc. But somewhere adjacent to those description that takes into account both her own flaws but also that she deals with an infinitely more flawed husband.
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That's the one where Carm sees a therapist, right? Such a great episode; he actually uses the word "mafia" and is the first person to call out how comfortable with and complicit she is in Tony's business. I push against the shrill/nagging mainly for her cultural place in the trinity of Nagging Wives of Tv's Golden Age, along with Skyler White and Betty Draper, both of whom get a really bad rap. In reality that is her character though: she specifically goes after Tony anytime he tracks his messes into the house, but isn't concerned with anything he keeps out of her eyeline.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
I’ve been watching the first season of Invasion this week. I honestly can’t decide what to make of it. It has two modes: slow, and EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. Once I decided that’s what I was in the mood for, it was fine, but it took a while to settle into the tone. This is a show that rewards watching 2-3 eps in a sitting. Watching week to week would lose me pretty quickly I think.

Anyone else keeping up with the show?
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I’m yet to start season 2 but enjoyed season 1 - and yes it is slow but worth keeping with
 
Goddammit True Detective Season 4
I had seen some vague spoiler-free disappointment in the season following the finale and I was thinking it was another case of people being disappointed that season 4 wasn’t season 1 (this was the case with season 2 and to a lesser extent season 3) but man, they really blew the landing. My theory going into the finale was that it was a bit of a rehash of the fantastic first season of AMC’s The Terror (maybe it was the CGI polar bear and the endless whiteness, also a native woman with a missing tongue) I thought we were gonna discover that the mine pollution was causing madness amongst the townspeople and thus leading to hallucination and murderous psychotic breaks. That somehow Grant had been responsible for the murders of Annie and the Scientist as a result. I still feel like that resolution would have made more sense than the cleaning ladies going full A-Team on a group of murderous research scientists. The part that I was least thinking I would be disappointed in was the actual detective work. Say what you will about previous seasons but the actual police work always proved to be sound. I do not believe that a whole team of detectives could have investigated the laboratory and the site of the corpsicle without finding any traces of other people or the secret ice cave lab. I get that the cleaning crew was there regularly so finger prints and whatnot wouldn’t necessarily send off alarm bells but there were at least a dozen people with guns raiding that lab it all seems a bit ridiculous. Anyways, I enjoyed the season up to the big reveal and appreciate a lot of the cinematography and individual performances but man that ending sucked.
 
True Det 4 Spoiler

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I was pretty disappointed as well. Not that the ladies were behind it all but more that all the extra stuff they threw in like the hallucinations, the whole Pryor killing his dad, the Rose plotline, the tongue on the floor, the guy having weird seizures before the attack, was Annie a ghost who attacked them, she's awake. A lot of stuff just seemed thrown in that ultimately didn't have much to do with solving Annie's murder. It just was a bit of a mess that I was ready for it to be over. The worst thing HBO did was put True Detective in the title. If it was just called The Night Country, it wouldn't have the burden of all that came before it.
 
mdmost said:
True Det 4 Spoiler

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I was pretty disappointed as well. Not that the ladies were behind it all but more that all the extra stuff they threw in like the hallucinations, the whole Pryor killing his dad, the Rose plotline, the tongue on the floor, the guy having weird seizures before the attack, was Annie a ghost who attacked them, she's awake. A lot of stuff just seemed thrown in that ultimately didn't have much to do with solving Annie's murder. It just was a bit of a mess that I was ready for it to be over. The worst thing HBO did was put True Detective in the title. If it was just called The Night Country, it wouldn't have the burden of all that came before it.
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Completely agree regarding Night Country being burdened with the True Detective name. It was my understanding that Lopez had written at least some of the show prior to HBO suggesting it be pulled into TD franchise and then they Retconned a bunch of stuff so it would could sit nicely under the title. The issue with the franchise really goes back to disappointment with season two; which for better or worse was fairly disconnected from season 1. So with season 3 they sprinkled some of the season 1 mythology into the mix. If True Detective had kept things truly as an anthology series with no connection season to season outside of movie stars solving crimes. It might have worked but at this point the interrelated pieces that carry over really hinders the show by giving the audience unreasonable expectations.

Grant saying “Time is a flat-circle” was the most cringe part of the entire season.
 
Yeah I’m not someone hating on season 4 for not being like season 1. There were interesting ideas here, but the follow through is what bothered me. Various subplots felt ultimately pointless. And how it resolved was kind of ridiculous. The deliberate callbacks to season 1 never felt organic, but the “time is a flat circle” line in the finale was laughable. Same goes for the irritating and terrible cover of Twist and Shout in the finale. Those are nitpicks I guess. I think the attempt to craft an atmosphere was cool, but the journey and the destination of the story just doesn’t work for me. And yeah the detective work was rough.
 
I did this while looking over at my wife when the "time is a flat circle" line was thrown out. I mean just wink at the camera when you say the most obvious "let's link this to the 1st season...again" ham fist of dialogue.

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It's funny seeing how varied the response has been to this season:
www.rollingstone.com

'True Detective: Night Country' Just Gave the Series Its Best Finale Ever

Season Four finale of HBO's crime-drama anthology not only sticks the landing — it sets the standard for how to close a 'True Detective' case.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com

Moment by moment I enjoyed this season, but as we pulled closer to the end I was feeling like the weight of unresolved story threads and unrelated case detours was going to crush the illusion. I don't expect everything to have an answer, and if a detective story lacks side characters or plots, well, that sounds boring as hell; but when you start adding the mail-order bride, the trailer shrine, the mysterious visions, oranges, christmas trees, one-eyed polar bears...all to just throw that ending at my feet...not my cup of tea.

The answers felt a little yadda-yadda'd in terms of how an entire research crew would commit murder (and Clark would finish the deed??) and agree to cover it up without signs of guilt (excecpt Oliver Tagaq, who....well, forget Oliver Tagaq, I guess), how the cleaning women learned of the murder, and how they got away with the murder (and who got the tongue and how/why they left it). The whole "I think they died before they froze" thing was a red herring, yet the actual answer doesn't explain the circumstances of the corpse.

Plus, they're terrible detectives! They torture Clark into a confession fully assuming he's guilty (imagine he didn't do it; that'd be such a messed up thing to do to a witness!), then they neglect him long enough to let him freeze himself! I don't understand how (or even why) they fake Hank's death. Why doesn't the Tsalal team find a more ethical way of digging up the magic snake?

Finally, I think it says a lot about the storytelling failures of this season that there's no consensus whether Navarro is alive at the end of the story or not.
 
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