What's one youve had?

If you like Columbo, Poker Face is a spiritual descendant. It’s honestly far better than I expected, and sometimes there’s camera work that is intentionally straight from the 70s.

Fringe

Yeah I’d consider it pretty niche. Most people I gushed to about it didn’t want to give it a chance because it was dubbed, weirdly enough. Their loss. This reminds me I need to do a rewatch…

Firefly, of course.

On the plus side, what Joss Whedon did to Wash in Serenity made me hate him long before the revelations of what an asshole he is came to light.

Band of Brothers. I’m not obsessed with per se, but it is a show etched into my brain forever.

idk, that had already changed the basic nature of how gods work from the book.

they also tended to go for cheap shots where the author really thought a lot about how to use certain gods.

for example:

in the epilogue of the anniversary edition of the book gaimam talks about wanting to incorporate Jesus, but deciding that the scene he wrote for him wasn’t good enough to capture what Jesus was to Americans. but he includes the scene in the post script anyway. it’s a quiet scene where Jesus comes and offers guidance in one of shadows most desperate hours.

in the show Jesus gets shot trying to cross the Mexican border. which is the absolute lowest hanging fruit when it comes to Jesus. i have made that joke before. I’ve heard others make that joke before. “if Jesus actually was alive right now he’d get shot at the border for being brown and communist”. they clearly just wanted shock value at the lowest intellectual price.

i don’t hate shows or movies just for adapting a story to a new medium. for example, the new dune movies really aren’t actually capturing the point of the books very well so far. that’s because the dune books are mostly people thinking about what people think it doesn’t adapt into visual mediums well. what villenuve has made is a great movie series regardless. the shining is another great example of that. i had a Stephen King fan try to tell me that Stanley kubrik was a hack for not following the book better. I’d argue that Stanley Kubrik is a better filmmaker that king is an author. the shining is an all time great movie regardless of what it was based on or how much it changed that material. that said, i do hate adaptation that add story elements and change basic rules of reality without putting thought or effort in to making it worthwhile. these two examples are great because kubrik and villenuve are masters of their craft that made these movies with immense amounts of care and effort.

deviating from the source material isn’t inherently a sin, but making a much worse story when you started with a good one that was already written and loved and using its name to draw people in is worse than just making a bad show. a bad show is easily ignored, but a bad adaptation will put people off of the source material you love. or worse, will supplant the source material in the cultural zeitgeist and you’ll forever have to specify “i mean the book, not that terrible movie they did”. i think tv American gods was… just ok. it completely failed to capture what i liked about the book, but others seem to like it well enough. it has gotten multiple people i know into the book, so i can’t hate it entirely.

similar to the Witcher show. i hated it. it had nothing of the books in it. it was schlocky and the plot BARELY made sense. they just went off and did entirely their own thing after season 1 and it was shit. but everyone who hasn’t read the books seems to still like it so maybe I’m just a hater.

I’ve been watching that and Deep Space Nine.

DS9 is the more well known, but I think Babylon 5 was more hard sci-fi

They’re both good

Farscape was also on TV way back then right after so it was amazing