TV Series (Opinions, Recommendations, Flaming, etc) ***BEWARE POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

[munchmemory]

5 minutes ago, DMan77 said:

Yes, exactly! And I'm not an expert on these things, or a TV snob or anything like that, but shows become so formulaic to me after watching for a while.

You can just see the same similar story arch in each episode and each season. Yes, they change things up and there's a surprise or two, but the overall bell curve is the same episode after episode after episode... And to your point, that get's old. It's like just getting the middle over and over instead of the beginning/middle/end. 

I DO like TV and all the great shows out there, and I will watch them... I just can't do more than one or two episodes of the same show at a time. It just gets predictable. 

Yup.  You definitely see the same themes repeated as well as all the storyline holes.  Guess they get less obvious when there is a week or so between episodes. 

 

[JoeC36]

**Spoilers for some shows below

Your TV Show Doesn’t Have To Be A Movie: In Defense Of The Episode (Again)

#THE CREATIVITY OF PEAK TV

ALAN SEPINWALL

 

 

SENIOR TELEVISION WRITER

 

I’ve been thinking about episodes again, and why the most basic unit of TV storytelling is being undervalued these days.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, after growing frustrated with too many shows (particularly ones made for streaming services) that had no interest in differentiating one episode from the next, and just offered up 13 amorphous hours of… stuff. But three recent events have put the issue at the front of my mind again.

First, Indiewire, for their weekly TV critics survey, asked a bunch of us to name our favorite concept episode of television ever. We all wound up overthinking it by assuming everyone else was going to pick “Hush” (the silent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), thus ensuring that no one actually picked it, but the choices were all interesting, and spoke to the many wonderful things an episode of TV can do and be when the creative team tries hard enough to do something different from what they normally turn out.

Then over the weekend, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss appeared at South By Southwest, where they looked ahead to the end of the series, and back across an experience that they suggested they didn’t think about as a TV show at all:

 

And yesterday, one of our writers pointed me to a fan-made attempt to edit all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad down into a feature-length movie. Having just spent a lot of time rewatching and thinking about the series as prep for my upcoming Breaking Bad review collection, I was curious to see what parts of the story were included and what fell away in the attempt to squeeze it all in.

It will, of course, shock you to learn that 62 hours of TV do not seamlessly condense into a little over 2 hours, and that the “movie,” while an admirable effort, doesn’t in any way work as a standalone entity. It has to jump from beat to beat, scene to scene, so quickly just to establish all the relevant plot and character points, that a lot of it would make little sense, narratively or emotionally, without having already seen the series. It leaves a bunch of characters on the sidelines because it has no room for them, which then has a ripple effect down the line: It chops out everything with both Tuco and the Cousins, which in turn means the conclusion to the war with Gus happens off-camera, because it would be gibberish without Tio Hector there, and Hector makes no sense if you haven’t already met the rest of his family.

But more than any single editing decision, the movie approach fails because Breaking Bad wasn’t made as a movie — not even, to paraphrase the GoT guys, a 62-hour movie. Vince Gilligan and company were making a television show, by God, with the understanding of the medium’s many distinct and valuable properties. They told a serialized story that’s powerful precisely because you get to see it all unfold over a long period of time, even as each individual episode is treated as its own entity: To borrow the Friends title approach, it’s “The One Where They Dissolve A Body In Acid,” followed by “The One Where Krazy-8’s Locked In The Basement,” or later “The One Where The RV Breaks Down” or “The One With The Train Heist.” Each episode helps add something to the larger story — and takes advantage of the length of a TV series to focus on what Vince Gilligan talks about as “the in-between moments” that crime movies (this fan-made one included) rarely have room to depict — but there’s a specific structure, conflict, and often theme to each that makes it satisfying whether watched a week apart from the others (as it originally aired) or as part of a binge now. You could watch “4 Days Out” without knowing anything about the series and still be wildly entertained by what happens in that hour.

HBO

Which brings us back to the Game of Thrones comment from SXSW. I understand where Benioff and Weiss are coming from. They’re adapting a collection of books that are telling one grand, sweeping story; it’s not a medieval fantasy procedural, you know? And they’re far from the first showrunners to insist that they’re not really making a show at all: David Simon always referred to The Wire as “a novel for television,” actors and producers on multi-camera sitcoms love the phrase “we’re doing a stage play every week,” etc.

But The Wire debuted 15 years ago, and is part of the reason TV creators no longer need to sound apologetic for being creators of TV. Yet that one show has become the TV version of the Velvet Underground: Few watched it, but most of the ones who did went on to create their own TV shows, all of them using the same storytelling model. And unless you’re executing on as high a level as The Wire did, then treating the season — or the series — as the basic storytelling unit, rather than the individual episodes, can be more trouble than it’s worth.

There are too many series — many of which I’ve liked a lot, in spite of this problem — over those past 15 years that ran out of steam two-thirds of the way through the season (most of the Netflix Marvel shows), or sagged badly in the middle before recovering (most seasons of Boardwalk Empire), or simply weren’t satisfying enough in the end to justify the misshapen center. Whereas many of the very best series of the last few years — Fargo, The Leftovers, BoJack Horseman, and The People v. O.J. Simpson, to name just a few — go out of their way to figure out what sets each episode apart even as they’re telling bigger stories. Imagine a version of BoJack that had no room for “Fish Out of Water,” or a People v. O.J. that couldn’t give us “Marcia Marcia Marcia” because the creative teams were too focused on the big picture for the whole season, and making it feel like a stylistically cohesive whole. With Netflix alone, the respective subject matter makes me far more inclined to enjoy a Jessica Jones or Luke Cage than something like The Crown, yet the latter proved to be the more satisfying experience because it wasn’t just a 13-hour story blob, but constructed each episode along a Royal Crisis of the Week model. Similarly, the flashbacks on Orange is the New Black have started to run out of juice, but they still force that show’s writers to spotlight one or two characters in every episode and find something interesting and complete to say about them over the course of that hour.

When I wrote that earlier defense of the episode piece, I was focusing on the value of largely standalone episodes of serialized shows. For some series — like a Game of Thrones — that’s a practical impossibility. (I wouldn’t object to an entire episode set in Hot Pie’s bakery, but I doubt HBO would ever approve such a thing.) But an episode doesn’t have to be standalone in story to stand alone in form and function. Think about the best GoT episodes — the ones people talk about years later, and will likely talk about long after the series is done — and most of them were ones that deviated from the series’ usual tour guide approach to Westeros: “Now this happens here, now that’s happening over there, let’s go see what those nutty kids in Dorne are up to…” Though that format has produced episodes with great moments, Game of Thrones tends to be at its best when there’s more cohesion and thought to what’s happening in that episode and that episode only, whether it’s one where the entire hour takes place in one setting (“Blackwater”), one where a much bigger-than-usual section of the episode stays in one place (“Hardhome,” “The Winds of Winter”), or one where the stories feel thematically tied together in some way (“The Door”). I often feel like the sheer tonnage of story and characters that Benioff and Weiss have to adapt has been the biggest stumbling block preventing GoT from elevating past a show with great moments into an all-time great series, but it may be just as much about the showrunners viewing the storytelling model the same way George R.R. Martin does, even though they’re writing for a different medium with different demands.

Even if Game of Thrones had been made for a streaming service where fans could watch entire seasons at once — heck, even if they had somehow produced the entire series before releasing any of it — it still wouldn’t be a 73-hour movie. One, because that sounds terrible, and no one but the most obsessed and/or unwell person would watch all 73 hours in one sitting. And two, because it’s still not a movie. Both have moving pictures and sounds, but there are differences between the two, and those differences should be embraced, not ignored or swept under the rug(*).

(*) Sunday was the 15th anniversary of the premiere of The Shield, an all-time great drama that never felt apologetic about being television, and in fact took advantage of things that are often looked on as storytelling detriments of the medium. Not only were there procedural elements to almost every episode, which gave shape and form to all of the serialized material about Vic and the strike team, but creator Shawn Ryan instructed his writers to treat every scene as if it would be the last thing the viewer saw before an act break. This was originally just a way for him to have greater freedom in editing the episodes, but it wound up giving the show a relentless quality that served it well whether watched live on FX with commercial interruptions, or years later on Hulu without them. The moral: embrace the medium however you can and make it work for you. Use every part of the buffalo.

These are the questions any TV storyteller should be asking when they sit down to break an episode: What is this episode about in terms of what happens in the plot? What is this episode about in terms of what it says about the characters and the series’ larger themes? Is there a way to structure this episode so that it feels distinct and memorable? If not, can any parts of the episode be moved or left behind in order to make it better? Even if someone is going to watch six episodes in one sitting, how can I make this one stand out?

Those questions can result in a conceptually daring episode like “Hush” or “Pine Barrens” or “International Assassin.” Or they can just result in an extraordinarily satisfying installment of a uniform serialized narrative, like The Americans‘ “Martial Eagle.” But if asked thoroughly and answered properly, they wind up enhancing both the experience of watching that individual episode, and the season as a whole. “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” is both a cracking good hour of TV and a crucial building block of Mad Men season three, you know?

Breaking Bad isn’t a movie, and Vince Gilligan would have made very different choices if it had been. Game of Thrones isn’t a movie, and shouldn’t be designed as such.

This is television. And television has episodes. It’s okay to admit that. Your show will be better off in the long run for it.

 

 

http://uproxx.com/sepinwall/in-defense-of-the-episode-again/

[JoeC36]

2 minutes ago, munchmemory said:

Yup.  You definitely see the same themes repeated as well as all the storyline holes.  Guess they get less obvious when there is a week or so between episodes. 

 

 

11 minutes ago, DMan77 said:

Yes, exactly! And I'm not an expert on these things, or a TV snob or anything like that, but shows become so formulaic to me after watching for a while.

You can just see the same similar story arch in each episode and each season. Yes, they change things up and there's a surprise or two, but the overall bell curve is the same episode after episode after episode... And to your point, that get's old. It's like just getting the middle over and over instead of the beginning/middle/end. 

I DO like TV and all the great shows out there, and I will watch them... I just can't do more than one or two episodes of the same show at a time. It just gets predictable. 

Idk if it relates, but both of your posts made my think of the above article, that it's okay for TV shows to be TV shows instead of say a 64 hour long movie

[munchmemory]

3 minutes ago, JoeC36 said:

**Spoilers for some shows below

Your TV Show Doesn’t Have To Be A Movie: In Defense Of The Episode (Again)

#THE CREATIVITY OF PEAK TV

ALAN SEPINWALL

 

 

SENIOR TELEVISION WRITER

 

I’ve been thinking about episodes again, and why the most basic unit of TV storytelling is being undervalued these days.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, after growing frustrated with too many shows (particularly ones made for streaming services) that had no interest in differentiating one episode from the next, and just offered up 13 amorphous hours of… stuff. But three recent events have put the issue at the front of my mind again.

First, Indiewire, for their weekly TV critics survey, asked a bunch of us to name our favorite concept episode of television ever. We all wound up overthinking it by assuming everyone else was going to pick “Hush” (the silent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), thus ensuring that no one actually picked it, but the choices were all interesting, and spoke to the many wonderful things an episode of TV can do and be when the creative team tries hard enough to do something different from what they normally turn out.

Then over the weekend, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss appeared at South By Southwest, where they looked ahead to the end of the series, and back across an experience that they suggested they didn’t think about as a TV show at all:

 

And yesterday, one of our writers pointed me to a fan-made attempt to edit all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad down into a feature-length movie. Having just spent a lot of time rewatching and thinking about the series as prep for my upcoming Breaking Bad review collection, I was curious to see what parts of the story were included and what fell away in the attempt to squeeze it all in.

It will, of course, shock you to learn that 62 hours of TV do not seamlessly condense into a little over 2 hours, and that the “movie,” while an admirable effort, doesn’t in any way work as a standalone entity. It has to jump from beat to beat, scene to scene, so quickly just to establish all the relevant plot and character points, that a lot of it would make little sense, narratively or emotionally, without having already seen the series. It leaves a bunch of characters on the sidelines because it has no room for them, which then has a ripple effect down the line: It chops out everything with both Tuco and the Cousins, which in turn means the conclusion to the war with Gus happens off-camera, because it would be gibberish without Tio Hector there, and Hector makes no sense if you haven’t already met the rest of his family.

But more than any single editing decision, the movie approach fails because Breaking Bad wasn’t made as a movie — not even, to paraphrase the GoT guys, a 62-hour movie. Vince Gilligan and company were making a television show, by God, with the understanding of the medium’s many distinct and valuable properties. They told a serialized story that’s powerful precisely because you get to see it all unfold over a long period of time, even as each individual episode is treated as its own entity: To borrow the Friends title approach, it’s “The One Where They Dissolve A Body In Acid,” followed by “The One Where Krazy-8’s Locked In The Basement,” or later “The One Where The RV Breaks Down” or “The One With The Train Heist.” Each episode helps add something to the larger story — and takes advantage of the length of a TV series to focus on what Vince Gilligan talks about as “the in-between moments” that crime movies (this fan-made one included) rarely have room to depict — but there’s a specific structure, conflict, and often theme to each that makes it satisfying whether watched a week apart from the others (as it originally aired) or as part of a binge now. You could watch “4 Days Out” without knowing anything about the series and still be wildly entertained by what happens in that hour.

HBO

Which brings us back to the Game of Thrones comment from SXSW. I understand where Benioff and Weiss are coming from. They’re adapting a collection of books that are telling one grand, sweeping story; it’s not a medieval fantasy procedural, you know? And they’re far from the first showrunners to insist that they’re not really making a show at all: David Simon always referred to The Wire as “a novel for television,” actors and producers on multi-camera sitcoms love the phrase “we’re doing a stage play every week,” etc.

But The Wire debuted 15 years ago, and is part of the reason TV creators no longer need to sound apologetic for being creators of TV. Yet that one show has become the TV version of the Velvet Underground: Few watched it, but most of the ones who did went on to create their own TV shows, all of them using the same storytelling model. And unless you’re executing on as high a level as The Wire did, then treating the season — or the series — as the basic storytelling unit, rather than the individual episodes, can be more trouble than it’s worth.

There are too many series — many of which I’ve liked a lot, in spite of this problem — over those past 15 years that ran out of steam two-thirds of the way through the season (most of the Netflix Marvel shows), or sagged badly in the middle before recovering (most seasons of Boardwalk Empire), or simply weren’t satisfying enough in the end to justify the misshapen center. Whereas many of the very best series of the last few years — Fargo, The Leftovers, BoJack Horseman, and The People v. O.J. Simpson, to name just a few — go out of their way to figure out what sets each episode apart even as they’re telling bigger stories. Imagine a version of BoJack that had no room for “Fish Out of Water,” or a People v. O.J. that couldn’t give us “Marcia Marcia Marcia” because the creative teams were too focused on the big picture for the whole season, and making it feel like a stylistically cohesive whole. With Netflix alone, the respective subject matter makes me far more inclined to enjoy a Jessica Jones or Luke Cage than something like The Crown, yet the latter proved to be the more satisfying experience because it wasn’t just a 13-hour story blob, but constructed each episode along a Royal Crisis of the Week model. Similarly, the flashbacks on Orange is the New Black have started to run out of juice, but they still force that show’s writers to spotlight one or two characters in every episode and find something interesting and complete to say about them over the course of that hour.

When I wrote that earlier defense of the episode piece, I was focusing on the value of largely standalone episodes of serialized shows. For some series — like a Game of Thrones — that’s a practical impossibility. (I wouldn’t object to an entire episode set in Hot Pie’s bakery, but I doubt HBO would ever approve such a thing.) But an episode doesn’t have to be standalone in story to stand alone in form and function. Think about the best GoT episodes — the ones people talk about years later, and will likely talk about long after the series is done — and most of them were ones that deviated from the series’ usual tour guide approach to Westeros: “Now this happens here, now that’s happening over there, let’s go see what those nutty kids in Dorne are up to…” Though that format has produced episodes with great moments, Game of Thrones tends to be at its best when there’s more cohesion and thought to what’s happening in that episode and that episode only, whether it’s one where the entire hour takes place in one setting (“Blackwater”), one where a much bigger-than-usual section of the episode stays in one place (“Hardhome,” “The Winds of Winter”), or one where the stories feel thematically tied together in some way (“The Door”). I often feel like the sheer tonnage of story and characters that Benioff and Weiss have to adapt has been the biggest stumbling block preventing GoT from elevating past a show with great moments into an all-time great series, but it may be just as much about the showrunners viewing the storytelling model the same way George R.R. Martin does, even though they’re writing for a different medium with different demands.

Even if Game of Thrones had been made for a streaming service where fans could watch entire seasons at once — heck, even if they had somehow produced the entire series before releasing any of it — it still wouldn’t be a 73-hour movie. One, because that sounds terrible, and no one but the most obsessed and/or unwell person would watch all 73 hours in one sitting. And two, because it’s still not a movie. Both have moving pictures and sounds, but there are differences between the two, and those differences should be embraced, not ignored or swept under the rug(*).

(*) Sunday was the 15th anniversary of the premiere of The Shield, an all-time great drama that never felt apologetic about being television, and in fact took advantage of things that are often looked on as storytelling detriments of the medium. Not only were there procedural elements to almost every episode, which gave shape and form to all of the serialized material about Vic and the strike team, but creator Shawn Ryan instructed his writers to treat every scene as if it would be the last thing the viewer saw before an act break. This was originally just a way for him to have greater freedom in editing the episodes, but it wound up giving the show a relentless quality that served it well whether watched live on FX with commercial interruptions, or years later on Hulu without them. The moral: embrace the medium however you can and make it work for you. Use every part of the buffalo.

These are the questions any TV storyteller should be asking when they sit down to break an episode: What is this episode about in terms of what happens in the plot? What is this episode about in terms of what it says about the characters and the series’ larger themes? Is there a way to structure this episode so that it feels distinct and memorable? If not, can any parts of the episode be moved or left behind in order to make it better? Even if someone is going to watch six episodes in one sitting, how can I make this one stand out?

Those questions can result in a conceptually daring episode like “Hush” or “Pine Barrens” or “International Assassin.” Or they can just result in an extraordinarily satisfying installment of a uniform serialized narrative, like The Americans‘ “Martial Eagle.” But if asked thoroughly and answered properly, they wind up enhancing both the experience of watching that individual episode, and the season as a whole. “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” is both a cracking good hour of TV and a crucial building block of Mad Men season three, you know?

Breaking Bad isn’t a movie, and Vince Gilligan would have made very different choices if it had been. Game of Thrones isn’t a movie, and shouldn’t be designed as such.

This is television. And television has episodes. It’s okay to admit that. Your show will be better off in the long run for it.

 

 

http://uproxx.com/sepinwall/in-defense-of-the-episode-again/

Thanks for this article.  I just sent it to my wife.  lol  BTW, doesn't the image of the author look like Mcc?

[JoeC36]

15 minutes ago, munchmemory said:

Thanks for this article.  I just sent it to my wife.  lol  BTW, doesn't the image of the author look like Mcc?

He totally does lol good eye

[DMan77]

14 minutes ago, JoeC36 said:

 

Idk if it relates, but both of your posts made my think of the above article, that it's okay for TV shows to be TV shows instead of say a 64 hour long movie

Wow that is a great article! It's always nice to see someone more articulate than me put similar thoughts into better and more thoughtful words, hah.

But yes, exactly. 

 

[BroadwayJoe12]

Just finished watching The Night Of, probably the best thing that I have seen on television since True Detective Season 1. Marvelous performances by the entire cast, Turturro was phenomenal. 8 episodes, an hour each, well worth the watch for anyone that likes good television. 

[JohnJ]

On 4/27/2017 at 9:17 AM, southparkcpa said:

yeah... I wont PAY for it , so Ive watched 4 seasons on Amazon, enjoyed them all, but yes, the Paige thing towards end of season 4 was "not good".

Are you in season 5?

Yes. I've watched from the start. It started last season and has become every other scene with Paige and her teeny problems. It doesn't go anywhere and it doesn't end. I find her annoying to begin with and I'm about to bail. Seems to have taken a nose dive

[JohnJ]

Found Taboo on FX to be most entertaining. Tom Hardy is great. Love the historical setting and the mysticism.....and Oona Chaplin 

Bosch on Amazon is pretty good. One of the better Amazon offerings.

[JustInFudge]

This could totally make up for how terrible Iron Fist was...

 

[T0mShane]

Trying to get through Jessica Jones so I'm ready for that upcoming Marvel series and I can't believe how painful it is to watch Kristen Ritter try to act or fight or emote or speak. 

[JustInFudge]

3 hours ago, T0mShane said:

Trying to get through Jessica Jones so I'm ready for that upcoming Marvel series and I can't believe how painful it is to watch Kristen Ritter try to act or fight or emote or speak. 

I too find her terrible but for some reason it worked for me in that role.  I loved it.  Got better and better each episode too. 

[gqxluvx]

On 5/9/2017 at 1:31 PM, T0mShane said:

Trying to get through Jessica Jones so I'm ready for that upcoming Marvel series and I can't believe how painful it is to watch Kristen Ritter try to act or fight or emote or speak. 

Do you hate EVERYTHING shane?

[chirorob]

22 hours ago, JiF said:

I too find her terrible but for some reason it worked for me in that role.  I loved it.  Got better and better each episode too. 

I liked that one.   And David Tennant was great

Iron Fist.... not so much.

[munchmemory]

Just started watching Aziz Ansari's "Master of None".  It's absolutely phenomenal.  Super funny with a great cast which delivers crisp, well written comedy.  

[JustInFudge]

1 hour ago, chirorob said:

I liked that one.   And David Tennant was great

Iron Fist.... not so much.

Kilgrave is runner up to Kingping as far as villains go out of those series, IMO.  He was fantastic.  That ending...so good.

 

[JustInFudge]

10 minutes ago, munchmemory said:

Just started watching Aziz Ansari's "Master of None".  It's absolutely phenomenal.  Super funny with a great cast which delivers crisp, well written comedy.  

One of the greatest opening scenes in the history of shows.  I was dying. 

[T0mShane]

2 hours ago, gqxluvx said:

Do you hate EVERYTHING shane?

As a guy who seeks to fix things, I'm just predisposed to seeing where things need fixing, and I'm more vocal about things that are sh*t. 

[T0mShane]

28 minutes ago, JiF said:

Kilgrave is runner up to Kingping as far as villains go out of those series, IMO.  He was fantastic.  That ending...so good.

 

The guy has the power to make anyone do anything and he wastes it stalking a chick who looks like one of those melting nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[chirorob]

22 minutes ago, T0mShane said:

The guy has the power to make anyone do anything and he wastes it stalking a chick who looks like one of those melting nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Hey, I forgot.   What was that thing you actually liked?

Never mind, I see that was covered.

[munchmemory]

2 hours ago, JiF said:

One of the greatest opening scenes in the history of shows.  I was dying. 

Awesome, right?  Asking if she'd ever tried Martinelli's apple juice killed me.  lol

[CrazyCarl40]

On 5/10/2017 at 4:30 PM, munchmemory said:

Just started watching Aziz Ansari's "Master of None".  It's absolutely phenomenal.  Super funny with a great cast which delivers crisp, well written comedy.  

Season two is out. And it's fantastically done. 

[munchmemory]

11 hours ago, CrazyCarl40 said:

Season two is out. And it's fantastically done. 

Thanks.  Can't wait to delve in.  Just about done with the first season.

[chirorob]

I remember GLOW Wrestling.

This show could be amazing.

 

[chirorob]

Actual Clip from GLOW.

[munchmemory]

On 5/14/2017 at 9:19 PM, CrazyCarl40 said:

Season two is out. And it's fantastically done. 

Watched episode one ,"The Thief", last night.  Very well conceived and executed.  The little Italian kid is hilarious.

[CrazyCarl40]

15 minutes ago, munchmemory said:

Watched episode one ,"The Thief", last night.  Very well conceived and executed.  The little Italian kid is hilarious.

The best episodes for me were New York I Love You and Thanksgiving. 

[CotcheryifyouCan]

better call saul was pretty good last night. first appearance of the saul character

[Lil Woody]

Is anyone watching "American Gods"?

It's kind of slow building and there is a certain scene with 2 muslim guys that I wish I never saw, but it is a really interesting and different idea than anything I've ever seen done before. I'm hoping it gets better, fast.

[munchmemory]

Started watching "Genius" yesterday.  Excellent.  And who the heck knew Einstein was such a ladies' man? 

[munchmemory]

On 5/16/2017 at 9:56 AM, CrazyCarl40 said:

The best episodes for me were New York I Love You and Thanksgiving. 

The Thanksgiving episode is a true TV classic.  Loved it and the NY episode, too.

[chirorob]

Dark Crystal Prequel

 

[JustInFudge]

Bloodline season 3 is on Netflix.  I dont know but I love this show...

[JustInFudge]

I think it's because I often dream about killing my friends and stuff. It's weird.  In my dreams, I kill all my close friends and then end up killing more of them in a cover up.  So Bloodline like. 

[nj meadowlands]

The Leftovers was awesome.