Keeping it light -- what TV shows do you find unwatchable?

You too huh? I saw the show as ‘here let’s make fun of this person on national tv.’

Ever notice how the original opening kinda lead the audience to think guys would get makeovers too? I never saw guys on said show.

In fairness? Later on when they got actual hard cases (post stomach surgeries or people who are genuinely difficult to find a good outfit for due to body type, they seemed far less… catty about it.

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I can’t help but see thread like this and think

All you mfers watch gd law and order.

Why? Because everyone does. You may not admit it. But you do. That shit is alwaaays on. In a way that nothing is always on. It’s like the thesis from PCU.

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Not if you don’t have cable!

I did watch the first season of Criminal Minds though because I love Mandy Patinkin.

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" Ricky Gervais grew up next door to my mum"

Ricky Gervais grew up? (I kid, I kid)

The episode of Extras, written by Gervais and merchant, with Kate Winslet is one of the best pieces of television.

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Hello there - I’ve now read up to speed on the posts since mine. (Cursed sleep and life and shopping getting in the way.) Also - thanks for the insight - I wasn’t expecting to get a view from the inside, in response, so thank you.

I get that my particular example was an old style one-camera shoot (so all the laughter for the studio work was ‘canned’? Which would be why it was isolatable in that specific case?), and I also get that some performers, especially comedians work better off an audience for live feedback, I really do.

I… You may be right that a lot of it mightn’t be for me. I take your explaination that the experience of ‘being in an audience’ is deliberately being aimed for, but I simply don’t watch it from that perspective, which throws me - I (just) want to watch the actors deliver the story as best they can for entertainment. The atmosphere and laughter and responses are in the room I’m viewing in, my friends or family (or no-one), and am enjoying the show with. The remote audience isn’t part of that.

I do know the (few hundred?) people in the studio are enjoying themselves but I guess I also know I’m not in that audience - so - well yes: Not a typical person, and it can throw my suspension of disbelief, and simply get in the way. But everyone’s mileage varies, of course.

It isn’t all shows with laughter (comedies with audiences, I guess) and as you absolutely say upstream, some are much better done than others. (I guess I’m just somewhere near the sashimi end of the scale. ;))

Buuut I’m at risk of over-emphasising what isn’t that big a deal on the scale of things in the first place so I’ll stop there.

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Oooh! Actually, there’s an example in the UK which does try to give much more of an ‘in the studio watching the filming’ effect: ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ (BBC)
While feeling in some ways like a '70’s throwback, it starts with a reveal of the entire multi-room set, pans back out for the cast presentation and applause at the end, the camera pans past set walls, and the cast visibly continues through (and makes fun of) goofed lines, corpsing and other production errors, restarting lines where they can’t salvage things.

The fourth wall is visibly blown, and the effect is of seeing the things that the studio audience do, that the viewing audience don’t.

I mention this because it just occurred to me that it seems (to me) to more closely match the experience and effect you are describing and - if you hadn’t already heard of it, you might possibly find it interesting - it’s certainly a unique production.

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Law & Order is so much fun in my house tho!! MrPants is criminal defence. He HAAAAAATES that show so much! LOL - I put it on sometimes just to see how long it takes before he starts yelling. Two minutes is the max we’ve gone so far. To date the best “law” show that he says is the most realistic is Better Call Saul. Or the very short lived Canadian show “This is Wonderland”. I really want to start a blog or podcast where actual professionals watch an episode of a popular procedural like L&O or House or whatever. I’d listen to that. :slight_smile:

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Why do these writers think it’s necessary to play fast and loose with well known systems, technology, physics, and geography? I do FX and couldn’t watch McGyver, so much was bullshit. Thankfully the age of TV car crashes is mostly past, somehow every collision yielded a car literally flying through the air!

If you know NYC or LA all these shows make it seem like it’s nothing to get from one end of town to another. In Luke Cage they get from Harlem to Police Plaza far downtown in nothing flat. Just once, ONCE, I’d like to see not finding a legal parking spot be an issue, instead of just pulling up in front of their destination. In terms of believability, that’s up there with the Trek Transporter.

Lastly, for our period adventure freaks like me, cannon balls don’t explode. Even as late as the Civil War most shots fired were solid balls or forms of grapeshot not shells. Yet in most films and shows they explode like mortars throwing people up in the air. Only Master And Commander was realistic with the impact of solid shot.

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The small town I grew up in had the “privilege” of being the town a movie was filmed in/based in.

When the movie was finally shown, yes - there were places filmed that everyone recognized. Few were actually called by their correct name and nothing in the movie was geographically where it actually was in real life. Changes that had no bearing on the movie, but just changes to be changes.

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Welcome to Toronto! Also known as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Gotham, NYC, and everywhere else you can imagine!

:slight_smile:

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Vancouver, too.

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Oh, I know. That happens everywhere either (a) In the name of expediting the plot, or (b) to move you from suitable filming location A to (unrelated) suitable filming location B. Actual geography isn’t high on that list.

I can tell you that the London that appears in most movies is a jumble of unconnected streets, with each scene-cut also acting as a teleport to an unlinked part of Town - hell, I’ve seen the same in things filmed in Scarborough (UK seaside town).

Still, where you are local, it’s annoying to feel that you have to go “B-But that street doesn’t go there.” :slight_smile:

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I stopped watching Sleepy Hollow when they went to visit a “Ranch” in the Hudson Valley and they were driving up a dry treeless landscape. WTF? I guess they’re one of the few shows still being shot in Southern California instead of Canada. And there’s no such thing as ranches in the east. Even if you raise horses it’s a horse farm.

Maybe this all belongs in “what really grinds my gears”.

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Or bits of Cardiff.

I don’t know London especially well, but the screwing around with geography in films like 28 Weeks Later is egregious.

I find it weird when films are set here in Seattle but filmed elsewhere - like 50/50, or Chronicle. Just set the things in Vancouver if that’s where you’re going to make them. Is there really any point in unconvincingly setting films in what is hardly a major city to start with? You’ll just annoy the locals and nobody else cares.

I guess with Chronicle they wanted the Space Needle ending, but even then they could have just done Harbour Centre instead.

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This Old House was good though. It went into the technical details of architecture and refurbishment, not totting up how much value it would add on the resale market. Mostly people having their own homes that they lived in fixed up. And the accents were hilarious — there was one episode about insulating the bedroom over the garahge from the sound and vibration of the doohr every time someone pahked their cah. I was rollin on the floohr.

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Try to keep up. Magic Man is no longer magic, he’s Normal Man now and has been reformed. He’s currently back on Mars making amends.

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Oh it’s still like half of ION’s programming!

Agree whole heartedly about Mandy. Did you watch Dead Like Me? I think that’s my fave character he’s done. I feel like I could sit around for days on end listening to him give advice.

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It’s so absurd, the tv equivalent of rubbernecking a car crash. Goes great with pizza for curing hangovers.

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The same contrast existed between the British Kitchen Nightmares and the American version. In Britain, Gordon Ramsay seemed primarily interested in helping the restaurateurs succeed, while in America he was all about yelling “DISGUSTING!” at them and starting fights.

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That’s quite telling

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