spiderwing

Still playing catch up, but midway through the first season it's enthralling. Kevin Spacy is deliciously evil, Robin Wright is amazing, and everyone else is, well, background.

There's a limit to how long it can hold together, and how long I can maintain interest in unlikeable people, but it's a fin ride.

Each episode is a self contained, dark-to-dystopian, near future story. They are bleak and grim and, like most good fiction, say more about the world in which they are written than the world in which they are set.

Think Twilight Zone without the supernatural elements.

Worth watching.

I heard good things about the show, and felt that I really should give it a try.

Having watched a season, I have to admit it was well done. The premise is bizarre, the writing is very skillful. The main character engaging. There is certainly food for thought.

However, just because something is well done doesn't make it worth watching. So, the show can make me connect with a serial killer. I have to admit that that's an achievement. I don't have to invest the time or energy it takes to watch it, not when there are other very well written, produced and acted shows out there which don't have horrendous premises.

The fact that I didn't give it 1 star says something. I do respect what the creative team did with the show - but I gave it a real chance and still don't want to watch it.

The movie was explicitly a closed loop timeline (you CAN'T change the past), while the TV series is an open loop timeline with some form of temporal inertia (you can change the past) as opposed to being chaotic (changing the past at all rewrites your present).

Not quite 'time travel works the way the writers want it to this week', but it could go there if the mini series becomes a back door pilot. I'll keep watching, but I'm not too optimistic.

I do, however, like the way the characters and setting mirror the movie while the metaphysics don't. It's an interesting exercise in adaptation.

Definitely a 'pretty people with supernatural added' show. I'm giving it an extra half star because of John Noble.

The individual episodes are tight enough, but the seasons meander a bit. The interpersonal relationships develop at a glacial pace, but at least they seem not to be building a romantic link between the two leads (please let there be a cross sex meaningful platonic relationship that doesn't go there in the end...) The mythology is all over the place. There is no Masquerade, people just don't believe in magic because it never happens, except that it's happening ALL THE TIME. It's a watchable mess.

I heard good things about the series and so I searched out the movies - I found them painful. Completely self-indulgent cheese-whiz, celebrating an obnoxious know-it-all.

The series, however, is something else. The protagonist of the movies is barely present (due to the actor having other commitments), so what would be the supporting cast gets the limelight - for the WHOLE SEASON. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, and when the original Librarian rejoins the team he's been humanized enough that it comes together well (he still knows everything, but he's taken a half step back from full on Marty Stu)

I'm really enjoying the show. Sorry that Bob Newhart has been written out of it. I hope it will get a second season.

My only complaint is the excessive gross out factor - it gets to the level of shows where the gross out is the point. Except that in Fringe, it's not.

The world building is phenomenal. There are several points where the universe overtly re-writes itself (multidimensional time travel stories have a tendency to do that), and a couple of seeming continuity errors that are probably more subtle re-writes. The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is because they never really developed Astrid as a character.

Be warned, it's silly. It's so silly that it's a real shame it's not family friendly. Don't expect a lot of plot. There is some character development, but not a lot.

Each show has two or three musical numbers, which is really impressive. The actors are great (Love Timothy Ormondson). Enjoyable.

Season one is a fairly standard Monster of the Week show, with a really bland protagonist and a very quirky sidekick. In the second season we've got a global conspiracy Masquerade element, the MOtW has slowed down, the protagonist has got a personality, and the quirky sidekick has his own romantic interest.

This one is a lot of fun.

It's an interesting concept, but the execution drags - probably because the show runners want to draw out the mystery. At the end of the second season we still don't have a clear of what the dome is, or why it's there. I've been told that, in the book, the main characters were all dead by the end of the first season, which is to say that the second season may not have anything at all to do with King's cosmology.

Don't think about it too hard, the showrunners probably didn't.