steppensquirrle

Hilarious and and often hits very close to home. Very well written, often well-researched (rare these days), and nicely paced. The characters are over the top and somewhat hard to relate to, but they are also very like people I know.

This was one of my favorite shows as a child. It was just the right amount of liminal unsettling surrealness. You had a chill down your spine, but not so much that you wanted to stop watching. I think every kid growing up in idyllic suburbia secretly hoped there were such "eerie" things afoot in their own neighborhoods. That secret is better than the truth, that all our parents and neighbors were just poorly hiding their own dissatisfaction and existential frustrations.

I am terrible at history, and I could tell how horribly inaccurate this is. Even if you can look past that, the show is anachronistic within its own world building! You're going to have the quartet at the ball play "Royals"? Really!? Even if you can get past that, the storyline is absurd, the dialogue is painfully forced, and everything is over the top. It's good softcore for teen girls, I guess.

This show is not just hilarious and entertaining, it is also socially important. Picking up some of where Chapelle left off.

A brilliant and disturbing near-future science fiction series examining the social and psychological effects of technology on humanity, and visa-versa-- how society's less appealing qualities can be magnified by technology and can direct the path of technological advancement. Many episodes hit frighteningly close to home. This is not a good show if you are looking for a cheery pick-me-up, but it will hopefully make you look at your phone less and your friends more, make you rethink reality television, and make you stop cycle-checking facebook.

Sure it's another formulaic mystery show, but the characters are brilliant. It is easy to get invested. Phryne is a strong well-written character. And I could just watch for the outfits!

This show surprised me a bit. Episode to episode it can be mostly a formulaic cop show with a will-they/won't they romance, but Carey's (and by extension Gaiman, etal's) characters are not altogether lost, and if you stick with the show the characters have quite some depth. I can't deny that it is also very sexy and has a certain style.

This show was so well done I sometimes found it hard to watch. Krysten Ritter very convincingly portrays a woman recovering from physical and emotional trauma. The fact that she has super-powers is only incidental to her humanity. David Tennant is so terrifying as the villain that I fear my view of the 10th doctor will forever be marred. The pacing is a bit slow, and the cinematography is a bit uninteresting, but overall I really liked the show.

Take the (in my view realistic) philosophy behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstren are Dead (we are all NPCs with no pre-defined purpose and no deep connection to the plot of history) and imagine a universe where that is flipped on its head. There are no NPCs and everything matters. It means that even when things are brutal and ugly it is still beautiful (if only in its complexity) and meaningful. It is fast-paced surreal absurdism. Supremely entertaining. Somehow simultaneously sweet and dark, charming and ugly.

An extremely clever show full or literary wit, genre play, and social commentary masquerading as a low brow cartoon show.