I know I am perilously late to the game here, but I’m surprising myself by watching—and very much liking—Game of Thrones. I always dismissed it as probably too violent and fantasy-ish for me. And it is wickedly violent—this fictional world is full of beheadings and various quite imaginative forms of torture. So some of it I watch while covering my eyes. But mostly, I think it’s a really engrossing portrait of a perfectly imagined world, and I am so on board for it. (And, I’ll add that while the women on this series are often portrayed as only as powerful as the men they’re attached to, there are also some thoroughly great female characters.)
Not sure these will fit, as I was never a big fan of GOT (I annoyed my husband with too many questions as I couldn’t follow). Agree with recommendations for Hacks and Mare of Easttown (Jean Smart!) along with Ted Lasso. Also enjoyed Starstruck and Mythic Quest. And it’s very network, but if you liked Parks and Rec, try Rutherford Falls.
I liked the first couple episodes of Rutherford Falls and the subject matter, but was super bummed that I had to subscribe to watch the remaining season. Already subscribe to enough shows.
Oh speaking of subscriptions, the Loki show has been quite good (like a Wes Anderson take on time travel in the Marvel universe). Also love that both that and both that and the Falcon and the Winter Soldier have been run by women executive producer/directors — Kate Herron and Kari Skogland.
Mythic Quest probably had the best pandemic-focused episode last year (Zoom call, etc. but with the heartbreak of quarantine).
I enjoyed Starstruck, too! It was perfect “it’s too hot to do anything but sit on the couch and not think” viewing. Also loved Mare and enjoyed Hacks, although not quite as much as I thought I would given the hype.
Mare of Eastown, The Wire (how did I miss this?) and Handmaid’s Tale. I need to find something less intense for my next binge.
I, too, missed the Wire first time around (I didn’t have HBO) but it’s so good. Fully understand the opinion that it’s the best written television series ever. AND it’s filled with in-jokes about Baltimore that are only understandable to people who grew up here.
I flew through Flack — Anna Paquin is great, but I REALLY loved all her female coworkers at the PR agency. I’m in the middle of The Boys. It’s violent, but I feel like the violent scenes are quick, not dwelled upon torture like some shows do, and the characters are super interesting. I also enjoyed Hacks. Not sure what my next show will be, but two separate friends have raved to me about For All Mankind, so I think that might be next!
Kevin Can F*ck Himself on AMC is amazing so far!
Completely hooked on Spiral, and watched The Bureau. Both are terrific and so much better than American crime/thriller series, except for Bosch which I also loved. I also loved GOT and think the really good character development is what carries it along. Agree the ending was terrible and so sad considering what came before. Fauda is quite good even though it has it’s weak points with gender and from what I read, the politics.
Succession.
Another vote for Call My Agent, Lupin and am now watching High Seas, an Agatha Christie style Spanish mystery drama set in the 40s….a bit campy and addictive! On a totally different note, my guilty pleasure this past few months was New Girl. So consistently funny!
I agree call my agent great as is lupin. Going to check out high seas. I found New Girl start to finish way more enjoyable than I thought I would.
I’m in a totally Scandinavian mode right now: Beforeigners (HBO) from Norway–sci fi in a very unexpected way; the movie, Oslo, which kinda blew me away with how much I did not know about the Oslo Accords and then there is Andrew Scott who is just brilliant in whatever he does; currently watching Rita from Denmark (Netflix) which is so many seasons it usually overwhelms me but now I’m all in. Next up: Borgen and Copenhagen. I think this must be my first post-pandemic international trip lol.
I heard such great things about Borgen, but I just couldn’t get into it. I’m not sure why.
Anything with Jean Smart! Also, “Search Party” and “A Discovery of Witches” which is a little soap opera-y but good acting and amazing locations. And the second season (it is a trilogy and the third comes out next year) is pretty great historical fiction. Just watched “Sophie: A Murder in West Cork” and liked it. Very atmospheric and a good story.
Can’t wait to watch “Sophie: A Murder…” – my youngest daughter lives in Cork city and she said people are obsessed with the case after 20+ years! Listen to the West Cork podcast on Apple podcasts – SO addictive.
I just finished watching Sophie. I’m from the east coast of Ireland and spent many long weekends in West Cork, but that was before the murder. It made me homesick.
Oh! Never Have I Ever…hahaha!
Also, Dead to Me.
I did attempt Game of Thrones but just couldn’t get on board – hate fantasy! I know I’m in the minority, to say the least.
“Mare of Eastown” is outstanding. “The Affair,” “The Undoing” and “The Stranger” – all good! Another great one is “Defending Jacob” starring Mary from Downton Abbey.
We’re currently watching “The Flight Attendant” – highly enjoyable!
How about Halston? Supposed to be good for the fashion lovers.
Loved the Flight Attendant!!
We just finished The Morning Show. Loved Mare Of Easttown and Ted Lasso, The Flight Attendant. Looking forward to the final season of The Walking Dead and Ozark.
I’m not generally a fantasy fan either, but GOT was fantasy treated/approached as historical fiction or political drama (if that makes sense). The fantasy elements were baked in but not generally overdone — they were MacGuffin devices. Anyway, I liked (though didn’t get to love) the show enough until the disappointing final season. Still worth watching, entertaining, good performances. It was fantasy for geeks and non-fantasy geeks.
Lupin, Succession, Queen of the South, Ted Lasso, Mare of Eastown
Queen of the South…YES. How did I miss this when it originally aired? So good!
Really enjoyed Ted Lasso on Apple+. Slow start but totally fun and sweet.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum….Mr. In Between on FX/ Hulu.
Australian hit man – family drama. Really well done. Final season is airing now.
Am trying to get through the 2nd season of Lodge 49. Great cast and season 1 was unique.
Endeavour — I love the characters although the plots manage to be both repetitive and untenable — and major league baseball. I’m eagerly awaiting new seasons of Vera and Shetland (I know there are ardent Jimmy Perez fans here). My partner finds it not restful to watch subtitled shows, so I’ll have to sneak away to keep up with Call My Agent and The Bureau.
I love Jimmy but am enjoying watching Duncan on Catastrophe right now!
One of my all-time faves! Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney are genius-level funny.
They are brilliant! And her clothes are incredible. She made me rethink my mostly black wardrobe. 🙂
Oh my gosh, please give “Babylon Berlin” a try….my fave since “The Wire” or “Madmen.” Immersive German-language noir-drama set in the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin, has flappers, vice agents, singer, dancers and the rise of Brown shirts. Amazing, and the costumes and sets are a feast.
Ooo – that looks good. Very reminiscent of the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr, which I’ve read through twice now.
We loved Jean Smart in both Hacks, and Mare of Eastown. Great casts in both.
I watched Flack by myself. Anna Paquin’s character was just too self destructive for my husband to watch, but this was a dynamite cast of women.
We wrapped up Bosch with the final season. Such a stylish LA cop show. It has a great soundtrack, and I’d kill for his house!
We’re ready to start the new season of The Good Fight.
I am behind on GOT too. I thought I might read the books first. Has anyone read them? I still need to finish Harry Potter, come to that…
I’ve read all the books. If you haven’t gotten through Harry Potter, you’ll never make it through GOT. hahaha 😉
The books are great until and including Book 3, after that it’s just … meandering and lost the plot.
Do yourself a favour and stop watching Game Of Thrones after Season 6 – 7 and 8 are a travesty I wish I could unsee. I used to love Game of Thrones and before the ending I thought I’d rewatch it every year or so, but even during the pandemic I was never tempted once to rewatch any of it and I’m quite sure I never will. The same goes for the new Game of Thrones series HBO is currently producing – I’ll never watch that. The two last seasons and especially the ending managed to completely kill my interest in all things Game of Thrones – so you’ve been warned: You’re in for a disappointment of truly epic proportions.
+1000 and Amen.
Think I’m in a small group that believes otherwise! Never read the books, first watched all seasons this winter, so way late to the party — didn’t have any particular expectations and enjoyed all 8 seasons!
So I hear, Cora.
I say watch it all – I loved GOT even though it was not always perfect. And as you get towards the end – there are some SERIOUS bad ass women!
Hacks, High Maintenance, Call My Agent, Euphoria, and highly recommend For All Mankind. The season 2 finale is one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen. Always rewatching The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm as background/fall asleep shows.
High Maintenance is great. I still need to finish the last season.
Summer of Soul is a must, on hulu & in theaters and I want to see Zola in theaters – and loved Inside on Netflix. Other than that I’m reading books this summer – The Vanishing Half, Red Island House, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, There There, Burnt Sugar, An American Marriage, Hidden Valley Road, & Sister Carrie. Picking up The Largesse of the Sea Maiden today.
Sister Carrie is such a great book.
I read the the GOT series years ago. I’m not a fantasy genre fan but agreed to read it with a friend and found it enjoyable. I’m not a fan of over the top violence and found the reading violence easier to take than watching it on screen. The book plot has parts that are different from the tv show especially as the book series is still incomplete and GRR Martin has reported that the book will have a much different ending (if he ever gets around to finishing that). The Harry Potter books are exponentially better than the movies with far more backstory and complexity. It’s a fun, easy, hyper-imaginative read and it’s not surprising why it’s immensely popular with adults too. I liked it better than GOT. If you do read either, I would love to hear what you think.
Viajera: Oops this comment was supposed to be in reply to yours.
The fourth season of In Treatment, with Uzo Aduba as Dr Taylor! So good. Anthony Ramos, Quintessa Swindell…the cast list is wonderful. AND an unconventional (and enviable) personal relationship with Adam. Swoon.
Call My Agent, Kim’s Convenience, and the adorable surprise Penguin Town.
Speaking of therapy shows, “Couples Therapy” was really intriguing.
I really enjoyed In Treatment too. The first three seasons were great as well. loved Uzo Aduba’s Dr Taylor.
Just watched the first episode of Lupin… and can’t wait to see the rest!
I oddly loved that series too. My best binge list has been – Succession and Bosch.
Re-watching Downton Abbey, and enjoying the final season of Bosch. I highly recommend Call My Agent, Shrill, and Insecure.
I think there may be another Bosch series, or an extension – there was a bit in the LAT. We are hoping.
I heard it is a storyline starring Maddie Bosch as a rookie cop.
There is a spinoff in the works which if you haven’t watched season 7 would be a spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that.
I too was surprised by how much I liked Game of Thrones, since I hate fantasy. I’m really loving Physical. Once you get past the first two episodes which are heavily voice-overed and slightly hard to watch, it’s really entertaining. It also makes me really want to do aerobics. I loved that Hulu show you recommended, Alone Together, and I also need to watch the new season of Tuca and Bertie, which is a hilarious, absurd, kind of psychedelic animated show whose first season was amazing.
Oh, this is good to know. I love the look and feel of Physical, but I couldn’t get over the overbearing voice-over in the first episode.
Ziwe is brilliant-so funny and smart. I felt I got there late….
Also finished Mare of Eastown. Starting Physical and Kevin Can Fck Himself, both very dark comedies with conflicted female leads.
Hoping to watch We Are Lady Parts too.
Film/docs next-Zola & Summer of Soul asap!
Just posted about Kevin Can F*ck Himself and then came back because I wanted to add Physical, also a great show. I am amused and horrified to see how I have talked to myself in the past portrayed on screen. My husband thinks its an exaggeration, but there are some scenes where I cringe at how real the awful self-talk is.
I love watching Physical and Kevin Can F at the same time. Physical has a better soundtrack, but Kevin’s format is so clever.
Ziwe! She’s brilliant!
We’re “watching” the NBA finals (GO BUCKS!!) and sumo on NHK World Service while surfing the interwebs and negotiating laptime with the cats, because we are Fun People.
Finished Hacks about a week ago and still in mourning that it’s over — really, really loved this. A very fun find — just clicked on at random on Netflix — was Staged. It’s Michael Sheen and David Tenant trying to figure out how to rehearse a play over Zoom during the pandemic. Quick, entertaining, sometimes hilarious, and smart. Nice to watch while you’re eating dinner or cooking dinner or whatever.
Just started Bosch (Amazon Prime). Just finished The Summerdahl Murders and Candice Renoir on Acorn (also a kind of fun one is Whitstable Pearl also on Acorn) and I’m just about to finish Season 6 of Line of Duty (Britbox) All of this sounds like I watch a LOT of tv, but this covers a long period of time! As for GOT––I liked it and am NOT a fantasy person. Also thought the female characters got progressively stronger and the male characters got progressively weaker. I read somewhere that the prequel of GTO has begun filming.
Acorn has such great options – I think I need another channel (like I need a hole in the head!).
Here’s the show I want to watch next. It’s about real adult relationships and the drama of family life, and it’s a virtual travelogue through Europe.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/us/
OMG – just finished The Knick – it’s extremely underrated but a rare gem. Stars Clive Owen and is directed by Steven Soderbergh – episodes on HBO Max. Premise: Turn of the 20th century NYC based on Knickerbocker Hospital at the dawn of the industrial revolution and modern medicine discoveries. It’s a walking painting from the ashcan school incredibly well acted. Not to miss!
Oh yes! A friend recommended The Knick mid-lockdown and I blew through it.
I found GOT a little rapey, to be honest. Couldn’t get past the first season. But I binged Schitt’s Creek fast and furiously.
Shtissel, Call My Agent, Pose, and Couples Therapy on Showtime
OMG Shtisel – of course! I am an Ashkenazi jew so to hear yiddish and Hebrew spoken together was like sitting in my grandparents living room with plastic slipcovers listening to them talk over me while I snuck sweets off the coffee table :). Such an excellent show!!! Pose really really good. Season 3 is over the top but the series ending was extremely gratifying. The soundtrack to Pose is music to anyone’s ears who grew up in NYC in the late 80’s / Early 90’s.
Betty, Shitts Creek, Mare are all winners in their own ways.
I also like Run the World on Starz and liked the second season of the Kominsky Method on Netflix.
Super excited that Season 5 of The Good Fight has begun (2 weeks ago on Paramount+ this round) — such a great response to the ridiculous but dangerous Trump era and post-Trump (fingers crossed) eras. Strong, dynamic women characters.
Looking forward to Season 2 of Ted Lasso in 2 more weeks. About to begin Master of None Season 3 and Mr. Robot Season 4.
Re-watching the Wachowskis’ Sense 8 on Netflix — unfairly slept on.
Finished and loved in the past 1.5 years — Hacks, Queen’s Gambit, Search Party, Sex Education, Wayne, The IT Crowd and Richard Ayoade’s Travel Man (for good armchair travel w the droll Ayoade), All Creatures Great and Small (new Masterpiece Theater), Borgen (didn’t love Season 3),
Finished and liked — The Kominsky Method, Shrill, Made for Love (Cristin Milioti rocked in this and in the Palm Springs movie last year), The Flight Attendant, Unorthodox (have Shtisel on my list now), This Way Up (w Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan), Episodes.
The shows that really knocked me out were I May Destroy You, Bojack Horseman and Normal People.
BTW, if you’re ever looking for another good Mad-Men type show with great, complex women (and men) characters (didn’t see it till Hacks), watch Halt and Catch Fire on Netflix. An AMC show that should’ve gotten LOTS more attention and viewers. Plus, it has the highly attractive and TALL Lee Pace in it (though I also have a fondness for Toby Huss).
Oh, you have just done a good deed! I did not know about Travel Man. As appreciation, a Richard Ayoade clip that makes me laugh every time I see it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0BWXXM8Q9o
We binged The Wire, which I’d originally thought would be too intense for me to like. LOVED. IT. Also binged the German Netflix show Dark, about a tiny town with a nuclear power plant and, y’know, a rift in the space-time continuum — a mix of film noir and time travel, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Loved, even tho the plotting/characters were so knotty (tons of characters, all intertwined, in several different time periods and different actors playing them at different ages!) we literally had to PRINT OUT DIAGRAMS of who was who. VERY compelling tho! On the lighter side, loved High Maintenance, Ted Lasso, Hacks, Pen15, Evil (dumb jump scares, but I love Asif Mandvi and Michael Emerson), Mandalorian (I was not alive for great, silly/exciting serialized adventures in a movie theater in the 1930s but it FELT LIKE THAT), Great Pottery Throwdown, Lupin, Succession, Call My Agent, Documentary Now, that show on Netflix with Anna Kendrick about dating, that other show set in Chicago about dating (Easy?), The Boys (SO DARK), and with the teenagers, ABOUT teenagers: Dash and Lily (meh, but NYC looks GREAT) and a bunch of shows I really liked: Never Have I Ever, The Half of It, Trinkets, I Am Not Okay With This and Teenage Bounty Hunters (I couldn’t handle Euphoria, but older teen watched alone and loved).
Evil is great — just that cast alone. Also another show from The Good Wife and The Good Fight producers. If you like The Boys, try Invincible on Amazon — even darker superhero stuff. AGREE on Mandalorian!! — also great pure cinema stretches in it.
I will check out Invincible, thank you! (I cannot imagine anything darker than The Boys! Tho, have you seen Banshee? I LOVED IT. Same lead actor, same level of Grand Guignol blood-spurting.) And as much as I am not a fan of Star Wars movies, I am that much MORE a fan of The Mandalorian. So much less clunky and bombastic, such a sense of play and sweetness.
Me too. I loved the initial 3 Star Wars movies as a kid — Episode 4 (OG SW) and 5 (Empire Strikes Back, never gets old) hold up the best now, but agree that Mandalorian is several levels above.
I will check out Banshee.
Setting expectation s — Invincible is animated, but yes, DARK.
Starstruck on HBOmax was a delight. Finally watched Normal People & now I keep thinking about it. A rare occurrence where I preferred the video adaption over the book.
Huh, good to know. I loved the TV adaptation and have the book on my list for the year now. I agree about still thinking about it after I saw it. It’s very evocative and lingers — it made me think about my own relationships in youth.
I’m five years behind everyone else but I am loving The Americans. How did I miss out on this when it was originally on? So freaking good.
Ooo – that looks good. Very reminiscent of the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr, which I’ve read through twice now.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – I think it’s on Acorn, originally Australian Public Broadcast. Set in 1920’s Australia – strong female characters, surprisingly contemporary issues, sweet love story and AMAZING clothing!! Great for escapist watching.
Also behind, but just making my way through A Discovery of Witches. It’s fun, and more Matthew Goode is never a bad thing.
In real-estate-themed reality TV, I randomly saw an episode of My Lottery Dream House last week, and it seems to be—amazingly!—the only HGTV real estate show where buyers are smart about their money, care more about fundamentals like location and function that open plan kitchens for their constant (fantasy) entertaining, value quality craftsmanship over “updated” (white/gray/beige) kitchens, and end up actually houses that make sense. And then at the chateau-and-hôtels particuliers end of the spectrum, there’s The Parisian Agency on Netflix, which is also fabulous.
Oooh, Matthew Goode is something new?!? I’ll add to my list.
Finally- for the first time ever- I’m watching Freaks and Geeks. I can’t believe I waited over twenty years to watch it!
I’ve rewatched it once and will likely rewatch it again. Jealous of your first time.