"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" is flat-out the weirdest television show I have ever seen. That is all.
My wife and I have watched parts of a couple episodes, couldn't turn away despite the fact that we had no idea what was going on, and didn't particularly want to, seemed more fun that way. And she's actually read the book, though many years ago.
My wife, daughter, and I truly disliked the third episode of the recently-completed fourth series of Sherlock. Word is it might be the last. My wife tends a bit to conspiracies, and thinks they did it on purpose so people wouldn't want it back particularly stridently.
It was really, really harsh. I'm not that into the show but my wife watches it religiously, and she had a hard time with a lot of that episode, just a little too torturey.
I watched the first episode (Season 1, Ep 1) a long time ago and never returned to the series. A friend recently implored me to give it another go, swearing that I'd like it -- just also skip Season 1, Ep 2. I've followed her advice and have been enjoying it thus far. I had no idea there was a Dirk Gently series!
You are correct, I had the wrong name. I guess the episode with the British PM raping a pig was a bit more than I wanted to think about so I excised, partially, the show from my mind...
John Lithgow looks like he had a blast playing maybe-wife-murderer Larry Henderson in Trial and Error.
what show(s) or creator(s) do we have to thank for the past 10 years of uninterrupted pure quality of television? we've had The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, House of Cards,Orange is the New Black and so many more series. TV is at its peak right now. Though of course on cable or Netflix. Really riveting stuff. Is it The Sopranos that started this wave? Or The Wire?
I think the credit is due to HBO who were the first to build a profitable model that makes TV and film irrelevant. In 25 years, the idea of a theatre or cable will seem laughably olde fashioned.
Alan Sepinwall actually wrote a good book on just that subject: http://www.alansepinwall.com/ The earlier shows he credits are stuff like "Homicide: Life on the Street" (where David Simon first cut his teeth), "Oz", "Hill Street Blues", "St. Elsewhere", "Wiseguy", "Twin Peaks", "NYPD Blue", "ER", ... but he does see "The Sopranos" as the first "real" example of the Golden Era of television.
I would add "Northern Exposure" to that list, which, in a roundabout way, can be interpreted as the granddaddy to shows like "Fargo".
The difference with this those shows is that they were made in the network era. That era is moribund. HBO found out that if you make really good, high production shows, people would be willing to spend money to watch it. (Especially as theatres have gotten so outrageously expensive and monitors and sound have gotten so cheap and good.) That breaks the advertising model for broadcast and it kills the notion that one would go to a theatre and pay 10 bucks for popcorn when the tv in the living room is 4k and 5.1.
I was going to mention the two in bold: Twin Peaks was directed by David Lynch, and there was nothing else on TV like it. The first several episodes where terrific. When the show started to go downhill, I remember thinking, "too bad the networks won't give movie directors chances to direct mini-series or something." Beat you to it, HBO! And the wife and I just started to watch the first season of Wiseguy last night. The one thing both those shows have in common the way they broke new ground, is that they had a story arc, which network TV avoided like the plague. "What if someone misses an episode. They won't know what's going on then they'll start watching something else." It's common now, and HBO gets credit for getting that ball rolling, but Twin Peaks and Wiseguy both were doing serials before it was cool. In prime time. Soap operas were doing that from the start, but weekly series pretty much avoided it.
I actually watched "Wiseguy" with my dad. But it was dubbed in French. And I was probably too young to be watching it. Joan Severance though! With Kevin Spacey playing her brother.
Mel and Susan Profitt! Luckily, I was old enough to get the joke when they answered their business phone "S and M Family Enterprise, how can we help you..."
I had totally forgot about Homicide on the Street. Do you guys think that network tv might evolve more over the next decade to compete with cable series? Perhaps allowing more swears. allowing a breast or butt to be shown on screen, more antagonist as the lead in their series?
The bigger question is perhaps if network TV will still exist as we know it today. We might see a total 'Netflixication' of what we perceive as the TV entertainment format today.