Buffy The Vampire Slayer is going to be rebooted. I am going to giddily dance in celebration. https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-tv-reboot-1202880128/
OMG. It's gonna suck. Reading the article, it says that the Kuzuis are going to be producers on the show, which is strange. The way I heard it, they were the producers of the movie and Wheedon hated, hated, hated what they had done with his idea, and he had to buy back the rights. Part of the agreement is that the Kuzuis were listed on the show as producers though they never spent a day on set. This does not sound like good creative tension.
It'great that we are seeing more diversity in tv. Especially in richer storytelling rather than generic stuff.
Yeah, that's the detail that makes me hopeful. Buffy is about lots of things, and one of them is power dynamics. It's why Buffy is a Buffy and not a Biff. I know the movie took that and was all "Look how hilarious it is to think a girl can be a superhero" but the series took it seriously and created something meaningful out of it. That their starting point is a Buffy with a new set of power relationships with others means (I believe) that they are thinking hard about things.
"The Haunting of Hill House" adaptation made by Mike Flanagan drops on Netflix today. There is really too much TV to even keep up with all of the good stuff.
Interesting, Europeans get American TV but in USA we hardly get European TV. Is HBO available in Europe?
Our studios (and networks) make too much $$$$ and wouldn't wanna jeopardize that with establishing a foothold for Euro series. There are some Euro shows on PBS/Sundance channel and I believe IFC.
So I watched the first two episodes of "The Haunting of Hill House". It's good TV. The flashing back and forward from the past to the present and back again works well as a narrative device. I like the cast and Mike Flanagan must be one of the most loyal directors across projects when it comes to having his regular players returning. The visual motif of "hiding ghosts in the backgrounds of scenes" is fun but I also find it distracting. You are spending half the time watching the episodes playing a game of "where's Waldo" with cleverly hidden ghosts and apparitions instead of focusing on the scene in question. I also find it a bit hard to believe that none of the characters ever seem to spot what the audience does.
PBS? I read a few years ago that their average evening viewership was just over 2 million, and last year the evening news show was at 1.2 million nightly viewers. Once upon a time those would have been dismal numbers, but in today's super-divided era, it isn't bad at all.
I wonder if they still hold those numbers after the end of Downtown Abbey. I never watched it, but most everyone I knew was into it.
Halfway through "The Haunting of Hill House". The reveal at the end of episode 5 was really well done.
I'm not a horror guy. Is it worth investing my time? I'm gonna try and binge as much of DDS3 this weekend. But I kind wanna try The Haunting (at least the first 2 episodes).
It depends. Mike Flanagan likes to devote a lot of time to the family dynamic (not just here but also in some/most of his horror films) so it is a family drama as much as it is a horror story. There is even one reading of the story in which this isn't about a family that grew up in a haunted house but rather a story about two mentally ill people and how their illnesses have effected their relatives well into adulthood.
Up to episode seven of "The Haunting of Hill House". It's (very) good TV, but no episode so far could match up to the Nell-centric episode five. That might be the best thing Mike Flanagan has ever done and he is a director I rate very highly.
The last season of Downton Abbey premiered to more than 10 million viewers. Last year, they had the only nightly news broadcast that added viewers (the PBS NewsHour is the best out there).
The PBS stations now have a streaming service, it's called "Thirteen Passport" in my city. May be worth looking at, especially with most Netflix movies being garbage.
Having produced programs for darn near every network out there, I can tell you that Netflix and Amazon probably have the highest standards in the industry for stuff that they produce in-house.
Sadly it's the truth, and this is becoming more and more a widespread opinion. We get Netflix for free from our cell phone carrier but they are replacing top movies with their in-house mediocrity and it's only worth it at free. The TV series are mostly good to great however. Amazon on the other hand makes terrific movies and TV series, great diversity too.