Change Your Image
DangerousDag
Reviews
The Crown (2016)
Even for voyeurism, it's not very entertaining
The one positive thing that I can say about the show is that it looks fantastic. The sets and costume designs are sweeping, masterfully executed and period-accurate, and the cinematography is extremely well done.
All of which makes it doubly disappointing that such craftsmanship was wasted on such trashy show.
The mere concept of The Crown is terrible. No matter how often the show's producers and defenders attempt to defend their shallow, tabloid-inspired approach to their subject matter as a fictional drama rather than an attempt at a documentary, the vapid, overwrought scriptwriting makes it clear that they believe they are writing for an audience who are too stupid to be able to make that distinction.
And so, what we are left with is a show that pretends to be merely a fictional interpretation of real events, but which in reality portrays its subject matter with such a juvenile earnestness that it can only be meant to be taken as gospel. It hardly seems plausible, given how little the producers can actually know about the truth behind the events they are portraying. Either way, they are just purely dishonest.
Even to someone such as myself, who is not the biggest fan of the royal family, this show comes across as a voyeuristic, reality-show-level melodramatic portrayal of their lives, with absolutely no effort made at honesty, subtlety or nuance. The Crown makes Regency costume dramas seem like high art by comparison.
The scripts manage to be dense and glassy at the same time, where characters use entire paragraphs to expound on concepts that could be dealt with in a single sentence, but the producers clearly feel that all of the extra explication is needed in order to get their point across to their audience, whom, as I said, they clearly believe are morons. Perhaps they are right.
The Old Man (2022)
The writers clearly think they're smarter than they are.
In most cases, I don't mind a slow-building narrative. I'm not the kind of action-hound who gets bored if there's not an explosion on screen every five minutes, and I enjoy the quiet moments of character development and the plodding pace that are often necessary to create an interesting, immersive story with a dramatic climax.
Unfortunately, this show has all of those elements except for the interesting story and dramatic climax. Instead, what begins as an intriguing, thoughtful spy drama fizzles out into nothing as its characters talk each other to death, dwelling for entire episodes on the most predictable of plot twists and ultimately satisfying neither themselves nor their audience.
This is a truly tragic example of what happens when script writers become too carried away by their own conceits, and forget that what they're writing is a story, and not just a series of character introductions. This interminable, soporific psychodrama delivers a huge array of beginnings and no endings or climaxes at all. Each time it seems to be building up to something big, that something ends up being just another pithy, needlessly verbose dialogue penned by writers who clearly think they're much smarter than they are.
What an absolute waste of top-tier acting talent.
The Wheel of Time (2021)
Fans deserve better
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books are, at their core, an aspirational story: a high fantasy designed to lift the spirit with a tale of people and nations coming together to triumph over a seemingly-insurmountable enemy. Its appeal to its legions of fans has always been that it doesn't give ground to Ice and Fire-style nihilism and subversion. It's the kind of story that provides its audience, not just with an escape, but with hope and optimism.
At its very core, this television series is a fundamental betrayal of that story, of its author, and of the fans who could have made this show a success if they had been treated with respect by the producers. Instead, I predict that the show will be an abysmal failure.
Jordan's characters and the world they inhabit have been dragged through the mud by this interpretation. Not a single character is recognizable from the books, and what replaces them is a cast of vapid, inconsistent, hollow shells of human beings that only a narcissist could relate to.
Plot elements that have nothing to do with the books have been thrown into the show for no reason other than to sexualize it, likely in an effort to create a clone of Game of Thrones, rather than anything approaching a faithful interpretation of Jordan's work, which depicts almost no sex anywhere in the books. Characters who stand on their own in the books as heroic individuals are made into villains or bumbling buffoons in order to elevate other characters who, in a faithful interpretation, would not have needed the help.
Characters whom readers of the books came to love and admire for their courage, their innocence, their determination, their faithfulness or their sense of right have been robbed of all of those things, clearly for no reason other than to appeal to the edgy Millennial nihilism of the show's writers. Never mind that millions of Millennials, myself included, grew up enjoying the Wheel of Time books as a welcome escape from exactly that sort of stale, insipid cultural bankruptcy.
But the ultimate betrayal is the first that I mentioned, and one that encompasses all of these elements: the abandonment of the forthright, optimistic, aspirational tone and themes of Jordan's story. It seems beyond the intellectual and emotional capacity of this show's producers to create something that might be in the least bit inspiring or enriching. Instead, they seem determined to trap themselves and their audience in the cultural desert that pervades almost all of modern entertainment, a landscape devoid of heroes, optimism and inspiration, and devoted instead to edgy self-indulgence and moral agnosticism.
Wheel of Time, and its fans, deserved better.
The Orville (2017)
More an act of love than a mean-spirited spoof
It is refreshing to see that someone working in television understands the spirit of Star Trek, as CBS certainly seems to have forgotten it. When a satirical take on Roddenberry's legacy treats it with more respect than its nominal successor, we are in strange times indeed.
Beyond (2016)
Quite possibly the most unlikable protagonist in all of television history
It speaks to the vapidness of this show's writers that they genuinely expect the audience to find any of their characters relatable, and this is especially apparent with the main character, who is apparently supposed to be some sort of hero, but who is in fact a whinging, self-involved, utterly annoying narcissist with no redeeming qualities.
Babylon 5 (1993)
I've never understood the hype
I've re-watched Babylon 5 all the way through perhaps three times now, each time trying to figure out what it is that so many others enjoy so much about it, but I just don't get it. Perhaps it comes down to a difference in taste, but to me it just doesn't measure up to any of the other giants of televised science fiction. In terms of the quality of writing, the visuals, the cast of characters it portrays, even the weakest of the older Star Trek shows are simply better, and so is Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, all of the Stargate series, and many more shows from the same era.
Ultimately, while the show certainly holds up better than most of the absolute dross that passes for sci-fi in television now, it has always seemed to me to be a show whose reach exceeded its grasp. The high-minded concepts and the complexities of the world it tries to portray are held back by inferior writing, lack of direction and numerous episodes that contain nothing but fluff and do nothing to advance what appears to be the main story.
The central concept of the show: the interpretation of the mythic angel-demon conflict and humanity's role in it as nothing more than parental squabbles over the raising of their children, is actually quite interesting, but this is undermined by the conceit of the show's creator, to whom "subtlety" is a word as alien as "Vorlon".
Straczynski can't stop himself from beating the audience over the head with his message, laying on the broader themes so thickly and oppressively that the human factor of his story is ultimately buried by it. He seems determined to pepper his dialogue with sweeping references to mythology, poetry and literature, not as a plot device or even as a subtle coloration of his characters, but rather as a self-indulgent way of showing the audience how smart and well-read he is: trying to overawe us with his intellect by having his characters speak and act in ways that make them completely unrelatable as human beings.
In the end, the concepts of Babylon 5, both its political commentary and its speculative aspects, while both are well worth exploring, are let down by their execution in this show. The ham-handed script-writing is mostly to blame. The characters are more archetypes than real people, and the conflicts that surround them seem to be caused and resolved more by deus-ex-machina than by any of their own actions or decisions.
Foundation (2021)
Why would the producers bother making a show based on books that they clearly haven't read?
I was prepared to give this show the benefit of the doubt, but watching this mess of a production just after watching the new Dune movie made the contrast so clear to me that I can no longer offer any sympathy or find any redeeming qualities that could earn Foundation a higher score than the lowest possible rating.
The Dune film was an absolute masterpiece, a perfect realization of the grand, visionary scope of a great author of speculative fiction, a successful effort to merge that author's voice with the production values, themes and narrative style that a modern screen audience can instantly connect with.
Isaac Asimov was also a great author of speculative fiction, and Foundation was his masterpiece: a saga so replete with important themes and brilliant insight that it deserves an honest, faithful interpretation. Foundation is made to be understood, and only by understanding it can anyone communicate it properly to a wider audience.
What we have here is the opposite: an empty, hollow shell of a great work of art, stripped of all of its color and meaning, left bland, emotionless and boring. That the producers and writers are incapable of understanding Asimov's vision is hardly surprising, given that vision as a concept is something the clearly eludes them.
Superman & Lois (2021)
Refreshing
For decades now, the nature of dialogue in ostensibly serious films and television shows has increasingly trended towards snarky, sarcastic, often mean-spirited one-liners and vapid, overwrought emotional drama. This same pattern has come to define every one of the so-called superhero shows that the CW puts out, even those that were, back in their early seasons, actually good, like Arrow and the Flash.
Superman and Lois bucks this trend in a manner that can only be described as refreshing. Superman as a concept and as a character simply wouldn't work with that level of insincerity mingled with high-school drama. It is genuinely surprising and enjoyable to see that the writers of this show have opted instead to approach Superman with the sincerity and optimism that has always defined his character.
On top of that, the premise of the show, Superman as a father, is unique and well-executed. It is also refreshing, in modern-day entertainment, to see a father figure portrayed positively for once, and it takes a writing staff that is well-intentioned and familiar with family life to pull that off in a way that also enables Lois to stand on her own two feet as a mother, which she does.
The actors who play Lois and the two sons are well-cast, and each does a good job, but the standout of the show is Tyler Hoechlin himself. It is satisfying to see him portray the character in a venue where his interpretation of the character of Clark Kent is not let down by shallow, spiteful, vindictive writing, as it was in "Supergirl".
Altogether, if Superman and Lois keeps going like this, it could very well breathe new life into the CW DC franchise. It would be wonderful to see other DC comics characters portrayed with this level of honesty and good intention.
The Hardy Boys (2020)
Low Effort
I loved these books growing up, and still own quite a few of them. When I heard a new series was in production, I was cautiously optimistic. I suppose I should have known better.
Not a single facet of this show resembles the source material in any particular. It is so far removed from the novels that I can only surmise the producers were deliberately going out of their way to spit in Frank Dixon's eye, and in the faces of his fans as well. Such deviation from the books might have been bearable if what was served up instead was at least reasonably good television, but apparently that is too much to ask.
The production values for this show are abysmal. The sound editing is so poor that the dialogue is inaudible at some points, which doesn't mean much, as the dialogue is mostly nonsensical even when you can hear it.
The show is full of useless side characters and irritating main characters, who share their names and nothing else with the characters who populated Dixon's books. It provides its audience with a "mystery" wrapped in an enigma, but it was wrapped by a five-year-old, and the enigma is ripped in a dozen places so you can see what's coming. The only thing with more holes in it is the plot. The writers attempt to tantalize us with threads that go nowhere and clues that serve no purpose other than to generate useless side plots to fill certain episodes while doing nothing to advance the main story.
If the writers had simply stuck to the source material, there is enough of it to have provided several seasons of reasonably good television. Instead, they abandoned it in favor of trying to spin a season-long story arc, which is of course the fashion for binge-model television. It's too bad they lack the skill or creative resources to pull it off.
Dickensian (2015)
Why is this a thing?
Dickens would be spinning like a top in his grave at the mere concept for this abomination. Plenty of television adaptations of his works have been done over the years, some of them quite good, but the notion of taking characters from all of his different novels and placing them all in the same narrative is an affront to the audience, as well as to decency and common sense.
Highlander (1992)
The best action show ever produced for television
The ultimate expression of 90s genre fiction, Highlander built a formula that worked and for five solid seasons, it never tried to be anything more than what it was. It was a fun fantasy-adventure show built around a unique and compelling concept, a well-constructed action show with excellent fight sequences, and a perfect encapsulation of the fashions, the music, and the feel of the 1990s.
Unfortunately, towards the end, the show does fall off a bit, firstly by introducing a storyline, at the end of the fifth season, that didn't really belong in the show, then by carrying forward into a sixth season when the star of the show had made it clear that he wanted to move on. The producers of Highlander trapped lightning in a bottle with Adrian Paul. When he decided he'd had enough, they should have taken the hint. Still, looking back, it is absolutely possible to enjoy this show every bit as much as I did when I first watched it as a kid, and just pretend that Season 6 doesn't exist.
Killjoys (2015)
The quality declines as it progresses
The first 2 - 3 seasons of Killjoys are pure fun. Initially a breezy, humorous, action-packed sci-fi adventure show, it gradually becomes weighed down by its own success. Or, perhaps, by the conceit of its writers. Deviating from the fun-filled space-punk adventuring of its first season into a more complex narrative was a mistake, and doubly so because the writers clearly had no idea how to end their own story.
Another mistake was to burden the ensemble of likeable, relatable core characters with an ever-increasing number of wholly unlikeable hangers-on, who added nothing meaningful to the story while stealing screen time from the only three characters the audience actually care about.
Killjoys is still worth a watch, but ultimately, it lives up to neither of its two initial promises: the fun all but evaporates during the final seasons, and the heavy narrative drama that replaces it does not deliver a satisfying payoff in the end.
M*A*S*H (1972)
A show that changed television
Sometimes, milestones are easily recognizable. Other times, they are much harder to pinpoint. In a lot of ways, MASH is both. The impact that it has had on the development of scripted television as a medium is undeniable: in some ways overt, in others, much more subtle. It remains one of the most popular, longest-running and most influential sitcoms ever made. It elevated the genre of situational comedy to heights that have never been achieved by any other show before or since, and provided viewers with just as many thought-provoking moments and emotional gut punches as laughs, each just as effortless and just as memorable as the other.
In spite of the many line-up changes over its 11 seasons, MASH consistently provided its audience with the finest ensemble cast in the history of television, comprised of characters who were equal parts hilarious and tragic, and whose efforts to make sense of the senseless situation they found themselves in provided inspiration and insight to a war-weary generation of viewers.
Ultimately, what makes this show so eternally memorable, so universally accessible, is that it is a show about family. Not the traditional, nuclear family that anchors most sitcoms, some more successfully than others, but a family of misfits and strays, thrown together into the most miserable of circumstances, with no choice but to rely on one another for comfort and sanity. The quality of the writing and acting elevates this simple formula to the fullest heights of its potential, and MASH remains one of the most instantly relatable, quintessentially human shows ever produced.
Surface (2005)
I really wanted to see where this was going
It's always frustrating to see a good show cancelled before it's allowed to really pick up steam, or to gather the audience it deserves, but in this case, it was especially disappointing. The writers clearly had a plan already in mind for how the story was going to develop, particularly around the main character himself, and it was a unique enough concept, and an enjoyable enough execution, to have me really excited for more.
Even now, fifteen years later, just this one season of television is enjoyable enough to be worth watching.
Andromeda (2000)
A fun and compelling show ruined by the network
Andromeda is yet another tragic example of what happens when networks and studios assume too much control over a project and sideline the real creative forces that had initially made it special.
The universe that Andromeda introduces us to was not necessarily original in the realm of sci fi, but it had enough fresh new elements to make it immersive and interesting, drawing its audience in to an experience that was different from every other genre show that was on at the same time, while remaining just as compelling.
Standing out from this vivid backdrop was a caste of funny, relatable characters whom the audience couldn't help but like, often subverting the traditional character tropes found in science fiction. This was especially true of the quirky, sarcastic Artificial Intelligence played impeccably by Lexa Doig, and the character of Tyr Anasazi, who remains to this day a unique and indelible merger of the anti-hero and the warrior poet.
The narrative that began to spin itself around these characters was layered and multifaceted, providing the audience with both the simplicity of episodic television as well as ever more depth and mystery to unpack, both concerning the characters themselves and the events that were beginning to take shape around them. By the second season, it really felt as though Andromeda was going to be the first truly great example of the still-new format of novelized television in science fiction, with a broad, sweeping narrative unfolding across multiple seasons.
And then the network decided that this approach made the show too inaccessible, contemptuously underestimating the intelligence of their own audience in the process, and demanded a return to a more episodic format. In protest, Robert Hewitt Wolfe left the project, and all of the careful, methodical work he had done to craft his grand narrative was scrapped.
To this day, I believe this could have been one of the greatest science fiction stories ever told on television, easily on a level with Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek at its best. As is so often the case in television, the disappointment that Andromeda ended up becoming can be laid entirely at the feet of meddling network executives too shortsighted to just leave well enough alone.
Westworld (2016)
That went downhill fast
Season 1 of Westworld was as close to perfect as television can get. The writing and acting were nothing less than superb, especially the performances delivered by Hopkins and Harris. The storylines were compelling and well-executed, the pacing was perfect, and the intricacies and subtleties made for an engrossing, cerebral viewing experience.
As it turns out, this achievement was almost entirely due to the influence and legacy of Michael Crichton, because as soon as the writers ran out of source material and had to draw upon their own creativity to continue the story, the quality of the show plummeted in every particular. While there were a couple of high points in Season 2, the show rapidly became inconsistent and unbalanced. The pacing was erratic, the characters suddenly lost much of their depth and dimension, and the acting suffered as a result.
But even Season 2 was quality television compared to what was to follow. Season 3 of Westworld is utterly unwatchable. The vivid, indelible and unique future world that was built up in the first season has been left utterly bereft of any interesting characters, meaningful interactions or memorable plotlines. The subtle, penetrating dialogue that made the first season such a joy to watch has been replaced by shallow, glassy exchanges so full of contrived melodrama that the show is more indicative of a high school drama than anything approaching serious, mature entertainment.
Had I known what an embarrassing disappointment this would turn out to be, I would never have watched the first season, let alone recommended it to so many friends and family. Instead, I am left feeling heartbroken and more than a little betrayed. It hardly seems possible that so much storytelling potential could have been so comprehensively squandered.
The Tudors (2007)
Michael Hirst is to historical fiction what Tarantino is to romantic comedy
One good thing I can say about this show is that it at least looks reasonably good. The costumes and sets are a bit overwrought, but mostly at least believable for the time period, and the show at least looks as though it is set in Renaissance England. Mostly.
With that out of the way, I will now list all of the things I dislike about the Tudors:
Everything else.
Michael Hirst's flagrant infidelity to anything resembling actual history works reasonably well in a semi-fantastical show like Vikings, set in a period about which we know very little, but to create a show about a well-documented period in European history and then to demonstrate such contempt for the actual history surrounding the events the show portrays is just silly.
There is not a single actor in The Tudors who looks anything like the real-world individual he or she is portraying. They could at least have gone to the minimal effort required to dye Rhys-Myers' hair red, and the same could be said of Maria Doyle-Kennedy. Both are fine actors, and they do the best they can with the scripts they are provided, but their lack of physical similarity to their characters, as well as the infantile shallowness of the writing, does not make for a very evocative viewing experience. This is exacerbated by the fact that the characters they portray do not behave anything like what we know of the real people they are supposed to represent.
For such an unserious show, The Tudors takes itself far too seriously. The inanity of the scripts could at least be made bearable by some comic relief, but instead, Hirst tries to carry off this farce with an insincere intensity, littering his scripts with asinine platitudes and vapid truisms that very few in the audience could possibly interpret as clever or profound. As well, there is a disruptive focus on ridiculous symbolism, often distracting from the actual events of the story and clumsily drawing the audience's attention away from the events they're supposed to be focusing on.
Altogether, The Tudors is a sophomoric costume drama, portraying real and complex historical events with all the subtlety and intricacy of Jane Austen at her worst. Indeed, if the goal was to make a melodramatic romance centered around a villainous male lead, then adapting a Jane Austen novel would have been a much better idea.
The Last Kingdom (2015)
A compelling, immersive experience
For producers filming pieces set in medieval Europe, there appear to be two default options to revert to when designing sets and costumes. The first is bright and colorful, with unrealistically large palaces, unfeasibly beautiful actors and impossibly bright, shining armor. The second is dark, shadowy and macabre. Both are equally fantastical.
The makers of The Last Kingdom, however, are among the few who get it right: they capture both the wide open vistas, wild forests and muddy marshes of Iron Age England as well as the muddy, fetid claustrophobia of its towns and villages with remarkable vividness. While many of the cast are still unmistakably far too beautiful to belong in this time period, with soft skin and perfect teeth, they are often so covered in mud and dirt and excellent makeup that they really do look as if they belong.
On top of this, the writing is excellent. The characters are likeable, relatable and satisfying complex, with muddled motivations producing very believable, very human friendships, romances and rivalries. None of the drama seems contrived or overwrought, and most of the major plot events seem to flow naturally from conflicts between the characters.
While some of the show's main cast do come across as a bit stiff with their acting, the skill of the script writers, often borrowing dialogue directly from Cornwell's books, more than makes up for it. Most actors in the show do a fine job, coming across as natural inhabitants of their on-screen environment.
Altogether, very few historical shows do as good a job as the Last Kingdom of making the audience feel as though they are a part of the world the show portrays. For all the minor gripes anyone might have about historical inaccuracies, this is ultimately a fun, exciting and well put-together piece of television.
Helstrom (2020)
Well that was interesting
Actually, no it wasn't.
Let's all fight evil by talking about our feelings. Let's eat hipster food and talk about our feelings and the demons will be vanquished. Let's sit in a confessional and talk about our feelings and evil will be conquered. Let's be terrible at acting while talking about our feelings and good will triumph over evil. Let's be unable to write a single line of original dialogue while we fight evil and bore the demons to death.
An unfortunate side effect of this strategy is that the audience is also bored.
Rome (2005)
The attention to detail is phenomenal
HBO's official excuse for cancelling this show was that it was too expensive. With production values like these, the expense is understandable, and the finished product is one of the greatest period pieces ever produced, either on film or television. The level of historical detail, from the depiction of the Roman pagan religion to the costumes, sets, customs and mannerisms is truly a labor of love, and the finished product is magnificent to look at, and really fun to watch.
On top of the sheer spectacle the writing is phenomenal. While some of the dialogue can at time be a bit verbose and stilted, this is understandable given the characters being portrayed, many of whom are among the most famous orators, writers and statesmen in history.
The scale of "Rome" is breathtaking, and it could very easily have been a disaster. Trying to tell the sweeping tale of the downfall of the Republic and its replacement by the Roman Empire, with actors portraying all of the major characters from Caesar and Mark Antony to Augustus and Cleopatra could easily have made for a boring, detached, overwhelming or confusing viewing experience.
In order to simplify these complexities, we are treated to two fictional protagonists, common soldiers whose exploits bring them into sporadic contact with all of these great historical personalities. This concept is a stroke of narrative genius, and the stories of Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo weave a singular, consistent line through the vastness of the subject matter being portrayed, making the story of Ancient Rome not only beautiful to look at and immense in scale, but also a human story, told by two relatable characters who never existed, but who could be any of us.
After the vomit-inducing travesty that was the final season of Game of Thrones, I'll wager some people over at HBO are kicking themselves for cancelling "Rome" in favor of that train wreck.
The Wire (2002)
A show that is not afraid to ask questions it doesn't answer
If you're looking for certainty, The Wire is not for you. Ultimately, while some characters on both sides of the cops/criminals fence are more virtuous than others, there is no such thing as a pure "good guy" or a pure "bad guy" in The Wire. Each character is motivated by a mix of self-interest and a desire to do what's best for those around them, and each character makes mistakes in their interactions with the institutions that govern their lives.
The city of Baltimore is a uniquely appropriate microcosm of the American experience. "Our dark little corner of the American experiment", Jay Landsman calls it in one episode, in just one of many perfect lines of dialogue that can be found throughout the show. Baltimore's tapestry of small, diverse neighborhoods and its complex, disparate polity makes it the perfect backdrop for a show that explores issues such as the drug epidemic, the corruption of democratic and civil institutions, the decline of the American working class, the consequences of widespread poverty and fatherlessness in the black community and the way in which all of these problems feed into a cycle of crime and violence.
What makes The Wire so good, however, is that it does not lecture us about any of these issues. After a decade of watching the quality of television writing decline precipitously, and growing frustrated as the medium has become increasingly politicized, rewatching The Wire was beyond refreshing for me. Here is a show does not beat its audience over the head with its political message. It does not try to shove moral imperatives down our throats. It just shows. It shows the good along with the bad, it shows bluntly and uncompromisingly, and it does so through the eyes of characters who are nuanced, conflicted, compelling and multifaceted.
Ultimately, in spite of the problems and issues it exposes, The Wire just tells a good story. The complex tapestry woven by its large cast and all of their separate arcs is spread bluntly out across five seasons of perfect television.
The Rain (2018)
A boring teen drama made for teenagers
Only in a teenage fantasy could characters this stupid, short-sighted, narcissistic, self-indulgent and entitled actually survive for any length of time in an apocalypse. In anything approaching a real-world life-or-death situation, these characters' own stupidity would get them killed, and yet, as in every other supernatural teen drama, their plot armor is so thick that groups of enemies who want to kill them suddenly decide not to for no good reason, life-threatening situations mysteriously evaporate, and the diabolical schemes of evil corporate megalomaniacs are overcome by the power of friendship.
As preposterous as the premise of the show (the nature of the "virus") really is, it is still compelling enough to make a decent sci-fi backdrop. Unfortunately, the quality of the show's writing is simply awful, and the characters are so unlikable that the whole thing really could only be tolerable to the most braindead of adolescent audiences. The main characters are written so inconsistently that they almost seem to be different people in each episode, and I'm assuming we're not supposed to notice because they're attractive.
The writers might have been able to save it at least part of the way by inserting some self-referential humor, but instead, the scripts are carried out with an intensity and a seriousness that the show is unintentionally funny instead. Some segments are delivered with an air of philosophical profundity, rendered totally absurd by the superficial shallowness of the plot and the characters.
The third season makes it clear that the writers really had no idea how to end their own idiotic saga, no vision in mind at the beginning. Instead, in order to provide their audience with something resembling resolution, they are forced to insert one of the most absurd MacGuffins I have ever witnessed.
Black Sails (2014)
They just had to ruin it.
Black Sails is a study in what happens when you take a swashbuckling, well-produced, well-choreographed action series with good acting and compelling storylines and turn it into a boring psychodrama comprised of a series of vignettes where two or three characters spend ten minutes talking to one another about their feelings. I feel certain that this is where the Arrowverse got the idea from.
The Borgias (2011)
Jeremy Irons makes the show
As far as the writing, the storylines and the quality of the drama are concerned, as well as the historicity, the is a mostly average period piece.
The quality of the writing, however, is elevated by supreme production values, with the sets and the costumes absolutely dazzling the audience and bringing the period to life, as well as the acting. The standout performance is of course Jeremy Irons, although Colm Feore and François Arnaud both deliver the goods as well. If not for the quality of the actors cast to play these characters, the show may not be worth watching, but Irons' performance alone makes it enjoyable.
Young Justice (2010)
The First 2 seasons are excellent
The animation on this series is excellent, and the characterizations, the plots and complex storylines make it perhaps the best animated superhero show since Batman: The Animated Series.
The Team we got in Season 1 was perhaps the perfect ensemble cast, and although I do agree with many of the criticisms leveled at Season 2, many of the new characters are still at least well-written and likeable, and if the writers had been allowed to carry through their storyline for the number of episodes they had originally been promised, it could have been just as good as the first season, in spite of the wrench thrown into the works by the change in the Team dynamics.
Season 3 is the reason I gave the show a rating of 6 overall. If I were rating it on Season 1 and 2 alone, it would be a 9 or 10. If I were rating season 3 alone, it would be a 1. Get the original writers back, and get rid of the so-called "characters" we had to put up with in this Season, or don't bother giving us any more.