I believe the best thing that Arcane has done is the correct use of voice actors.
Many animator shows and even movies, that can hit every check box, will still have either actors who don't how to voice act or just be miscast.

 

I watched the new Alex Rider season and it was okay but I would honestly have preferred if it leaned a bit more into the power-fantasy of Alex being this talented teenager/spy. I don't want them to go overboard but it would have been nice to have a few more scenes where Alex had a chance to demonstrate some skill beyond being a normal teenager.

 

Dexter:The New Blood is surprisingly fun and a really good return to form. Binged 5 episodes today and it completely hooked me.
It also helps that the production value is really high.

I also enjoyed The Foundation. The idea of the Empire being controlled by clones of the first emperor is incredibly a smart and fascinating way of showing how dynasties could work in such a future.
Really didn't enjoy some of the characters though.
Biggest highlight was seeing Empire do their thing.

 

So, did anyone else here see the Book of Boba Fett?

 

Watched the first episode of Boba and it was... alright, I guess?

I'm no Boba Fett fanboy as the sum total of my exposure to him was as random mook #12 who fell into a sarlacc. I wasn't particularly invested in him, or in his story when he turned up in Mando. It was just a lukewarm reaction of 'Huh. Okay.'

Episode one failed to get me past that reaction. Like I said, it was alright, I guess. The action was pretty lethargic and lacking in much logic. Boba and Shand are both people of few words which kinda worked with Mando, but just seems to be boring here. My greatest issue is the complete lack of a hook beyond 'look, it's Boba!' Mando introduced a number of motivations for the main character in episode one, but with Boba I'm just left asking, so what? Is this show just gonna be about Boba and Shand doing stuff? I understand that Boba wants to replace Jabba, but why should I care? Neither of the main characters are charismatic enough that I'm drawn in by their sheer magnetism.

I'll see how it goes, but so far I'm fairly underwhelmed.

 

Yeah, I was honestly pretty underwhelmed myself. The flashback stuff was pretty good, and made for interesting television imo, but everything else was pretty lackluster. I'm especially disappointed about

Spoiler

The ambush scene toward the end. I noticed almost immediately that Boba wasn't carrying any weapons that weren't built into his armor, and Fennec wasn't carrying a damned thing. You have two characters who are almost literally armed to the teeth in every other scene they've ever been in together, but they mysteriously and nonsensically decide to go for a walkabout with a literal bucket-full of hard currency in a rough and tumble Tatooine town unarmed? Conveniently just in time to run into an ambush that wouldn't be half as threatening if they had their full arsenals with them. When Fennec cornered the last two guys (who were still armed with whatever kind of shock-baton they were using) on the rooftop and put up her fists threateningly, I actually almost laughed out loud. It so thoroughly destroyed the tension of the scene, and made their wary reaction actually a little unintentionally hilarious.

Plus there's the fact that Boba randomly became an idiot the first time he comes up against an enemy the writers want him to lose to. The dude's got a flamethrower, wrist-blaster, and grapple-cable launcher built into his vambraces, but what does he strike with against a shield only a few feet in front of him? A freaking mini missile launcher, a weapon that does splash-damage! Even if he'd succeeded, it still would have knocked him on his ass, and he'd have deserved it for being a moron.

There's also the way he seemed to completely forget that his jetpack was a thing when he was surrounded. Why he couldn't do a quick hop over the assassins' heads to divide their attention and give Fennec room to maneuver, I'll never know. Hell, why didn't he just grab her and take off for the rooftops where he could pick them off at his leisure? And all that's setting aside that Fennec absolutely deserves to be fired from her job as Boba's bodyguard for escorting him around completely unarmed.

This stuff is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's a depressing pattern with Filoni and Favreau that if they want some character to lose a fight, they don't make the winning character strong and good at what they do. No, they take the cheap, lazy path and make the losing character shockingly incompetent. This kind of Idiot Ball shenanigans is how they basically ruined the Empire as a credible antagonist in the Mandalorian, and they're doing it again now with Boba's show. It's just plain shitty writing, and it's very disheartening to see it in the very first episode. At least The Mandalorian waited an episode or two before slanderously and inaccurately portraying Stormtroopers as absolute useless fucking clowns...

 

Why are you doing this to us Will Smith? Is this revenge for all the scientology jokes?

 

It's like...

I kinda want to see it. Out of pure morbid curiosity. And maybe a little bit of "I hate myself."

Man, Will Smith used to be awesome. Now he's become whatever this is.

 

I mean. It's a good trailer. If I never knew about the original I'd be interested in this. But the Fresh Prince was lightning in a bottle. I don't know that it can be recreated.

With that said, the concept itself lends itself pretty well to a series like this. I'm assuming they'll lean more towards drama and less towards humor though, because how do you emulate Will Smith?

 

Lol and the cycle continues.
Truly. It's an incredibly rare thing to see an original.

 

While it's a good trailer, I was hoping they did the reversal: one of the kids of the old cast getting sent to Philadelphia to wake them up from being a rich little shit.

 

Oh they actually made it.

No idea if this will be any good but it's kinda cool that one of the fake YouTube trailers got turned into something.

The fake trailer for those whohaven'tseen it:

 

The fake trailer looks better lol. Still lame to make pointless re-makes though.

 

This looks pretty dope. Never got into Critical Role, but nice to see their crowdfunding got them a show on Amazon

 

Watched the first 3 episodes of Legend of Vox Machina. It's actually pretty good, with episode 1 possibly being a weak start.

However, I know that this is an adaptation of the Briarwood arc, and that is one of the best that Critical Role has produced, so I'm pretty sure this will only get better.

 

Late to the party, but Arcane is really rather good, speaking as someone who's knowledge of League of Legends extends to knowing that it exists. It's the first thing that's got me binge watching in quite a while.

 

Wow. The new Jack Reacher show is impressively bad. Whoever wrote that dialogue needs to be taken out back and beaten with a wet sock.

 

NO! You must be joking. I was so looking forward to it ☹️

 

It's ungodly. Like, the guy they cast for Reacher is so on-point, but then people start talking and it is just a cringefest. I have literally never heard less natural dialogue in a scripted TV show.

 

Wtf are you talking about?

I'm hyper-sensitive to poor dialogue (mostly in books tbf, but it carries over to visual media) and the only time I even came close to cringing was during Reacher's courtship when it got a bit OTT for me (for Reacher).

I went in here bracing, still not over the hurt from the Cruise movies, and came out gagging for season 2.

The show was great, so on-point and exactly what I wanted. Reacher and Neagley are so perfectly cast - their chemistry perfect too. The supporting cast, particularly Finley, were stellar imo.

There were maybe a few nitpicks. Reacher's relationship was overly sappy compared to the source, but I mostly just shrugged it off. The books are mostly told from Reacher's perspective, which allows him to be outwardly a statue 99% of the time without him coming off like the T1000 to us. They don't have that luxury in the TV show, so I mostly forgave any overly emotional displays from Reacher.

The last ep was however really cringe, particularly the final showdown. Bordered on silly. I read Killing Floor a long time ago, so I'm not sure if that's how it actually went down or they 'TVDramatized' it up, but it was a bit parody-like. Especially the Picard bit.

My one other nitpick was a fight scene where someone got in fisticuffs with Reacher and didn't instantly get pulverized for being so stupid. It's the only time it happened and it was some scrawny hillbilly gangbanger type, but other than that, the fight scenes were brutal and satisfying. I genuinely laughed out loud when my brother-in-law looked at me and said 'Is Reacher supposed to be this crazy?'

I think my only negative is something happens in the season that I think invalidates my favourite Reacher book from happening (there's... a lot of books and my memory is hazy), but other than that, I'm eagerly hoping for a second season.