TV

All You Can Eat Media – Nick vs Netflix, Man vs Marvel Unlimited

June 2, 2014 by Nick Bryan

In the last few weeks since my birthday, I’ve catapulted myself hard into the world of unlimited on-demand media. Yes, I already had things like BBC iPlayer, 4OD and American equivalents, but this was the next level: Netflix for TV and the Marvel Unlimited service for comics.

After years of only watching carefully selected shows and targeted media, going back to having a wide range of stuff I might like available and choosing from it has been a strange experience. It’s like when I was young and I used to read TV guides and consider watching new stuff.

Only with comics too, which is where the comparison breaks down.Anyway, after two months in the new world of everything-you-could-ever-want rampant consumption, here are the observations I’ve made.

Staring At The Menu

First big discovery: how long I can just gaze at the list. If all the time I’ve spent scrolling through the contents of Marvel Unlimited and Netflix was used on content consumption, I would be the GURU by now. More than once, I’ve opened up the apps because I have half an hour to kill and want to fill it with a show/comic, only to spend that entire thirty minutes just browsing the catalogue.

Marvel Unlimited is particularly good for window shopping, by the way – hours of fun tittering at silly covers and titles from the past of superhero comics. Like good old Giant Size Man-Thing, or the 1992 X-Factor cover pictured to the left – a devastating warning from history about the dangers of cybersex.

This brand of procrastination eases up after the first few weeks, but my tiny brain is always kinda paralysed by the volume of stories I could be consuming. What if I’m not watching the right ones? What if I’m missing a classic? Do I worry about stuff too much?

(The correct answer to that last question is YES.)

The “Might As Well” Generation

Honestly, I never got into channel-surfing. If I have a few minutes of free time, I generally find a book/DVD/comic from the list of Important Stuff I’ve Planned To Experience, rather than switching on the TV and seeing what’s showing.

But the discovery of already-available all-you-can-eat media deals has gifted me the opportunity to finally see a lot of shows I’d glanced at before and decided, well, I’ve already got enough to watch. It’s all there, one click away, so I can put it on in the background while I’m doing low-brain activities (like typing out and proofreading blog posts, or fiddling with Scrivener compile settings, or just surfing the internet without the slightest pretense of achievement).

Or I can sit back and read comics I’d not bought because I only quite fancied reading them, rather than desperately wanting to, and comic books are rather expensive. Or at least, they were before the advent of the Comixology sale. Digital comics saved my interest in the hobby, to be honest.

Controversially, I’ve discovered it’s fun to watch a few silly comedies or entertaining-but-not essential procedural TV shows, read well-executed-but-not-genre-redefining superhero comics. In a strange way, it helps me relax.

So, that’s my big reveal about my feelings for today. Do post about your similar feelings in the comments if you want to help me feel okay about myself.

Oh, and if you too have Marvel Unlimited and want some good reading material, I wrote a homage to Christopher Priest’s Black Panther series a few weeks back, and I stand by every word. Check it out.

This blog post was finalised whilst half-watching an early episode of Castle.

Best of 2013 – Top Ten TV Edition

December 31, 2013 by Nick Bryan

Hello, and welcome to the final section of my Best of 2013 series. Earlier posts covered Music, Movies and Podcasts and Books and Comics, and now we’re finishing on TV, the only area of culture to get a whole post of its own. Well, I do blog about it a lot, so I seem to have accrued more opinions. To make those thoughts easier to digest, they’re arranged in an internet-friendly Top Ten format.

If you want to compare and contrast, my Top Ten of 2012 appeared on The Digital Fix as I was TV editor at the time. I am no longer, as I wanted to devote more time to the fiction writing, so we’re over here for the 2013 countdown. I’ve stuck to show which actually aired in 2013, and there are some omissions simply because I haven’t seen them – Netflix’s new House of Cards series, for example, may well have made the list if I’d viewed it. (I got the DVDs for Christmas if that helps.)

Here we go.

#10 – Count Arthur Strong

A new sitcom based on a radio series by and starring Steve Delaney, who cowrote the TV version with Graham Linehan, Count Arthur Strong followed a former variety star who now hangs out in a Polish cafe, through the eyes of his deceased business partner’s son. A lovely dose of old-school sitcom silliness, with a sprinkling of genuinely moving material about age and our attitude to it.

Enjoyed this a lot, and even though not many people seemed to watch it, a second series was commissioned. Hopefully the BBC will keep giving this time to develop, as I think it’s a great funny-yet-sad-yet-uplifting show. Check it out on DVD or similar if you can.

#9 – Homeland

Homeland had a strange conclusion to 2012’s second season, a confused few weeks that suggested the writers were feeling trapped by the success of the Brody character and subsequent commercial pressure to keep him alive. Well, this year they shoved him off-screen for most of the run and only brought him back as a doomed, broken man, crushed by the meta-knowledge that his story arc had long ago concluded and he was living on inertia.

If nothing else, the people who rooted for him to die must be feeling vindicated. A slow start, some early episodes were flat-out dull, but the last half of the season was so tense and well-characterised that I wanted to give it some recognition.

#8 – Doctor Who

The placement of Doctor Who was one of the biggest headscratchers for me compiling this list. The anniversary special Day of the Doctor was among my favourite TV episodes of the year, and I kinda enjoyed last week’s Time of the Doctor for what it was, but that eight episode run in spring was… just rather middling, in my opinion. Nowhere near as consistent as the shows higher up the list.

So I weighed up all that, and it’s landed here at #8. Still, the anniversary stuff really was excellent – the surrounding celebrations as well as the special itself – and I’m looking forward to the Peter Capaldi run next year.

#7 – Orphan Black

It’s always good to see a genuinely new and interesting property in the sci-fi field, as too often the same motifs get rather hammered, and Orphan Black certainly took clones to new heights. Not a perfect show, hit a few cliches quite hard, but the chemistry between the different multiples, all played impressively by Tatiana Maslany (even if one or two of the accents were dodgy) was fun to watch, and a couple of episodes did brilliant things with the confusion.

This is getting a few extra points for being exciting and new, might collapse in on itself next year, but for now, a fun addition to the genre TV club.

#6 – Borgen

This was #3 in the list last year, so has taken a tumble. Much like Who, a hard show to place, as both the second and third series aired on BBC Four in 2013, and the second was once again excellent. It was as good as the first one and if only that had been in contention, Borgen would be up in the top three or four again.

But series three, sad to say, suffered from a less nuanced storyline on a couple of fronts, amplified by one of the main characters being scaled back dramatically (due to actor availability, I’m told by the internet, rather than a writing decision).

All told, although series three was still a classy show, it wasn’t quite as riveting. Shame. Nonetheless, I hold that Borgen was the best straight political drama since the mighty West Wing. At least check the first two series out, they’re amazing.

#5 – Fresh Meat

I was kinda excited for Fresh Meat to come back, it was pretty entertaining last year and I still think the JP character, as played by Jack Whitehall, is one of the great monstrous sitcom creations of our time. Still, the third series smashed my expectations. The ensemble clicked, characters who had been digging into ruts (Oregon, Kingsley, Josie) found new ways to be funny and the old reliable favourites (JP, Vod, Howard) were as good as ever.

One of my favourite things in recent days, the third series of Fresh Meat hardly put a foot wrong and ergo it gets to shoot up the charts from #9 last year.

#4 – Him And Her

Or Him And Her: The Wedding to use its full title. This was the final series of Him And Her, and my sentiment about it being over might be pushing the show up the ranks a tad, but this was properly lovely. The first two series were among the most heartwarming, upbeat, up-the-underdogs fun things I’d seen in a while, and although the third started to struggle within the “one set, hardly any characters” set-up, they reacted perfectly with this fourth and final one.

So we have a bigger cast, a wider backdrop and a comedy-drama that worked for me on every level, humanising even the characters who started off as caricatures, and ended on a smile, thank god. Glad they’ve ended Him And Her at the right time, but I’ll miss them.

#3 – Game of Thrones

For whatever reason, Game of Thrones season 2 didn’t leave as lasting an impression on me, but this third one I loved. Maybe because I’d recently re-watched the show and read the first three books, meaning I had a firmer grasp on who everyone was, but this was amazingly compelling viewing every week for the most part. So much going on that even when a storyline doesn’t work (the endless Theon-torturing scenes, for example), it’s hard to get too bothered.

It had an iconic TV moment (the Red Wedding), it had dragons and witty political headgames, it had a lot of characters trudging through the woods towards their destiny (the danger inherent in only adapting the first half of a book), it was great. Can’t wait for season four.

#2 – Hannibal

I’ve enjoyed Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls in the past, both from showrunner Bryan Fuller, so it was exciting to hear he was bringing his quirky-morbid sensibility to a known property in the form of Hannibal, a prequel to Hannibal Lector’s movie/novel appearances. Fuller tones down the quirk and pushes more genuine horror here, and the result is a grisly, atmospheric, scary yet charming series, focusing on the sinister friendship between Lector (played this time by Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), when Hannibal was at his cannibalistic peak.

Touching on a range of interesting cases but mostly telling a single exciting story culminating in a brilliant finale, this was one of the most compelling shows of the year. I raced through it at high speed, and I’m very happy that we’re getting a second year – even better, it’s coming pretty damn soon. It would probably have been number one, if 2013 hadn’t been the year when another charismatic villain ended his story…

#1 – Breaking Bad

Yes, a TV reviewer puts Breaking Bad at the top of his likes list. I imagine you’re all very surprised. Nonetheless, this was a brilliantly executed ending, staring down sky-high expectations and producing something special. As Dexter proved this very year (sigh), ending a long-running anti-hero series and providing the right degrees of catharsis and justice is a massive bugger, but the drug-cooking adventures of Walter White came to just the right conclusion, ditching many of the distractions and focusing back in on the central relationships.

It produced one of the best single episodes this year in Ozymandias, it had Bryan Cranston doing yet more best-on-TV acting, it was really good. I wouldn’t go as far as saying BEST THING EVER ON TV NOTHING ELSE CAN COMPARE WHAT’S THE POINT as I don’t think that’s a worthwhile argument, it’s just using the quality of Breaking Bad to be implicitly pissy about other shows, but it’s a great accomplishment nonetheless. Interested to see the upcoming Better Call Saul spin-off, but even if that turns out to be a misfire, this was a great complete work.

Honourable Mentions

That was a rather long post, wasn’t it?

Anyway. Other shows I liked this year but didn’t quite make the top ten: The Fall was very well-acted and atmospheric but a touch generic and disappointingly ended, In The Flesh did a surprisingly good job of making zombies interesting and How I Met Your Mother has been reinvigorated by the prospect of finally concluding.

Also watched the second season of Parks And Recreation on BBC Four, it was hilarious and uplifting, but I’m so far behind the “new” episodes, I felt odd listing it. Still, check it out.

And with that, I think I’ve filed 2013 away. Back soon enough with some 2014 thoughts, but thanks to anyone who read anything on here in the past year, hope your New Year’s Eve celebrations are pretty rockin’. Ta-ta.

Best of 2013 – Movies, Music and Podcasts Edition

December 18, 2013 by Nick Bryan

As half-predicted in last week’s WriteBlog, my fiction-writing has slowed to a standstill thanks to festive distractions and an inconvenient cold. I’m just about keeping up with Hobson & Choi commitments, but aside from those, all quiet.

So, both to keep this blog ticking over and because I genuinely love reviewing stuff, I’m going to do a few posts about stories, shows and stuff I enjoyed during 2013. These are in no particular order and may involve items released pre-2013 that I’ve only just got round to dealing with, though I’ll try to keep those to a minimum.

This time out: movies, music and podcasts. Subsequent posts will cover books, comics and TV.

Movies

My film viewing has been slack, so this shouldn’t be a long segment. My favourite film from 2013 was Django Unchained, released on January 10th in the UK, so it does count. The ending ran a bit long, but I enjoyed the characters and knowing meta-Western aesthetic a lot. Christoph Waltz was as amazing as everyone says, but no-one was bad in this movie. Well, except Tarantino during his cameo.

Elsewhere, I didn’t even keep up with superhero movies that well – not seen Man of Steel or The Wolverine – but Iron Man 3 was excellent, one of the best Marvel movies bar Avengers and maybe the first Iron Man. Heavy on character and light on costumed punch-ups, but I think we’re all getting a bit numb to shiny fights anyway.

Speaking of which, Thor: The Dark World was decent superhero fun-action, but we’re so saturated with these films at the moment, “decent” isn’t necessarily enough to make a huge impact. Still, it was enjoyable and didn’t let the side down.

The World’s End was a fun cap-off to the Cornetto trilogy that has been rumbling through my entire adulthood; Zero Dark Thirty has already been reviewed on this very blog, and was compelling and light on triumphalism; I finally saw The Hunger Games just as everyone else watched the sequel and it did a great job of capturing what I liked about the books and converting the unfilmable parts into film.

Also saw Looper and yes, that was a dynamic, entertaining sci-fi movie, although maybe I’ve watched too much Doctor Who to be totally blown away by time travel mindscrewery.

Music

This should be even shorter as I’ve dropped out of current music almost entirely – Frank Turner released Tape Deck Heart, which was listenable and stayed on rotation for a while, but the new Arcade Fire lasted even longer, especially once I cut out the draggy second and third tracks. Seriously, try it yourself if you’re struggling to get into Reflektor – cutting We Exist especially makes a difference.

The Duckworth Lewis Method debuted Sticky Wickets, their second cricket-pop album. Yes, I’m aware songs about cricket veer into novelty music territory, but since half the band is indie-pop maestro Neil Hannon (of The Divine Comedy), it was still excellent, catchy work. Recommended, especially if you’ve enjoyed Hannon’s stuff in the past.

Finally, we dive full-on into the novelty music vortex, as both of the former Amateur Transplants duo released new parody albums in the last few months. Adam Kay’s album Specimens features more inventive offensiveness, whereas Suman Biswas’s Still Alive After Amateur Transplants is catchier and longer. Both are good purchases if you enjoyed their previous work, or Weird Al-style word-swapping pun-parodies in general.

Podcasts

The podcast champion of this year is probably satirical-surreal mocknewscast The Bugle, even though it always is and they’re almost too obvious a choice. The schedule was patchy at times this year, probably due to John Oliver’s increasing stateside celebrity, but news stories like the US government shutdown and the UK’s huge pig semen exports meant they were always on form when they did release.

Elsewhere, I subscribed to Welcome to Nightvale like everyone else in the geekosphere, and yes, it is excellent. Creepy, funny, endearing, generally lovely. Perhaps less predictably, I also listened to the entire backlog of Me1 vs Me2 Snooker with Richard Herring. It’s an acquired taste, perhaps best kept for when you’re also doing something else, but I got strangely into it.

Daniel Ruiz Tizon, South London’s master of darkly comic melancholy, seems to have put his Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast on hiatus for now. However, he did also write and star in The Letter for Resonance FM, a tragicomic series of monologues that distilled the best of his recent work into a single run. If you’ve never tried his stuff before, this is definitely the one to go for, and if the end of his regular show means more work like The Letter, I will have to grin and bear it.

Finally, I listen to a few podcasts about comics, the best of which continues to be House to Astonish, dissecting recent comic book news and releases with exactly the right levels of fannish enthusiasm, cynicism and good humour. I also picked up Silence! this year, which also has good thoughts, analysis and chat. And yes, despite reading largely American comics, I only seem to like comics podcasts hosted by British folks.

Not entirely a podcast, but the makers of Alternate Cover also released a sci-fi sitcom called A Brief History of Time Travel this year, which is worth a look if you enjoy the Hitchhiker’s Guide/Red Dwarf Brit sci-fi comedy genre.

And that is it for now. Hopefully there’s stuff in there you haven’t already seen and might consider giving a shot. If I’ve missed anything of note, let me know in the comments below – especially in the podcast category, always looking for more good listening. I shall return in the near future to cover another category or two – probably Books & Comics unless plans change.

TV