we are SO living in the best time EVER for television entertainment. HBO aint playin around....

first 'Watchmen' hits and (so far) TOTALLY EXCEEDS my own expectations...

Then this "His Dark Materials" shows up, which i know nothing about, but two eps in and i am ALL about it...KILLER cast--its got Ruth Wilson (who first wowed me in 'Luther'), Dafne Keen (Wolvie girl from Logan), Clark Peters (you'll recognize him when you see him, dudes been in everything), and too many more to mention... , fantastic production (this thing looks amazing), and the world and plot have me sucked in. Its fun, its mysterious, it can be tense & thrilling .... 2nd episode aired tonight and that nailed it, we're officially 'in' for this show too...

dont sleep, its definitely worth your time....

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5607976/


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http://www.meshell.com/site/
https://www.facebook.com/officialmeshell?fref=ts
http://www.freemyheart.com


RIP David Williams:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Williams_(guitarist)

It's clear that they've chosen a linear timeline rather than how the books were presented, and I understand why they'd make that choice pragmatically but it sure does have the potential to deflate a lot of the more shocking, Ned Stark-esque ways this season could've ended.


So far, the show seems more interested in Mrs. Coulter than Lyra, with the Lyra here being a way more generic YA protagonist than I expected. In the novels, Pan is the one pushing back on her wild impulses, where here Pan is constantly guiding her in and out of trouble. It's an odd swap that makes her a far less charming character to root for aside from the shoe making it clear we should.


I'll give the first couple episodes a solid B; it's fine entertainment and conjuring up a lot of fuzzy feelings for the books, but even if I hadn't read the novels a few times as a teen I feel like this show just has weird pacing issues that make everything a little less mysterious and wondrous than they should feel.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

At least a decade since I read them, but I read them over and over as a kid.

I’m not gonna be in here like a GoT reader was ready to pounce on every surprise or mistake, but they really meant a lot to me as a teenager so I’ll definitely pick up on when they swap things around or alter the general feel of the story. Episode 2 treated parts of Boreal’s story the black detective) fairly passively for how massive (and late) they occur in the books, while Lyra and Pan just don’t behave like themselves, which is a large part of the story’s charm.

Somebody elsewhere made a comment that if you didn’t know the material, large swaths of the first episodes could’ve come from any regular network fantasy show, and it’s not necessarily the world’s lore that carries the books. It’s wild stuff, but even more than GoT it’s the characters and how they react to the situations they wind up in that’s the hook; it’s ultimately a story about faith more than more traditional tropes like family, love or whatever, so the show really needs to find that side of it I think if it’s going to reach its potential.

It is in many ways Lord of the Rings if you pulled (most of) the lineage and royalty bits out of it and made it about a journey to discover you’re external rather than internal strengths.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

Having no knowledge of the source material. Seems more like a late-season reveal, unless shit is gonna get crazier from here.

I can't say I see people writing much about it, and obviously this thread went nowhere.

Personally, I think it's safe to say at this point the ways they've blurred the lines between The Golden Compass and A Subtle Knife haven't helped the story at all. If anything it's forced the show to scramble past some of the more interesting character moments in the first book because they have to get back to Will Parry, but until they actually get to The Thing he's not a very engaging character other than the shock of Subtle Knife's opening chapters. I'd have left all the Will stuff on the cutting room floor in favor of an episode more focused on the bears and bear culture; it's not just because armored fighting bears are a cool idea that fans of this series almost uniformly point to the time spent in Svalbard as the moment the series became a must-read. I wasn't surprised when the show's subreddit was flooded with "where is the armor?! / jaw drop scene" threads following that (admittedly very impressive in its own right) climactic throw down.


More broadly, this feels like a 10-episode show hamstrung by being a BBC-first production. The plot seems mostly there but I feel like if I hadn't read the books I'd feel pretty detached from this show, the direction is pretty stale and the show just feels over eager to hit its beats. If one of the major hurdles The Golden Compass (the movie) had was trying to fit a single book that mostly hides its true intentions from the reader until the final chapters by following its story's most sheltered yet curious character, one might expect a television series to be the perfect remedy, but this show still feels in a hurry to get where it's going in a way that makes it feel more like Thrones Season 7 than Thrones Season 1.

Lastly, she's a kid so it's hard to really go in, but...Dafne Keen is lowkey a drag on this show in a way I've been kind of shocked by. She shows flashes of good acting, let alone what makes Lyra a really fun character, and it's not always clear if the portrayal is her fault or the production as a whole. With what we get to see on screen, though, it's not surprising that Mrs. Coulter and Lord Boreal are eating up screen time because those are the performances you want to watch.

His Dark Materials doesn't have a lot of reveals the caliber of Ned or the Red/Purple Wedding, but it does have at least five incredibly emotional, shocking twists of the knife, and I wonder if people who haven't read the books would be aware we've already seen three of them.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

it didn't have the power to really capture my attention

outside of keeping some fidelity to the books, I'm failing to understand the purpose of their inclusion.

I want to know more about Cittagazze already.

I continue to feel ambivalent about Lin-Manuel's casting.