Things I'm watching lately
Ted Lasso - Sitcoms aren't normally my thing, sports sitcoms even less so, but this is too adorable not to love: a fish-out-of-water/underdog-sports-team show about an American football coach who is hired to coach a British football (soccer) team in an intentional effort to torpedo it, everyone hates him at first, but ... you know, underdog sports team show, we all know how it goes. It's one of those shows where it's the cast and the writing that really make it zing. The episodes are heartfelt and hilarious, everyone has wonderful chemistry with each other and great comic timing, and the show does especially wonderful things with its female characters considering that there are only two of them; in particular there's a character arc that is one of my absolute favorite kinds that I almost never get to have with female characters and this show does an extremely nice job of it. I also really loved the canon ships. The show is much more grown-up about relationships than I expect from shows of this type, and it was a refreshing change! It's only one 10-episode season so far, but it's been renewed for two more and I'm thoroughly looking forward to them. (It's on Apple+, and you can marathon the whole thing with a free trial if you want to.)
Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty - Currently watching this with
sheron (we stopped on Ep. 12 last night, I think?). It's really a lot of fun, with exactly the sort of found-family slowly coming together across lines of culture and class thing that appeals to me, and once again with more and better female characters than I was expecting from the bits of promo/fandom-talk I'd seen. (Badass Mongol princess with weaponized whip!) The historical details are also really interesting - I mean, not that I know all that much about the specific era and I recognize that it's historical fiction, not fact. But I think I was expecting it to be entirely focused on the Imperial China court stuff and, although there is a lot of that, there's also a lot of the characters traveling to interesting places and engaging with the social, cultural, and technological flux of that time period - some of the characters are Mongolian immigrants in the Imperial capital, there are firearms and tomatoes and other such things that are new or imported or rare. One of the characters reminds me incredibly of Lt. Shaw from the Benjamin January books and is also super hot. No spoilers past ep. 12, please!
The Magicians - Okay, so a little while back Orion read the books because he saw me rereading them, absolutely LOVED them (which I was totally not expecting; he does read some fantasy - he liked Harry Potter, for example, and loves Dresden Files) but he's much more of a sci-fi guy and this wasn't the sort of thing I would have thought he'd be into. But he devoured them in about 3 days and has been gently prodding me to watch the show with him. I bounced off it before - the show is a really different animal to the books - but we've now watched the first few episodes and (again to my surprise) we're both really enjoying it. The changes from the books are really interesting to me, since I haven't seen a whole lot of the show and what I've seen was mostly in the middle. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1372615.html with
comments.
Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty - Currently watching this with
sheron (we stopped on Ep. 12 last night, I think?). It's really a lot of fun, with exactly the sort of found-family slowly coming together across lines of culture and class thing that appeals to me, and once again with more and better female characters than I was expecting from the bits of promo/fandom-talk I'd seen. (Badass Mongol princess with weaponized whip!) The historical details are also really interesting - I mean, not that I know all that much about the specific era and I recognize that it's historical fiction, not fact. But I think I was expecting it to be entirely focused on the Imperial China court stuff and, although there is a lot of that, there's also a lot of the characters traveling to interesting places and engaging with the social, cultural, and technological flux of that time period - some of the characters are Mongolian immigrants in the Imperial capital, there are firearms and tomatoes and other such things that are new or imported or rare. One of the characters reminds me incredibly of Lt. Shaw from the Benjamin January books and is also super hot. No spoilers past ep. 12, please!
The Magicians - Okay, so a little while back Orion read the books because he saw me rereading them, absolutely LOVED them (which I was totally not expecting; he does read some fantasy - he liked Harry Potter, for example, and loves Dresden Files) but he's much more of a sci-fi guy and this wasn't the sort of thing I would have thought he'd be into. But he devoured them in about 3 days and has been gently prodding me to watch the show with him. I bounced off it before - the show is a really different animal to the books - but we've now watched the first few episodes and (again to my surprise) we're both really enjoying it. The changes from the books are really interesting to me, since I haven't seen a whole lot of the show and what I've seen was mostly in the middle. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1372615.html with
comments.