Whatcha Watchin'?

You aren’t the only one. Even series 3 had some preposterous elements, but series 4 was a notable shift in audience attraction if not a calculated attempt to abandon some audience members. I am not spending 110 minutes of my life watching that video.

I’m watching the DVD box set of the US television series “Ellery Queen” (1975-6) which is entertaining not only for the cavalcade of guest stars, including occasional John Hillerman appearances, but because the audience is invited to solve along with Ellery. Some plot areas are nonsensical to the point where one thinks it really doesn’t take much brains to be a police inspector, but only one so far of the 22 episodes seems to be an unfair “Ellery saw something you didn’t”, and that episode didn’t even invite the viewer to match wits.

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The last cycle was the weakest, but considering how terrible most tv shows are these days, I’m willing to forgive a lot from one of the better ones.

I agree with Mr Peterson that 2 hours is a long time to spend bitching and complaining about something if you’re not getting paid to do it. And watching someone else bitch and complain for that long is out of the question.

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That is the sort of person who likes to hit themself in the head with a hammer because it feels better when they stop.

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big joke aside

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Have fun.

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:thinking:

Running down the list of what I remember:

  • Every case ties back to Moriarty, Watson, Mary, or Sherlock himself. The problem isn’t that there’s an overarching plot, it’s that there’s nothing but an overarching plot. Past the first two episodes, you can’t just watch one episode out-of-sequence, the way you could pick up any of the Doyle stories without having read any of the others.
  • Moffat has a problem where he never really pays off what he sets up, a problem that shows up in other shows he works on as well. The best example in Sherlock would be the end of The Reichenbach Fall: the show acknowledges that the story told by Sherlock of how he survived wasn’t consistent with all of the evidence, but then shrugs and has Sherlock walk away without providing any further explanation.
  • Irene Adler is supposed to win against Sherlock. That’s her defining characteristic in the books, what makes her “The” woman to him. The ending of her episode is about as far away from that as possible.
  • The show seems to regard its actual fans with contempt. Anderson, the stand-in for fans of the show, is treated as comic relief, and actively derided for trying to figure out what happened to Sherlock when he “died.”
  • The “boomerang” scene is lambasted in earnest.
  • The show doesn’t spend enough time actually solving mysteries, instead spending that time establishing character beats that just as easily could be established while doing the “solving mysteries” scenes.
  • And then Season Four.

I like examining storytelling choices in-depth, which is why I enjoy both reading Film Crit Hulk’s essays and watching videos like this. But yeah, I can see why someone might not want to spend two hours watching this.

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I’m not going to watch the summary either, but those are all valid points. And the constant snide jokes about Holmes and Watson being a gay couple annoys the hell out of me. Really? In this day and age?

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This is the biggest one for me, and is definitely a Moffat trait (come on down Doctor Who). Any criticism of his work at all leads to a revenge sub plot where he craps on fan favourites by saying “here you go” and then creating something horrible that, point by point, supposedly fulfills fan expectations. See the Victoriana nonsense with the proto-suffragettes in the crypt.

From where I’m sitting this started as early as Season 2, until it got to the absurd lengths of Season 4.

I’d also add that Moffat’s persistent apologia for sociopaths (both Holmes and the Doctor call themselves this and make it out to be a good thing) is tiresome at best and dangerous at worst. Furthermore, sticking to Holmes, it’s most definitely not canon. Holmes keeps his intellectual detachment through conscious effort. Sure, he’s not the most sociable type, but he does care about doing his clients good.

Calling Anderson the on-screen fan stand-in is rather insulting, though.

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That’s the main reason I’m glad Moffat isn’t the showrunner for Doctor Who anymore.

As far as I’m concerned, no adaptation to any screen has gotten the character of Irene Adler right yet; not even Rachel McAdams’ offering in the RDJ films.

Agreed; dude is projecting his own issues there, methinks.

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Blatantly stolen from The Beast Must Die:

This is genuinely possible, as TBMD came out just a year before Ellery Queen premiered.

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Earlier seasons of Mr. Robot made me grumpy because (among other reasons) although the series famously depicted hacking and computer security in a relatively realistic way, its treatment of multiple personality disorder was a cartoonish cut+paste from a certain David Fincher film.

Well, for whatever reason, early Season 3 (as far as I’ve caught up) is a big improvement. Elliot’s symptoms are a lot more consistent with what I saw and heard spending time with people who actually have (or claimed to have) that particular problem.

Maybe the writers are responding to criticism from people like me, or maybe since the story has caught up with the end of Fight Club they no longer feel the need to follow their source material so closely :confused:

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Well, I guess I’m still not picking up on sexism when it’s in front of me. Feminists like @doyouconsideryourselfafeminist on Instagram are calling out Michelle Wolf.

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I’m not really familiar with her work, so I can’t say either way.

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This person sounds deranged. I don’t know Michelle Wolf, but I’m taking her side here

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Rather than take a side, I’m inclined to just shrug and say, “Well, that happened.”

@doyouconsideryourselfafeminist may have a point, but she was far too incensed to make it clearly.

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It’s not that I’m trying to tone police this Instagram rando or anything, it’s just that I don’t think she has a point. She can’t bring up a concrete example of anything outrageous. If not explicitly calling white men terrorists is offensive, and yet saying that men sexually harass women more than women sexually harass men is also offensive (???), then I guess we’re all offensive here. Her initial position is simply one I can’t get behind.

Michelle Wolf, on the other hand, tries to listen at first, then gets frustrated (oops), but points out that jokes aren’t literal truths, comedy shows aren’t feminist lectures, and then correctly points out what would be pandering and what wouldn’t be pandering. Pandering is bending one’s act to the whim of every rando who gets offended, as opposed to telling the jokes one wants to tell. Also, comedy is about jokes, and I say this as someone who is not at all a fan of standup. Most standup I hear is full of observational humor which rings true, is good for a few laughs, but doesn’t hold up to intellectual scrutiny. It’s enough to offer a funny new perspective, but not one that’s bulletproof enough to change my worldview or anything. That’s by design, I think. Comedy is light, and the intellectual stuff is heavy.

Keeping in mind that I don’t know the context, and that I was never provided with the context, I don’t think Michelle Wolf is necessarily anti-feminist or that @knoxblox feminism detector is broken. I think this Instagram person is a bit extreme, and Michelle is spot on about what comedy shows are and are not. I feel for every comedian who has to explain over and over again that what they do isn’t literal truth and isn’t who they are as a person… yet I’m still not sure what it was that Michelle had to answer for. That isn’t even clear to me. If I had to pick a side, I’d pick Michelle’s, because at least I understand her point.

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I follow a few feminist accounts on IG, so the algorithm feeds me more in my open feed, and I run across a few of these from time to time.

I generally think that if something bothers me I need to check myself and be sure I’m not protecting my white male privilege. However, the tone from some of them is worrisome to me at the levels of the “dad joke” incident from last year when the alarmist level felt like it was way off the charts.

I think comedians like Michelle Wolf, Margaret Cho, and Sarah Silverman are funny, and I believe them when they state they are feminist. The fine minutiae of tone policing between feminist accounts on IG is quite baffling at times, and I find it difficult to separate the goodthink from the badthink when they call out celebrities and their platform.

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Yes, this is a good thing to do.

But I don’t think you’re protecting your privilege by not recognizing anti-feminist sentiment when there isn’t any. Do you really think that not explicitly calling white men terrorists is some big anti-feminist statement and should be cause for outrage? This is like saying that not saying the phrase “meat is murder” is an endorsement of meat.

This is why I’m not a SJW. It’s more of a contest to see who’s the most woke than actually fighting for social justice. It’s incentivized so that people who spout off extremist views are seen as more enlightened than those who are less extreme but actually walk the walk.

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