Howdy!
I had a rough time figuring out when I was exactly going to put these posts up as there’s not much room between Christmas and New Years to put up more than one post, but then I realized maybe this was the reason why I only write three posts a week? It’s not, so don’t worry but it was a nice thought to have in the middle of the chaos though!
I’m doing the list of favorite television shows I watched in the spring and fall schedules. I do have to point out that towards October 2016, I basically stopped watched majority of the shows like This Is Us, Notorious, The Arrangement, Timeless, and Speechless. I felt as though I had too much going on at night throughout the week so I cut back on almost everything I was watching at the time. Once January came around though, I became very hesitant about what I wanted to watch. Thankfully everything on this list was kept me entertained and focused.
Victoria (PBS – Jenna Coleman, Tom Hughes, David Oakes, and Rufus Sewall)
I loved Victoria! It premiered on PBS I think either in early December or January, my gut is telling me it was early January though.
I don’t know much about the Havorians, I’m actually only just now learning about “The Mad King” and his son George IV and the regency era. I didn’t even know that much about Queen Victoria. My focus of British royals goes from Plantagenet, Tudor to the current family Windsor. This show gave me a lot of new information to digest, and I really love Jenna and Tom playing both a young Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. You get a nice insight of their lives before they were married. I actually can’t wait to see what happens in season two when it comes to us in the US next month!
Taboo (FX – Tom Hardy, Oona Chaplin, and Jonathan Pryce)
Now this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, but I really enjoyed this show. My dad and I don’t really watch the same shows very often but we did watch the crap out of this and it was nice to talk about a show the day after it came on. However, I would have to do it before he watched his Vikings because he usually was distracted by the series of events that took place on that show. Thank god for both Facebook and Twitter though!
This show was a bit of a mystery, some of the things featured in the eight part series, still confuse me. For it to be called “taboo” I don’t necessarily know what the taboo would be, then besides the incest part. I liked the creepy undertone though, I like learning about Britain’s gritty past.
The White Princess (Starz – Jodie Comer, Jacob Collins-Levy, Michelle Fairley, Essie Davis)
I had been looking forward to The White Princess after I finished watching the first series of the House of York kings in The White Queen. The show was based on historical fiction writer Phillipa Gregory’s about King Edward IV and his consort Queen Elizabeth Woodville, and their oldest daughter Elizabeth of York and how life went for her after the death of not only her father, but her brothers and uncle, Richard III. And how she came to marry her enemy: Henry Tudor.
I ended up reading Alison Weir’s book Elizabeth Of York: A Forgotten Tudor Queen in January and this show started in mid-February. I actually finished reading the book like the day before it premiered and I will never do that again! I wasn’t open-minded like I was with the first one. They also butchered a lot of historical events to fit into this world and I think that was what bothered me the most actually!
The Mist (Spike – Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Spector, Gus Birney)
Before I start writing out what I thought about this show, apparently I should have swallowed my pride and watched it live because maybe they wouldn’t had cancelled it. Yes, it’s no longer on air, but it is on Netflix if anybody wants to check it out.
Considering the fact that two Stephan King movies came out this year, The Dark Tower in early spring and the classic It back in September, I’m surprised that this didn’t have a good rating. I thought it was creepy but maybe not enough for hardcore Stephan King fans I guess. Oh well, thankfully for me there’s a book that I can get now.
Midnight, Texas (NBC – François Arnaud, Arielle Kebbel, Peter Mensah, and Persia Fitz-Henley)
Just when I think I’m finished with the vampires, this show turns up! If you’re wondering why I said that is because this is based off of a book by the author who created the True Blood series. It wasn’t all about vampires, but it had almost every supernatural being that you can think of really, and as much as I liked this, I feel like this will probably be cancelled too.
The Deuce (HBO – James Franco, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Margarita Levieva, and Emily Meade)
As much as I liked this show, I never exactly finished it. I think I stopped on episode four, so that’ll mean I have about five episodes to watch.
You know how I said that my dad and I don’t watch too many shows together, my mom and I are about the same too. I recorded the first episode and she thought she had done it herself, so picture her face when she finally watched it. Apparently it was a lot more racy than she was expecting it to be. She wasn’t too sure why I liked it, but then again neither do I! It’s about the early days in the porn industry and somehow the character or characters that James Franco plays (because he plays a pair of twins!) go into creating the media world too. So now you understand why my mom was basically freaking out a bit, because it show quite a bit!
The Sinner (USA – Jessica Biel, Christopher Abbott, and Bill Pulman)
This was a surprise for me. I don’t have USA as part of my list of channels on my guide so the day I saw the previews for it was probably the week they premiered episode three. Like the one above, I never finished the series but I would only have to get caught up on the last two episodes though.
When mom was in the hospital recovering from her surgery back in October, she saw the commercials still circulating for the network. So she’s now interested, but yet hasn’t tried to rent or recorded them yet. I would like to see what she thought of it, but I fear she’ll freak out about the scenes with Bill Pulman though, if you’ve seen the show, you know what I’m talking about here. In a way, it goes with what I just explained above!
The Gifted (FOX – Stephan Moyer, Amy Acker, Sean Teale, and Janie Chung)
This is unfortunately another TV show that I have yet to finish. I’m really hoping that this is On Demand or Netflix, because I really enjoyed this a lot. The main reason why I stopped watching it was because the setting was confusing me. It is set when the X-Men have disappeared. You hear the term “Sentinel Service” a lot, so I’m guessing everything takes place if Wolverine wasn’t successful when Dr. Trask built the Sentinels in X-Men: Days Of Future Past. I pretty much like everything about it, the characters and their stories. It’s a little strange seeing Stephan Moyer and Amy Acker back on my screen again. I’m very behind it on it and I’m really not happy with myself at the moment.
Damnation (USA – Killian Scott, Logan Marshall-Green, and Sarah Jones)
The story is about the rich and poor, but based in the 1800’s. Farmers need to sell their goods to stores in their counties, to be able to provide for their families, but when the price to sell the stuff is too low, until an interesting man wants to spark a revolution to try to help the farmers. You see the point of view through both the farmers and businessmen throughout the Midwest and Northwest states and how they deal with the strikes.
I think after watching Taboo my dad and I have been looking for shows that either have similar themes or look like the show as far as the gritty, raw scenes. Thankfully, this show has everything that we both like! It has the unruly and yet historical background. One thing that I know my dad will be happy about is the fact everybody is speaking in an American accent. And the reason why I said “will be” is because he hasn’t even watched the three or four episodes in his folder on our DVR yet. He hasn’t even watched his newest Vikings episodes either! He’s been enjoying Netflix lately!
Have you watched any of these new shows yet? Did I miss any of the others? What else do I need to check out?