Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I feel like Big Bang Theory is a show about nerds for people who aren't nerds. I'm not offended by it, but as an actual nerd I found it uninteresting. Especially because most of the things the characters were really nerdy about weren't things I'm nerdy about.

 Jadenim wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

Oh Yeah, Big Bang Theory. I just kinda.....stopped. I was never one to say it was like blackface for nerds or mysoginistic like other(Hey guys, BTW, just because people in the show are mysoginistic, doesnt mean the show is Kay? All those guys get taken to town for their gakky attitudes) I just stopped watching it.
I never really actively stop watching something, i just kinda.........never get into the new season.

I had this two, three seasons before the end; they are on endless repeat over here and I still really enjoy the first five or so seasons, because they had a bunch of jokes that you had to have a basic understanding of physics/geek culture to understand and there were a number of goofy conversations that I have had in real life with my friends. But at some point any of the actual science / geek jokes got removed and it just became a generic US sitcom, but with nerds. Also they really played up Sheldon being obnoxious, rather than just weird/disconnected and I there enough people who annoy me in real life without having to deal with that in my entertainment.

BBT was funny, I still laugh at a few of the jokes(Flash Pacing back and forth was hilarious to me)
To sheldon. It always sucks when they Flanderize a character, so many of my favorite character go to having funny quirks that are part of their personality, to it being the only part of their personality. Because when people find that part funny or likeable, they obviously have to add more of it right? I can name so many characters that i loved that by the final season I didnt recognize them.

I've never been able to follow Who. It's a show that's easier to enjoy specific well regarded episodes. This got really difficult to do, particularly towards the end of Smith's run and I haven't taken the time to watch Capaldi even though I've loved him in the episodes I've watched.

 LordofHats wrote:
I feel like Big Bang Theory is a show about nerds for people who aren't nerds.

This is exactly it, it was a show about nerds for non-nerds, a way to connect to, or project their ideas of, "nerd" stuff without actually having to interact with it. I've never met anyone in any sort of gaming, academia, fandom, etc that was actually into Big Bang theory themselves.

I don't generally do a hard 'nope, never watching/reading that again' especially since I will reread/rewatch stuff so even a franchise that's gone in a dud direction can entertain me with the good earlier stuff

that said I did actively stop watching new battle star galactica midway through a season, I also gave up on stargate-lost in space after loving pretty much all the rest of the franchise

and star wars prequel 2 really put me off the whole thing, although the new stuff has reversed that a bit (they're not a patch on the original but so much more fun than the prequels)

 Vaktathi wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I feel like Big Bang Theory is a show about nerds for people who aren't nerds.

This is exactly it, it was a show about nerds for non-nerds, a way to connect to, or project their ideas of, "nerd" stuff without actually having to interact with it. I've never met anyone in any sort of gaming, academia, fandom, etc that was actually into Big Bang theory themselves.

Whilst I'm not defending the steaming gak show it became, the first couple of seasons were fairly distinct if a bit middling, but then I think Chuck et al made a clear choice to go full formula trope sit-com

I also agree with folks about Vikings, there was a clear end point but they just kept going and even lubbery Ms Winnick wasn't enough to carry on bothering with it

Movies:

I thought they tied everything up quite nicely in the first Matrix, sequels seemed an obvious cash grab.

Like so many others, TLJ absolutely murdered my interest in any further Star Wars offerings. I mean Dead 10 dead.

TV:

Battlestar Galactica earns two spots. First, the original series died in my eyes when they actually reached earth... and it was now.

Second, the new series, I lost interest at the end of the premier. The base slander on many of the characters, the ship looked 'ribbed for her pleasure' more than anything else... and Boomer being a boomer was the death knell. Given what I heard about what came after that, I'm glad I stopped there.

So BSG is the only series I should have liked but ended up hating... twice!, and the only series I should have liked but ended up hating by the end of the first episode.

To be honest, most TV shows hit this point two seasons before they get canceled. There's very few shows I'll watch all the way to the end, it might be easier to list those than the ones that jump the shark.

Game of Thrones (TV) - I was still hoping for them to stick the landing as far along as mid-season. They did not, obviously.

Game of Thrones (novels) - I've still enjoyed them, while being increasingly aware that there is no way he's going to be able to pull all of this together. If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.

X-Files - right when they brought in Doggett and whatsername. I tried watching the newest ones, and one or two episodes were fine, but I heard the series finale was hot garbage and didn't bother. For me, they should ended it at the Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.

The Office after Steve Carell left. I stuck with it for a sense of closure but man it was work.

I try to pretend there were no Matrix sequels.

Jericho was a show that got cancelled, had a huge fan push to come back, and then upon miraculously getting a second chance, dropped a season so bad everyone was like "yeah, we're done."

I gave up on TWD once it became apparent only the zombies had any kind of plan at all. For me, this was right around when Curls's mom got eaten, but I would argue it was actually trash since season 2.

Witcher - didn't really enjoy epsiode one and they killed the one chrracter I did like, then episode two had a god awful bard and worse crappy elves. never been back
Lost- not sure waht episode but two or three I think - it was just stupid and boring
The Boys - Epsiode One - didn;t care about anyone and they thought they were so clever for swearing, didn;t bother with epsiode two.

Books
Wheel of Time - didn;t get past book one and the epicly slow and tedious descriptions of travel and people.

As far as GoT goes, I realised somewhere around season 5 I was actually rooting for the ice zombies to just march on south and put everyone out of their misery because I no longer cared about any of the characters.

Star Wars from The Farce Awakens, onwards.

The Dresden Files, from when Michael Carpenter was introduced.

There was only one Matrix film, so that doesn't count for the purposes of this thread.

Friends.

Watched a mere handful of episodes, and found it to be pretty awful. Would see the occasional additional episode, often round friends houses, and always felt the same.

Yeah I should have mentioned TLJ destroyed my interest in further films and certianly would not watch anything further by that director.

 harlokin wrote:

The Dresden Files, from when Michael Carpenter was introduced.

Restart at Deadbeat. The first 6 are just essentially character introduction and groundwork.

 Hulksmash wrote:

 harlokin wrote:

The Dresden Files, from when Michael Carpenter was introduced.

Restart at Deadbeat. The first 6 are just essentially character introduction and groundwork.

Thanks, I'll give that a looksee.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Red Dwarf series 7....

 harlokin wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:

 harlokin wrote:

The Dresden Files, from when Michael Carpenter was introduced.

Restart at Deadbeat. The first 6 are just essentially character introduction and groundwork.

Thanks, I'll give that a looksee.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Red Dwarf series 7....

No problem. I got back and generally reread the series when a new book is coming out and I never go back to the beginning. I just start at Deadbeat as that's when the world outside of just Harry and friends starts to open up. Though I'm surprised you didn't like the first Carpenter appearance. It's one of the better early books with the introduction of the swords and the daenarians (sp?).

And I forgot my sci-fi trifecta of old favorites that became my least favorites and now I don't even shrug when I hear new developments.

Predator. Mainly the AvP's killed it for me. The most recent Predator felt like an insult.
Alien. I feel like they forgot what made the originals so good.
Terminator. Went to the well too many times.

I'm done with them, provided a stellar reboot.

I think its about where I stopped too. I don't think there's anything wrong with it; I think its a difference between binge reading and keeping up with something. That's about the point where I felt reading them one after another that repetition set in and I wasn't getting the same sense of novelty I enjoyed so far. If I'd been reading the books as they came out, I'm sure I'd be more eager for more.

 Hulksmash wrote:

 harlokin wrote:

The Dresden Files, from when Michael Carpenter was introduced.

Restart at Deadbeat. The first 6 are just essentially character introduction and groundwork.

The climax of Dead Beat is legit awesome.

The next Dresden Files book is coming out in a couple months, so this might be a good time for a reread. I’m currently trying to get back into the Mercy Thompson series that I walked away from 4 books ago. She’s a little too ...Rey. Also, the series has an odd mix of religious restraint and urban fantasy sensuality that I find distracting, like if Ned and Maude Flanders were always naked with their blood-thirsty monster squad.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, Harry Potter. I made it through Deathly Hallows (book and movie), and now have no urge to consume another Harry Potter storylike product in my life.

Agreed - read the first one and was not interested enought to read another HP book.

I made the mistake of trying to read the first Harry Potter book right after I'd just finished reading Dune. There is a reason I never got further.

Only ones I can think of right now, will probably be lots more I've missed in TV shows and Movies.

Books:
The Farseer Trilogy - Can't really put my finger on why, but I'd bought all three to eventually get around to, took the first one to read while waiting around on jury duty, finished jury duty, put it down at home and never picked it back up.

Game of Thrones - Pick a character and stick with their perspective for longer than a chapter, and don't force me to wait about ten more annoying chapters about people IDGAF for to get back to the ones I like. The way the first book was laid out drove me up the wall, and while I can't remember if I finished the first I certainly didn't start the second.

Horus Heresy - I fell off the wagon somewhere reasonably early on, and at this point I'm too scared to ask where to get back on.

Artemis Fowl - The Opal Deception was my last one. Reason: I grew up.

Alex Rider - Archangel? Reason: I grew up and also got sick of the whole "this is definitely the final one now, I promi- never mind I lied".

Wheel of Time (maybe) - In at "maybe" because I'm on Book Three, and I'm not sure if I can really be arsed any more. Most of the characters are about as nuanced and/or likeable as a sun-bleached dog turd, the pacing is glacial until it isn't, and then it's faster-paced and quite good until it's contrived not to be again, and the little symbols above each chapter denoting what happens in it often has me reaching to skip ahead of the formulaic, predictable bits. Part of me wants to struggle through it just to say I did--or at least reach Sanderson's ones--but most chapters make me question why I just spent the last few hours working through them, and I didn't just skim ahead to the next interesting chunk.

The Sword of Truth/Richard and Kahlan - JUST LEAVE IT ALONE. FOR GOD'S SAKE, PLEASE. LET IT LIE.

TV Series:
Parks & Rec - I don't get it. At all. And whenever I mentioned it to anyone who asked if I'd seen it I got different answers to what I should skip and ignore to the point where I genuinely didn't care any more.

Archer - Also didn't get it.

Bojack Horseman - As Above.

Doctor Who - I didn't watch the end of Smith or any of Capaldi until a Netflix rewatch, bar the season opener of Bill's time as companion... I still haven't finished Capaldi/Clara, tried jumping back on for Jodie and after a fairly poor opening - and an episode all about spiders - I stopped trying.

Game of Thrones - "Maybe the TV show will be more watchable." It was not. Halfway through the first episode I realised I was bored and ultimately didn't care.

Agents of SHIELD - To be fair, it wasn't in the UK until Channel 4 got the rights ages after airing, so not really its fault, but I stopped pursuing it after Daisy's parents' arc was done, because it felt like a natural enough end and I was pleased to leave it like that.

Iron Fist - After the first season, because it was bad enough when it was just Whiny McBankHuge, and then it promised to be Whiny McBankHuge + "I Wanna Be The Guy" + This Character Had Literally No Reason To Suddenly Be Evil.

Movies:
Star Wars after TLJ - I had hopes for TRoS, I really did, but then it released and even the people who staunchly defended the painfully average mess that was TLJ turned around and went "Okay, WTF?". I never bothered watching it. Currently have a Disney+ free trial. Could watch it there. Don't think I will.

Harry Potter - Fantastic Finances and How to Grow Them et al don't interest me one jot, and neither will anything else based on the franchise, not least because Rowling herself is already Continuity Crusher-in-Chief, so I trust nothing about any new content to make sense for longer than it stays in cinemas/on stage.

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End was 168 minutes of PotC-themed nothing. I watched the first bit of On Stranger Tides and decided it was stupid.

Transformers - I stuck around longer than any of their main characters do.

Star Trek Voyager. I eagerly ate up TNG and DS9 when I was a kid and VOY was pretty much the same, at the start. I think the rot set in when they brought in Seven of Nine. Jeri Ryan is a stunning-looking woman, but that brought up extra doubts about just why they decided to put her in halfway through this nerd show. And the 'pinocchio' arc in Star Trek was already done with both Data and the EMH.
That said, the borgy babies and the 'hologram rights now' storylines were the parts that got a bit too goofy for me.
I'm watching the series for the first time since then, rerun on the Horror Channel. The later seasons don't seem so bad now, maybe because I know what to expect and current TV isn't much better.

Chuck Lorre sitcoms. Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. Thought they were great laughs at the start, then realised how banal they were when they just retread everything over and over. For BBT I can pinpoint the episode where Leonard and Sheldon try to bury the hatchet with an old school bully, and Penny steals from charity. The way the show made out who made the right decision, and how these were monkeys dancing for a crowd rather than actual characters, was like a light switch in my head. Done.

Game of Thrones. I made it to maybe the end of season three or four. Can't remember which and I don't care to look it up. There were too many noticeable changes, of the type that usually get excused as 'but you have to change things for the screen!' (but which usually mean mucking up some meaningful plot or character point) as well as some other peculiar out-of-nowhere oddities. Hearing about how clueless the showrunners were after 7 and 8, it doesn't surprise me.

The first films in each of the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies. 'Nuff said.

Dune! First time I tried reading all the original Frank Herbert-penned books, I ended up throwing God-Emperor of Dune against the wall. Years later I tried again and managed to finish, but man, it's a slog. It's like Herbert realised that his first rant against 'charismatic leaders' made his charismatic leader too... charismatic... and sympathetic, so doubled down on his rhetoric for the rest of the series. And then there's trying to get your head round the arms race of the magic-psychic-powers-but-not-really-magic-psychic-powers-you-guys-just-totally-believable-mundane-insights.
Recommendation: first book. Maybe one or two after. Then stop.

I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone recently, because it was free on Prime Reading and I decided to finally see what the fuss was about. I'm still half-wondering what the fuss was about. I guess you had to be a kid.

The Boys. The comic series. Every so often I get the next trade in the series, and then I have to stop for a while because it's such a horrifying, cynical, crapsack interpretation of superhero comics and the world. Superhero comics are always ripe for mockery and deconstruction, but The Boys is more, like a dark glimpse into the head of someone with a permanent hate-on, who you don't really want to hang out with. I'm at the point where I'm not sure I want to suffer on, just to see how the Butcher takes out the Homelander.

Who was that old Black Library character? The Flashheart-in-40K one. Commissar Cain? Loved the short stories in the old Inferno mag. Didn't think much of the longer novels, when the plot had to be pushed along by this cowardly, self-serving character getting a sudden rush of moral indignation out of nowhere.

Robot Chicken. I just found out that All4 has a bunch of Adult Swim stuff for streaming, including Robot Chicken from season 5 onwards, and I thought 'right, there's something to keep me occupied when I'm stuck inside.' I got about halfway through season 6 and stopped. It's nothing. That's the best way I can describe it. There's no wit, no cleverness, very little charm. It's the same couple of instant farting, fighting and sex jokes over and over again. It's not even overly offensive with those, just monotonous and tedious. It makes Chuck Lorre look like Shakespeare and Mel Brooks rolled into one.

Wow. Some of those interpretations aren't even recognizable to the source material. Particularly Dune and Caine (moral indigination isn't ever a motive, its always about image and reputation so he can keep himself as safe as possible).

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

IMO, Moffat really ruined to show with his take on the Doctor. Where the Doctor was essentially a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl that came into peoples lives and made it better by their antics, and then when they tried to be serious it felt disingenious.
Capaldi was a nice breath of fresh air

I dropped out of being a regular Who watcher after the season finale where the Doctor definitely for real no kidding you guys had to die at a certain time or place or the universe would break. Everything in the season had been hammering home that this was an inescapable deathtrap, with characters brooding over this inevitable doom and how to avoid it, or being prepared to risk breaking the universe to save him.

Season finale, turns out that he just needed to be somewhere in that area and appear to die. And so he uses an obvious escape clause to sidestep it, one of several obvious ones he could have used just with super-tech introduced in that season alone. So the entire season was a big fakeout.

I think Moffat's a genius when it comes to creating mood and mystery, and doing clever storytelling with time travel. Most of his individual episodes are brilliant. But that's not the same skill-set as telling a coherent and satisfying story arc, so you have characters who have little to them other than being a Big Mystery and big plots that just fizzle out when the questions actually need to be answered.


I dropped out of Game of Thrones early into S4. I think the bit where I was done was where, hey you know how we spent a big chunk of the last season establishing the wildlings as being an interesting and complex culture of their own rather than just a horde of evil savages? Here are these other wildlings, who are rapey cannibals! And it just seemed to be going out of its way to tell me that nobody in this world deserved anything nice, and I should be rooting for the Night King.


Though I read this and immediately thought of webcomics, and two that were my favourites for well over a decade--

For Schlock Mercenary, it was when I realised somewhere in the whole "they own a space colony now" arc that the pace had become so decompressed that I'd actually entirely lost track of where the characters were or what they were doing. But the nagging problem was the God-AI characters who only seemed to be around to suck the drama out of arc climaxes, be annoyingly smug, always-right and superior to the human characters and to make the setting collapse in meaning

For Scary-Go-Round, it was the abundent WTFery of the Into The Woods arc--let's bring back characters from ten years ago, savagely mock them and then kill them off without them actually adding to the plot. Let's have the entire thing happen because one character is breathtakingly negligent and have nobody at all call him for all the death and destruction that is completely and utterly his fault.

And I've quit more than one "surreal humour" webcomic when the author suddenly decided that the audience really, really wanted to know about his political and social views instead of laughing.

Voss wrote:
Wow. Some of those interpretations aren't even recognizable to the source material. Particularly Dune and Caine (moral indigination isn't ever a motive, its always about image and reputation so he can keep himself as safe as possible).

I know P&R was asked to be kept out of the thread, but...

Frank Herbert always intended Dune to be a parable warning against blindly following a leader figure. It's not a well-hidden secret, aside from the fact that the first Dune novel comes across more as a standard 'hero's journey', underdog-freedom-fighter plot. The theme is more of a focus in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, which are about Paul's abject failure and the harmfulness of the cult he built up*; and God Emperor of Dune barely has a plot - or at least a plot that could be squeezed into a book less than half the length - because of Leto acting as a mouthpiece for Frank's religious and political rants.

You can call it a biased interpretation, fair enough, I know it's not a widespread opinion. But if you say it's unrecognisable, I wonder what version of Dune you read.

* Imagine the Luke Skywalker scenes from TLJ, then imagine that the bulk of the SW sequel trilogy were those.

Commissar Cain... it's been a while. That's the impression the first book left me with, though. Cain - whose usual reaction is not to outrun the ambull but to outrun the other guy running from the ambull - at one or two points gets uncharacteristically miffed about how the poor imperial citizens are used and sacrificed.

X-Men movies.

First one was a good, if flawed effort. X-2 is superb. X-3 shouldn’t exist. The three Wolverine films are just canon confusing, First Class was brill, Future Past had its moments, and have no interest at all in Apoc or Phoenix.

Ciaphas Cain is not the same as Flashman. He is not a total scumbag, but generally cares for his men. His cowardice sometimes outweighs it, but the series (especially Amberley’s notes) makes it clear that Cain self-deprecatingly exaggerates his flaws and understates his character out of some kind of guilt complex. The books may not be for everyone, but your description of them does not fit, either.

Yup.

Cain’s main flaw is not recognising his very human reactions to things, and failing to understand bravery isn’t about not being scared.

Fair enough, but it's still a departure from the short stories that I didn't agree with.

(And at least someone thought enough to offer a bit of a counterpoint!)