beer_good_foamy

So here's a thing. A while back, me and some friends, all bitter old Buffy fans, decided to get drunk and put together a list of the best TV series of the 2010s. And to make it interesting, we used a format based on the podcast Screendrafts, which means that rather than vote together on a common list we all agree on (and which would be boringly predictable), each of us got to pick 4 pre-determined spots on the top 24 list which we then revealed in ascending order, which means this list gets a little... creative, and much more focused on personal favourites.

So, the list:
( Top 24 TV series of the 2010s )

Questions? Comments? Guesses on which four spots are mine...? :)

Maniac showrunner to adapt Emily St John-Mandel's Station Eleven for TV

I didn't care for Maniac, but I'm hoping this'll be better. I loved the novel - a very Canadian post-apocalypse, where everyone is starting to piece things together again and work together rather than kill each other for fuel, centered around a traveling Shakespeare company travelling from settlement to settlement as civilisation begins to tentatively bounce back. I could see a very good TV series coming out of this if it's handled right.

Sounds about right:
Satanic Temple sues Netflix' Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for Grand Theft Goat

( A few words on Sabrina, no spoilers beyond ep 2 )

Haunting of Hill House is a lot more successful. ( No particular spoilers here either, except for a Buffy reference that will alert people to the fact that people DIE in this horror series )

Of course, being Netflix, neither show sets out to truly unnerve the audience or subvert the expectations of either viewers or algorithms. Both essentially set out to be the Stranger Things of their particular target demographic (where I obviously fit into one more than the other). After being disappointed by how Castle Rock fizzled out, I'm still not convinced it's possible - or rather, economically feasible - to make a bingeable long-form horror story in this medium. We'll see what they come up with next. At least The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell has cake and murderous muppets.

But damn, episode 6 of Hill House was good.

OK, that was a hell of a satisfying episode, but is it just me...?

( Spoilers )

Good luck to all my American friends tomorrow. May things work out smoothly. Try not to blow up the world or anything.

---

And speaking of apocalypses, the excellent webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent put up a very neat family tree of all the characters the other day, and so I wrote a drabble about one of the ancestor characters who is fairly badass.

Deep In The Woods; 100-word drabble about Ensi Hotakainen, who was born after the world ended and never says much.

The other day, curiouswombat (ETA: sorry, can't brain) posted something about real-life Swedish chefs. Here's a typical one in action this morning:

Swedish TV Host Starts Fire Live on Air While Frying Cheese Doodles for Some Reason


In other news, under the cut, my thoughts on s3 of House of Cards (the weather was really unbearable this weekend). The short version: not all that impressed. While the first two seasons never really reached the heights of the original BBC series, it was still often really entertaining, and brilliant binge TV. Now, though...

( Spoilers all of s3 )

Title: Everybody Knows
Author: Beer Good (beer_good_foamy)
Fandom: Welcome To Night Vale
Rating: PG13
Word count: ~1500
Summary: Written for zombi_fic_ation and the prompt "254. The tiny city under the pin retrieval area of lane five of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley And Arcade Fun Complex is having a tiny problem with tiny zombies."

"All bowling alleys are sacred to Discordians and, if necessary, you must give your life to protect them from desecration."
- Principia Discordia

( Lane 5 is no longer in use. Please use any other lane. Enjoy your bowling! )

Hey, I just realised that they announced the Willowy Goodness Awards, and my fic "Total Perspective Vortex" won two awards. Thanks a lot! Please make sure to check out the other winners as well.

( pretty banners )

And in completely unrelated news, I just watched the first couple of episodes of The 100 just because when I first read about it, I vowed to write this fic. I don't actually hate the show, but hey, you don't say no to a plotbunny like this one.

If you haven't watched the show, this should be readable anyway with this summary: 97 years after nuclear holocaust killed everyone on Earth, the surviving humans all live on a space station in orbit... and they just sent 100 convicted teenage delinquents down to the surface to see if the radiation kills them. With predictable and very CW-does-Lost-ish results.

Title: It Is Defended
Fandom: The 100/Surprise crossover
Warning: Character death
Word Count: ~280
Summary: What is that creature stalking them?

( Make sure you tell them this... )

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which I guess will forevermore make it impossible to talk about The Shield in Whedon fandom without causing confusion): ( Vauge spoilers for the first two eps )

Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.

...OK, I do have a few words.

Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.

( Spoilers for Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, The Shield (the Shawn Ryan series), Angel, Dexter... )

Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.

Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.

And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.


But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.

Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.

Second verse, same as the first: It's awards season, and they just announced the winners at absence_oflight. And among all the other very deserving winners (CONGRATS one and all!) I happened to pick up a couple as well:




Thank you so much! Check out all the winners here.

Also, I hope everyone's checking out the Three Sentence Ficathon? I found a prompt for Wolf Hall and had to write this, a little Thomas Cromwell character slice. (I wrote a Buffy one as well, but I'm not entirely happy with how that one came out so I'm planning to turn it into something longer.)

Roughshod

The courtiers keep asking him the same question in the same incredulous tone, as if they're astonished that a... person of his background can even speak.

The honest answer would be that he's fairly certain his hands have forgotten how to shoe a horse, they are used to pens and handshakes now.

But he likes the look in their eyes when he answers yes, he can; as if only for a moment, they realise that they might one day go barefoot.