📺 3 Body Problem (The Netflix version) was a great introduction to the topic for my non-science-fiction-reading spouse, but of course couldn’t even begin to approach the depth of the original. Some unordered observations:

• The first season of the show encompasses the entire first book and a part of the second. I didn’t mind that as much as I thought I would, though huge chunks of the parts I liked were cut out.
• The plot had more handwaving then I remembered from the book, which I believe was the result of the above cutting but I’ll have to re-read the books to be certain.
• The signature blandness of Netflix shows works in its favor for the VR scenes and is muted in “the real world” for a net positive effect.
• Several key (Chinese) characters from the book were combined and re-sliced into an unlikely team of five Oxford buddies who have an oversized role in the future of humanity. I hope that’s the worst we see of the show runners' interventions.
• I liked the intro and loved Ramin Djawadi’s theme song but Netflix decided to show the whole thing only in the first episode and cut it down to 2 seconds in all the subsequent ones. Thumbs down for that.
• The first season was the easy one. I hope technology catches up to make Death’s End feasible to film.

Prompt: “Give me an elevator pitch for a TV show called Stakeholders, a corporate dramedy with vampires.”

ChatGPT-4:

“Stakeholders” is a cutting-edge corporate dramedy that intertwines the cutthroat world of business with the dark, secretive existence of vampires, offering a unique twist on the workplace drama. In the bustling metropolis of New York City, a prestigious investment firm, Bloodline Capital, serves as the battleground for power, ambition, and survival. The catch? The firm is run by vampires who’ve been pulling the strings of the financial world for centuries. By day, they’re savvy business moguls navigating mergers, acquisitions, and corporate espionage. By night, they engage in a more primal struggle for dominance within the vampire hierarchy and their quest for the elixir that promises them daywalking abilities.

Our protagonist, a young, ambitious MBA graduate, unknowingly becomes embroiled in this supernatural corporate world after landing a dream job at Bloodline Capital. They must navigate the treacherous waters of vampire politics, corporate rivalry, and their own burgeoning vampiric powers after a fateful encounter. As alliances form and secrets are uncovered, they discover that in the world of vampires and venture capital, stakes are more than just a financial term—they’re a matter of survival.

“Stakeholders” blends dark humor with thrilling drama, exploring themes of power, identity, and the quest for immortality against the backdrop of the high-stakes corporate world. It’s ‘The Office’ meets ‘True Blood,’ where every negotiation has fangs and every boardroom battle is a fight for eternity. This show promises to captivate viewers with its witty dialogue, compelling characters, and a plot that twists and turns like a stock market chart on a volatile trading day.

I’d watch it.

This morning I learned that one of the many plot lines in the British TV show Bodies has been lifted from real life:

The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by a man sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed “the Claimant”, to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.

It goes without saying that the real-life Claimant was not as successful as the fictional one — this is why Wikipedia makes for better reading than most fiction.

📺 Beckham (2023) seems to have had full access to David and Victoria. It may have paid for that access by painting too rosy of a picture of the couple. But that’s OK! I have new respect for both realizing how young they were when they had their family photos plastered all over tabloids, and how dedicated David Beckham was to football and family — in that order. Most of all, how dedicated his parents were to his career, which is all the more poignant when you realize, in the last few moments of the last episode, that he could not show the same dedication to his own children.

📺 True Detective: Night Country comes 10 years after the first season, if you can believe it has been that long. It is a different show for a different time now: the atmosphere of confusion, uncertainty and dread from the original is still there, but so many other things are different that it is a bit of a stretch to have them share the True Detective title. A few spoiler-ish observations:

1. Like the original, there is an actual real-world solution to the murder mystery. Unlike the original, which had a slight layer of the supernatural added on top, Night Country has supernatural tendencies up top, down below, and everywhere in between but somehow leaves out any of the Lovecraftian horror that would have been perfect for the setting. Oh well.
2. Night Country had too much vagueness in some key aspects for me to be fully immersed: What kind of pollution, exactly, is threatening the town that is able to cause so much misery but also… speeds up thawing of the permafrost? And how could those substances, whatever they are, possibly speed up studying bacteria?
3. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are as good of a couple as McConaughey and Harrelson were in Season 1, if not better, but True Detective is not only about dysfunctional cops partnering up in barely inhabitable locations.
4. When I saw that the season was set in Alaska I was hoping for some more callback to H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, At the Mountains of Madness was set at the other pole, but dark horrors lurking deep beneath the ice would have fit perfectly with the season’s premise. Alas, nonsensical mentions of time being “a flat circle” and people “asking the wrong question” were the only artifacts brought back from 2014.
5. The intro sequence was the only time I tolerated a Billie Eilish song.

If nothing else it made us start watching Season 3, which we hadn’t noticed at all when it came out in 2017. It looks promising!

📺 Silo, Season 1 is the first show I finished watching on AVP and all I could think about after the last episode was how very appropriate that Apple would be the one producing it — I’ll write no more lest I spoil it. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Fallout 3.

📺 I have high hopes for the fourth season of True Detective. There is no one better to play a detective in an ice-cold town than Jodie Foster. And the frigid, sunless setting pairs well with the Arctic weather we have been having. Now if only the murder mystery itself actually went somewhere.

It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:

• The Last of Us, which I have to thank for making my wife interested in something video game-related. Because Pedro Pascal is in it, to be clear, but I’ll take it.
• Severance would have been even better if played at 1.25x. The office party scene was masterful, though, and at the right speed.
• Slow Horses, Season 2 and Season 3 were the best 12 hours of live-action TV this year.
• Ted Lasso, Season 3 was a disappointment the more I think about it, so I try to think about it less.
• The Bear, Season 2 was the opposite of Lasso and I look forward to Season 3.
• Guy’s Grocery Games was a bad habit which we broke shortly after I wrote about it.
• The Afterparty, Season 2, which was… fine, but a bit too West coast for my taste. Unlike…
• Only Murders in the Building, Season 3, which hit just the right spot. The soundtrack is still a hit with the family on our rides to school.
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake was the perfect sequel to the original.
• Bodies were a nice surprise, although Primer (2004) is still the only one with time travel that makes sense.
• The Great British Baking Show, Season who-knows-which had some of the “worst” contestants to date — quotation marks here because they were all good both in personality and baking skills — but some of the best moments, so one of the better seasons overall.
• Scavengers Reign were the best 6 hours of any TV this year. Not for everyone, to be sure, but I hope it will be for enough people for their flaky Warner/Discovery corporate overlords to order another season.

Last year’s list is here.

📺 Scavengers Reign (2023) was hands down the best six hours of streaming I saw this year. It’s Adventure Time for adults; Saga for television; Fantastic Planet for the 2020s; and, yes, all in the Moebius style that influenced Miyazaki’s Nausicaä… so much that it’s probably the first thing that will come to mind after seeing the first few scenes.

But Scavengers Reign is not a mishmash of those, but a new and distinct work all of its own, with a better soundtrack and better voice acting than anything that’s come before. Highly recommended.

📺 Continuing my write-about-it-before-you’re-done-watching series, I would like to turn everyone’s attention to Scavengers Reign. Six of 12 episodes in, and it’s the best thing on TV so far this year. Between that and Across the Spider-Verse, 2023 has been stellar for animation.