What Are You Watching?

[Chris L]

While it seems redundant (or perhaps recursive) to have a thread about what TV show you're watching in a section of the board reserved for threads about the TV shows you're watching, I also don't think all TV shows or all forms of TV watching deserve their own thread. Think of this as something like The TV Thread on the old FTC. If you just want to say something brief about a TV show or two, post it here. If those shows generate enough interest, we'll spin off complete threads about them. I'll start.

Krypton -- This is a new show on SyFy about the adventures of...Superman's grandfather! Yeah, I know. It doesn't sound promising. And, having watched the pilot, it doesn't really look that promising, but it wasn't totally without worth, either. This is one of only two DC-comics-related TV shows I know of that aren't on the WB, which is owned by DC's parent company, Warner Brothers. (The other is Gotham, on Fox.) Like Gotham, this is a prequel to a well-known superhero's origin story, but it pushes things a lot farther back in time than Gotham does. The premise is that Superman's great-great-great grandfather, Val-El, has been banished to the Phantom Zone (the Kryptonian equivalent of Australia two centuries ago) for some kind of crimes against the oligarchy and his offspring have been demoted to a shameful underclass. But his grandson, Seg-El (Superman's grandfather), is given a second chance at the oligarchy by becoming engaged to the daughter of Daron Vex, the magistrate who banished Val-El despite being his close friend. Unfortunately, Seg is in love with Lyta-Zod, who seems to be an ancestor of General Zod, the villain played by Michael Shannon in Man of Steel and Terrence Stamp in Superman 2.

Following me so far? Good, because then it gets really complicated. Adam Strange, a longtime DC character known for hopping around in time and space kind of like Doctor Who, appears to Seg to tell him that the planet Krypton is going to be destroyed by the spacefaring villain Brainiac and that he must save it in order for his grandson, Kal-El (AKA Superman), to be born. He gives him the key to his grandfather's Fortress of Solitude, which bears a striking resemblance to Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Seg then learns that his parents are members of a resistance group fighting the oligarchy, and both his father and mother are dead by the end of the episode.

It is, as you might gather from that confusing summary, a bit of a mess, though somehow all of that made more sense when I was watching it than when I was explaining it. There are some decent special effects and the viewer gets a nice tour of the slums of Kandor (a Kryptonian city that, if they stay true to the old comics, will eventually be miniaturized by Brainiac and placed in a large bell jar, which Superman will keep in his earthly Fortress of Solitude). Everyone weirdly talks like they're from various parts of England, with only a few speaking in the more-familiar-to-Americans received pronunciation. The characters have more depth than one would expect and the best I can say for the show is that it's better than Gotham, at least the few episodes of Gotham I could bring myself to watch when it debuted.

Amy and I are also binge-watching Halt and Catch Fire, which started getting raves about halfway through its four-season run on AMC. We're not quite to the halfway mark, so the plot occasionally halts and then catches fire again, but I'm enjoying reliving the computing days of the 1980s, when I was rabidly following the very same information about the microcomputer revolution that the show is based on. They even have Commodore 64s. And 1200-bps telephone modems. And Nintendos. Ah, those were the good old days!