The Walking Dead Needs To Man Up

*Spoilers for The Walking Dead below*

That's right, I said it. The Walking Dead has built a reputation for scripting the most graphically gruesome ends for beloved characters and I watch every episode on tenterhooks. That's what I thought anyway. A couple of weeks ago I decided to re watch the pilot episode just to feel the first time viewing rush again and naturally I continued watching until I'd caught up to season six. Watching that body count soar once again made me realise something, I don't actually fear death on the show anymore. I thought my lack of empathy in recent episodes was because I had become desensitised to death which was quite unsettling but I was wrong, it's because the deaths no longer matter. 

Will Lucifer Go Down In Flames?

Any satanists that clicked on this post can turn around and leave because I doubt anything I write below will appeal to you as this post is about Lucifer the television serial, not Lucifer your saviour. The series is based on the DC comic book of the same name which I haven't read so I'm sure I'll be incredibly analytical and be able to cross reference the comics with the show. That was sarcasm, I'm not going to even try to compare the two because I don't want to flaunt my lack of knowledge about DC and get flamed by diehard fans so I'll do what I do best and rant about the television show while everyone rolls their eyes.

Lucifer follows the exploits of Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis), the former ruler of Hell, as he abandons his post and decides to live the high life in Los Angeles. While on vacation from Hell he meets Chloe Decker (Lauren German), an LAPD detective, and decides the rush he gets from helping her capture criminals with his power of compulsion is just what he needs in his life. In theory this seems like a show I would be eager to watch, something slightly procedural with supernatural elements but somehow I just can't enjoy it. A police detective with a supernatural sidekick is not exactly a new phenomena, we've seen it quite recently in the last few years with shows including Forever and Sleepy Hollow which both do it a hell of a lot better than we see in Lucifer.

Does The Night Manager Have Longevity?

*Minimal spoilers from the novel and TV show*

The BBC made a splash earlier this year with the premiere of sleek new espionage drama The Night Manager. The miniseries is based on a novel by the God of all espionage/cold war dramas John Le Carré, if you don't know the name you will definitely know his work. From Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (which I misspelled throughout a three thousand word essay) to A Most Wanted Man he has cornered the market in thrilling spy drama and his works have seen numerous adaptations over the years. In my opinion The Night Manager seems to be one of the better page to screen adaptations his novels, possibly one of the better adaptations I've seen in recent years full stop.

Why Do People Watch Suits?

*Spoilers from season 5 of Suits*

I'll start by saying that I will not be using this post to insult Suits, I am an avid watcher of it but the second half of season 5 had me wondering why. The show follows the deeds of savvy fake attorney Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) and Harvery Spector (Gabriel Macht), the man that hired him knowing he's a fraud. These are our lead characters, the ones that we are supposed to support and root for but right off the bat they are doing something both unethical and illegal. Somehow the show managed to make me pretty much forget that for 4 seasons and I stuck with them through every antagonist they encountered but I can't ignore the fact that they are in the wrong any longer.

Top Drama With Top Boy

*Possible spoilers from the first series of Top Boy below*


Top Boy has been on my watch list for a couple of years now but then my friend Lanita decided to binge watch it. This will not do, I do the binge watching in our twosome and she's the one that puts things off until I give up on trying to make her watch something that's dear to me. She clearly doesn't care for our friendship as much as I do because the night after she told me she'd finished the show I decided to watch the first series which was time well spent. I'm not going to start bashing the Harrodians or the Etonians of the world because I do genuinely enjoy watching them on our screens in quality programming but at times it does feel like that all we see on our screens is upper class people with upper class troubles. I am partial to a little bit of costume drama but I did not shed any tears when Downton Abbey ended, I don't watch Downton but I know it ended because I would have to be living in a hut in an Alpine land to avoid that news. If you like Downton fine, but there needs to be a light shone on little gems like this.

Below is the synopsis of Top Boy taken from www.imdb.com:

The Legends Of Yesterday?

*Spoilers from Arrowverse/Flarrowverse/IDon'tCareWhatIt'sCalledVerse below*

I'm a huge fan of Arrowverse or Flarrowverse or whatever the hell it's called, so clearly I was excited to hear about the development of DCs Legends Of Tomorrow or Legends Of Tomorrow or whatever the hell it's called. A joint spin off of two shows I love that are using minor characters that I enjoyed a bit, how could it go wrong? It sounded like it was going to be brilliant and the little teases that we'd recieved from The Flash and Arrow seemed promising until we reached the major The Flash/Arrow crossover event with the introduction of Hawkman (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl (Ciara Renee). The dialogue, the premise, the wings, heck everything in those crossover episodes was just plain bad and it certainly didn't help that the actors that they cast to play said characters are wooden as hell.

The DVD Is Dead, Long Live The DVD

Listeners of The Dorks Deduction will already know this but I have a major thing for DVDs. My obsession with them runs so deep that I even have a spreadsheet to keep track of what they are and where they are. I also have a thing for spreadsheets but this is not the time to get into that (there will never be a time to get into that). I even know when the obsession with them started, I was 16 and researching for a piece of coursework I was doing for college so my father gave me £20 and I popped down to HMV. That day I owned my first 5 DVDs outright and it was an amazing feeling, I didn't have to share them with anyone. From then I always believed my adding to the collection was just because I was able to claim ownership over something but lately I've come to realise it's a lot more than that, the DVDs mean a lot more to me and not just items I possess. My emotional attachment to these inanimate objects has left me incredibly disappointed whenever I've purchased them within the last year.

Limited TV Shows Should Stay Limited

British television has a tendency to be short and sweet, I mean even the long running shows (not including soap operas) have an incredibly low episode count. I can see how this could be appealing to viewers, you don't have to dedicate as much time to them and the majority of the time the viewer does end up with some sense of closure when the show ends. Not always though *cough* The Fades *Cough*. To be honest I think it's quite incredible the impact these shows make, they run for no more than 8 episodes at a time and sometimes they aren't even on every year and rather than lose viewers they tend to gain them through word of mouth.

For a while I've thought that American television should do the same, having 18-24 episodes a season is a bit too much. There's only so much you can stretch a story line before it all gets repetitive and you start losing the audiences attention. Even I, a self confessed television addict, have lost the love of American television when once upon a time that was all I watched, I would get up early before school to watch episodes of Supernatural after they'd aired. Yes, I was that bad. The audiences getting tired of the show leads to problems for American networks as they rely on advertising and advertisers aren't going to pay big bucks for shows that it seems like no one watches so that inevitably leads to the shows cancellations. I was the type of that would get really invested in the shows, watch it every week and then be devastated when it was cancelled. I'm so happy we have the TV license fee here.

Well anyway, lets get down to what I've been doing the past year instead of writing for Spockfull. Limited TV shows. Networks have seen that the smaller episode count and shorter run shows are working, the most successful (both critically and commercially) American TV shows tend to be on cable which like the Brits have a shorter episode count. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's The Walking Dead that has the most episodes per season with 16 episodes but it takes such a huge break it feels like two separate seasons. So now network television shows are batting around the term 'Limited run' when advertising certain shows, and one would assume that that would mean that it's a self contained story that has a beginning, middle and end. I'd expect closure. Do I get that? No.