Reply With QuoteAfter Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead I'm excited to watch anything AMC puts out.
This review compares the tone of the show to Twin Peaks:
No word yet on the quality of coffee or pie in this story but it appears to be worth a look.It's impossible to watch the opening moments of AMC's new series "The Killing" (Sundays at 9 p.m./8 Central, starting April 3) without thinking of David Lynch and Mark Frost's groundbreaking "Twin Peaks." It's not just the Pacific Northwest setting, perpetually overcast skies and rumbling synth chords that spark a trip down memory lane; it's the series' patient way of telling a story.
After Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead I'm excited to watch anything AMC puts out.
Based on a Danish show that left the streets empty but I didn't watch...
I've been meaning to watch it. It's on over here and The Guardian are going into paroxysms of ecstacy over it, for whatever that's worth. Though their non-spoiler coverage of it so far has told me little other than that the protagonist wears a lovely jumper.
But that's the Danish version with subtitles. AMC has done a complete remake with Sarah Lund becoming Sarah Linden...Originally Posted by Hunty
And the sweater isn't as prominent...
Looks like Twin Peaks minus the weird, and the weird was the best part. Still I'll at least watch the pilot out of PNW solidarity.
I saw an extended preview of this show recently while watching AMC. I saw enough in that extended preview to convince me that this show will depress the living shit out of me and probably make me feel awful after watching it. While the story looks interesting and I'm sure it will be as well acted as most other AMC original series, I just can't take "depression as entertainment" anymore. Other shows that do this that I'll no longer watch include Criminal Minds and Law & Order : SVU.
I guess I'm just a wuss. I want my television time to be an escape from reality, not a punch in the gut by it.
This show is awesome, on a similar level to Breaking Bad, with some of the same gorgeous cinematography.
It's sloooow, especially compared to the network procedurals. But that's not a bad thing. It's nice to see a show where the murder isn't solved in 60 minutes.
Also, there's an extra character on the show: the rain. They did an awesome job of making the pervasive rain of Seattle very, very present.
Ugh. The rain was total bullshit. It almost never rains like that in Seattle. Seattle gets a constant drizzly mist in the winter which mist I think they portrayed in like one scene. But the torrential downpours that were a constant feature of that episode? Those are pretty rare.
Maybe I'm thinking of Portland.
Maybe, I duno. I mean it's not unheard of to get torrential downpour in Seattle, but it's the exception to the rule. Seattle actually gets less annual rainfall than NYC; the city's reputation as "rainy" is due to the constant overcast dreary drizzle you get from like November through April.
I lived in Seattle for like 12 years, and I'm pretty confident in saying that the type of torrential downpour depicted in The Killing occurs far less in Seattle than it does in, say, New Jersey.
Other than that minor nitpick I really liked the show though. My favorite part was picking out all the landmarks and whatnot during what I'm guessing were the on-location shots.
Enjoyed it a lot, but I'm not totally sold on the two lead characters. The woman seemed bland and the guy was too gangsta gangsta. The parents of Rosie were great though.
Was the first scene of the pilot where she is jogging and finds a body ever explained?
I thought it was a dog or something she found. It was a very traditional beginning - cuts between two different scenes where they try to fake you out that the cop will be jogging in the same area where the body is. But of course it's not the body, it's something else (the same way movies often intersperse scenes of the bad guy scrambling to get out of a hideout and the cops pulling up on a house - cops bust down the door, and it's a different house from the one where the bad guys are).
I liked the show, though it does seem to linger quite a bit on the main female character staring out into nothingness. I can certainly see its roots in a Scandinavian original (sort of the same way I felt when seeing the remake of the film Insomnia).
Well, the first two episodes take place over an elapsed period of only a couple days. Not that hard to believe it was just really rainy for that period of time. Besides, I think it's spring, which is pretty wet in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, I don't think they even portrayed anything I would call torrential by my, admittedly, Oregon standards. A couple times it was raining pretty good, but we save words like "torrential" for very special kinds of rain. I think the most unrealistic thing was the jr detective eating that burger in the open rain. I've never seen anyone try and eat something like that unprotected. You wait 'til you're in your car or under an awning or something.
I only watched the first half of the pilot, because I had to go to bed. When they revealed the body, I drawled, "She was wrapped in plaaaaaaastic."
Yeah, looks like Twin Peaks with less weird. The new guy who's supposed to replace her is kinda weird. Not a very nice guy either.
You should. It's phenomenal, really. I will try to reserve judgment until I watch the remake, but I am nevertheless a tad disappointed that you can't just air a subtitled Danish show in the US.
Also people call the original "quiet" or a slow burn, and I know what they're getting at, but that makes it sound kind of sleepy. It's not sleepy, it's crazy suspenseful. And smart. And brilliantly acted.
I wasn't sure if she was divining something or just soaking it all in and using her intuition.
It was a dead sea lion.
This was absolutely terrific. Even though it wasn't actually filmed in the place where it is set, it still nails what I love about Breaking Bad — you get a genuinely naturalistic sense of location that functions as a character itself, rather than something feeling perfunctory and incidental like most television shows.
I thought it was fantastic. By the way -- what videogame was the one character playing?
I don't think it was a real video game.
Guest starring: every actor who has ever worked in Vancouver.
Battlestar Galactica + Stargate + The 4400.
More are surely to appear.
I thought it was pretty good but borrowed heavily from Twin Peaks (like the moment the father knows his daughter is dead while the mother is on the other end of the phone, look a video, look a locket). I guess it's Twin Peaks for the rest of us so to speak, but it definitely lacked the unique character of TP.
True. Pilots usually are stiff, though, so perhaps it will loosen up a bit. Twin Peaks was what... 17 years ago now?
It was like the fakest fake videogame this side of a Law and Order: SVU episode. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I never understand why they don't just get footage of a real game unless it ends up being a plot point. But that kid could have been playing Blops or MoH or Gears or anything. Maybe Sony or Microsoft or Activision don't want their games associated with such a twerp of a character, but you can't tell me Ignition wouldn't have said OK to using Blacklight: Tango Down or whatever.
The fake video game can't be as bad as the monkeys-with-guns shooter they've been playing on House this year.
After the Gilmore Girls, that sort of communal wackiness thing is sort of played out IMO. It's a relief this doesn't have any of the quirkiness of Twin Peaks.
Combining the glacial pacing of Rubicon with the deep and intricate plotting of an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent might not be the formula for success here. I made it through the first two episodes, but man, is this ever grinding for me. I'm also sick of seeing Ensign Ro in pretty much everything, though at least she's not an irritating, overbearing bitch in this one. Yet. I'm not sure what to think about the lead actress, either. On the one hand, I immediately like her a lot because if they didn't make her up to look like a refugee from Winter's Bone she's generally the right dimensions for Karrin Murphy. On the other hand, the character thus far has all the gripping personality of a doberman with severe head trauma. Her impromptu partner is also kind of hard to pin down - you generally don't want to have the skeevy guy hitting on twelve year old girls scene until after we get to know the character well enough to understand that he's just trying to figure out where people go at this school to totally do sex on each other.
I want to like this, but I'm not sure that the show wants me to like it very much.
Not knowing what Skeeve Cop was up to with those girls is what made that scene interesting, Brian. Your version turns it into every other bad cop show already in existence.
I concur, to a point. I'm just saying that most networks prefer to avoid characters that want to rape for a reason (which really begs for an ATHF reference, but I'll skip it), so a little bit more setup might have been nice to have, because as things stand right now I still have almost no idea who this guy is, outside of his generally douchey persona. That's the weirdest part of the series so far for me - I feel like I've got a better handle on everybody other than the two people who are, ostensibly, the primary leads.
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