I think it'll depend on whether this final season ties everything together well. The show's already a bit disjointed.

By not caring.

To be honest I've yet to see a show with a bad ending where the signs weren't already there.

The short answer is that Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are better shows.

The long answer is... many reasons. For example:

• Tony Soprano and Walter White are iconic characters, two of the best performances ever, and their trials and tribulations are about things that normal people can relate to. That makes them timeless and appealing. Dexter is somewhat iconic too but its a much more shallow character, because he is not normal in any way, he is a serial killer. Lost was an ensemble show and most of the characters are not really iconic.
• Lost is quite long at 121 episodes, and is a very 'Easter Egg' show which isn't for everyone. I think people are aware that it's a big time commitment.
• Dexter is honestly just not very good. S1 and S4 were highly rated, the rest of the show ranges from passable to bad. It is a show from a different era where simply having 'adult content' was a big deal.
• Dexter is still pretty popular anyway, the 'new' season had high ratings. Lost gets brought up here a lot and I think most people have fond memories of it.
• Nobody actually watched Breaking Bad while it aired, except the last season. It 'remains' relevant because people have discovered it long after it aired.

The issue with Emmys is that the nature of television (shows run for many years) allows them to be dominated by a few heavyweights.

I don't know that D&D had that right. Rather, HBO does not want to do the "crass" network TV thing where you keep the show going even if the creators want to leave because you want to make more money. They are supposed to be a place for 'creatives,' after all.

I think Breaking Bad is the much better show.

They had a core idea: to turn a 'good' person into a 'bad' person. What makes the show truly great is how committed they are to this. They were fearless in taking the character down very dark paths even when they knew the audience might react poorly. They understood that even if we liked Walt, we had to see him 'break bad', to the point where he turns into a repulsive antagonist for the whole of the last season. This fearlessness gives the show its power.

Better Call Saul suffers from not being committed to anything. The writers have openly acknowledged that the show was going to be about Saul Goodman but they liked Jimmy so much that they kept stalling on his transformation to Saul, dragging their feet, taking things back. It's the opposite of Breaking Bad. They are not committed enough to turn the guy into Saul because they "like him."

This is a problem for the other stories too. There's really not much rhyme or reason to Mike, Gus, and Nacho being there. They are remnants of a show that never was. Their storyline has very little depth and we learn almost nothing about Mike and Gus that we didn't already know.

>I would add that I enjoy tragedies, films likeWolf of Wall Street, where we are presented with a charismatic or sympathetic character who has a tragic storyline and turns into a cunt. I just don't seem to like films where the characters start off as a cunt and end up as a cunt.

The main character in The Wolf of Wall Street starts off as a cunt and ends up as a cunt.

The ending had plenty of solid reviews at the time.

It's just one of those things were 1) people who disliked it have been so loud about it that they created a myth that nobody likes it, and 2) online publications are incentivized to "go along" with this kind of thing even though many of them reviewed it positively.

>I really don't get how so many people managed to misunderstand it when they basically have a character knock you over the head with exposition explaining everything.

I imagine that these people got lost somewhere around flash-forwards and time travel shenanigans and just didn't have a good grasp of anything that was going on by the time we got to the actual ending.

In The Sopranos, Christopher's dad (who is deceased) is a drug addict. We sort of imagine him to be a different version of Christopher.

In The Many Saints of Newark, this was retconned so that it's actually a fake rumor. He's just some guy who isn't very similar to Christopher at all. Kinda sucks.

Not sure where you are hearing that.

Dexter is barely above network television writing quality, it just has cable content (violence, sex, etc.). It's like Sons of Anarchy and stuff like that.

I thought the first season was great and I liked all the corny elements in it.

Second season I thought was considerably less interesting, especially turning the whole thing into "alternate worlds" which has been done way too many times. Though I did like the episodes with the kids.

The script is not the movie. The movie is the movie.

The emotional climax of the movie is when Chuck and Kelly declare their love for each other in the rain. Kelly tells him she never truly lost hope that he was alive, that he's the love of her life, that she loves him, but in the end she can't leave her family. In Chuck's words, she "has to go home." It's a heartbreaking scene. And it only works because it's real: they really do love each other.

That scene is not in the script. Neither is the previous scene where Kelly can't bear to meet Chuck and cries by her car, which Chuck is able to see through the window. Instead, Kelly shows up, talks to Chuck with other people around, and is totally fine. The scene is lighthearted, even. They joke around a bunch. Then she goes back to Memphis. She never declares him the love of her life or anything of the sort.

It's clearly not the same relationship as in the movie.

The way it is presented in the movie makes more sense dramatically. All the movie is doing is switching the consequences of the main character's attitudes from real ones (losing out on friends and family because their feelings about you change) to movie ones (losing out on friends and family because you are stuck in a desert island and they think you are dead). It is unnecessary to have both the real and movie consequences, it is redundant.

Yes, of course, in "reality" Chuck would get dumped. That is what happens here, just in "movie" form (he gets dumped into a deserted island).

It's projection because it's a movie. It's not real.

The movie is about a guy who does not appreciate life. This lack of appreciation for life almost literally costs him his own life. He survives, and is reborn, but he nonetheless figuratively loses his past life, because people had to move on. That is the tragic element of it.

If Helen Hunt was going to dump him because he was a workaholic then there's no need for the movie at all!

It's bad as film analysis but it also doesn't really make sense factually.

>Four months have passed since the crash, and two years pass from the first date to their wedding date. Two years! Two years seems like an awfully short turnaround for a woman to be married when she’s not even sure if her fiancé is still alive or not.

A quick Google search tells me:

>By 25 months after the spouse's death 61% of men and 19% of women were either remarried or involved in a new romance.
>
>Younger age was a predictor of becoming involved in a new romance for women.

This is for all ages and younger people are more likely to be in a relationship so the actual odds of "this woman" (who it needs to be said, is a fictional creation) are at least higher than 20%.

These kinds of things are funny to write and think about but they are bad film analysis.

Kelly didn't cheat on Chuck because it makes no thematic sense for this to happen and be kept hidden from the audience.

This movie is good because it's so mean spirited.

>Slowik didn't just enjoy killing people for no reason.

I mean... he kinda did.

Killing someone because they went to Brown with no financial aid is.. funny, certainly, but there's no real principle to it.

An obvious question is: do you have a hard time reading non-fiction?

Great novels are not necessarily the best place to start reading. Just like you wouldn't recommend anyone get into movies by watching Citizen Kane or Vertigo.

It's very common for books that have a decent shelf life. Most don't, so they get the one adaptation and that's it. That's true for genre fiction and for literary fiction.

>You have a great book. There is. Whole story in there and all you have to do is film it.

You cannot, in fact, do this. Certainly not for any book that is actually "great."

Even for simple books there are budget considerations, pacing, clarity, the interests of the actors, etc.

Not that many. But there's this one: DWB.

There's lots of corrupt cops in L&O, but they don't typically portray the 'average' cop doing crimes.

I think the original Law & Order is pretty great, and quite underrated. It has a lot of character and has aged better than a lot of stuff from the 90s.

I'd say seasons 4 to 10 were great. Maybe up to 11. After that, it's good until maybe season 16 or so. Then it gets pretty bad for a while.

I know the latter seasons were considered a 'return to form' by a lot of people, but I don't think that stuff aged very well.

Tried to watch a bit of the last season and it was atrocious.

Don't think they'd reboot Twin Peaks as it is far too associated with a singular person (David Lynch).

This list is two years old.

It's also kind of bad.

Most of it is well-regarded shows, some which were influential and some which weren't. And then there's a bunch of newer shows, none of which were actually influential in the way the list claims. So it really is just a list of good shows.

There are probably some very influential shows of the 21st century that actually sucked, y'know.

The explanations are also very superficial. For example, something very influential about 24 and Lost is that they were, iirc, the first network shows that consciously moved from the typical broadcasting schedule (with some new episodes followed by reruns and so forth) and toward airing every episode without interruption. This happened for Lost starting with season 4 (with a little intermediate 'experiment' in season 3) and for 24 starting season 4. This is pretty relevant to how lots of shows work nowadays!