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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1006 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So, has anyone else watched Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus yet, and if so, what do you think of it?

Personally, I'm currently a bit lukewarm on it so far. It's still early days so I won't pass premature judgement on it, but a common complaint is that the show past episode 1 doesn't seem to have enough compelling material per episode to justify its runtime, and frankly I agree. Episodes are long and drawn-out, with much of the second and third episode being focused around a core repeated cycle of "Zosia (or some other stand-in for the hive) tries to do things for Carol" - "Carol gets aggressively angry at Zosia" - "[insert bad thing] happens" - "Carol feels bad" - repeat. The story beats are so repetitive.

I understand that this show is in part meant to be a tone piece and that the long extended shots are meant to build atmosphere, but the vibe isn't good enough to carry the show on its back alone (sometimes the show is so sterile and clean-looking that it comes off almost like stock footage to me), and there are plenty of shows which achieve a thoughtful pace while also moving the plot along in interesting and compelling ways. Severance, season 1 in particular, comes to mind as an example. The problem's not so much that it's slow and more that it's not intriguing, that the extended scenes don't achieve much for how long they are, and that there's a lack of economy in the writing. So many scenes exist to achieve only one goal; e.g. the extended scene where Carol tests the thiopental sodium on herself and watches the footage from it just accomplishes one very simple aim, and yet it takes so long.

My barometer for whether I like a show or not is whether I'm interested to see the next episode, and frankly I could drop this at any point and not really have much of an urge to see what happens next. There's a serious lack of compelling mysteries within the show to drive viewer interest, with the only question I can think of amounting to "How are they going to progress this?" which is a question that moves the focus from something within the story to something outside of it, namely the writers' intentions. In addition, there's so much philosophical ground you could explore (Does disconnecting a member from the hive amount to lobotomy or even murder? Is "de-integrating" the hive, like Carol wants to do, tantamount to killing a hyperconscious, hyperintelligent organism that might have more moral worth, strictly speaking, than any human in existence? And it does claim to be happy), but the show just doesn't engage with much of that. At least, not at the moment.

Carol as a protagonist is quite unagentic, which means that much of the series consists of long sections of her engaging in pointless filler like sleeping on the couch, getting impotently mad at the hivemind, wanting her Sprouts back, etc, while not probing the hive or asking questions that a more interesting protagonist would when placed in such a situation (Episode 4 features more of this, to be fair). A common defence is that her behaviour is realistic given the situation she's put in, but a more important question IMO is if she's a compelling protagonist to watch, and I don't think that's the case - her characterisation and behaviour is paper thin, and she doesn't particularly get up to anything that makes you hugely like her or root for her either. She is demonstrated to be an absolutely miserable person even before the soft apocalypse occurs, and it doesn't make her a particularly enjoyable or interesting character to follow when you're in her shoes all the time.

Yet another element that makes it worse is that she only has a bunch of eternally jovial yes-men to interact with the whole time, and this makes the premise wear thin very quickly. All the interactions feel as deep as a puddle, and this may be the point, but it also makes for a very shallow viewing experience. Most of the other human characters aren't much better either. I was fucking flabbergasted by how easy it was for them to accept life with the hivemind looming over them without thinking too much about what it implied, and in fact outright aggressively attacked anyone who suggested doing anything about it. They seemed almost like ridiculous caricatures, completely in denial, who had been set up just so the writers could knock them down.

I don't think it's a bad show, not yet at least. But the unending positivity towards this show makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I often see such criticisms of the writing being addressed with thin, condescending dismissals along the lines of "You only think the show is uninteresting because you have TikTok brain", or worse, "People don't like Carol because she's a woman" (which is the way the entire Gilligan fandom has been dismissing criticism of the writing of female characters ever since people had the temerity to dislike Skylar White). I'm not saying it's impossible to like the show for valid reasons, but any and all criticism has not been not treated well.

I was so powerfully underwhelmed by Breaking Bad that I have zero interest in watching anything else Gilligan is involved in. I was intrigued by a column suggesting the show can be read as a metaphor for the Great Awokening, but watching a show I don't enjoy just because I agree with the underlying politics is pretty antithetical to the way I consume media. Weird to think that the entire life cycle of this generation of wokeness – initiation, peak and recession – all took place since the Breaking Bad finale.

I got through SE1 of Breaking Bad. The scenes that I suspect were meant to play for dark humor depressed me.

Probably because everyone I knew who watched TV was telling me it was the greatest show ever made, I stopped watching it. The same is true of Six Feet Under, The Wire, and The Sopranos. One season, much hype from everyone, me stopping. I am just realizing this now. You'd think I'd go the other way with so many recommendations, especially since all these shows can be streamed with a few clicks now, without having to borrow/buy then insert DVD box sets disc by disc. (Of course I once rented a VCR from Blockbuster in a giant bag for a weekend and watched videocassettes with my buddy, so convenience probably isn't the issue.) Probably dadhood keeps me from devoting the hours of time to games, shows, etc. the way I used to. Most media now that I watch is when I am showing my sons movies or shows I used to enjoy. Is this a stage of life? Certainly my dad never sat me down to watch Shane (though I do remember him saying once it was his favorite movie.)

I watched a few episodes of The Sopranos and it didn't really grab me, just seemed like Goodfellas fanfic, a reaction unaided by the huge overlap in the respective works' casts (David Chase even originally intended to cast Ray Liotta as Tony).

I only got around to watching season 1 of The Wire earlier this year, and while it's definitely a slow burn and the huge cast of characters can make plotlines difficult to follow at times, I can confirm that it lives up to the hype. Watching season 2 as we speak.

Kind of shocked by this. Breaking Bad is a low attention span normie's idea of the greatest TV show. It's good! ...But Better Call Saul is probably "better." And I'm not going to say that anything is wrong with liking "lower" brow entertainment that is faster paced or more superficially enjoyable (plenty of action shows and comedies are great!), but The Sopranos and The Wire are probably both consensus top three shows for nearly everyone credible and being out of the top five is probably grounds for not being a reliable rater.

I think it's okay to not like the classics, plenty of people complain about Shakespeare, but you have to understand why they are great and interrogate yourself on your likes, dislikes, and your relationship with art if you feel you have appropriate taste but don't like "the best."

In the case of The Wire it demands your attention and is often deliberately paced (although perhaps not truly slow) and at the same time it is truly literary, it's authentic, it says something, and it is beautiful constructed in ways that are often only noticeable in retrospect.

It is okay not to value these things but I think it's important to understand that they are there.

I've found this sort of examination at times helpful in making me enjoy things I wouldn't have otherwise. For instance I disliked Kpop because of the inauthenticity and somewhat disturbing process but managed to just embrace the fact that some of the songs are bangers and my life is richer for it.

For you taking the time to slowly watch some of those "greats" may bring that richness to your life. Maybe start with some of the British shows like Slow Horses which are a lower time commitment.

I think you might simply not like the pacing of episodic content. I understand, why. One can't make a long movie: if you're a famous director you might get three hours and change of runtime. And this is all you have to do everything, from the introduction through growth and development to the conclusion. And it's hard: you have to spend weeks going over the script, spend weeks in the cutting room.

Serializing your idea suddenly gives you lots of breathing space: your characters now have sufficient screen time to develop more naturally, you no longer have to chop some of your favourite scenes into a montage. Or maybe the story you have always wanted to tell simply cannot be told in three hours.

A lot of viewers like spending more time with their favourite characters. But there's always a cost: inevitably, B-plots and filler episodes start to sneak in. And is the story really worth the time commitment it demands from you?

Most people I talk to agree that it started in 2014, specifically; we don’t place it to 2016, when Trump replaced Obama, or 2010, which is a nice round number... If you were in one of those spaces and weren’t one of The Converted, then you stuck out like a sore thumb. I somehow avoided having my mind wiped — I attribute that partly to age and partly to being a world-class cranky bastard — and I stubbornly clung to old ways of thinking (e.g. free speech and color blindness are good)

Sometimes I feel like I came from a timeline where affirmative action was already going strong for the better part of the second half of the 21st century, and the timeline got merged into one where it only ascended in the 2010s. Color blindness hasn't been "good" for decades; Bakke was in 1978.

Color blindness and affirmative action are incompatible. I remember wearing a t-shirt saying "Love Sees No Color" shortly after returning from Africa.* Affirmative action was as strong as ever. No one seemed to acknowledge the contradiction.

*around 1993

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