Rachel Brosnahan, Alex Borstein

Another excellent season. The supporting cast is stellar.

From Gilmore Girls writer, producer, director Amy Sherman-Palladino.

 Great show! Just finished the entire series awhile ago. It stays consistently good throughout. 

Enjoy the rest of it!

Also up to episode 4 of the final series of Peaky Blinders. I loved Peaky Blinders, but this series is a big let down for me. There isn't actually much going on and I'd go as far to say it's really gone up its own arse - too many lingering shots, ineffective music without any substance, it all just seems so ridiculous and convoluted now. I understand the final episode will be feature length as a practice for a spin-off movie. I just hope it improves - a lot.

4 episodes in to Series 3 of Servant. Still dead weird and no wiser as to actually what is going on. Good though.

Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)

Drama

Lee Pace,Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis,Kerry Bishé

A group of misfits struggling through life in the early 80's come together to challenge IBM's PC monopoly and bring their own visions to life. But will their internal demons crash the system?

It's really good. It's tonally similar to the film Parasite, which came out a few months later; both remind me of classic Chabrol at his class-conscious Hitchcockian best. The main villain reminds me of Iago from Shakespeare's Othello - an almost Satanic character using human nature against itself.

So, I had picked up this DVD of the complete series at an antique mall for $5 months ago without ever having heard of it before and gave it a spin while I was waiting for seasons 3 and 4 of The Expanse to show up in the mail. The story centers around the crew of the space shuttle Odyssey 5 (three astronauts, a journalist, and a geneticist) led by Commander Chuck Taggart (played by Peter Weller - of RoboCop fame). In the pilot episode the crew witnesses the Earth implode and loses control of the shuttle. Immediately after losing all of their oxygen, they are saved by an extraterrestrial called The Seeker. The Seeker tells them that he has witnessed 50 other worlds destroyed in this manner and that they are the first survivors he has found. He offers to send their consciousnesses back in time five years to their earlier bodies to find out who destroys the Earth and to try and stop them. 

So, the remaining 18 episodes of this deals with this team of five trying to figure out what happened and they find themselves in a world of AIs known as Sentients and artificial humanoids called Synthetics. The best I can compare this with is kind of a mix of the X-Files and the 1995 reboot of The Outer Limits (the creator wrote several episodes of this). The series kind of drags on a bit in the beginning (overdone character development, spending not enough time on the story arc, and occasional boring episodes), but picks up midway through the season and ends with a cliffhanger. 

Unfortunately that was it for this series as Showtime cancelled it and only showed the first 14 of the 19 episodes in 2002. They later aired the last five episodes in 2004. So, I likely missed this back then because my cable subscription lacked Showtime. Manny Coto, the creator of the show, envisioned this to be a five-season series, hence the cast being transported back five years during the pilot episode. The potential this show had seems rather high to me, maybe not like Firefly, but possibly more like the same level The 4400 reached if I were to compare this to other series that got rudely cut before they could reach their potential.

One caveat if you ever come across this is beware of the CGI because it really dates this. Remember, it was 2002 when this came out and television series back in the day didn't have the best CGI like movies with larger budgets did. It would be nice if Coto were ever given a chance to reboot this, albeit this would be difficult with the original cast as they all have aged 20 years since this series aired.

First half I would rate 6/10, last half 8/10. Overall 7/10.