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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Keri Russell a lightweight? I’m curious what gave you that impression as I’ve always thought of her as an excellent actress. Probably missing out on The Diplomat too if you like political intrigue at all.

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Well on that topic, the French series "The Bureau" [1] was fantastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bureau_(TV_series)

I don't understand why people like these shows, there isn't a proper story just things that happen that are essentially discarded at the beginning of the next season. There is never any real 3rd-act/resolution.

Are you sure you aren't confusing The Bureau with something else?

Don’t think he can be talking about The Bureau either. It’s in my top ten all time TV shows.

No. Every season ends on a cliffhanger that seems critical to the story and then is quickly resolved as if it were some minor point in the first episode of the subsequent season. This is the nature of this type of episodic television that runs for an indeterminate time and therefore has no real overarching story (but pretends to) like soap operas do.

I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.

I think you're confused about what episodic TV is. Star Trek is (or was) (generally) episodic. The Wire is serialized, as is most TV these days.

Some people like episodic TV, some people prefer serialized.

I don't think they're confused about episodic vs. serialized shows; they're talking about the plot structure of serialized shows often having a change of direction at every season boundary instead of resolution of the existing plot threads. That sort of meandering never-concluding plot can be annoying. One way to avoid that pitfall is by staying episodic, (Old Trek,) another is to wrap up each season and start from a relatively blank slate on the next, as if the seasons are episodes. (The Wire.) I think a third is to have all the story structure written in advance, as with a book adaptation, so there is a real through-line.

Yes I shouldn't have used the word episodic. The problem with your third solution is that it seems to be difficult to do with the current way TV series are financed and produced: You can't commit to multiple seasons at the outset and you also want to have an arbitrary number of episodes depending on how well the show is doing (milk more episodes if the show is doing well). There is also incentive to create cliffhangers so that subsequent seasons can be produced.

There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.

I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.

I have to mention Babylon 5 here, I don't think anything is as complete in terms of a 5 year, 110 episode plot. Note; don't read up on the plot, it's actually self-destructive.

It's great, strong recommendation.

Riverdale is that thing you hate but made the primary characteristic of the show. Especially past season 1.

They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen.

I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writing one extremely-long joke about television writing, or if they thought it was actually good.

Lost would like to have a word. I rented the 6-season DVD set to watch while recovering from an injury and the ONLY good thing about that show was that the first time through you had to wait a week between episodes.

Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.

Riverdale features a character whose (incest-having? Probably.) brother is murdered, who becomes a leader of a bow-wielding vigilante club of women (this is not the only vigilante club in the show, mind you), whose grandmother becomes inhabited by the undying spirit of an ancient witch (also this character is herself a witch), whose family estate was built on a mine full of ghosts and also the mine contains lots of palladium which her Russian spy parents try to use to build a bomb (oh also she kills her dad and burns the mansion down early in the show but it’s fine, they just rebuild it and also there are alternate universe shenanigans), who gains fire-based superpowers and destroys a comet, who keeps her dead taxidermied brother around in a shrine-room (when he’s not alive again for whatever reason)… and that’s like 20% of the insane shit that happens with that character who is not even a main character. There are characters with way weirder sets of events in their biography. Also she’s in high school and a cheerleader, because why not? I think maybe she saves one of her lovers from the afterlife, too.

It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.

I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.

...but, but... bow-wielding club of vigilante women, you say? ;-)

Apparently it's the actual spies favorite.

A.k.a. "Le bureau des légendes": criminally underrated. Was available to view in Australia on SBS On Demand, where I serendipitously encountered it. It is right up there with the best of John LeCarré's film and television adaptations: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "Smiley's People", "The Little Drummer Girl", etc.

As another semi-obscure “spy” series check out the british production _The Sandbaggers_. Very lecarre-esque story that reflected the inanity and stakes of the cold war, written by a RN officer.

> "Keri Russell a lightweight? ... Probably missing out on The Diplomat too if you like political intrigue at all."

I have a running theory that The Americans and The Diplomat are in fact set in the same universe. Keri Russell is still playing the same character, a deep-cover Russian agent, and now she has infiltrated the upper echelons of the US government...

Reminds me of The Double (2011)

I can understand the reflex. To me she was "that actress from that show Felicity that I never watched". The Diplomat turned me around real quick.

The Americans was awesome, especially that last "showdown" climax. Best TV ever, along with parts of Breaking Bad.

I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.

Episode 3 is the one that kicked it up into the stratosphere for us.

Incidentally, and I realize the appeal for the show is significantly less if you aren’t a teenage girl (as I was when I watched it), but Felicity is excellent and she’s excellent in it. Like, beyond excellent. Like, there was the acting all the other WB actresses were doing in the late 90s/early 2000s and then there was what she was doing.

If that show had aired on a real broadcast network (as JJ Abrams' next shows were) and not on The WB, she would have been nominated for Emmys out the wazoo. As it was, she won the Golden Globe for that first season, but she should have at least been nominated for the Emmy for her work on that show, because she was every bit as good or better than her peers on cable or network.

Th Diplomat is excellent and she plays the role perfectly.

Everything I see her in, her acting style to me resembles a lifeless cardboard cutout. I get that that’s “the point” of the Americans, but if that’s all she’s bringing, something’s not working here. And in the diplomat it seemed exactly the same. Lifeless acting, and it seemed a lot of her personality was expressed by other characters because she wasn’t doing it herself.

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