Yeah, you're not the only one. The season has gotten good reception overall, but the show itself is a bit of base breaker between hardcore fans. If it doesn't work for you, okay then. I did admit the problems with the show, but I still consider it good overall. Still better than the 2007 anime or Bayonetta: Bloody Fate.
Listening to the Castle Super Beast podcast because I figured they would talk about it this week. Pat and Gene are very unkind to the show, and also completely right.
I'm currently 7 episodes in.
So...the demons are Gazan refugees, the White Rabbit is doing an October 7th, Lady is the IDF? Is that the metaphor here?
Also, if demons are naturally no different from humans and just want to live in peace then why does Dante using his devil trigger make him feel anger and hatred that he has to struggle to control?
Also, man I thought Lady would maybe get better as the season goes on, but she just gets worse. One of the worst character assassinations in an adaptation I've ever seen. It's right up there with mouth-less Deadpool from X-Men Origins Wolverine.
I'm shocked you thought the number one positive of this show was that it got the source material right.
Listening to the Castle Super Beast podcast because I figured they would talk about it this week. Pat and Gene are very unkind to the show, and also completely right.
I already knew they wouldn't like the show, and I personally don't give a shit. I like Pat, but I've disagreed with him on several things, and je has been wrong and not as right as he likes to make himself. He's not wrong for disliking the show, but I am not wasting time on either of them. I don't know who Gene is though. The show has gotten great reception from the critics and audience reception is good. It's getting another season, so I suggest you don't even bother with Season 2 since it is going to happen.
Well, it seems as if the anticipation has paid off, with the series benefitting from a superb early response on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. From critics, Devil May Cry has earned an enormous 93% rating, with a worse but still strong 76% score earned via audiences. After its debut on Thursday, April 3, 2025, the early reception has been ultimately positive for the series, with many citing the stunning animation, a penchant for more mature themes, and creative, colorful action sequences for the show's success. One person who agrees with this positive critique is Collider's Aidan Kelley, who gave the series a 9/10...
As the live-action Minecraft film is having great success in the theaters, Netflix often bets on video game adaptations in animated form, and Devil May Cry is off to a solid start with 5.3M CVEs in its first 4 days. That's well behind Sonic Prime, but well ahead of Castlevania: Nocturne within the same genre.
I already knew they wouldn't like the show, and I personally don't give a shit. I like Pat, I've disagreed with him on several thing, and has been wrong and not as right as he likes to make himself. He's not wrong for disliking the show, and I am not wasting time on either of them. I don't know who Gene is though. The show has gotten great reception from the critics and audience reception is good. It's getting another season, so I suggest you don't even bother Season 2 since it is going to happen.
I don't particularly care about the critical reception.
I am curious on what you actually think the show got right about the source material, since you put that rather high on your list and since I could not disagree more. Especially since I know you have a massive boner for the Devil May Cry story.
I am curious on what you actually think the show got right about the source material, since you put that rather high on your list and since I could not disagree more. Especially since I know you have a massive boner for the Devil May Cry story.
I love the show overall. I already knew going in this adaption that it would be different from the games, as it is an AU. I do disagree with some of the writing choices made. Mainly in episode 8, but I will let you see it for yourself. Despite some changes, I thought Adi and the team got the spirit of the games right. They definitely got Dante right, and he isn't a problem for me in the show. White Rabbit is my surprise/stand out character. They took a simple minion who was implied to be controlled by Arkham in the DMC3 Manga, and gave him his own backstory and motivations. The voice actor definitely killed it. He is now one of my favorite DMC villains. There lesser demons or weaker demons who just want to live in a better environment and don't want to cause any harm is nice aspect and added change. The series theme has always been about how there are some demons who are kind hearted or kinder than some humans. The series never explored this much, outside of Trish, Lucia, Nero, or Sparda himself. There was that one demon minion in the 2007 anime who hated his master and fell in love with a human woman. Thus Dante leaves him and her be. DmC 2013 only has Phineas who's more of a proper grey, but still on the kind hearted scale in terms of helping Dante and humanity by extension. I swear, Phineas is only one of the very few good things about the reboot's story.
The story I actually enjoy has a whole and can't wait for Season 2. I do love the story of the OG games, but I won't let them blind me. I already got peak storytelling from Devil May Cry 3 & 5. I don't need a straight 1 to 1 adaption DMC3. I can always go back to the games or watch the cut-scenes on YouTube. I would have been satisfied if it were a more accurate adaption, but similar to Castlevania (2017) and Castlstevania Nocturne, I wouldn't have been as interested. The Netflix show getting good reception from casual audiences has more people who never heard of the series or little of it, get invested in the games now. So see that as an win and extra win. I take the good and silver lining and move on. You can do whatever as you wish, but I am more than willing to stick around to see what happpens next.
I finished binging The Newsroom the other day. Have some thoughts:
The first season is arguably the best with a more episodic approach to each episode as ACN goes about rebuilding its integrity as a news service, whatever that meant in the mid 2000s, and all the pitfalls that come with it. On screen it basically means taking the piss out of the Tea Party (remember them?), with one particularly scathing monologue has Will refer to them on air as 'The American Taliban'.
The best and most consistent characters in terms of quality are Will (Jeff Daniels), Don (Thomas Sodoski), Sloan (Olivia Munn) and my personal favourite, Charlie (Sam Waterson). The rest of the characters are good but have some pretty serious defects: Jim the Deputy Producer is our resident skilled at his job but utterly stupid at talking to women guy to the point where I think they should have written a TBI into his back story from Afghanistan as an embedded reporter, Mackenzie the Executive Producer is really up and down in terms of her behaviour. Its not awful but it can get a bit distracting. Neal who runs the online portion of ACN - a role that if this show was produced ten years later would have him sitting in his own office and not being treated like a dogsbody - is perfectly fine aside from his weird bigfoot shit. Jane Fonda also stars as Leona Lansing, the owner of the corporation that owns ACN and every scene she has with Sam Waterson is solid gold. Her son Reese also stars and he gets busted at the end of the season for basically doing a News of the World on his own team.
But Maggie. Oh fucking hell, Maggie. I'm not a fan of Allison Pill as a rule and holy shit does that come to a head here. Like the level of screwing up her character does would, on Sorkin's previous show The West Wing, have been enough to have seen her sacked by halfway through the season. And her big moment of losing her shit and screaming at a Sex and the City Tour Bus about how the show is bullshit and lying about SJP's character being a single woman in New York is one of the most cringe worthy monologues I've ever heard. And the fucking love triangle - which to be fair is a shit-show all around - of her, Jim and Lisa (Maggie's roommate) is insufferable.
One memorable episode has the team making a few sacrifices so they can do a new presidential candidate debate format. The format is essentially treating each candidate as if they're being cross-examined and asked questions about their policies and making them defend them. Adam Arkin has a line that is so weirdly prescient, which I'll paraphrase, "We should welcome it because it'll clear out the clown car"
Oh if fucking only.
Season 2 changes the formula to a season long arc about a story coming to them that would have been one of those once in a lifetime events and how it just comes off the fucking rails.
The story is, allegedly, that US MARSOC deployed Sarin gas on civillians while performing a rescue mission for two captured marines. To the show's credit they spend something like a year or so vetting the story but they just can't get that crucial admission from someone. That unambiguous "Yes that was what we did, we dropped Sarin gas". They have lots of hearsay, lots of third and fourth party corroboration that makes it LOOK like that's what happened, but nothing bulletproof. So, a new character from their Washington branch, who got the story leaked to him in the first place, commits the absolute cardinal sin of journalism: he doctors an interview to make a Marine Lt. General appear as though he's flat out admitting what is a warcrime so they go to air. So, yeah, oops
There's a B-plot starring Grace Gummer (daughter of Meryl Streep) as Jim's newest not-love interest who he meets while covering the Romney campaign trail - badly - as a way to stay away from Maggie for a while because she and Jim cannot talk to each other like grown ups. Maggie (who in the season opener now has short hair dyed red) meanwhile gets to go to Africa. I'll allow you to draw your own conclusions about the correlation between those things.
This season is good but not great and its a pity because the main season long thread is VERY interesting. Most of my favourite characters remain the same but I think they really needed to have made the end result of the story a genuine institutional failure and not what it was. This season also marks when Leona Lansing and her son Reese have their come to Jesus moments and more or less come over to the side of Will and co.
Season 3 was a short one, it opens up with the Boston Bombing and is basically a vehicle to let you know that reddit and twitter journalism is bullshit (a position I agree with emphatically) and the ability to scour facebook does not make you a detective, intelligence operative or investigative journalist. The main thrust of the season is yet another explosive story of US government malfeisence being dropped in their lap except this time its completely true and this season is where Neal (Dev Patel) really comes into his own since its his lap.
The story this time is US counter intelligence using false news stories to destabilise an African nation called Equitorial Kundu (borrowed from Sorkin's West Wing) which leads to riots that kill about 38 people including three Americans in country. Ooops. So begins a series of back and forth conversations regarding national security, the duty of reporters to report news, the duty to protect sources because Neal, bless his cotton socks, may or may not have instructed his source on how to steal highly classified documents which technically makes what he did espionage. Double oops.
The stand out moment though involves Charlie, and it is backed by an absolutely beautiful cover of a song called Shenandoah by an artist called Sissel.
Its the most uneven season and where its critics and some fans say the show just totally turned into Sorkin's mouthpeiece but to be honest I don't see it. Or at least I don't think the obvious soapboxing was any LESS obvious in the previous two seasons compared to this one. And honestly since the B-plots mainly involve them taking the piss out of the tech bro asshole who buys the network at the end of Season 2 and the bunch of Buzzfeed drop outs who start running the online part of the business, I can't hate it too much.
Also, I have no doubt its accurate, but Sorkin really used the freedom afforded by HBO to make his characters swear. A lot.
Oh wow, the Newsroom. It's been a minute since someone mentioned that show.
Here's my experience with that show:
WARNINGS: story time, personal bio stuff, politics
First episode aired. It was HBO, Jeff Daniels, famous writers, serious topical stuff- of course I watched the first episode. In which Daniels mansplains everything wrong with millenials these days to some woman who asked him a question. I laughed at this show's boomer-ass nonsense and forgot about it. I mean so what, another tone-deaf stupid wannabe prestige show, whatever.
Next day on the facebooks (oh yes that's how long ago this was, I was still using that shit) to see that people freaking loved it! Especially that monologue in which he "explains everything wrong with America!"
I was already experiencing a disconnect from how I was seeing the world vs everybody else I knew. It's only been proven more and more so since then but that was just such a funny and surreal moment of that.
Oh wow, the Newsroom. It's been a minute since someone mentioned that show.
Here's my experience with that show:
WARNINGS: story time, personal bio stuff, politics
First episode aired. It was HBO, Jeff Daniels, famous writers, serious topical stuff- of course I watched the first episode. In which Daniels mansplains everything wrong with millenials these days to some woman who asked him a question. I laughed at this show's boomer-ass nonsense and forgot about it. I mean so what, another tone-deaf stupid wannabe prestige show, whatever.
Next day on the facebooks (oh yes that's how long ago this was, I was still using that shit) to see that people freaking loved it! Especially that monologue in which he "explains everything wrong with America!"
I was already experiencing a disconnect from how I was seeing the world vs everybody else I knew. It's only been proven more and more so since then but that was just such a funny and surreal moment of that.
You know the interesting thing about that tirade, as cathartic as it is, is that people spend the season basically busting his balls over it or treat it as a sign he’s seriously emotionally compromised. It only works as an ‘epic monologue’ if you utterly divorce it from the context of the show.
I watched Episode 1 of Lazarus, the new Watanabe show, and Christ I think I already hate this anime immensely. It's trying to be so fucking cool with its main lead that not only does it come off as incredibly obnoxious, it's also boring as hell. The episode is like 70% parkour action, which would've already been dreadfully out of date if it was live-action, but being animated it can't even benefit from the excitement that stuntwork is supposed to bring. I mean, I'm all for animated action, but when you're trying to play it off as stuntwork it completely defeats the purpose. They got Chad Stahelski to do the stunts... for an anime.
The future setting also looks boring and cheap. Whether that's due to the visual design or the CGI used to bring it to life, I don't know.
I watched Episode 1 of Lazarus, the new Watanabe show, and Christ I think I already hate this anime immensely. It's trying to be so fucking cool with its main lead that not only does it come off as incredibly obnoxious, it's also boring as hell. The episode is like 70% parkour action, which would've already be dreadfully out of date if it was live-action, but being animated it can't even benefit from the excitement that stuntwork is supposed to bring. I mean, I'm all for animated action, but when you're trying to play it off as stuntwork it completely defeats the purpose. They got Chad Stahelski to do the stunts... for an anime.
The future setting also looks boring and cheap. Whether that's due to the visual design or the CGI used to bring it to life, I don't know.
I read somewhere that really Watanabe wanted to make a farce like Space Dandy but the powers that be twisted his arm to make it more like Cowboy Bebop and (in my opinion) the result is Watanabe taking the piss out of his Bebop cred by making something that's pure posturing.
Chad Stahelski is probably there to get the hype rolling on the John Wick animated prequel. I imagine as "stunt coordinator" what he did was get his people to storyboard the action sequences and maybe gave a few notes.
I read somewhere that really Watanabe wanted to make a farce like Space Dandy but the powers that be twisted his arm to make it more like Cowboy Bebop and (in my opinion) the result is Watanabe taking the piss out of his Bebop cred by making something that's pure posturing.
Chad Stahelski is probably there to get the hype rolling on the John Wick animated prequel. I imagine as "stunt coordinator" what he did was get his people to storyboard the action sequences and maybe gave a few notes.
Honestly the parkour was so weightless in the first episode that I don't think real life was much of a reference. Why even bother when the main character is flying around doing air combos.
There's some Mirror's Edge action after the prison break with some nice heft to it but again, the dude has already shown to bend physics like he's in a Platinum game, so I'm not exactly gasping at the feat of clearing a jump or surviving a fall.
I'm going to assume Stahelski was brought in some kind of vague consultant capacity, but is otherwise featured mostly as a stunt (ba dum tss).
Noah Wyle returns to the medical drama scene in this new show from HBO. The hook for this latest iteration of medical drama is the same as 24. Each episode is one hour of a single shift.
Now that alone is enough to make for at least some interest but the show builds on that foundation by also never leaving the hospital and its grounds bar the opening scene and the closing scene. This leads to a lot of what would in other medical dramas be b-plots just swinging in the breeze: the young woman the nurses suspect of being trafficked? Once she’s gone there’s fuck all they can do. It’s pretty merciless with killing patients. The main benefit though is you don’t involve yourself in the love lives or personal lives to anything near the degree of its contemporaries. If it’s a big deal but happens outside the hospital, you don’t see it. Only what it makes the characters do at work.
Again being on HBO means the characters - doctors, nurses and patients - swear pretty hard but give the high stress stakes it makes sense. Another benefit of HBO as its home is that the show doesn’t really shy away from how gross being in emergency medicine is. And the season ending event is a banger.
Stephanie Hsu stars in this latest iteration of a genre I call "funny sluts." Girls, Broad City, Fleabag- I generally like these shows that center messy women with comedy and drama and aren't afraid to let them and audience kind of wallow in their sexual and romantic misadventures, anchored around talented comedic women actors riffing and doing their thing.
This one adds a high-concept with the gimmick that the main character's exes are dying in the order she banged them.
The good part of the show is Hsu, doing lots of improv-feeling but highly scripted jokes and riffs and camera mugging. Hints of her capabilities popped up in things I've seen her in but this is her going all out taking the spotlight. Jack Black, Melissa McCarthy- that larger than life personality and energy that can even gloss over weaker material.
And therein lies the rub- a lot of the material doesn't quite get there. Similar to a show like Loot where the premise is good, the setup, the cast, the main character- but the jokes, the strong beats, the killer moments- are just rarely there.
This exposes the absurd plot mechanics. I mean given the premise and that it's a comedy, of course you would expect that, but when the jokes don't land you notice it more.
A small thing but an example of the kind of thing that bugs me- when she meets her primary love interest, she goes all ga-ga and stupid. This is a 33 yr old woman acting like a 15 yr old. That is a typical sitcom trope but it goes so over the top that, when the humor doesn't quite land, I focus on more.
But despite all that there are enough gags and character moments with the supporting cast that pulled us through the season. It's pleasant enough and a nice something fun and short to watch after the serious and violent stuff we been watching like Yellowjackets and Black Mirror.
Basically, your enjoyment will be proportional to your appreciation of Hsu.
Yellowjackets, season 3, D+
What a clusterf**** lol. Show just completely gave up on restraint, subtlety, or reason and went all-in on batshit insanity. Which is kind of fun, actually, it's just really really dumb.
I don't know if I'll be back for the next season when it comes back. I might not be able to resist the hate-watch.
What's funny is that when the show started I was like "oh it's kind of like Lost." Well now it really is Lost- strong first season, decent for a bit after, then devolving into improvised nonsense.
Mystery-box shows really should figure out what's in the box before they put it in front of us.
Some more adventures with a shared AppleTV+ subscription:
The Studio, 4/4 episodes aired so far, B+
When it was announced and we saw the trailer, we dismissed it as a self-indulgent Hollywood sniffing its own farts show since it's about a Hollywood studio and how zany that life is! Seth Rogen and his pals getting in a bunch of cameos. Blech, normally not my thing.
We watched the first two episodes and yes, that is exactly what the show is. But I find it amusing while my wife did not, for the same reason- Rogen's character is an insufferable, cowardly schmuck. So I'm watching the rest on my own.
Favorite episode so far is the one with Ron Howard, where they have to tell him to cut the last section of his new movie because it's boring and self-indulgent but everyone is afraid of him. They use the trope where he has a nice guy reputation but he can be real mean when he wants to which is also a clever way to make use of IRL Howard's acting background. The inevitable scene where they blow-up at each other was awesome.
The show is absolutely self-indulgent with long takes and an aggressive jazzy soundtrack and it would bother me if the eps were longer but at half-hour it's a nice punchy bit of zaniness.
Dope Thief, 6.6 episodes aired so far. C+
This is one of those shows (a limited series only I believe) where you watch a trailer and you know exactly what you're getting into. Crime stuff! Paperboi from Atlanta, and Narco from Narcos! But also Captain Janeway and Marcellus Wallus.
And yeah the cast is the strong point here. Brian Tyree Henry is a magnetic screen presence and at this point I'll pretty much watch him in anything.
It's a classic crime caper where low-level criminals who aren't really bad people get themselves caught up in fatally dangerous shenanigans and now have to survive.
As I suspected, this would have been a perfectly serviceable movie that is being dragged out into a series, as is the trend nowadays. Since I new that going in I don't mind having it as something to turn to when I have 48 minutes to kill in between meetings or whatever.
AppleTV+ excels in the good-not-great show type because they have the money to make things look good.
Sidenote: you know what's a good way to get in some TV or gaming time? Have a job where you work from home but have to work with people from all across the US, UK, and India (and occasionally Australia). Bursts of work and down time all over the place, so you need your little breaks but you can't go f*** off for the whole day.
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