Suits was another show that was notoriously bad at this.

LOL, that hurt to read. I liked Luck a lot.

That's going to be a tough act to follow. Shea Whigham was just superb as Liddy.

Yes, I believe New York Undercover was part of Fox's Thursday night bloc, which were all shows with a (mostly) minority cast. I believe it was Martin, then Living Single, then New York Undercover (since Fox's prime time slot was just two hours, and still is today).

Your view on what changed about the show sounds about right. I can't point to anything specific (that time/memory thing yet again), but it started feeling "samey". A part of television since its inception has been shows about cops and the law, and so many of them seemed to hit the same exact note. New York Undercover appealed to me because it felt so fresh and raw compared to the other cop shows airing at that time. My theory is that the ratings were flat and the consultants at the network wanted to boost them up, so they "retooled" it and took away what made it fresh and raw and different. Again, something you see to this day.

It's already looking like this thread is going to have the same discussion it seems to have every other day about which shows declined in quality and stuff like that. It's nice that you brought up New York Undercover, I didn't know it was streaming. I know BET was airing reruns recently and I watched a few episodes. I used to watch it back in the day, I think I stopped around Season 3 or around there. It was a really long time ago, so I can't really elaborate on what exactly changed, but I know I wasn't enjoying it as much as I used to so I stopped watching. It was a very unique show for its time, in that the two main characters, detectives were minorities and their captain was a woman. And it felt natural, it didn't feel like they were pandering. It had that Dick Wolf feel like Law and Order, but it had a more gritty, on the ground quality since it was just about the cops. I'm just giving my really basic assessment; again, I hadn't watched it in a very long time until recently, and only a couple of episodes at that. Malik Yoba and Lauren Velez seem to have had pretty decent careers, I still see them in stuff to this day. I don't know what happened with Michael DeLorenzo, I don't recall seeing him in anything after this.

I know I looked it up once when Paramount Plus was CBS All Access. It was on there, but not the entire series, just random episodes from each season. Really fucking annoying, and something I still see to this day on other streaming services. Glad it's available in full now though. One of our local channels in NYC has a Taxi marathon on New Year's and I always try to watch some of it.

CNN just did another docuseries about Rudy but I haven't watched it yet.

Even the first three shows you mentioned went on for way too long. Dexter was the only one out of the three that I stuck around til the end for, and even that was a struggle considering how awful some of the latter half of Dexter was.

I'm surprised this wasn't further up. There's even a term for characters who are written out of a show early in its run: They're being sent to "Mandyville."

I was reading an interview with Samuel L. Jackson once and he said that he says "Yes" to pretty much everything. I've seen his name on some direct-to-video stinkers over the years and was wondering why he, of all people, would sign on to shit like that? He said a similar thing in the interview, that before he finally made it big, there were many days where the phone didn't ring and he never forgot it, and doesn't take for granted that it won't happen again.

That last part simply is not true, at least from my experience. My family and I had just recently cut the cord, it's been just under a year. Prior to that, I'd had cable as long as I'd been alive. When cable started providing VoD services, it was mostly ad-free and if there were ads, you could usually fast forward through them. Even for certain stations (like the networks), if there were ads and you couldn't fast forward through them, it was only one or two at most. Not ideal, but easily manageable. Over time, I really started seeing it shift. More and more networks that were featured on VoD made it so that you couldn't fast forward through commercials anymore. And that one or two commercials I mentioned a few sentences ago? Yeah, that was no more. Towards the end, it wasn't worth watching anything on demand because the commercials went on for at least five minutes, I might as well had been watching it live.

I just finished the show and I liked it enough. The one thing I didn't particularly care for, and I must be in the minority since I haven't seen it voiced elsewhere, was that it felt more of an ensemble, and that Willow was just a supporting character. I was really hoping for Warwick Davis to shine, and I think he can definitely carry a show. It's the same issue I had with Book of Boba Fett (ironically, another Disney Plus show).

A friend of mine got us tickets to see Bruce Campbell in a few months, and it made me think of his show, Ash Vs. Evil Dead. Ash Vs. Evil Dead had two really good sidekicks, El Jefe and Kelly. They were three-dimensional characters, with their own unique personalities and stories, but you also never forgot that Ash was the central character. I just wish that Willow had that. It was a lot of supporting characters, the prisoner was the only one that did anything for me, the actors were hit-or-miss and like I said, it felt like Warwick was relegated to the background more than a few times just to flesh them out and it didn't really suit the show well. I will watch the next season though.

The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore was involved in the development of a series in the 90s called Better Days, which took place in a midwestern town where their auto plant went under. I believe it was to star Jim Belushi and Chris Elliot? He talked about it once on his podcast. It sounded interesting and seemed set to have the social commentary that Moore was known for. Which was a problem. He said it was set to air in the fall, CBS I believe was going to pick it up, the audience scores were really good. Then top advertisers threatened to pull their advertising since it wasn't going to be a corporate friendly show and CBS deep-sixed it. I'd always wanted to see that pilot.

Pity, just checked and it's not on there.

For my money, any show that got a renewal and then got it reversed. Regardless of whether I watched the show or not, that's rough.

I wish I could. I got suckered into a one year subscription. This was back in October, and I thought this bullshit was in the rear view. Turned out fortune telling isn't my forte. The only thing that's giving me hope is The Last of Us. HBO Max is by far the worst streaming service I have, and not too long ago, it was at the top.

I mean, I don't mind so much that shows are getting cancelled, that's part of the territory unfortunately. But I have never seen a streaming platform just remove shows at the rate that this one is. And these are shows that they OWN. Movies and shows get shuffled around from one streaming service to another all the time, because another studio owns them. HBO Max is deep-sixing shows that they produced and aired over their streaming platform or on their cable service. It's like Netflix pulling Stranger Things.

OMG, you need a cable subscription to subscribe to AMC+? No wonder they're having trouble getting subscribers.

I only watched the first few episodes of Halo, but I remember seeing the Showtime logo at the beginning. To clarify, it was originally supposed to air on Showtime, but Viacom wanted to boost the Paramount Plus service so they moved it over there.

That's a perfect way to describe it. So much great TV has been made in the past twentyish years, especially on HBO. I don't think Oz quite makes that list, but as you said, it opened the door and there should always be a place in the books for Oz because of that. Prior to Oz, HBO had some half hour comedies that were decent but not great (with the exception of Larry Sanders, which was incredible). Oz broke the mold for an hour long drama that was relatively successful, and again as you said, that paved the way for stronger shows like Sopranos and The Wire.

Thanks for recommending, I'll have to check that out. I was really disappointed in Last Blood too, I wish he'd have just ended it at IV. The ending brought John Rambo full circle, so to bring him back in a movie we've seen tens of thousands of times is really unnecessary.

I like Cranston a lot and will give this a shot, but on the surface, this feels really unnecessary. I wasn't crazy about the first season but the ending was one of the few things I liked about it.

It was called The Audience Network and it was just never going to work. What the hell were they thinking over there? Kingdom was another great show they had; IMO, it had the potential to be absolutely huge had it aired literally anywhere else. It couldn't get any traction because 90% of people couldn't watch it.

The only good thing about Audience Network was that they saved Damages after FX cancelled it. It was a mixed blessing though. The last two seasons weren't as strong and the budget got cut to shit, it looked so cheap compared to how it looked when FX aired it.

That's a real shame. I don't turn to CNN for my news, but their originals are actually really good.

I know Agent gave a good recommendation, I just wanted to second him. It's really good. I found the premise going in initially confusing, I wasn't sure what was going on, but it makes sense very quickly and keeps getting better. The penultimate episode (and the finale too) is insane.

I don't think that's happening anytime soon. TV is way too lucrative for him to go back to movies, as much as I'd love to see that happen.

They're doing a spinoff on the 6's ranch, featuring Jimmy. I really wouldn't have minded something like a backdoor pilot, but it felt most of last season of Yellowstone was just to promote the spinoff. I like Jimmy, but it was so annoying and made it hard to watch.