Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, Hijack, The Morning Show, Mythic Quest, The Problem with Jon Stewart, Shrinking, Silo. All good shows worth checking out!

I also really enjoyed Slow Horses.

>For All Mankind

I’m halfway through the first season, and it’s got a lot more Ted Lasso-type scenes of people talking about their feelings than I was expecting. Does it refocus more on the actual premise of the show later, or is it like this all the way through?

It's both a high quality drama about the characters' lives and a detailed, well researched alternate history story with interesting differences in politics and technology as it goes on.

Let's just say it doesn't shy away from torturing its characters, whereas Ted Lasso is a lot more even-handed in that regard, with equal measures of torture and wholesome moments. For All Mankind definitely leans harder towards "outer space makes life difficult and dangerous" in its balance between joy and pain.

If you're thinking that the original premise was basically an alternative history space program procedural, it'll become less focused on that over time. The space flight parts will become less and less plausible, and the plot will mainly be driven by totally artificial drama and disasters caused by these characters with huge and obvious flaws being given increasing amounts of responsibility.

I think it's still worth watching to a point, but the quality is monotonically decreasing. Once you're annoyed more often than enjoying the show, stop watching. It won't recover. (For me, season 3 was honestly purely a hate-watch of wanting to see just how far down the show would sink.)

Thanks for the heads up. I was pretty checked out by episode 2 (Everyone knew Wernher was a Nazi. Hell, by 1970 they had been rearming Nazis in West Germany to fight the Soviets for 20 years!) but as you say it was only getting worse. I just read through the episode summaries and it doesn't sound like I missed much.

What the hell even happened? It's not like Ronald Moore lacked experience. After Voyager and BSG he should know the formula: the A plot is actual story events and B plot is interpersonal conflict among the cast. You set up conflicts in the B plot to add tension on if they can overcome the challenge in the A plot. What you don't do is spend 40 minutes out of a 60 minute episode on squabbles among the astronaut wives. It's a show about stuff happening in space! Show us things happening in spaceships!

Just another failure to add to the scrap pile of all the "prestige" dramas produced during Peak TV. Hollywood responded to an unprecedented demand for content during Covid by disappearing up their navels about gender and race. An incredible waste of billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

Definitely agree with that list! The new Lessons in Chemistry is also really solid! Severance was also noteworthy although a bit slow going. Shrinking was really good. Physical, and the one about Bezo’s ex-wife becoming her own person and running her foundation was pretty funny… overall I think Apple is doing their best to target a certain demographic and I for one appreciate it. They have spent more on writing than other services, it would seem.

Severance is excellent. As is For All Mankind.

As someone who's into more light-hearted fare...

The After Party is fun. It's a murder-mystery, with each episode retelling the same night of the murder in the style of a different film genre. Rashomon-y, but more about playing with genre than with strictly what was seen.

Mythic Quest is pretty well targeted for the HN crowd, insofar as it's a comedy set in a video game studio, and does a lot about software-dev culture.

The Big Door Prize is also excellent and light hearted but asks big questions

As were Ted Lasso, See, and Servant (all done now).

Severance, extremely slow burning but turns into a great show.

I found Severance to be pretty meandering and I didn't like the acting. I'll give it another try.

The lore building in it is really enjoyable to me.

It almost reminds of me Tales from the Loop, which is extremely slow but all about world building.

I almost stopped watching because the middle episodes (of the first season) were just wheel spinning. But the last 3 episodes surprised me, they really redeemed the season in a big way.

A victim of the medium. Prestige TV almost always has too little writing to cover too many episodes. At least with episodic TV you could skip the filler episodes, but when long-form linear TV drips out plot revelations every ten minutes you have to sit through the whole thing.

It's a slow burn but a solid mystery/drama. The end of the season has some edge-of-your-seat moments that wouldn't hit nearly as hard without all of the smaller moments from the middle of the season

Don’t forget Drops of God

Severance had stronger Philip K Dick vibes than other shows that were actually based on his work.

Also Bad Sisters

Foundation has less common with Asimov books than the "I, Robot" movie