____twoism

jcnporter wrote:

Echo the Sun wrote:don't get me wrong, game of thrones is a glorified soap opera for men, and mad men is rife with contrivances and historical inaccuracies, but i still have a feeling serialized tv dramas are going to keep getting better because of the freedom on-demand tv services like netflix affords them.

I'm watching the current seasons of both Game of Thrones and Mad Men at the moment and for me they are definitely up there with the best TV series I've seen, along with The Wire and Six Feet Under.
I'd be interested to hear how much of them you've seen, as they definitely take time to reveal their best - sure, the media portrayal of GoT is 'Lord of the Rings with sex and violence' but for me it's a classic political drama, where complex characters reveal themselves and change over time as they struggle with power, responsibility, morality and the personal consequences of that struggle. Like any good genre story should, it addresses big issues and has much to say about them.
Again, for me Mad Men is not so much for me about how America changed through the 50s and 60s (I'm not from the US) - of course that's the backdrop and a huge part of it, but more of a character study of a man's journey through his 30s and 40s, struggling to see how he and his masculinity are affected by his own age, career and the social changes around him. I'm roughly the same age stage of life as Don Draper, so that probably was a big factor in my enjoyment of and identification with the series.
Definitely agree about Sherlock, for me it's pure entertainment from start to finish - although difficult to compare with the larger scale US TV dramas - it almost seems like British drama should be an entirely different genre due to the obvious constraints on what can be explored in a much shorter format - other recent highlights for me are Utopia and Southcliffe.
Actually I gave up on Breaking Bad after the first season, not really sure why, it just didn't pull me in, but I'll give it another go.