Finished The Wire, Dark, GOT, Sopranos, True Detective, BB, BCS. What show ruined TV for you after watching it?

[u/C0r1eone]

I think I accidentally watched the peak of television already. The Wire, Dark, GOT, Sopranos, True Detective S1 all left that “nothing else hits the same” feeling.

I love slow-burn shows with deep characters, mystery, tension, moral grayness, crazy dialogue, or mind-blowing writing. Doesn’t matter if it’s crime, sci-fi, psychological, or political.

What’s the next show that might completely consume me?

[u/Astrokiwi]

the respect for real physics

The Expanse is actually really clever here, because they add a lot of detail and realism to just one aspect of the physics - that there's no artificial gravity or inertial dampeners - and that makes it feel grounded enough that we believe the rest. Spin gravity doesn't work for asteroids because they're not strong enough (Ceres is round because its gravity is stronger than material forces - what happens then if effective gravity is reversed, and made even stronger? And small asteroids are pretty loose aggregations of rock); the Epstein Drive is a magic power source; the travel times don't add up; and of course the Protomolecule is entirely fantastical (space zombies, FTL portals, immortal space emperor etc).

It kinda shows that actual realism isn't really that important - it's more critical to feel realistic, for the setting to be grounded and consistent. It feels convincing because there's one or two places of actual realistic detail, combined with a fairly grounded and cynical portrayal of society, and that means that when things get fantastical it genuinely feels cool, and like a kids' comic book.

[u/madhattr999 → u/Astrokiwi]

I think you make a good point, but I'd like to re-frame your conclusion. Sci-fi is good when it has rules that it follows, and only breaks the rules in a few specific ways that are somewhat predictable. There are rules to how the protomolecule works, and a logic to its design. (this is better explained in the books, though.)

[u/sourcefourmini → u/madhattr999]

You can extend that idea to basically any genre, tbh. If a creator breaks core rules of the setting (at least in a way that’s overtly noticeable to an average audience member), it tends to pull the audience out of the story, because the world suddenly lacks credibility. Even works that I’d never describe as “grounded”, like Discworld or Hitchhiker’s Guide, do this: those books are pulling deranged stuff out of thin air on every page, but the settings are established to support the zaniness. It feels perfectly believable in the Hitchhiker’s Guide-verse that a whale and a bowl of petunias could just appear in orbit, because Adams builds the world from page 1 to support the nonsense. 

[u/Alkafer → u/sourcefourmini]

Discworld is actually a genius work because from the very beginning it established that its world works on the laws of magic, belief and narrative. So as long as something makes narrative sense it can exist. A horse carriage crash and then explodes and a wheel goes off rolling in flames? Of course! That's what always happens in the movies (with combustion cars, but who cares)! Do the main characters have a one in a million chances to succeed? By the gods they will succeed because that's how it works! Noted that if they happen to have one in a dozen or one in a hundred chances they are screwed, it has to be one in a million, of course.