Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 02:12:17 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Mayans

Started by Z, August 26, 2018, 12:22:03 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Z

Saw a trailer for this pop up and genuinely thought it was some kind of satire thing on how Kurt Sutter's career is in a downturn after his medieval thing bombed.

But no, Sons of Anarchy is back, in Mayan form. Can you wait?

samadriel

I just couldn't drag myself through the last two or three seasons of SoA, I stopped at the episode with the school shooting.  It was all so endlessly dry and po-faced, and the slow-pop-song-over-a-montage-of-everything-fucking-up at the end of that episode was one slow-pop-song-over-a-montage-of-everything-fucking-up too many.

bgmnts

I am much more interested in the Incas than the Mayans to be honest.

Z

Quote from: samadriel on August 26, 2018, 12:39:49 PM
I just couldn't drag myself through the last two or three seasons of SoA, I stopped at the episode with the school shooting.  It was all so endlessly dry and po-faced, and the slow-pop-song-over-a-montage-of-everything-fucking-up at the end of that episode was one slow-pop-song-over-a-montage-of-everything-fucking-up too many.
For the final season they seemingly let him make episodes as long as he wanted. IIRC almost every episode had a katey segal cover song being played over a montage and some had two montages.

I never really liked the show but always had some kind of weird morbid curiosity about it and it never failed to reduce itself to my low expectations.

Mister Six

I maintain that the second season (with neo-Nazi Henry Rollins) was great. Sadly it was after that season that they seemed to realise they would have to spin the show out indefinitely with endless subplots rather than have Jax confront Ron Perlman (can't even remember the character's name) and upset the status quo. So off they went to Oireland for some fucking stupid interminable shit about a baby. Pffff.

Jumped off in the season where Tig watched his daughter burn to death and then two episodes later was back to being the hilarious comedy character again. Sutter's good when he's got someone to rein him in and provide some direction, but left to his own devices, he's just not capable of running a coherent show.

Ant Farm Keyboard

Season 2 was indeed great, and it was the only time where the show actually matched the quality of The Shield.
Season 3 was shit, apart from the finale, which was great.
Season 4 was good to great (Ray McKinnon's turn), apart from the finale, which was shit.
Starting with season 5, Jimmy Smits and Walton Goggins were the saving graces from a few episodes, which were otherwise getting longer and longer, in addition to being crappier and crappier. SoA was at that point the highest rated show ever on the network (middle-aged women started to get fascinated by Jax and his ass), which is why they actually asked Kurt Sutter for longer cuts, that allowed FX to sell more commercials at their highest rate. But the show also had to deliver versions of standard length for syndication and foreign markets, which explains a lot of needless plots or song montages, as this stuff could be easily deleted.

The Executioner Bastard looked like a show produced to take advantage of tax cuts for stuff produced in Wales. It might have worked better if they had gone with the alternate title Medieval on your Ass.

Mister Six

Clay! That's what he was called. Clay.

Moribunderast

Quote from: Mister Six on August 27, 2018, 05:48:08 PM
I maintain that the second season (with neo-Nazi Henry Rollins) was great. Sadly it was after that season that they seemed to realise they would have to spin the show out indefinitely with endless subplots rather than have Jax confront Ron Perlman (can't even remember the character's name) and upset the status quo. So off they went to Oireland for some fucking stupid interminable shit about a baby. Pffff.

I think this was the core issue that ruined the show. If it just went three seasons and followed the Hamlet structure that it started out with, it would have been fine. But because they needed to keep making it, they just stretched the main story arc way too long and by the time Clay or Gemma received any comeuppance the anticipation was gone and the momentum of the story evaporated. I watched every episode and I legit couldn't tell you how Clay died, or even IF Gemma did. I just know that by the end Jax had become Jesus as opposed to Hamlet, which at least made me laugh at the very end.

Ant Farm Keyboard

Another core issue is that Kurt Sutter is great at having outrageous ideas, that other writers wouldn't have thought of, and make for a pulpy narrative, but that he's very bad at sticking with the best ones, or the ones with the most potential. After season 3 or 4, he started to assume he could no wrong, and that's when comes the school shooting, that's ultimately only used for shock value, as the connection to the Sons is strenuous at best (the gun was provided by the Sons to the mother of the kid who stole it from his mother and did the shooting, so the D.A. tries to prosecute the Sons for something that's basically the fourth worst thing they do in a regular episode).
Then you get an umpteenth scene of Sutter's cuckolding fantasies, as Gemma has to strip in front of prison guards who want to humiliate Clay, then comes the musical montage, then you get Tara who was given nothing to do but bitching during entire episodes.

And then comes another plot line related to the whorehouse or the porn studio, that allowed the production to use actual adult actresses as extras.

At one point, Bobby Elvis was turned into a mere plot device rather than a character (he approves stuff he was previously opposed to, because of a vibrant speech by Jax).

But my favorite memories are every time Jax promises to Tara "Trust me, we will go legit. I can do this."

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

This'll be shit I reckon.

That's my Mayan prophecy.

First episode was worse than shit. Lead character is as wooden as Jax was.