TV shows you most recently finished watching

Started the latest season of The White Lotus last night. I'm liking this one much more than the second series.

The Penguin

Picking up a week after the events in 2022's The Batman, this HBO series puts us in the festering gutters of Gotham with an unrecognizable Colin Farrell in the lead trying to fight his way back up the crime syndicate food chain with some help from a young street kid (the excellent Rhenzy Feliz) and the daughter of a mob family recently released from Arkham Asylum.   More a mafia crime story than a supervillain action-drama, The Penguin works and delivers the cold hard goods.
   

Sons of Anarchy

This was a good show. A bit of a classic Western in a modern vehicle. I learned a bit about biker culture, something I knew nothing about. The performances by Katey Sagal and Jimmy Smits in particular were just masterful. That said, I have my criticism of it. Too much violence, some poor writing and plot choices. The biggest fail here is the dropped ball of not doing a concurrent backstory with the "First Nine" bikers who founded the motorcycle club a generation earlier. They are mentioned so often and in brief images that the producers cue our interest big time, and then they just let it die on the vine. Animal Kingdom did it so well with Ellen Barkin's backstory, and Sons of Anarchy could have included that backstory by using some of the time given to senseless shootouts and drug deals for the umpteenth time. Still, it was a ton of fun to watch.

Finnforest wrote: Sons of Anarchy This was a good show. A bit of a classic Western in a modern vehicle. I learned a bit about biker culture, something I knew nothing about. The performances by Katey Sagal and Jimmy Smits in particular were just masterful. That said, I have my criticism of it. Too much violence, some poor writing and plot choices. The biggest fail here is the dropped ball of not doing a concurrent backstory with the "First Nine" bikers who founded the motorcycle club a generation earlier. They are mentioned so often and in brief images that the producers cue our interest big time, and then they just let it die on the vine. Animal Kingdom did it so well with Ellen Barkin's backstory, and Sons of Anarchy could have included that backstory by using some of the time given to senseless shootouts and drug deals for the umpteenth time. Still, it was a ton of fun to watch.

I've not watched SOA but did watch all of Animal Kingdom. It seemed to me they only did the Ellen Barkin backstory because she had left the show ( I presume her choice) so in order to keep it on the rails it still needed her presence to knit it together. Yep I did find it interesting but I tend to think it was a convience to squeeze an extra season out of it rather than something that was planned all along. I could be wrong though..