Well a movie is more or less what we are getting - a two-hour special to air next year! Sense8 will return from Netflix cancellation in 2018 with a surprise two-hour special
This is a bit of an old thread, but there isn't a "television series rant" thread. Today I came across The New Legends of Monkey, a tv series from 2018 which I never knew existed. Because I am old and from a British colony, I grew up with the 1978 Monkey tv series which was brilliant (Japanese tv show filmed in China, and later dubbed into English by the BBC). The original series is based on an old Chinese book and follows the adventures of the magical Monkey King, freed from under a mountain by the monk Tripitaka, who then travel with two angels-transformed-into-demons, the cannibalistic river god Sandy and the gluttonous bestial Pigsy. Tripitaka rides on a horse which was really a dragon (after it ate his real horse), and which sometimes transformed into a human. I watched the first episode of the new version on Netflix (at my sister's place, because I don't have Netflix) wondering how bad it would be. It was pretty bad. Whereas Monkey was crazy fun, The New Legends was taking itself far too seriously while also trying to be quippy at the same time, which just made it feel awkward. The special effects are janky as anything. Monkey doesn't look like a monkey at all - just some handsome non-hairy muscley dude. And whereas in the original series the character of Tripitaka was a boy monk but was played very obviously by a female actress, in this version the character actually is a girl pretending to be a boy monk. When the episode started I thought that they were trying to use noticeably-non-Chinese actors to pass as "Asian" (the girl who plays Tripitaka is Tongan, for example) but it quickly became obvious that the series is set in some indistinct fantasy world - in the first episode at least, a lot of the cast are very white indeed, and the majority of those who aren't white are Maori or of other Polynesian descent. Almost everybody has extremely strong Kiwi or Australian accents. Unsurprisingly, the series turned out to be an Australian production filmed in Auckland. Anyway, I finished the first episode and thought I may as well watch the second one because the world had a definite Xena feel to it which I liked. By the end of the second one I was thinking "this is pretty good, actually". In this episode they had introduced Sandy, except in this version Sandy is a female god rather than male, and I suspect they have dispensed with the cannibal aspect. I actually really liked this version of Sandy - it is like the actress watched The Doctor's Wife and thought "yeah, that lady that the TARDIS is inside of, I'm going to model my character on her." Then I immediately watched the third episode. Yeah, I like this show. I'm going to watch the rest of it when I can. It's really nothing like the original Monkey series, other than the characters having the same names. Tripitaka and Sandy are both female, for example, and Pigsy is just some deadpan guy with a rake - I'm sure it had to have been a deliberate character choice but the actor just comes across as if he doesn't want to be there. So far there is no dragon / horse for Tripitaka to ride. But it really is a lot of fun once you get past the first episode.
