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Kung Fu
2021 · TV series · 42 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Christina M. Kim
A quarter-life crisis causes a young Chinese-American woman to drop out of college and go on a life-changing journey to an isolated monastery in China. But when she returns to find her hometown overrun with crime and corruption, she uses her martial arts skills and Shaolin values to protect her community and bring criminals to justice…all while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor and is now targeting her.
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4 comments on Hacker News
But that's not unique to Netflix - I can remember thinking how much better '24' would have been w/o all the filler crap - but then they wouldn't have been able to make a "real time" TV show (well, they could have, but they didn't). Also I tried watching the reboot of "Kung Fu" a few weeks ago - wow, there's more Asian family drama filler than there is actual "Kung Fu". It seems like the filler stuff is everywhere now.
But then again, back in the day of network tv shows when they did ~26 episodes per season, there were entire episodes that felt like fillers.
This is a reference to the old TV series "Kung Fu":
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhenYouSnatchThePebble
One of my "sniff" test to evaluate a martial art is whether it is taught in the police academy or in the military. I used to rely on the Olympics to do this kind of evaluation but not now due to heavy inclination toward the "art" form more than "martial" form.
For example, Jiu-jitsu, Karate-jutsu, Krav maga are very popular among police academy & military camps around the world. Even Ken-jitsu is taught in Tokyo police academy as well, though not very popular outside of Japan. Those martial arts are designed not only to be very practical in physical contact (neutralize opponent in the shortest amount of time) but also increase the mental toughness. Their cousins (replace the jitsu with do) are more sporty and humane, thus popular in the Olympics.
Growing up watching a lot of Kung-fu/Wushu movies from Hong Kong, I was amazed how artistic it was: beautiful kicks, long-rally sparring time. After getting into Ken-do and boxing, I noticed a typical sparring match lasts at most a few minutes. Then, I came to realize that how a practical martial art is vs. the one with more emphasis on art form. I'm sure certain styles/forms of Kung-fu are more practical (i.e: focusing more on neutralize opponent) as they were intended to be. But over time, the dramatization of motion pictures destroy its original purposes.
"Ever since the American-Norwegian crime drama “Lilyhammer” became Netflix’s NFLX, +2.32% first original series to premiere in 2012, the company has been committed to voraciously generating new content in addition to its huge library of existing TV shows and movies."
"huge", my posterior.
U.S. context: In the last couple of years, aside from a very few new headliners (e.g. "Rogue One"), and some lingering headliners from older contracts (e.g. "West Wing", Star Trek), and ever-fewer good independent productions, I find Netflix's streaming library to be the dreggs of barely acceptable quality. (People will watch it when there's nothing better.)
Netflix streaming seems to be more popular than ever, but, "Jessica Jones", "The Crown", and a few other Netflix productions aside, Amazon Prime is bringing more engaging content into their lineup than Netflix is. (And that isn't saying too much. Most recently, on Prime, I'm enjoying re-watching the old "Kung Fu" show from the 70's -- in good if not spotless, widescreen prints -- apparently, original filming was with cinema-format cameras.)
There are still some worthwhile titles on Netflix streaming (U.S.). But after a few months, you've seen them all.
For those of you outside of the U.S., for all that your catalogs are smaller -- so I read -- you should know that, in the U.S., almost no new major films end up on Netflix. And almost all of the older ones are now gone -- contracts expired. Per what I read and hear, some do still end up or remain in other countries' NF catalogs.