Hacker Cinema
Legion
2017 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Noah Hawley
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasyDrama
David Haller, AKA Legion, is a troubled young man who may be more than human. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real.
2 positive8 neutralfrom 10 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
10 comments on Hacker News
The show Legion had an excellent vignette about this very topic near the end of season 2. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHj2slKBF98 for reference). I thought it was pretty well done, although it doesn't really answer any questions, just raises the topic.
I am slightly depressed at how content on the web has evolved in the last decade. More and more content providers (youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc) make their platforms harder and harder to search. They continue to promote what essentially they want you to consume.. and actual content your looking for is buried.
The other day I wanted to watch the last season of Legion (forget never finished the series) and was looking around for it. Turns out it is indeed on Hulu (which I have) however you would never just stumble on this. Despite my history of watching just about ever comic book series and comic book movie there is. Its almost like they don't have a true interest in pulling up what I want. Instead literally the front page is full of stuff I have zero interest in watching.
Legion is at least one counter-example. They used award winning indie film directors on a per-episode basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(TV_series)
The result was that each episode often had a very distinct style, which matched well to the underlying theme of schizophrenia.
> I've watched the first, and consider it to be 13 hours of my life completely wasted
I really enjoyed the first season. I've "trained" myself to enjoy TV / movies that "get nowhere" as long as they manage to keep my attention. And "The OA" does that.
> Does it get better in the 2nd season?
Regarding the 2nd season, I'm my opinion, there are _a lot_ of scify TV series that start more or less well /interesting (Colony & Falling skies are 2 examples of this). But - I take it to get people interested fast - make big bets in their first season, and then keeping that rhythm proves an impossible task. Falling Skies, for instance, was a complete disappointment. It's like you get people to invent nukes and in the next season they go back to fight with bows & arrows.
I want to keep this spoiler free, but let me tell you this: The 2nd season of "The OA" gets effing weird. Like, really. It's not as hardcore as "Legion", where you need to grow a 2nd brain to understand what the heck is going on, or high fantasy tune as "American Gods" but I found it really entertaining - although at points the story drags a little - but they managed to build / invent a rather interesting universe, that unfortunately we'll never get to see again.
In the last episodes of TV show Legion, they bring in Monsters from another dimension (time). So it was not exactly 4D in spatial sense as is in this paper.
Checked some episodes from some shows I had available, first seasons, DVD or Bluray source:
Miami Vice (1984): 48m
Homicide Life On The Streets (1993): 47m
TekWar (1994): 45m
Nowhere Man (1995): 45m
Battlestar Galactica (2003): 44m
Dark Matter (2015): 43m
12 Monkeys (2015): 43m
Lucifer (2015): 43m
There are exceptions though. Legion (2017) episodes are around 50m, and several of the newer "made for streaming" shows have 50-60m episodes.
Off the top of my head: Succession, VEEP, Barry, Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects, True Detective (seasons 1 & 3), Chernobyl.
Big Little Lies was probably the worst of that bunch, and is still lightyears ahead of any recent Netflix drama.
On Prime, The Man in the High Castle is a guilty pleasure despite its flaws. The bizarre spy drama Patriot is absolutely excellent.
I like that with Prime, I can subscribe to HBO within the app, and also buy seasons of some cable shows, like FX’s Legion, Fargo, What We Do in the Shadows.
I prefer that experience much more than Netflix. With Netflix, the original content has to be so good that it offsets the lack of being able to purchase non-Netflix content, and frankly Netflix originals have just not been good enough to cut it for a while.
It's probably unfair to refer to Netflix as ad-free, but (as I mention elsewhere), from a creator perspective, I'm referring more to the 'break-free' experience than 'ad-free'.
I do agree that impositions on the creative team to write in product placement are a hurdle, but I disagree on how difficult that hurdle is relative to literally stopping the show for a few minutes at a time, and from a consumer's perspective, product placement (when not overdone) is far less disruptive to the narrative than a commercial.
Of course, people discuss products in real life all the time, so it can be made to feel natural. Four Roses bourbon, TV shows like "Legion" and "Fargo", or Seagull Guitars could be product-placed into a TV show about my life and would look like just any other day in my life, for example.
Star Wars is already the movies, plus two animated series (Clone Wars and Rebels). You can look at the Marvel strategy to see where it could go, with multiple movies a year plus multiple tv/streaming series (Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Legion, Defenders, Gifted, Inhumans, Punisher, Runaways). If all that Marvel content moves to Disney streaming, plus new Star Wars content, plus their kids TV shows, plus Pixar, ABC, and ESPN, then you have a package that is really strong.
I'm amazed how many people on HN complain about the content on Netflix. Especially compared to any other streaming service, such as Amazon or Hulu, they continue to provide much higher-end content for my dollar, as well as a (far) superior UI experience.
For me, the stand-up specials like Dave Chapelle and Louis CK alone are huge and welcome additions, never mind the many, very good lesser known comedy specials on there.
Their agreement with Dreamworks has only helped, allowing me to enjoy surprisingly good films like Zootopia.
Even great cable channels like FX (The Americans, Legion) and AMC (Mad Men, Better Call Saul) are not available for any reasonable price as standalone cable packages, so I'm not sure what the comparison is in terms of quality. HBO at 15/month?
But even HBO shows are hit-or-miss. And while their movie selection is generally pretty great, I still find myself not watching it all that much.
It seems to me that Netflix provides a pretty high level of content at their price point.