Hacker Cinema
Luther
2010 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Neil Cross
A dark psychological crime drama starring Idris Elba as Luther, a man struggling with his own terrible demons, who might be as dangerous as the depraved murderers he hunts.
3 positive1 negative5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
In the top 50, I've see Night Agent (give it a 7), Luther (6-7), Extraction 2 (6).
I've heard good things about Beef, and maybe Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope is novel because it's an 8 episode heist show that, in theory, can be watched in any order and be cogent. Arguably, this is one reason I have not watched it. Not a big fan of gimmicky things.
Of course there's also the bit of the "how can there be 18,000 shows and nothing to watch?"
Also was a key plot device in Luther season 5
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
it's the film equivalent of midcentury-Scandinavian design in architecture really. Explosive colors, maximalism and so on have been out of fashion for quite a while, and TV shows and movies opt for a more serious, colder, functional look. Funnily enough I think also inspired by a lot of Scandinavian media. The Bridge which was quite popular internationally is a very muted, grey show as is a lot of British television, Luther comes to mind, which has a lot of success internationally.
I don't really think one needs to go for technical explanations at all because that modernist aesthetic of black and white colors is pretty much everywhere. Inside Apple Stores, in the clothing you see in offices or even at fashion events. If you see something extremely colorful or extravagant today it almost automatically stands out.
Yeah, and I generally agree with what you were saying. And I totally agree with some like 24 sigh
I think that generally US seasons are too long. However, I only realized that after watching a bunch of foreign (mostly UK) shows on Netflix. These are shows I would have never been exposed to.
I too agree that sometimes the UK ones are a bit too short. I remember wanting to watch Luther, but was thinking 5 seasons was a lot (despite loving Idris Elba). Then we got watching and one season (err, series) was 2 episodes. Five series had a total of 20 episodes. That was crazy. The same goes for Sherlock.
There's definitely a happy medium, and I feel that the 10ish episode length seems like a nice point.
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
The problem I have with Netflix recommendations is that while they understand genres, they're not good at recommending good shows.
Since I've watched Archer and Arrested Development, Netflix thinks I'd like every mediocre comedy show, since I've watched Sherlock and Luther, it thinks I'd like mediocre non-serialized detective shows, and anything made by the BBC. Watching all of BSG (which isn't even on Netflix anymore, RIP) has given me a permanent section of terrible sci-fi recommendations.
I've seen the first "season" of black mirror it was OK is just don't like that type of Scifi I like my Scifi more bigger than life, and while i don't mind some "futuristic earth" shows Black Mirror has the same issue I have with most UK shows and that they produce too little episodes to even fill an afternoon, but Black Mirror just took it to a whole new level with having like what 2-3 episodes?
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.
> 28 Days set up a few shots like this in downtown London [..] which appeared to be taken very early in the morning.
That's some of my favourite "London" film footage. Most of the time London is shown horribly in films, just hamfistedly moving from one obviously recognisable location to another. Even the BBC do this - Spooks and Luther seem to need every outdoor scene to be set in some well-known location, which is not only distracting but a little insulting.
Saying that, because it was obviously so early in the morning for logistical reason it pulled me out of the film, even though I guess in the film's narrative of "we must travel during the day" might neccessitate a "it's morning, thus we are now travelling again" establishing shot.