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It's such a superb show. Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that

It's such a superb show. Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that aren't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or that aren't historical dramas. Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life, with some observational humour thrown in here and there. For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is somehow boring. A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida has a similar vibe, and is also excellent. Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession, Mozart in the Jungle… any other good ones?

jl6 5y ago
Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing perhaps? Although I can never tell if it’s some kind of obtuse absurdist parody or sincere.
munificent 5y ago
Ted Lasso.
- atombender 5y ago
  Ted Lasso is good, but it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody. So I can't really agree with you there.
  - munificent 5y ago
    > a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody I personally found it to be none of those things. Often, we experience a piece of art as being something when really much of our experience is defined by what we brought of ourselves to it.
    - atombender 5y ago
      Well, it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!), plot, and so on. Its depiction of real life and relationships is cartoonish and hardly any more true to life than other escapist fare like Sex and the City. It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though Ted Lasso does it better than many of them. There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness, which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that everything in Togetherness not only happens in real life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
      - munificent 5y ago
        > it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!) There are different levels of realism in art. Guernica is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war scene would look like if photographed. The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys the subjective experience of war in a meaningful way to the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand experience with war and comes away from it with belief X. Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact that it doesn't aesthetically look like it is not particularly relevant. It's an artifact. Togetherness is profoundly unrealistic because it is a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal points. It is very far removed from what it would be like to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no appreciable source in the scene. But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not important for your appreciation of the work. The kinds of unreality that bother you about Ted Lasso are in the set of things that I don't consider important. The behavior of the characters (especially in the first season) rang true to me.
        5y ago
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    It got even more cartoony in S2, had to stop watching. S1 struck a chord that was going to be really hard to replicate.
    - munificent 5y ago
      Yeah, season two definitely wandered towards more typical high drama heroes and villains fare, unfortunately.

jl6 5y ago

Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing perhaps? Although I can never tell if it’s some kind of obtuse absurdist parody or sincere.

munificent 5y ago

Ted Lasso.

atombender 5y ago
Ted Lasso is good, but it's a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody. So I can't really agree with you there.
- munificent 5y ago
  > a saccharine, deeply unrealistic fantasy bordering on self-parody I personally found it to be none of those things. Often, we experience a piece of art as being something when really much of our experience is defined by what we brought of ourselves to it.
  - atombender 5y ago
    Well, it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!), plot, and so on. Its depiction of real life and relationships is cartoonish and hardly any more true to life than other escapist fare like Sex and the City. It's an urban feel-good fantasy, clearly not intended to be realistic. There are tons of shows like this, though Ted Lasso does it better than many of them. There are a lot fewer shows like, say, Togetherness, which shows the raw, unpolished reality of ordinary middle-class people living very ordinary, albeit dramatically interesting, lives. I would argue that everything in Togetherness not only happens in real life (and the characters also talk like adults do in real life), it also has. Whereas pretty much nothing in Ted Lasso has ever happened, at any time, anywhere.
    - munificent 5y ago
      > it's objectively unrealistic in terms of dialogue (nobody talks that way in real life!) There are different levels of realism in art. Guernica is not a realistic real life portrayal or what a war scene would look like if photographed. The more interesting question to me is whether it conveys the subjective experience of war in a meaningful way to the viewer? In other words, say person A has a first-hand experience with war and comes away from it with belief X. Then person B looks at a work of art and also comes away from it with belief X. Then in some sense, the art is a realistic portrayal of war because it caused the same change in the viewer that experiencing war does. The fact that it doesn't aesthetically look like it is not particularly relevant. It's an artifact. Togetherness is profoundly unrealistic because it is a series of two-dimensional images shown at a fixed frame rate from a viewpoint that spontaneously and instantly jumps from place to play with wildly varying focal points. It is very far removed from what it would be like to be in the room with the actors. Not to mention short pieces of music spontaneously being heard from no appreciable source in the scene. But you accept that those kinds of unreality are not important for your appreciation of the work. The kinds of unreality that bother you about Ted Lasso are in the set of things that I don't consider important. The behavior of the characters (especially in the first season) rang true to me.
      - 5y ago
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  It got even more cartoony in S2, had to stop watching. S1 struck a chord that was going to be really hard to replicate.
  - munificent 5y ago
    Yeah, season two definitely wandered towards more typical high drama heroes and villains fare, unfortunately.