top-list List Everything you watched during the Pandemic

I was answering a part of a letter the other day, and a guy asks me a question. How can you watch all the SP stuff, to review it? I laughed. During covid I didn't get out much, and I leave a second tv playing all the time, cycling through playlists. During the Pandemic I watched every show in history, in one year. Almost every one worth rewatching. I thought people might be surprised at the amount of tv one can watch in a year, so I thought I'd make this list, and I'd be interested in hearing other people's pandemic watch list as well. I'm not going to list movies, because there would be too many, but basically, all of them. I will also rate them on a scale of one to 10, for people looking for shows to watch


since January of 2020, in no particular order, I've watched

Golaith 6
Harvey Birdman, attorney at law, 3
Leverage, and leverage redemption 6
dr death, 4
Star Wars, all movies and all series except for clone wars, including the Mandelorian twice 8
Star Trek, TOS 9, TNG 9, Discovery 3, Enterprise 6, Picard 4
Squid Game 9
Black Monday 8
War of the Worlds 4
The Chair 5
The White Lotus 7
Cobra Kai 8
Space Adventure Cobra 7
Invincible 5
Sweet Tooth 5
Loki 8
How to become a tyrant 7
Love Death and Robots 9
Domina 6
Intergalactic 4
The walking dead 4
The Righteous Gemstones 7
Your Honor 4
Jupiters Legacy 4
That Damn Micheal Che 5
Snowpiercer 5
Made for Love 6
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier 6
Mapleworth Murders 6
Resident Alien 3
Young Rock 4
The Umbrella Academy 6
His Dark Materials 7
Disenchantment 5
Bob's Burgers 3
The Sinner 5
The Twilight Zone 8
Billions 7
The Eric Andre show ???? WTF
Mindhunter 9
Solar Opposites 7
Lovecraft Country 5
American Horror Story 7, with some dips to 3 on bad years
Servant 3
Dr who (new version only) 6ish
Avenue 5 4
X files 5
Dublin Murders 4
Fate the Winx Saga 4
The Watch 4
The Stand 3
The haunting of bly manor 4
True Detective, season 1 and 3 only. 9
The end of the F%^%&g world 7
Fargo 7
Doom Patrol 5
Archer 6
Perry Mason 4
Chappelles show 7
The Flash 6
Helstorm 5
Des 7
Dungeons and Dragons TOS 8
The Midnight Gospel 2
Vikings 5
The Serpent 4
The Undoing 8
The Queens Gambit 9
Bloodline 6
Onyx Equinox 5
Ted Lasso 8
The Expanse 8
The Head 4
The Boys 10
Truth Seekers 6
Blood of Zeus 4
Powerless 3
Black Mirror 9
Raised by Wolves 6
Ratched 4
Gotham 5
Red Dwarf 7
Lexx 3
Luther 4
Curse of the Bermuda Triange 3
What If? 8
You me and the Apocalypse 6
Wu Assasins 4
Wilfred 4
Westworld 7
Watchmen 6
Waco 8
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea 8
Battle of the Planets 7
Vice Principals 6
Veep 6
Upload 8
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt 5
Twin Peaks 8
True Blood 9
Tron Uprising 6
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan 4
Through the Wormhole 7
The Witcher 6
The Terror 5
The Sopranos 10
The Prisoner 7
The Outsider 6
The Man in the High Castle 5
The Jinx 9
The Hot Zone 3
The Wire 8
The West Wing 10
The Tick 6
The Strain 5
The Shield 10
The Real Ghostbusters 8
The outer limits 4
the OA 4
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel 7
The Magicians 5
The Last Kingdom 7
The Haunting of Hill House 7
The Good Place 8
The Handmaids Tale 5
The Dark Crystal age of resistence 3
The Critic 6
King of the Hill 7
The A team 7
The 10th Kingdom 6
Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles 3
Succession 7
Street Hawk 3
Stranger Things 7
Spartacus 4
Space Force 7
South Park 7
Six Feet Under 8
Sherlock 8
Shameless 3
Santa Clarita Diet 6
Robotech 8
Ray Donovan 8
Pillars of the Earth 5
Preacher 4
Quantum Leap 7
Rick and Morty 9
Penny Dreadful 4
Penn and Teller BS 7
Peaky Blinders 6
Boardwalk Empire 9
Parks and Recreation 7
Parker Lewis can't loose 4
Ozark 8
OZ 8
Noel Fieldings luxury comedy 1
News Radio 8
Narcos 9
Mr Robot 5
Metalocalypse 7
Mr Show 9
Key and Peele 8
Marvels Daredevil 6
Mad Men 9
Lost in Space 6
Locke and Key 7
Little fires Everywhere 6
IT crowd 7
Killjoys 5
Hunters 4
Lost 7
Hannibal 4
Heroes 5
Good Omens 4
Get Smart 7
Firefly 5
Futurama 9
Game of Thrones 10
F is for Family 6
Gangs of London 6
Entourage 6
Dark Matter 6
Dexter 8
Death note 7
Dark 6
Crossbones 5
Dilbert 7
Dirk Gently 4
Duckman 5
Cowboy Beebop 8
Channel Zero 6
Catch 22 8
Carnival Row 5
Brooklyn 99 7
Breaking Bad 10
Connections 9
Community 8
Continuum 6
Big Little Lies 8
Better call Saul 6
Bates Motel 7
Barry 7
Ballers 5
Battlestar Galactica 6
American Gods 4
Alf 4
Agents of Shield 5
Aeon Flux 8
A series of unfortunate events 8
30 rock 7
Altered Carbon 7

So yeah, you can watch a lot of tv in 18 months if you multitask
 
Jesus, Nate. Do you keep a journal?, lol. What a great idea. If I could go back In time I would start one--just a note, a date, and a rate or comment, of everything I have ever watched. If I were really masochistic, I could total the time and title it: how I wasted my life, lol. Anyway :)
 
List is incomplete, missing Frontier -- or do you only list shows if you've seen every season ?
 
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Jesus, Nate. Do you keep a journal?, lol. What a great idea. If I could go back In time I would start one--just a note, a date, and a rate or comment, of everything I have ever watched. If I were really masochistic, I could total the time and title it: how I wasted my life, lol. Anyway :)
it's worse than that, lol, I record and store everything I watch. I've been doing that for about 20 years. At this point I have about 24,161 episodes of television and about 4,578 movies. About 2002 I set up a system that auto reencoded dvr files and stored them on external hard drives. If I've seen a shot, or a reveal, or a color pallette, a joke setup, a fake defeat or anything else in a show or movie, I have an organized record of that that I can study and cross index. I just made this list by sorting watched files by date.
 
List is incomplete, missing Frontier -- or do you only list shows if you've seen every season ?
Sort of, but not exactly. I don't count one if I didn't make it through a single season, and those fade into obscurity. Frontier isn't on here because I watched it after making this list. My pandemic ended when I got multiple vaccine shots. I think it's ending different times in different places based an a lot of factors. I'm just glad I don't have to worry about it any more. Frontier is a pretty good show, but It's a bit annoying that they stole landscape shots straight out of "the last kingdom" I think it's the same crew from the same network shooting in the same area though. Did you see in "gamer" where they just took shots from Baraka and dubbed them into the movie? Lazy.

I do like Frontier though, thanks for the recommendation, the cast and direction are good, and the story has a classic feel with strongly defined characters.
 
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Mr. North--I'm impressed. Seriously. What an archive! Raw data, I think, is always valuable, even if you're not sure why. I've wished I had done this for every book I've read. Maybe it's not too late to start.
 
One thing, of some quality, you may have missed. HBOs His Dark Materials. Also Amazon's Bosch.
 
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I saw it, it's on the list. I really liked their colorist on that show, and I feel like they did a pretty good job overall. A much different show, but Lemony Snicket was also really well done, in terms of using the colorist art to bring a written fiction's mood to life. Stranger things also has a good colorist.
 
I'm definitely happy to hear about any major shows I've somehow missed though, I try to stay on top of the zeitgeist, but once and a while one slips past me. Like the other day IT was talking about super pumped, and I had missed that one. Each day I read through the global top 100 list of what's being watched, and I probably scanned past the title, assuming it to be a reality show about weight lifters. It was actually pretty good, maybe a 6.5.

Mara seems to watch most of the same shows I do, so when she mentions one, I usually watch it. Gaslit was really good, don't know how that one got past me. Julia Roberts starring and it never hit the top 10 global, strange

Out of the last year, a couple of shows I watched made me think "this is good, but I feel like no one is watching this"

I'd single out upload, severance, and made for love, and Barry as some of the better shows that are probably getting less viewers than they deserve.

I'd say "The Queen's Gambit" was probably the best pure drama of last year, and Chernobyl the year before.

The worst season of tv this year (out of actual contenders) was probably AHS season 10, with the second half of the "double feature" being especially bad. I assume it was still better than season 11 of the walking dead, which I stopped watching years ago once I had boiled down it's formula.

See if this sounds familiar. A group of eclectic but relatable people are in a town or place, but they hear about another place where things are better. They argue a bit about whether to go, one says that it's dangerous. They start the trek, zombies attack en route, they escape, they find a place to rest, interpersonal struggles between group members struggling with the difficulties of the situation. zombies attack. The trek continues, they find a new member for the group. They arrive at the new city/camp/prison/research facility and it's a relative paradise, led by a friendly and charismatic leader. They settle in and get to know the new characters. It turns out that the new charismatic leader is actually a bad guy. Some of the locals (the more camera friendly ones) join the core group and help plot an escape from the paradise turned prison. They hear about another place where things are better, and they argue a bit about whether to go, and how to get there. This cycle has just been repeating for a decade now, ever since they fired the guy who directed Shawshank and replaced him someone the money people picked out. (obviously one of your buddies is more talented than Frank Darabont, the director of the highest rated film of all time, the one that knocked Citizen Kane out of the IMDB top spot)

I seriously cannot recommend Chernobyl enough, kind of a masterclass in dramatic directing.

Of course I knew the director from his early works. You can see him here in one of his very first films, as the lead rapper. Here he is in 1993, singing "here we go to the temple of consumption" a tongue in cheek commentary on consumerism as the new global religion. He beat Palahniuk by almost a decade.

 
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I seriously cannot recommend Chernobyl enough, kind of a masterclass in dramatic directing.
I seriously agree. One scene I will never forget, I was moved in a way that one almost never is sitting in front of a television. The townspeople--fathers, mothers, children--standing on the bridge, watching the glow from the explosion, chunks of (toxic, deadly) ash filling the sky like snowflakes.

Also this quote, that I wished I would have heard someone say back during the impeachment trial:

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."

I've gone through Chernobyl twice plus, and can easily see myself dipping back in, getting engaged, and watching again.
 
Have you watched "The Offer"? I don't see it on your list but I might have skimmed through it too quickly.

It's on Paramount, and it's about the making of The Godfather. If you know a lot of the backstory, you might not like it as much as I do. But the cast is amazing, and Miles Teller seems to inhabit the lead role to a very impressive extent.
 
Out of the last year, a couple of shows I watched made me think "this is good, but I feel like no one is watching this"

A few from me: The Plot Against America. I love the Philip Roth book (all the Philip Roth Books, ever since I was laughing, as hard as I ever had, at the age of 15 or 16, late at night in bed, over Alexander Portnoy's reluctant, torturous, confession to his analyst about the worst thing he had ever done.) Anyway, it's hard to do justice to a great novel, especially one written by an absolute master of voice, but David Simon did an admirable, very respectful job. (Ron Silver, by the way, does a stellar job reading the audio book.)

And: Black Jesus (HBOmax) Is it just me? I swear to god, I love me some Black Jesus.
 
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And yes, on Mara's recommendation I watched Julia. And loved it. One of the things that really hit me, was really truly sweet, was Niles (all right, David Hyde Pierce) as a role model, as how to be a man, a mate, a husband. And I am on board with The Offer. One of the few recent shows I looked forward to every week, (just like in the olden times, lol). Absolutely right about the cast, and it was fun to see icons, like Coppola, like Gordon Willis, before they were really known.
 
I was answering a part of a letter the other day, and a guy asks me a question. How can you watch all the SP stuff, to review it? I laughed. During covid I didn't get out much, and I leave a second tv playing all the time, cycling through playlists. During the Pandemic I watched every show in history, in one year. Almost every one worth rewatching. I thought people might be surprised at the amount of tv one can watch in a year, so I thought I'd make this list, and I'd be interested in hearing other people's pandemic watch list as well. I'm not going to list movies, because there would be too many, but basically, all of them. I will also rate them on a scale of one to 10, for people looking for shows to watch


since January of 2020, in no particular order, I've watched

Golaith 6
Harvey Birdman, attorney at law, 3
Leverage, and leverage redemption 6
dr death, 4
Star Wars, all movies and all series except for clone wars, including the Mandelorian twice 8
Star Trek, TOS 9, TNG 9, Discovery 3, Enterprise 6, Picard 4
Squid Game 9
Black Monday 8
War of the Worlds 4
The Chair 5
The White Lotus 7
Cobra Kai 8
Space Adventure Cobra 7
Invincible 5
Sweet Tooth 5
Loki 8
How to become a tyrant 7
Love Death and Robots 9
Domina 6
Intergalactic 4
The walking dead 4
The Righteous Gemstones 7
Your Honor 4
Jupiters Legacy 4
That Damn Micheal Che 5
Snowpiercer 5
Made for Love 6
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier 6
Mapleworth Murders 6
Resident Alien 3
Young Rock 4
The Umbrella Academy 6
His Dark Materials 7
Disenchantment 5
Bob's Burgers 3
The Sinner 5
The Twilight Zone 8
Billions 7
The Eric Andre show ???? WTF
Mindhunter 9
Solar Opposites 7
Lovecraft Country 5
American Horror Story 7, with some dips to 3 on bad years
Servant 3
Dr who (new version only) 6ish
Avenue 5 4
X files 5
Dublin Murders 4
Fate the Winx Saga 4
The Watch 4
The Stand 3
The haunting of bly manor 4
True Detective, season 1 and 3 only. 9
The end of the F%^%&g world 7
Fargo 7
Doom Patrol 5
Archer 6
Perry Mason 4
Chappelles show 7
The Flash 6
Helstorm 5
Des 7
Dungeons and Dragons TOS 8
The Midnight Gospel 2
Vikings 5
The Serpent 4
The Undoing 8
The Queens Gambit 9
Bloodline 6
Onyx Equinox 5
Ted Lasso 8
The Expanse 8
The Head 4
The Boys 10
Truth Seekers 6
Blood of Zeus 4
Powerless 3
Black Mirror 9
Raised by Wolves 6
Ratched 4
Gotham 5
Red Dwarf 7
Lexx 3
Luther 4
Curse of the Bermuda Triange 3
What If? 8
You me and the Apocalypse 6
Wu Assasins 4
Wilfred 4
Westworld 7
Watchmen 6
Waco 8
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea 8
Battle of the Planets 7
Vice Principals 6
Veep 6
Upload 8
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt 5
Twin Peaks 8
True Blood 9
Tron Uprising 6
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan 4
Through the Wormhole 7
The Witcher 6
The Terror 5
The Sopranos 10
The Prisoner 7
The Outsider 6
The Man in the High Castle 5
The Jinx 9
The Hot Zone 3
The Wire 8
The West Wing 10
The Tick 6
The Strain 5
The Shield 10
The Real Ghostbusters 8
The outer limits 4
the OA 4
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel 7
The Magicians 5
The Last Kingdom 7
The Haunting of Hill House 7
The Good Place 8
The Handmaids Tale 5
The Dark Crystal age of resistence 3
The Critic 6
King of the Hill 7
The A team 7
The 10th Kingdom 6
Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles 3
Succession 7
Street Hawk 3
Stranger Things 7
Spartacus 4
Space Force 7
South Park 7
Six Feet Under 8
Sherlock 8
Shameless 3
Santa Clarita Diet 6
Robotech 8
Ray Donovan 8
Pillars of the Earth 5
Preacher 4
Quantum Leap 7
Rick and Morty 9
Penny Dreadful 4
Penn and Teller BS 7
Peaky Blinders 6
Boardwalk Empire 9
Parks and Recreation 7
Parker Lewis can't loose 4
Ozark 8
OZ 8
Noel Fieldings luxury comedy 1
News Radio 8
Narcos 9
Mr Robot 5
Metalocalypse 7
Mr Show 9
Key and Peele 8
Marvels Daredevil 6
Mad Men 9
Lost in Space 6
Locke and Key 7
Little fires Everywhere 6
IT crowd 7
Killjoys 5
Hunters 4
Lost 7
Hannibal 4
Heroes 5
Good Omens 4
Get Smart 7
Firefly 5
Futurama 9
Game of Thrones 10
F is for Family 6
Gangs of London 6
Entourage 6
Dark Matter 6
Dexter 8
Death note 7
Dark 6
Crossbones 5
Dilbert 7
Dirk Gently 4
Duckman 5
Cowboy Beebop 8
Channel Zero 6
Catch 22 8
Carnival Row 5
Brooklyn 99 7
Breaking Bad 10
Connections 9
Community 8
Continuum 6
Big Little Lies 8
Better call Saul 6
Bates Motel 7
Barry 7
Ballers 5
Battlestar Galactica 6
American Gods 4
Alf 4
Agents of Shield 5
Aeon Flux 8
A series of unfortunate events 8
30 rock 7
Altered Carbon 7

So yeah, you can watch a lot of tv in 18 months if you multitask
dude
 
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