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Southland

post #1 of 67
4/5/09 at 1:10am
Thread Starter 
No spoilers since this starts Thursday, April 9th, but the first episode is up on NBC. It's shot by Jimmy Muro, so you definitely get the Michael Mann/Peter Berg vibe - and that's a good thing. I hope it sticks around. People complain about the saturated cop show genre, but despite L&O's return to form, there's a shortage of quality shows.
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post #2 of 67
4/5/09 at 1:58am
Also available for free via iTunes. I'm a sucker for all things cop show, and I like Ben McKenzie and Tom Everett Scott, so I'll check it out. Although Michael Cudlitz is going to play cops and military guys for the rest of his career, isnt' he?
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post #3 of 67
4/5/09 at 2:21am
Hmmm I'll go take a look. I liked the teasers for it I've seen.
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post #4 of 67
4/5/09 at 6:40am
It's seems very...earnest, in an annoying kind of way. Like how cops are just soft hearted people who want to make all the troubles of the world go away by gently helping the downtrodden masses. Is that true?
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post #5 of 67
4/5/09 at 7:43pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by RathBandu View Post
Also available for free via iTunes. I'm a sucker for all things cop show, and I like Ben McKenzie and Tom Everett Scott, so I'll check it out. Although Michael Cudlitz is going to play cops and military guys for the rest of his career, isnt' he?
He did get to play a convict on Life though.
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post #6 of 67
4/5/09 at 7:44pm
He was a fairly funny redneck in SEX DRIVE.
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post #7 of 67
4/5/09 at 7:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mediumdave View Post
It's seems very...earnest, in an annoying kind of way. Like how cops are just soft hearted people who want to make all the troubles of the world go away by gently helping the downtrodden masses. Is that true?
I like to believe most cops really did get in the line to help.

The low-grade Hitlers who do dumb shit give the rest a bad name, though I wouldn't venture a percentage on how many are one and how many are the other.
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post #8 of 67
4/5/09 at 8:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
He was a fairly funny redneck in SEX DRIVE.
He also played a sexual sadist that was kidnapping and torturing women in an epsiode of Criminal Minds. He blows himself up with a grenade in the first five minutes.
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post #9 of 67
4/5/09 at 9:33pm
Cudlitz was also the killer on an episode of Saving Grace, and on CSI: Fishburne Edition. But still.
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post #10 of 67
4/5/09 at 9:53pm
I liked Cudlitz as the gay bartender in FORCES OF NATURE. But that's just me.
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post #11 of 67
4/9/09 at 11:18pm
Not too bad so far. And C. Thomas Howell is in it!
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post #12 of 67
4/10/09 at 12:09am
Will Beall is rather annoyed by this show, given the many similarities to his book.
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post #13 of 67
4/10/09 at 1:42am
I liked it more than I thought I would. I'll be back for more next week.
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post #14 of 67
4/10/09 at 1:53am
We have a lot of wildfires running rampant thru Oklahoma today, so thanks to never-ending news coverage of it (which amounted to two reporters looking at video and making asinine comments) I didn't get to see it.

iTunes, here I come I guess.
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post #15 of 67
4/10/09 at 3:03am
I liked it. It's a bit rough, but I'm willing to stick with it a bit. Although it seems to pull from THE SHIELD a bit much, ignoring the corruption angle of THE SHIELD.

I can't help but think that Regina King and Tom Everett Scott's characters are a poor man's Dutch and Claudette.
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post #16 of 67
4/10/09 at 10:42am
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarleyQuinn22 View Post
I liked it more than I thought I would. I'll be back for more next week.
Me too. I was sort of, "meh", going on but it surprised me. The end was interesting as well.
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post #17 of 67
4/10/09 at 11:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by tommy five-tone View Post
I liked Cudlitz as the gay bartender in FORCES OF NATURE. But that's just me.
Looks like you get more gay Cudlitz to soothe your savage breast.
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post #18 of 67
4/11/09 at 9:21pm
There were a couple stupid things (like Soul Man not letting O.C. guy check area accessible to hands) but I liked the show. I hope they don't pigeonhole faux-Dutch and faux-Claudette as the "emotional" case-working detectives. I liked the pace of the show, too, but I thought they cut the cases together a bit too much. Maybe that's a function of wanting to introduce the huge cast as fast as possible. I suppose we'll find out over the next episode or two.
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post #19 of 67
4/11/09 at 10:19pm
I thought it was a little lame how Regina King needed an epiphany moment to figure out that insects like to devour dead things, or that she would investigate without back up when there were patrol cops twenty feet from where she parked.
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post #20 of 67
4/11/09 at 10:43pm
Not bad for the pilot. It's got me for a couple of weeks.
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post #21 of 67
4/12/09 at 12:23am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Dnim View Post
I thought it was a little lame how Regina King needed an epiphany moment to figure out that insects like to devour dead things, or that she would investigate without back up when there were patrol cops twenty feet from where she parked.
I have to admit, the ant thing got to me, too. As soon as I saw that trail of ants going in and out of that place, I knew something was up and I ain't a cop.
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post #22 of 67
4/18/09 at 10:18pm
Second episode was much better, I thought. They slowed the pace down enough to where it made sense. Training Officer guy was pretty great, as usual. Who else saw the pairing of Deuce Bigelow's girlfriend and Rookie from The O.C. coming a mile away?
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post #23 of 67
4/18/09 at 10:53pm
The bleeping out of the curse words really gets on my nerves.
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post #24 of 67
4/18/09 at 11:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gravedigger View Post
Second episode was much better, I thought. They slowed the pace down enough to where it made sense. Training Officer guy was pretty great, as usual. Who else saw the pairing of Deuce Bigelow's girlfriend and Rookie from The O.C. coming a mile away?
Dark past is such a major draw for the ladies. Do you think his mother was raped in front of him? Or maybe he was?

As for the bleeping, I can ignore it. Although, I wonder about how it usually goes. Do networks just go with bleeping a lot or do they usually just have them cut out if writers have them in scripts? I don't think it happens much on network primetime.
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post #25 of 67
4/18/09 at 11:24pm
The bleeping never happens because (I assume) Standards and Practices is usually all over that shit. The bleeping is the most annoying thing about the show. If you want to be on HBO, be on HBO.
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post #26 of 67
4/24/09 at 3:02am
They need to figure out a way to make Sizemore a regular. Otherwise I'm done.
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post #27 of 67
4/24/09 at 4:54am
Ok, so I caught all of 30 seconds of this earlier tonight and what was up with the hip-hop looking rich dude not wanting to file a police report and Sgt Randleman all rolling his eyes and stuff?
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post #28 of 67
4/24/09 at 10:20am
The guy didn't want to file a report because he was married and didn't want it on the record that he had hoochies over his place while his wife was out of town. He wanted the cops to find his dog and keep it quiet.

What beat do these cops work? Seems like they go from the worst parts of town to multi-million dollar mansions within minutes of each other.
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post #29 of 67
4/24/09 at 11:14am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
What beat do these cops work? Seems like they go from the worst parts of town to multi-million dollar mansions within minutes of each other.
I don't know of any neighborhood around here like that. Unless they're filming in Houston, Texas and making it look like LA.
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post #30 of 67
4/24/09 at 3:25pm
No, they're definitely filming in LA.
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post #31 of 67
4/24/09 at 4:11pm
The bleeping is still bugging the shit outta me. But otherwise I'm liking this show more and more.
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post #32 of 67
4/24/09 at 4:15pm
I'd rather have bleeping than 50 toned-down iterations of "freaking", "farking", "monkey-humping", whatever.
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post #33 of 67
4/24/09 at 4:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by EdHocken View Post
I don't know of any neighborhood around here like that. Unless they're filming in Houston, Texas and making it look like LA.
Sad but true.
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post #34 of 67
4/24/09 at 4:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
They need to figure out a way to make Sizemore a regular. Otherwise I'm done.
Yep.

The bleeping doesn't bother me at all. What does is that you never see them say it. It's either off-camera or the actor's back is to the camera. They should just blur the actors' mouths so we can avoid all of the awkward angles and cuts.
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post #35 of 67
4/26/09 at 10:27pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
What beat do these cops work? Seems like they go from the worst parts of town to multi-million dollar mansions within minutes of each other.
I'm watching the pilot right now. It's not really grabbing me. The style reminds me of Robbery Homicide Division and the characters aren't really defined. Plus I'm really wearly of any cop show set in LA or NY because it's done way too much.

As for the neighborhoods? They're playing with geography. (In fact, they wouldn't be pulling that pretty boy in the Ferrari on Sunset. That would have been done by the Sheriff's because that's West Hollywood) Cops from the North Hollywood division aren't going taking calls all the way downtown.

It's not really an issue but it is an odd thing to do. At least The Shield stayed within one division.
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post #36 of 67
4/26/09 at 10:39pm
It's got C. Thomas Howell dicking it up. And that's never not awesome.
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post #37 of 67
4/26/09 at 10:42pm
I guess. Which one is he supposed to be? I didn't recognize him.
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post #38 of 67
4/26/09 at 10:59pm
Dewey. Not that many of the cops are dicks. Yet.

The guy paired with the girl cop.
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post #39 of 67
4/26/09 at 11:05pm
Oh okay, like I said. The characters are so generic it's difficult to differentiate.
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post #40 of 67
4/26/09 at 11:13pm
True. It gets better though in later episodes and they get more distinct.

I think I've been spoiled by The Shield and The Wire though.
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post #41 of 67
4/26/09 at 11:16pm
For me, it started with Homicide. Be warned it gets steadily worse in the last couple of seasons. But that was a cop show.
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post #42 of 67
4/28/09 at 5:12am
Hell yea, Homicide was probably the first great cop show, but my all time favorite, the Shield.

Southland has a lot of parallels to the Unusuals, I wonder which show is a copy, a reaction to the original.
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post #43 of 67
5/2/09 at 11:27am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
They need to figure out a way to make Sizemore a regular. Otherwise I'm done.
"This week featuring Tom Sizemore as....well, pretty much Himself."
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post #44 of 67
5/2/09 at 1:49pm
I certainly would have watched last Thursday if they had brought him back.

It is a bummer to think how great Sizemore was just 7 years ago on Robbery Homicide Division and contrast that with his appearance on Southland, which while he did entertain me it certainly wasn't much of a stretch from how he appears to be now in real life.

He needs to hook up with a show that could combine his current persona and fuse it with an actual character for him to play. Sons of Anarchy comes to mind.
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post #45 of 67
5/2/09 at 2:49pm
Why weren't the guy from the OC and his partner on this week's episode? It was kinda weird for them to just not be there.
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post #46 of 67
5/2/09 at 3:18pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moltisanti View Post
It is a bummer to think how great Sizemore was just 7 years ago on Robbery Homicide Division and contrast that with his appearance on Southland, which while he did entertain me it certainly wasn't much of a stretch from how he appears to be now in real life.

He needs to hook up with a show that could combine his current persona and fuse it with an actual character for him to play. Sons of Anarchy comes to mind.
He was pretty good in that flick as the cop on the edge under EJO's command a couple of years ago. He could probably pull off a Vic Mackie-type role.
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post #47 of 67
10/8/09 at 11:18pm
NBC does something I never heard of. The renew Southland, produce 6 episodes, and cancel it before Season 2 airs.

Blame Leno
Quote:
While "Southland" enjoyed support among NBC brass last season, after screening the finished episodes from the upcoming second season, the show's content was deemed too dark and gritty for broadcast TV, especially for 9 p.m. Additionally, a high-end drama like "Southland" is certainly far more expensive than newsmagazine "Dateline" for low-trafficked Friday night.
Then put it on USA. Now we get Dateline. Fuck NBC.
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post #48 of 67
10/8/09 at 11:38pm
Ah, NM.

So we get to see the 6 eps on USA then? Am I reading that right?
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post #49 of 67
10/8/09 at 11:38pm
Way not to send that into David, Anya. This is huge news. Should have been a main page story, as this is NBC basically saying fuck you to scripted dramas.
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post #50 of 67
10/8/09 at 11:43pm
Its decisions like this (regardless of what one thinks of Southland) that might get us a fifth season of Heroes. The popular opinion is to just blame it all on Ben Silverman, but NBC has been in last place for a couple of years now. So the problem was never 100% on him like they'd like to believe. Shit won't get any better until Zucker is fired.
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