Around the world in 80 Days with David Tennant

[dieastra]

Guys! Friends! Lovers of David Tennant! alumfelga!

I can't be the only one being OBSESSED with "Around the World in 80 Days"? Where are you? I need people to talk to!

For the unaware amongst us: It is a new 8 part series, NOT made by the BBC. It's made by a TV alliance of several countries, mainly Germany, France and Italy. But it does currently air at the BBC and in America it is airing at PBS. Poor guys only getting it once a week on Sundays. It will take them forever to go through.

In Germany it aired over three days before Christmas. I recorded it but hesitated to watch as usually German TV is dubbed. But to my delight it was available in original language and there are several different original languages from whichever country they travel to which makes it rich and full. So I only watched it last Sunday. When I say watched, what I mean is I binged it within one day. Yes, it's that good.

I was not yet sure after the first episode. David's Philas Fogg is a very insecure angsty man. But of course he grows, and with him grow the other characters. It is a modern and fresh take. It's very funny, I have been giggeling at times. It's also heartbreaking. David can show the full range of his acting.

Yes, there are those that say it does not stay true to the book, and how dare they have a black man and a woman in main roles. Ignore those ignorants! Go watch for yourself! On Twitter we are loving it, and we even already have fanfictions. One of them is by me:

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Around%20the%20World%20in%2080%20Days%20(TV%202021)/works

Everyone is embracing this new fandom, and a second season (with a different adventure) already was confirmed before it even aired.

Did I say it's good? How could I have even any doubt. Everything David Tennant is in is good. I am just falling in love with him all over again. It also has a certain Doctor Who feeling, which I think may be intentional. Him travelling the world with companions, running around with coat tails flapping, and looking at a fobwatch.

What are you still waiting for? Go watch, watch it now! Watch it till the end, and then come talk to me!

Comments

[dieastra.livejournal.com]

Usually it's the other way around, we getting stuff much later than America. They really should think anew about this. In these days of the internet, it is impossible to avoid spoilers. They should drop everything in the whole world at the same time. It's not too much to ask?

There was a huge uproar with the new Star Trek Discovery show. Shortly before the fourth season started, only days, they announced it would be only available in America. It was pulled from Netflix all over the world and put on Paramount. Which would be fine, fans were willing to pay for that but then it was said Paramount is not available yet in Europe. We may get the service some time this year, months later.

You cannot expect people to stay away from the internet for months! So the fans made a huge stink and they caved and now put it on Pluto TV, even for free. But that's still available in much less countries than Netflix was before.

Yeah, I've read those reviews too. There are tons of bad ones on IMDB. I have no idea whether we watched the same show. I have the suspicion they only watched the first or maybe second episode and then gave up. But you have to see it as a whole. He brought me to tears in the last episode!

Yes, there are side disctractions (a friend complained "they are talking a lot" but that's the whole character growing thing I am talking about! I think it is mostly women who like it and mostly men who complain ;) It's worth for David Tennant alone. And since you are a David Tennant fan I am certain you will like it. I think I can promise that. As pathetic and helpless as he is in the first episode.

And that's why I wrote this entry, to counterpoint all the negativity. There are a lot of excited fans, and we are getting louder.

I hear the French already have a DVD set, I'm sure more will come. Give it some time.

[shivver13.livejournal.com]

The big problem is that general streaming services like Netflix realize that nothing stops the signal, so they expand their services internationally pretty quickly (barring legal problems) - after all, your euros are as valuable as our dollars, but the individual studios want to make all that money for themselves, rather than having Netflix be the middleman, so they create their own streaming service and think they only need to serve the US. When they finally realize that streaming overseas is both easy and lucrative, they don't have the infrastructure and don't know the legalities, so it takes them so much longer to expand.

Yeah, the IMDB reviews seem largely based on the first episode alone. That's one thing I really hate about these public review sites - you never know how much of the show the person has actually seen.

[dieastra.livejournal.com]

It was the same when Orville came out. The critics had seen only the first two episodes, of which two are funny comedy and the third is proper Star Trek like making you think, and they wrote so awful reviews, saying the show didn't know what it wanted to be, and should decide for either humor or drama. While this is exactly what I love about! It even inspired me to finally do the Stargate rewatch I had planned for years. Same feeling.

Of course, once second season came around, they got a rate of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which practically never happens! So, never trust the critics.

Everything you say about the studios is true. I haven't followed it too closely, but apparently it's not yet sure whether we will be able to book Paramount individually, or only as an added side package to Sky. In that case it would mean you would have to book the bigger service, just to get this one. That's crazy.

I'm pretty new to Netflix myself, for a long time I was not sure whether my internet connection and my old TV can do it. But when I read about streaming in the past years, I always thought it would be one big pool of things, one access, and then one evening you decide what you want to watch, and pay for this one thing. That way those that made it would get the money directly. Why is it not like that? Then you would have not to look which service had what. Just the whole media, all in one place. Forever!

[shivver13.livejournal.com]

In a way, it's the same thing that happened to Firefly. When Fox started airing it, they aired the episodes in a random order, rather than in the designed order, so the audience had no idea what was going on. Thus, they didn't continue watching it after the first couple of episodes, and Fox decided to cancel it because its viewing numbers were low.

There are some pay-per-view services, such as Amazon, where you can either purchase a digital copy of something and watch it any time, or pay to rent it (I don't know how it works, like maybe you get two viewings, or maybe it's for three days). They also have a subscription service, too, just like Netflix.

I think Netflix in specific is designed the way it is because it evolved out of its original DVD service, which was pay X a month, then request any DVDs you want, which are mailed to you and you mail back after you've watched them. When they added streaming, they probably couldn't easily change from that model. And then the other streaming services followed the leader.

One of the reasons why my husband and I have not seen all the content we want is because everything is so fragmented with all the different services - for example, we haven't seen most of the newer MCU stuff because it's on Disney+ and we haven't bothered to subscribe. At this point, we choose what we want carefully and usually just buy whatever it is on Amazon, so that everything we care about is in one place, as you said.