anyone watching Terra Nova?

Yes, I am watching Terra Nova. I saw the preview and decided that I wanted to get in on this from the beginning. I love the premise. So far the show is great.

TiVo isn't able to be used where I am at. We have a very backward cable company.

 

We are watching it and like it. The writing seems to be pretty good.

 

Going to wait a bit, then use BitTorrent to go get multiple episodes. More rewarding to watch 4 or 5 in a row w/o commercials.

 

At least if you miss it on FOX....Nat Geo has it also. I recognize the hard-nice person Col. from Avatar.....looks like he's playing the same sort of role here.

 

One of the things to watch for during this series is "Plot Entropy". (e.g. Most series starts out with everyone being new to everyone else. By the time the series is ready to be canned, everyone has had conjugal relations with everyone else. Makes it hard to "surprise" the viewers at that point.) It will be seen if the writers are novel and creative.....or resort to being copy cats of other series. That will be the difference maker.

 

Hmmm, let me see . . .

environmental disaster precipitates a new start for humanity some where, some time and dinosaurs! Who ever thought of that is a genius!

 

Yes, Jules Verne was a genius and ahead of his time for science fiction writing.

As for this particular series: I watched the pilot and will probably watch the other episodes to see if there is any development. Right now I'm seeing cliches and future rehashes of Jurasic Park meets "the others" in Lost. If they go JJ Abrams with the plot developments, then I'll probably lose all interest. If they have the exact same formula for every episode the way the first seasons of Enterprise did, I'll lose interest pretty quickly.

 

With proper usage of the Fast Forward control you can watch 4 hours of Shows, in 3 hours!
It's the whole basis for my 4 DirecTV DVR's and 1 TB of memory. I do not watch "Live" TV, why waste that hour. My wife and I can follow continuing plots like Eureka, Dr. Who with much more clarity, besides commercials suck!

 

Only for a little while was I addicted to CNBC to try to track the daily market volitility. It didn't last very long because they are just as sensational as Jim Kramer with most their segments. I'd rather just track stocks or the DOW with the internet. From what I've seen, no one can beat averages: the best ubber hedge fund managers have a 1 percent difference compared to a low cost index fund. I'd rather pay less for a good performing average that will keep going. With all that's happened these past few years, I'm still a proponent for long term investment. Some of my assets are from my grandfathers when I was born: one was a $700 mutual fund from Pioneer investments (a moderate fund that started right before the great crash) and then the other gave me a similar investment in a regional bank. The Pioneer fund grew at a slower rate, but still grew to be equivalent to the bank stock (which really mushroomed because it kept on getting bought out until it was substantial shares in Bank of America). Needless to say my Pioneer funds have stayed very stable compared to my Bank of America stock. I have a few other stocks, but mainly invest in mutual funds that have lower fees. If you want to set it and forget it...diversifying is key. Since I also have family members who are short term investors...and seem to like spending time worrying with individual stocks...I've also anecdotally noted that they aren't swimming in anymore money then my conservative relatives. Anyway, that's my rant about financial news!

I am catching up on some series with Netflix: they're starting to have more series (on many networks) in their streaming section. I also catch series through other methods...there is very few programming I know watch "live" and with commercials.

 

I totally agree with davesrose above on investing. The only individual stocks I own are VERY small positions in a few companies I like for what they are doing, and I don't even regard those as "investments." Rather, they are expressions of support. I own some Toyota, some Panasonic (because they made the batteries for my Prius), some Tesla (very recently). One or two others. Otherwise mutual funds.

As for Terra Nova, after reading this thread I watched the first episode on Hulu. I get no commercials on Hulu. I get a message that says "Sorry. We are unable to load a message from our sponsor." Then asking me to contact them, which I don't.

I found the pilot to be interesting, but formulaic, and the acting to be mediocre. The couple who has an illegal child, and of course we sympathize with the lawbreaker because we like the kid: formulaic, tired. The escape from a maximum security prison using a tiny laser: formulaic, tired. Getting past incompetent security at the gate: formulaic, tired. The hero's real abilities reluctantly recognized: formulaic, tired. The misbehaving kid who screws up but then recognizes the error of his ways: formulaic, tired. The dinosaurs are cool. Dinosaurs are always cool. Too bad they don't say "gronk." And finally, the rebels, who we have a hint might be the good guys after all: formulaic, tired. Someone above pointed out that the general is recycled from Avatar. Well, at least he didn't have to learn to play a different character. Maybe the money they saved by not having to train the actor will be spent on more special effects. I wonder whether the kid's old girlfriend will get through, and then they can have some formulaic, tired tension between the old girlfriend and the new girlfriend and the kid will have some formulaic, tired internal struggle over which one he really loves. And perhaps the hero will realize that he's on the wrong side, just like in Avatar, and end up fighting the general, just like in Avatar.

Hack writing. Mediocre acting. The girls are pretty. That's always nice.

Some suggestions to make it interesting:

A dinosaur eats the little girl, who comes back as a zombie and eats her parents. The old girlfriend comes back, challenges the new girlfriend to a duel, but before they kill each other, they realize the kid isn't worth it, and they kill him instead. Then they kill the older sister so they can seduce and share the older sister's new boyfriend, and the three of them spend a few episodes fighting the little girl zombie, finally running her out of the compound, where she shows up from time to time and eats someone before being chased away again. It turns out that the general's secret agenda is actually to change the future (our present) so that the whole world follows Scientology, but of course he's foiled when the little girl eats him. This should happen early in the series so the three zombie fighters can take over the compound and convert everyone to Pastafarianism. I could go on.

 

I had thought of picking this series up to see if I was interested - but then I read that Brannon Braga (sp?) was responsible for it, I decided I'd rather chew ground automotive glass instead. In case you wondered, he was responsible for killing Star Trek.

 

My husband is...

I walk past the living room and call him a nerd/dork and then move on... lol

 

We have City of Monroe cable. It's a local cable company down here in Georgia owned by the municipality. Even if your television has the GUIDE feature, it doesn't work here. They still use "traps" to deny or grant the four offered pay channels.

 

I decided long ago to bypass all the cable company games. About 95% of what we watch at night is from the major broadcast channels so I record everything we watch over the air (OTA) in full 19.3 mbps HD, 1080p. I built a stand alone box that runs SageTV. I have 6 tuners ( 4 HD and 2 analog) that can all record simultaneously and about 7 TB of storage. I'm only 7 miles from the antenna farm and have my antenna in the attic. Why 6 tuners? There have been many times that we've needed to record 4 shows at once, either due to competitive time slot placement or beginning and ending show overlap.

I run a program in the background (ShowAnalyzer) that automatically detects the commercials and records the timestamps in a file that SageTV reads. That way, when we do watch the show, it skips the commercials without having to do the skip aheads manually with the remote. This also has a second benefit. If it's a TV series that we want to keep long term, I use another program called VideoReDo TVSuite to burn the series to DVD. It reads the commercial skip file I created previously and burns the show to DVD without the commercials.

It sounds complicated, but it's not and I don't pay a penny for the broadcast or to buy TV series on DVD's.

It has the ability to completely change the way you watch TV. We haven't watched a commercial in years.

So far we've been enjoying Terra Nova. It'll be interesting to see how it develops.

 

I can do you one better: I read books. I read them on my Kindle, but folks who don't want to spend the money can always get a library card and read books for free, though they have to go to the library and can only get them during library hours.