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I finally had a chance to see the entire series. Is there only 10 episodes or am I missing something? Was the last show the one about Simcoe being restained after shooting the uncle and the Continental's leaving in the boats? Just a little confused but really like the series. It would be great if they brought it back.
 
My daughter works in NYC in a job where she brokers networks, new shows and sponsors. She told me last May that TURN was going to be renewed, and it has been very interesting reading all these posts.

Being connected to the media as such, having lived to age 66 without getting arrested, having watched as many movies on our topics as I could get my hands on, having always looked for another book or article or web topic and having just about milked this hobby/sport for everything I could, I thought I'd share some ideas I was fortunately not too obtuse to pick up on...

No matter how you shake, rattle and roll it, Hollywood is an illusion. They do the best they can. Imagine our lives with the media taken out of it and you can forgive a lot more.

Watch each episode or TURN at least twice. You get past the flaws and perceive it's virtues...great sets, detailed stuff to look at, and character portrayals that might make you go back and re-read some of your sources.

Try to put whatever movie you are watching into the culture and values of the era it was performed in rather than just being another revisionist historian. It's a lot more fun, and you won't get as frustrated as you will trying to cope with the most recent trends of unnecessarily hushed voices or unreasonably dark cinematography.

Hollywood has come a long way from doctored Trapdoor Springfields to Replica Brown Besses.

The only cure for the above I have ever seen is to wait with the patience of a hunter for the directors cut to come out. The Lord Of The Rings, for example, cleared up every fault it had and even added footage left out subjectively by the director by the time they came out with their final version with which to harvest more profits.

Try to stay away from the ..."Making of..."... sequences where all the actors and actresses pat themselves on the back. It tends to spoil the illusion.

I'm old enough to remember when news shows did not occupy 24 hours a day. We're all ready to clobber mouthy actors and actresses over their political views because CNN, Fox et al have to fill air time whereas prior to Cable nobody cared about the political views of the Thesbian.

They'll always get my attention on anything about Robert Rogers. That's the main reason I started to look at movies more than once so I could pick up details and go back to my book shelf. Probably Angus MacFayden's only real fault is that he is six inches too short. I don't even know what sort of accent Rogers spoke with but the seedy guy Angus portrays is pretty close to the real Rogers at that point in his career.

Yeah, I am gonna watch Season Two, the usual point in a series where the writers start to run out of ideas and stray from the original values of the historically based series. I'll be flipping past the multitude of stupid shows on TV just like everybody else, but I'll be dipped if I am gonna cut short a Sunday shooting match just to get home to see what happens to Captain Simcoe, or how many more times couples will jump each others bones when you don't need to see that at all, or five minutes of show for every five minutes of commercials.

Now, go swab your bore. It's gonna be a long winter.
 
You seem to miss the point of the objections....


No matter how you shake, rattle and roll it, Hollywood is an illusion. They do the best they can.

Really? Being from a Television family myslef, having worked on and in both historic miniseries and stuff for the Discovery Channel...NO THEY DON'T.

Hollywood has come a long way from doctored Trapdoor Springfields to Replica Brown Besses.

Which is why we find fault with what they do TODAY. Nobody is really miffed that in 1937 Spencer Tracy has the wrong gun, wrong hat, and wrong clothes.

It's not just in the historic pieces, but in the VAST MAJORITY of what they do. Poor scripts from LAZY RESEARCH or NO RESEARCH at all, and it's not because they aren't historians, but because they simply don't care, and think most of us are stupid.

HEAT by Michael Mann (who also did Last of The Mohicans). I love Mann's work but his shootout was one of the WORST premised scenarios. Pacino and his crew set up around a bank in the middle of the day where bank robbers are KNOWN to have fully automatic weapons, and intend to engage in a running gun battle? Pacino's entire crew of cops would all be suspended 20 minutes after the shooting stopped.

Last of The Mohicans by Mann, they hired Dale Dye and some other clown to teach the extras the musket drill.... Dye is a well known name as a modern military movie advisor, but he doesn't know the drill, nor did his assisstant. 18th century musket drill is no more complicated than what they hashed together. Would it have been so tough to do it right???

HAWAII Five-0 remake....episode 1 Danno picks up a spent shell casing from a crime scene with his pencil, and drops it into his shirt pocket, not to mention without crime scene photos, etc. REALLY? (That manure went out with Sgt Joe Friday and DRAGNET 1969)

Back to historic stuff, REIGN about Mary Queen of Scotts, created by Stephanie SenGupta (the same "genius" who did Hawaii Five-0 reboot)...the Scottish boyfriend of one of Queen Mary's ladies wanders into the castle of the King of France, and finds his lady taking a bath...all without speaking French, never having been inside the castle before, not being stopped by any guards, after travelling all the way from Scotland. REALLY? (one of many "problems" with that show)

In The Patriot they changed the name of Bannaster Tarleton to Colonel Tavington, and set him as the villain. OK we get that they did some camera tests with the bad guys in the proper green uniforms, and this confused the average joe, so they put Tavington's men in red coats too. No complaints

But in TURN they took the name of a very honorable man, John Graves Simcoe, and used that for a very villainous character. The real Simcoe in Canada
"...was instrumental in introducing institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law, freehold land tenure, and the abolition of slavery. Slavery was ended in Upper Canada long before it was abolished in the British Empire as a whole; by 1810, there were no slaves in Upper Canada, but the Crown did not abolish slavery throughout the Empire until 1834." (Wikipedia) So why not change the name of the villain to Simpson, or Blackcoe or such?

Especially when there is often LOTS of nasty stuff that you can use that actually happened, so why make stuff up? Remember the church burning in Patriot? Well it NEVER HAPPENED, but Tarleton's men did ride into a regiment of Virginians who were surrendering and holding their muskets above their heads.... hacked them to pieces with sabers...so why invent the church scene? Heath Ledger's family could've been put into a prison ship to rot...that would've been horrible and accurate...

The problem is with the poor, lazy writing done by hack writers for hack producers... and much less the material faults such as the proper muskets and such.

LD
 
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Like I said...

No matter how you shake, rattle and roll it, Hollywood is an illusion. They do the best they can.

It ain't gonna change. We choose what we watch.
 
It's "Entertainment".
If you don't like it don't watch it.
What's the sense of complaining about a consumer product.
Simple, don't like it being a consumer of it,, don't.
I haven't paid for cable TV or News for years and I have no antenna to receive broadcast.
I pump everything to the HDTV from the computer for free, or DVD.
I select what I watch commercial free, If I don't like it I turn it off.
 
Huge difference between entertainment and a documentary.
Literary license is taken in entertainment. I appreciate the greater effort to be correct. I have seen horse drawn wagons with modern metal hub wheels in rev war civilian wagons in the movies. I don't expect the actress to wear hand sewn hand woven linen drawstring bloomers under her dress. I've never heard anyone complain that the actors do not have typical 18th century dentition.
 
Funny you should mention that....I often notice when the actors have improperly perfect teeth...it is bothersome...a really well done movie would account for that...
 
They do the best they can.

Greg, I just demonstrated that they don't do the best they can.

Necchi,

Voicing one's opinion about the difficiencies in a product is part of the process of improvement.

Folks may settle for something because they don't know better... they don't know they're being duped. Pointing out descrepancies or difficiencies sometimes garners enough consumer negative reaction to get a product changed.

I don't watch TURN nor the other examples of the series that I mentioned, because they suck in ways that could've been avoided without extra cost to the production..

LD
 

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