'Southland' on TNT HD

I was wonderring where the thread was. I guess few watched it? I have it on my DVR and will watch sometime over the weekend

Great show... I will watch even if I have to drop others from the DVR

Glad to hear it was good. I here you on the DVR thing I wish D* would come out with a 3 or 4 tuner box.

Recorded, haven't watched yet.

I was looking at the ratings for Southland in fredfa's "Latest TV News" thread and Southland performed very well in its debut. It retained its audience throughout the night, and didn't have an audience drop off. So I guess viewers enjoyed the show as well.

Good news.

Same here


Great DVR ratings

Really liked it and it's got that "Colors" vibe going on. If you like the movie Colors I suggest at least recording an episode and giving it a look. It's already set up for season pass on my dvr.

Decent show. Very weak time slot. Unfortunately, it's a slot where I usually sit down at night and do some work before going to sleep.

The show got better as it went along. Had a couple solid moments (the shooting and when the main character was talking to the teenage girl in the hospital).

I'm not crazy about the editing style. A little too short attention span at times.

Not bad overall. Could be very good once they home in on the better parts of the show.

Obviously, assuming the show lasts, that will change in the fall season as there won't be a 10pm time slot on NBC anymore.


I agree, both of those scenes were quite good.


I'm guessing we'll either get used to it or it will get into a groove as you mention below.


Also, I always thought Ben McKenzie didn't quite fit the role he played on The OC, but so far I like him in the role in Southland.

Watched it last night. They jumped from scene to scene a little quickly, but overall I liked the show.

I loved this show its about time someone made a show about street cops in the black and white units because i was getting tired of detective shows like law&order. this was adam 12 for the 21st century! I wish it was on every night!! NBC is showing the pilot again saturday night!.

Watched it last night. Not too bad but the camera work was so bad at times (probably intentional) that I felt like puking at times! I hate all this excessive shaking, in too close, rapid panning and zooming that is so prolific nowadays.

It's from the same producers as ER, & the shooting style looks similar. The dialogue was a little fast. I found myself rewinding several times to make sure I got everything that was said.

Good show, though. I have a friend who's LAPD. When he was first interested in the career, he went on a ridealong in a black & white. He said it was so interesting that 12 hours flew by like nothing. I felt the same way watching the pilot. Hope they keep it up.

The song at the end was pretty cool. Did anyone else notice that the Training Officer was at a gay bar in the end?

A pretty good show...has promise but I'm surprised at one thing. It seems they don't have a very sharp technical consultant making the show more accurate. There were four or five glaring errors that would never happen in a real situation. Like escorting a suspect back into a crime scene with just one cop around. Many such errors that make it less appealing to someone familiar with law enforcement procedure.

Has anyone read anything about the production on this show? IMDB has a credit for a Red Camera tech, so I assume they were shooting on a Red One. I thought there were a number of scenes that had pretty conspicuous HD video production. It was interesting to see that on a primetime drama as most are either done on film or processed to resemble film. It ended up having a really raw, Michael Mann feel to it that I thought was a pretty interesting style choice.

Yep, the guy talking about getting arrested was the guy the other cops had in the backseat earlier in the show.

I thought it was just ok and will give it a couple of more weeks not sure what I was expecting but to me they just kept switching around to different story lines a little to fast for me.

So far so good for me. I'll stick around.

Reminded me of the 'Shield' type of filming

Fast pace, Lot going on..

I enjoyed this as a return to a police squad style show that's been missing from network for a long time.

What I didn't love was the idiotic bleeping of words. I would assume they did it to give you the impression that it's filmed by a documentary crew but I just thought it was stupid. The show production is too glossy to be a convincing fake documentary so bleeping words detracted from the drama.

I can see what you're saying. I thought though that the "bleeping" was good, in that it allowed them to make the show more realistic, using language that would realistically happen. Bleeping the words is as close as they could get to actually saying the words on network TV. I mean, "Gosh darn it" doesn't sound very real to me...

Only read, perhaps at Reduser.net, that they'd use Red digital-cinema cameras as they did for E.R.'s final 7 episodes. E.R.'s final shows seemed to have a flat look, but it didn't seem as bad for Southland here.

Also curious to learn if they're shooting at ~4k with the Reds, then downconverting to 1080/24p. That could provide a big boost, resolution-wise, as discussed in the current thread about "400 Years of the Telescope." , where its producer mentions they did down-scale from ~4k to 1080p.

Southland, being fictional, of course requires camera diffusion filters and lots of selective focusing to blur the backgrounds and save viewers from too much distracting fine detail. Also brings to mind a just-cited comment about diffusion filters from a noted cinematographer. -- John

That scene bothered me, too.

However, I really enjoyed the show overall. I'll think I'll keep doing so as long as it stays as good as it was in the premiere.

It was never a problem for Boomtown, NYPD Blue or Homicide. They were all gritty police dramas and got around the language issue without needing to bleep stuff for no reason.

Either swear or don't. Either go the whole way with a documentary feel or don't. Shooting as a drama and editing the language doesn't work. It just pulls you out of the scene.

They bleeped words on The Middleman and it was hilarious, because they knew it was out of context.

Its an incentive to buy the DVD someday so you can hear them swear.

Isn't the opening music the same as from the film Primal Fear?

The first half of the episode was good, the second half, not so much. Better then the "Unusuals" but still needs to grow on me.

I had setup a season pass on my TiVo for Southland but the premier got preempted locally because of bad fires and property damage all the local stations were covering that night. I watched about half of the second episode last night and found it interesting enough to go back and watch the first episode on NBC's on demand site earlier today. I thought it was terrific and showed a lot of promise for the series. The dynamic between the young rookie cop and his sometimes mean but usually competent partner-trainer is very interesting. The scene that indicated the senior cop is probably gay was also an intriguing twist.

I have not yet finished the second episode but hope to do so soon. The part I have seen is not nearly as compelling as the first episode but has been all right, nonetheless.