Transcript of AE 1386 - The Goss: What TV Shows Are We Watching?

G'day, you mob! Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia. We also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English, and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Dad.

Pete.

Where's the beers?

Yeah. Oh. Hang on. Yes. Wait.

I know. Yeah. Guys, grab a drink. Hang out with us. You don't have to, um, have a beer, obviously, but get something.

Yes.

What are you watching at the moment, Dad? We can do that as a episode.

Ah yeah!

What TV shows are you into?

Um, I'm just trying to think because I've just finished a few.

Dad's so picky, guys.

I know. I know.

He's always asking me about recommendations..

Gives me all these recommendations and then..

You're always like, I watch one episode and it was shit..

Oh, I loved it, yeah.

I know. You've got more patience than I have, though I tend to, and I think we've discussed this before. I tend to, um, fall off things quickly if they don't grab me in the first episode, which is a bit, um, unfortunate because often the first episode is a pilot. And pilot episodes, while they are there to, um, establish credibility for an upcoming show and interest in it, um, they also suffer from not having much plot and they just introduce all the character arcs.

Yeah.

Um, so it can be a bit tedious, so I should give them more, but I don't.

Well, I guess the first thing to say with that I'm watching was that. Yeah. Chief of War.

Yeah.

Which is the Jason Momoa, um, series that's set in Hawaii. And the background of it is that you've got all these kingdoms in Hawaii. I guess they're Polynesians. I mean, they're Hawaiians.

Hawaiian, which are Polynesian.

Yeah. And so they, they speak a language I imagine is similar to Maori. Well, I don't know if they're into.

Polynesian languages are all from the same origin.

Yeah, but can they understand?..

I think they're pretty close. I think Maori is probably. I mean, clearly I am in no way an expert. So I will apologise profusely to all my Maori friends.

Well, there are Polynesians listening to the podcast..

.. apologize to the Polynesians who listen to this, um, but my I expect that Maori is probably as different from Hawaiian as any Polynesian language.

Yeah, because it's so far away.

As the long term isolation. But my understanding is they're basically the same language root. And so it's probably like dialects of English where somebody from Yorkshire couldn't understand somebody from Cornwall.

Yeah, it would be interesting. I should have looked that up ahead of time. But anyway, yeah, so there's all these kingdoms on the different islands of Hawaii and they're sort of battling for power. And at the same time, you've got the outside world like the the Western world has just arrived in Hawaii and found it effective, quote unquote. Found it.

Yeah. Found it where people have been living there for hundreds of years.

But discovered it for the West, right. And they're on the cusp of pillaging the place, you know what I mean? Like they've got all these ships coming out. Some of them are benign, you know, people who are just travelling by and need water or whatever. And others are like, how do we use this place to our benefit, by just pillaging all of the resources or whatever?

And the women?

Yeah, probably. But I heard, I don't know if this is a, um, uh, one of those bullshit stories, but I think I heard that a lot of Polynesian islands. Quite often when they had sailors come by, the tribes would offer up their women to reproduce, have sex with the sailors in order to get more genetic diversity into the islands, because quite often they lived on islands with only a few, you know, a small population of people. I've heard that, but I don't know if that's..

I think that's a hindsight explanation. I expect it was mostly trying to curry favour with them so that they would, um, you know, I think they quickly worked out that they were..

These men that have been at the ocean, the ocean..

But also that they and those they were underpowered in a defensive point of view.

Yeah.

When ships come in with guns and cannon and stuff, then, you know, spears and arrows are not really going to cut it. So, um, I suspect there was a lot of that going on.

Yeah. It's interesting. Anyway, I like it because you got pissed off, I guess, because I was sort of in the Hawaiian language. So you were having to read subtitles the whole time for the first episode or two.

I don't I don't suffer subtitles, really, I can, I can. Funnily enough, I don't speak French or Spanish, but I understand enough of both. Or Hawaiian? Certainly no Hawaiian. Um, but if I'm watching a French movie or a Spanish movie, I'll often turn subtitles off.

Yeah, really?

Um, because I can I can get enough of understanding of it. Whereas I just find, because I'm such a visual person, I just find reading, um, language such a distraction from what's actually going on on the screen.

Just have to watch it twice, Dad!

Yeah.

Just have to do the work. But yeah, anyway, so I enjoyed it. I thought it was cool because, um, it's obviously an effort from Jason Momoa, who is Hawaiian, to try and create Hawaiian content.

Yeah.

For Hawaiian people. That carries the Hawaiian culture, which is kind of cool. But later in the show, they do switch to sort of 50 over 50 English Hawaiian. And I think part of that is because, yeah, there was that interaction happening. The other part is, I think he's probably aware that, um.

People are not going to watch six episodes.

With ten episodes..

With subtitles. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so it's really good.

It's good. And I really enjoyed the first episode.

It's very scenic. You just like, these people live in a wonderland. They're running around with, like, loincloths on in the tropics, and they're, you know, beautiful nature. Like, all this stuff is just growing. The ocean is abundant. Um, I mean, they're warring and having fights all the time.

I think half of it was shot in New Zealand. But, you know, I think some of it was, but.

But it just made me think, God, these. It's funny how some of those, um, groups of people throughout history, you know, like if you could pick any to be it would be somewhere around the tropics as hunter gatherers or as people who are in those tribal societies, you know, a few hundred a thousand years ago. I think the, the lowest on my list would probably be Inuit.

Yeah.

I just, I don't want to be living in the frozen tundra of, you know, the. Yeah. So anyway, Dad's just closing the door because, um, the family's come home. Um, what's what's what have you been watching? What else have you been watching or. And actually enjoying.

And actually enjoying? Excuse me.

That's dying. Jeez.

Yeah, I've still got a way of getting over a month of various diseases.

Everyone's had that.

I know, that bloody chest infection. Bronchitis. Because I get bronchitis as well. So it wasn't just a chest cold, it turned into bronchitis. And being asthmatic, it gets worse. But that's not answering your question. What am I watching at the moment? Um.

The footy.

Yeah, mostly, um, football of various sorts. So, um, American football has just started in September. Um, so I'm sort of addicted to that, both college football and the NFL. And then we're at the end of the AFL Australian football season. The grand final is on two days time. It'll be over by the time this goes to air.

I was going to say, you guys will know the results.

You guys will know the result, yes. Tell us and we'll put our money on it.

Yeah. Geelong versus..

It's gonna be too late to get a bet on.

It's going to be Geelong. Come on. It's got to be.

Oh I think. So I think they'll, I think it'll be actually fairly one sided. But yeah I've been wrong plenty of times before.

Yeah.

Um so yeah. What am I watching? Um..

Any good series? You were bingeing a whole bunch of things.

I was, I was, and I sort of finished them. We've been going over some old stuff. Old, uh, British police shows.

Yeah. Okay.

Um..

What is it, Hart? What's it called again? That one. That was, that was on in the 90s.

Uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember the name of that.

Yeah, but.

There was so many of these small town British TV shows about policing, right?

Yeah, yeah. I've actually just started one. Uh, that's old now. It's not British. It's Canadian, um, called Hudson and Rex, and it's sort of a six and a half to seven out of ten light police show.

Yep.

About a detective and his dog, who's an ex K-9 police dog that has been adopted by this guy. And they go around doing their thing, but it's shot in, um, Saint John's in Newfoundland. So it's sort of fairly picturesque again. And you go, oh, I've been there. Oh, look at that. Yeah. And to the point where I've, I've actually I've only been to Newfoundland once and I spent most of the time indoors at Memorial University, and the police station is shot in one of the buildings at Memorial University. And the first time they walked through it, I went, I've walked down that corridor! It's really weird.

So it's funny how important TV shows like it is to kind of get a picturesque place just to kind of carry the show visually.

Yeah.

Do you feel like that at times?

Television. It's obviously a visual thing.

Yeah. Um, but I get sucked into those shows, too, even if I'm not necessarily able to just. Ah, the story, the story, the story is the only thing I really care about. If it's beautifully filmed, the story can kind of lag a bit and it's still decent. Like I watched The Survivors recently. H,ave you seen that one yet on Netflix?

I haven't. No.

It's based in Tasmania. It's a it's written by, I think the woman who wrote The Dry.

Mhm.

And um.

Yeah I've read the book.

Yeah ah okay.

I watched the show.

The show was really good because it's just the scenery. I just love that scenery, that same sort of vibe that I had as a kid watching TV shows like Round the Twist or SeaChange, where it's filmed along the coastline and there's these beautiful backdrops all the time. But then you also have this compelling story that's told. So this Tasmanian, um, sort of small town TV show just yeah, it has the backdrop of beautiful cliffs, the forests, the ocean, the mountains there. And it's just yeah, there's a vibe to it that I feel like I really sucks me. In that first episode, I saw that I was like, I just like that beautiful landscape and everything, especially when it makes it feel like it's a town far away from everything else. They kind of make it feel like it's isolated, even though you look it up online where the place actually is, and it's like ten minutes from Hobart or something, you're like, oh, okay, they've just avoided filming any Hobart in any of the, um..

Yes. They just shoot away from the city. Yeah.

Yeah, that's it. And it just feels like it's.

Yes.

In the middle of nowhere. Anyway, what are you watching or what have you watched besides that?

Yeah, well, hark back to my old favourite Heartland. That Canadian show shot in, um, the foothills of the Rockies in Alberta. And again, same thing. It's the scenery in it and stuff as well. And so much of it is shot outdoors.

Yeah.

Um, that it's sort of seductive in the, in all the B-roll stuff as well. And I've often said that regardless of the plot and everything else, they don't waste a shot.

Yeah.

Yeah. Every shot is shot in really good lighting. And they manage to to get even the indoor stuff. You know, it shot really beautifully. Um, and so season 18 has just come out on Netflix. I've already watched it, um, via, uh, a VPN connection to Canada.

Yeah, I know you have to get around it, right.

And season 19 is about to come out in Canada live, so I'll be able to catch that, but so I've been slow binge, if that's not an oxymoron, uh, slow binge watching the sort of last few seasons leading up to 18 again and then. So 19 will hit in a few weeks.

Yeah.

So.

What else? I was gonna say something. I love that.

Well that's good. I'm like, this makes good radio.

Don't forget the question. Don't forget the question. And then you get to the chance where you can, you know, ask it. And it's like, what was the fuck?

Yes.

Oh, Yellowstone. Did you finish that? Have you smashed out all of that?

I have not done that yet. No.

Yellowstone is another series that's similar in terms of like...

I got you sucked into that...

Yeah, yeah, I binged the whole thing really quickly, but it's, um, based in Montana, Yellowstone National Park, right. Or that area.

Yeah.

And, um, it's that kind of what would you say? It's kind of like, um, underbelly family mafia type thing with, um, ranch life.

Yes.

As well as business side of it. And all of these sort of worlds are intertwined. The lore, the indigenous like the indigenous side to it as well. They have the local kind of, um, Indian, Native American, sorry, um, people that are that are a big part of the story as well.

Yes.

And you kind of like, it's just cool that they've included all those areas and you get to touch on all of them.

Yeah. Funny that you mentioned Yellowstone connection with, with Heartland. Uh, listen to Amber Marshall, who's one of the stars of heartland.

She's the only reason you watch it!

Well, no. Not quite. Um, listening to her, um, a couple of years ago, talking about watching Heartland on TV, and she says I very rarely watch it, but it comes on a Sunday night and it leads into Yellowstone. And so she said, I watched an episode of me on TV, and Heartland is a very sort of family oriented, wholesome, sort of PG rated TV show, shot in a very similar fashion to Yellowstone of outdoors, mountains.

Ranch.

Ranch, horses, cattle, all that stuff. Um, and she said, yeah, it's not quite the same vibe. I really love Yellowstone, but it's not quite the same vibe where people are being shot and kidnapped. And.

Yeah, it's something, something about it, right?

Yeah.

It was really good, but I yeah, I finished that. So I'm looking forward to, I think he's going to do another season or series.

There's supposed to be a post season come out. Well there's now they've done two prequels and they're supposed to be an entire prequel coming out.

Yeah.

But there's also, I think, potentially a post one. Yeah, not season seven or whatever it is, but another show that's based on two of the main characters..

Yeahh okay.

And what happens to them.

It's pretty clever. Like, so Yellowstone was the main one. I think they started with, right. And this family on this ranch in Montana that had been, um, settled by that original family.

Yeah.

Um, you know..

Generations ago, in the 1880s.

And then as a result, they've kind of gone through those different periods of time to for the pre prequel seasons..

They made 1888.

Yeah. Where they showed how the people got there along the Oregon Trail.

Yeah. Yeah. And then 1923.

Yeah. And then I think they're gonna have a 1941..

In the 40s or 50s or something.

Yeah. So anyway, that's a really cool one. Obviously not Australian. Um, what else have I been watching? Alien Earth. I'm, I just finished yesterday.

Oh, really?

So that's the Alien franchise. But it's a series, and the premise is that this young boy genius is a trillionaire. Um, he's got this tech company, has an island where he's got his facility, and he's got these terminally ill children that are obviously going to die that have signed up to, um, what would you say, like transfer their consciousness into, um, what are the names of the things, the sort of like robots that they have.

Oh, Android.

The android. It's not a mix between a human android thing, but it's a, it's a they're completely digital like robot things, but they get the mind transferred and then, um, so there's it's really interesting. Initially I really enjoyed it because they've set it up to have this huge parallel between Peter Pan. So this like, um..

Yeah.

This genius considers himself Peter Pan, and the Lost Boys are these children that have been, um, turned into these.

Is there a Wendy character?

Yeah!

Yeah.

She's the main one, right. And anyway, it's really interesting because they have like it's prior to, I think the alien movies coming out.

Right.

Where the first time that these creatures have been, these different alien creatures that are very dangerous have been out and found in different planets. And this other, um, tech billionaire woman family group have tried to get these weapons effectively, these alien organism weapons, they try and ship them across, and then it gets the ship crashes into this guy's, um, place, right. And so he ends up getting them and being like, what the shit is this? What's going on here with these? And wants to use them for his own ends?

Right.

And then in the whole series, this Wendy, this character, good guess. She's sort of trying to work out who she is, what she is, how she fits into it with her lost boys. Because they're not children. They're not adults, they're not human. They're not robots. There's something in between all of this. And, um, she can, yeah, communicate with the alien.

So, yeah, I like I like those.

Like it..

It's kind of like those sort of science fiction shows where the premise is well established and it could be, you know, completely impossible in a sense, of our understanding of modern understanding of science. But if they set the premise up well enough and they stick to their own rules, then those shows work. Um, Stargate was a good example.

Oh, I love Stargate.

Star Trek. Yeah. You know, and apologies to all the Trekkies out there, the hundreds of millions of Trekkies out there. Yeah. But I enjoyed watching Star Trek, but it didn't suck me in.

I never got into it.

Because it had no premise. It was just travelling around the universe.

Yeah, doing stuff.

Doing stuff. Whereas Stargate had this premise of being able to travel to different places in the universe through a Stargate. Yeah. And and.

Oh, those were the days where you would have a 22 episode season.

Yeah, exactly.

My God, those were the days!

So. So that whole premise and the premise of having, um, aliens, having taken human beings as um hosts to their the aliens become parasites, uh, and took humans as hosts and established human populations in various places around the world.

So that they could take them as hosts..

So they could take them as hosts meant that..

Around the universe? You mean not around the world?

Sorry, around the universe. Uh, but actually meant that they, uh, the TV show could take humans from different periods in our history and and established different cultures around the universe.

Oh and the best thing was, they all spoke modern English.

They did! Yeah, exactly.

That's a thing. Looking back, that really jolts me out of it. You're like, they all have North American accents!

All speak like Canadians!

There's no Australians. There's no Spanish, there's no Africans. There's just, they're all just.

Not even anybody from Alabama. They're all Canadian.

The other thing is, like when you watch that series, you're like, there's just- every planet has fucking pine trees.

Yes. Yeah!

It's all the Rockies..!

Looks like Vancouver.

And I'm like, where are the desert planets?

I know, but it was. But it was an interesting premise that they stuck to their. Their own sort of, you know, fictional physics and um, so that sort of stuff works, I think, because you understand the world and you and you accept that it's not real and just move on.

Yeah. Um, well, they do have a few of those. Is it, like deus ex machina type things or. Oh, we have this. Is it Naquadah. We have this special new element that allows us to create insane amounts of energy that allow us to travel through space. And you're like, ah, it sounds good enough. You know, like.

Exactly, exactly. But yeah.

I can get on with that as opposed to just 'we just can'.

Yes, exactly.

I need to go back and watch Stargate.

They came up with a fictional explanation to a physics problem.

Mhm. The Foundation is the other one that I've been watching.

Well, yeah.

They finished season three of..

Asimov's.

Yeah. Isaac Asimov. Yeah, that was really good. I kind of liked the idea of having. They have an empire that is a galactic empire. I assume it's within the one galaxy. It's not universal throughout the universe, but it's the one galaxy. They have all these planets under their control. Thousands of different planets. And in order for the empire to sort of maintain its leadership, they have clones of the same original emperor.

Yeah.

And three of them alive at any one time. Again, so that they have like if they go to a vote, there's always 2 to 1 usually. Um, but they'll have a young one, Brother Dawn. They have Day, Brother Day. And then they have Brother Dusk, who's the older one. So they'll have like a 20 year old, a 40 year old and a 60 year old. And then at every certain age, for the 60 year old, he just gets snuffed, you know, like, just gets obliterated. And then they just.

Have another one.

Another baby. And so it's a really kind of interesting premise that they've had like 30 of these generations to maintain. So there's always effectively the same quote unquote person or people in charge, but they have different personalities each time and they travel through time quite a bit. Hundreds of years.

Yes.

Over this period. So he keeps. It's funny. They can use the same actors and the same characters, but the characters change their personalities because obviously they're new people each time that have new lived experiences. So I don't know, it was an interesting one watching that and how, how they, the premise was just interesting. You know, it was kind of cool watching that.

Yeah, it's funny, I didn't get into it as a TV show. Surprise, surprise, says Pete. Um, but not because I didn't get into it. Because the story is so good. The trouble is that I'd read the books when I was a teenager.

I've never read them.

And..

I know just the idea but.

And so I had that universe, the the visual of that universe already stuck in my head in a 1960s, 70s version of it.

It'd be like someone making a remake of Lord of the Rings films or something, right? And you'd be like, I've read the books and seen the originals, and they're just such a big.

Exactly. You already have..

Can't just redo them.

I know. And the whole thing was so sort of, you know, 2020s 20. I'd that I just went you don't need to do that. You know, you could actually, but now- I know. And now there is this expectation that everything is going to be so visually spectacular.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, the same as Dune.

Dune was good. Yeah.

The movie Dune.

Um, the book, I thought. And it's it's still the best selling science fiction book ever, I think.

Really? Okay.

Yeah. Um, you can fact check me on that one. Um, the.

Hey, Siri.

Again, I read that in the 70s, and I had the visual of what it looked like, and the movie was just way over the top. The modern movie was way over the top.

Mhm. It's number three.

1984 is number two, George Orwell. And then The Hunger Games is number one.

Well yeah. Again I would put Dune as a legitimate science fiction.

Foundation is number four.

Yeah eighty- 1984 is sort of a, a sort of futuristic rather than science fiction. And the same with Hunger Games. Hunger Games requires no science. It's simply..

Just in the future.

It simply set in the future with a different. It's a, it's sort of a, sort of future sociology.

Yeah.

Which is exactly the same as 1984. So there's no science involved in those other than the fact that, um, in 1984, they predicted a whole lot of technology that they got exactly right. Um. But.

Yeah, I like The Expanse. That was a good one, sci fi wise, right.

Yes.

You finished that, didn't you?

Yeah.

The Expanse was really good. Again just.

Very dark.

Dark as in?

As in, well, dark as in, it's shot almost entirely in what we would call night.

Yeah. Well, they're in space, Dad!

Yes, but but it's. But even even when they're inside buildings, it's dark. And dark, as in sort of, you know, almost film noir style plots.

Yeah. There aren't very many happy moments.

No, exactly.

But yeah, it's not. It's kind of..

It's like a, it really is a film noir western was shot as a sci fi space thing.

What was the one with, um, uh, what's his name? Harrison Ford, that sci fi that famously had him in it in the 80s. Not not, um, Star Wars, the other one, uh, Blade Runner.

Blade Runner.

That kind of vibe to it, right? Where it's like night time raining, like, all the time. Kind of dark. Yeah, I know what you mean. Dark.

Yeah.

But, yeah, The Expanse was a really good sci fi. That was probably one of the last, most recent sort of sci fi that I watched that was like full on sci fi. And I like that. That was at least like, realistic with time, space, um, travel energy. Like, the ships can't just randomly, you know, coast to the side and turn like a jet in...

Yeah, I know, yeah.

And they have to, like, sense the other ships, um, heat signals to work out what they are, which.

But it was all, it was also shown to, that time, it was also shot in real time.

Yeah.

That there wasn't any. Oh, well, now we'll just jump three minutes.

Ah yeah.

For something to happen. It was sort of. Well, this happens tomorrow.

Yeah.

So.

It was a good one. But yeah. Any other things? Anything.

Excuse me for coughing up my lungs here. Forgive the coughs. They won't be edited out.

Yeah. Probably not. You guys can handle it. It's part of English.

Hey, this is. This is a modern conversation.

You have to learn to cough with an Aussie..

Sick old man.

But, um. Anything on the list? What are you watching at the moment, or what are you going to watch?

What am I going to watch?

Is there anything you really like that's in the pipeline?

There's a few queued up and I can't remember any of them at the moment. I've got this. Well, the trouble with once you, um, subscribe to things like Netflix, they send you an update every day of things that are coming. You know, what's coming in the next month. And you scroll through and go, remind me, remind me, remind me, and you just forget about them until it pops up in your watch list.

So yeah, what have I got? I've got The Walking Dead, Daryl Dixon, season three.

I'm not a Walking Dead fan.

Task. I'm watching Task.

Haven't heard that one. What's that?

Um, it's about a group of people who are ripping off bikie drug houses and stealing the money. They've got an insider that's feeding them information, and they're robbing these houses.

Right.

And a sort of ragtag FBI, um, team has been put together to tackle this issue and try and catch them. Yeah. Hence, Task. And obviously all these characters have their own background information and issues and backstories and everything like that, that also go along in parallel, um, with it. But that was pretty interesting. And then I'm trying to think I've just, um, tried to find a whole bunch of Australian films recently to go and check out. I've gone through like it's one of those things I get on ChatGPT and I'm like, give me a list of, you know, the five best films to watch for every single year in Australia back to 1990. And then I just try and find them all. You know, I want to go through Australian film, but.

I gave you a list of a few because you gave me a list of, hey, here's the top ten or something. And.

Yeah.

Well, I've got ten more that could have been in the top ten.

Yeah, you had a whole bunch. I need to go through that and make that video.

Yeah.

South Park watching a little bit of that, that's coming out. That's pretty funny. And then, um, Futurama just dropped another season. I like Futurama. Talk about sci fis.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's the parody of sci fi. All they do is talk about it.

Well, it's just funny. Yeah, they come up with the craziest kind of things that are just hilarious. And I love Bender the Robot. Anyway. Yeah. Anything else to mention or are you sort of..?

Nah, I'm out.

You're out? All right. Thanks for joining us, guys. And we'll see you next time!

Bye!

See ya.