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millionreasonsTwo Doors Down. The Guardian recommended the Hogmanay special about a couple adapting their summer holiday to a highlands getaway, and I watched it whilst not realising that there were another four series, all featuring the nice couple next door (Arabella Weir as the lovely wife/mum) and the considerably more horrible couple two doors down (Doon Mackinnon from Smack The Pony as the screechy harridan) and in between, Elaine C Smith as the "you'll have had your tea" Glasgwegian tight-arse stereptype and her permanently embarrassed daughter (her from My Big Fat Mad Diary). Like a cross between The Royle Family and Mum (the sitcom, not the deodorant).
Staged. I didn't watch the first series of this during Lockdown 1 as I assumed it would be luvvie hell, but it was actually very funny, particularly David Tennant's and Michael Sheen's rows, Michael accusing David of over-acting, David saying that Michael's acting style is "Ok for Theatre Clywd". Could be filed under Middle Aged Man Banter, along with The Trip, Mortimer and Whitehouse, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Wandavision. I don't care about superheroes but I did enjoy this high concept sitcom pastiche series, which only became boring when it was the final battle of goodie witch vs baddie witch. Riffing off of sitcoms through the decades, such as I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Malcolm in the Middle, & Modern Family, the series had amazing attention to detail, not just in the sets, the jokes and the stock characters, but also the way the episodes were filmed, using the techniques of the time. A one-off, quite literally.
It's A Sin. Eighties nostalgia for the landline in the hall mixed with AIDS crisis horror. If you weren't crying in the first episode, you'd be crying by the last. Davies didn't make his characters into victims, in fact some of them were pretty self-centred, shallow and obnoxious, but you still cared about them.
Counterpart. The concept of this show was that the world split in two during an east German experiment with each universe carrying on ignorant but in parallel to the other one, with only an elite number of people able to pass from one world to the other at a Checkpoint Charlie type border. It was as if John Le Carre had written a sci-fi. It was first shown in 2017 and it was odd watching it in Lockdown 3 as the characters wore masks and used hand sanitiser following a deadly flu outbreak, which turned out to have been caused by the prime world infecting the secondary one.
Behind Her Eyes The TV equivalent of an airport novelette, but it was good schlocky fun: a single mum has an affair with a man who turns out to be her new boss, then befriends his wife - BUT WITH A RIDICULOUS TWIST.
Resident Alien. This seemed like an old fashioned weird comedy about an alien crash landing in space and having to fit in with the locals, Northern Exposure or Due South-style, with trad. quirky characters, but then had subplots of domestic violence and threats to kill a child, making it a bit darker than the average fish out of water sitcom.
Flight Attendant. Hot mess/functioning alcoholic, Kaley Cuoco, wakes up with a dead man in her bed and, on becoming a suspect, has to solve the case herself with the aid of her frenemy, Rosie Perez, nonchalant lawyer, Zosia Mamet and GBFF, Griffin Matthews. It also features Ann Magnuson as mother of the dead man, whom older readers may remember as the cigarette girl in Desperately Seeking Susan.
Mare of Easttown. Hurrah for the Monday night date with marvellous murder maven, Mare. It was perfect TV, brilliantly acted with great accents and the Pennsylvania backdrop becoming part of the story itself - as it should in all good detective stories. As in most whodunnits, it's not who did the dark deed that's important, more the secrets exposed, the seedy underbelly revealed, the perfect lives shown to be a lie. MoET had all this and more: female bonds, dysfunctional families and of course Murder Durder.
Kevin Can Fuck Himself. Another high concept sitcom pastiche show. Alexis from Schitt's Creek plays a sitcom wife who is disparaged, ignored, and ridiculed on screen and going mad/murderous off screen. It was never quite clear if she was actually in a sitcom and we were seeing behind the scenes, the life of a minor character exposed, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern style, or whether the sitcom bits were all in her head. It was good to watch a feminist TV show that wasn't about rape and murder - Kevin doesn't beat Allison, he isn't violent or a drunk. What he does do is belittle her, disregard her and deride her to his best friend and father, with whom he prefers to spend his time. With a bright palette and a laugh track, this is funny, to us it's heartbreaking. The show seemed to be criticising traditional sitcoms as well as traditional man-child behaviour and Allison gets no help from the other women: the next door neighbour's sister puts up with the men's boorish behaviour to be one of the boys, her co-worker says she ought to "dress nicer. Kevin deserves it".
The Chair. Eve from Killing- (Sandra Oh) stars as the chairperson of an English department at an Ivy League college. The series featured a lot of inter-generational humour and conflict, firstly the half-dead boomer academics who want things to remain as they always have and don't understand their increasing irrelevancy or their students and overlook the up and coming BAME lecturers vs Gen X who want a more modern approach and then Gen X vs Gen Z as the students use their internet addiction and cancel culture to bring down a lecturer who didn't mean what he is accused of doing. Best character is Joan (Holland Taylor), who starts a bin fire in her office to set alight student evaluations and wildly flirts with anyone 30-40 years younger than herself. If you did an English degree, you should definitely watch it.
Back to Life S2 and Guilt S2. Usually second series after brilliant first seasons are disappointing. Not so these two. In both series, it seemed that the stories had wrapped after the final episode: in Back To Life, Miri found a kind of peace as she discovered why her best friend Lara had attacked her back in 2001, and she finally enjoyed an ice cream on the beach at Hythe with her on/off/on/off/on/off love interest. S2 stayed on the same path with more or less the same characters continuing the story, with the new big bad being Lara's father (Ade Edmondson, having a second career playing deadbeat dads) determined to get his revenge on Miri. A big TV show this year was Ted Lasso, which I tried and didn't like. The characters were cliched and the jokes mouldy (English people like drinking tea! And eating hot curries!) and the hey diddly iddly Flandersishness of the main character irritating. What it was trying to do - a basically decent, slightly bonkers person tries to do good in the world but is stymied at every turn by people and circumstance - was done much better in Back to Life (imo).
Not so Guilt. This was about a man who tries to do bad in the world. Again, S1 seemed to have everything wrapped up, the bad big brother took the rap for the younger, hapless sibling for an accidental killing. But now big bro is back, he's taken over a children's play centre to create a legal centre with a PI whom he once pushed off the wagon. and they're now dealing with a new story, which involves bent coppers, undercover alcoholics, money launderers, corrupt priests, dodgy planning deals. Never mind Succession and NYC, I was more interested in Edinburgh and whole load of Guilt.
Only Murders In The Building. I bought![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davidnottingham 3 months of Disney+ so he could watch his superheroes and his star wars. I'm not that interested in Marvel or Millennium Falcons but I did like this comedy-drama of 3 true crime podcast nerds discovering a murder in their building (the beautiful art nouveau Upper West side Belnord) and vow to solve it, whilst keeping secrets of their own. Like Search Party with more babyboomers and less brunch.
The Boys. More superhero stuff but in reverse. In this series the superheroes, who all work for a private company, are the bad guys, whereas the good guys are a ragtag bunch of vigilantes, desperadoes and New Zealanders doing bad English accents. I preferred S2 which was written and filmed before Trump was ousted and featured a new superheroine called Stormfront who at first seemed like a good kickass female addition to the gang, but soon turned out to be a lot more than she seemed, with a subtle nod to growing fascism in the US.
Staged. I didn't watch the first series of this during Lockdown 1 as I assumed it would be luvvie hell, but it was actually very funny, particularly David Tennant's and Michael Sheen's rows, Michael accusing David of over-acting, David saying that Michael's acting style is "Ok for Theatre Clywd". Could be filed under Middle Aged Man Banter, along with The Trip, Mortimer and Whitehouse, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Wandavision. I don't care about superheroes but I did enjoy this high concept sitcom pastiche series, which only became boring when it was the final battle of goodie witch vs baddie witch. Riffing off of sitcoms through the decades, such as I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Malcolm in the Middle, & Modern Family, the series had amazing attention to detail, not just in the sets, the jokes and the stock characters, but also the way the episodes were filmed, using the techniques of the time. A one-off, quite literally.
It's A Sin. Eighties nostalgia for the landline in the hall mixed with AIDS crisis horror. If you weren't crying in the first episode, you'd be crying by the last. Davies didn't make his characters into victims, in fact some of them were pretty self-centred, shallow and obnoxious, but you still cared about them.
Counterpart. The concept of this show was that the world split in two during an east German experiment with each universe carrying on ignorant but in parallel to the other one, with only an elite number of people able to pass from one world to the other at a Checkpoint Charlie type border. It was as if John Le Carre had written a sci-fi. It was first shown in 2017 and it was odd watching it in Lockdown 3 as the characters wore masks and used hand sanitiser following a deadly flu outbreak, which turned out to have been caused by the prime world infecting the secondary one.
Behind Her Eyes The TV equivalent of an airport novelette, but it was good schlocky fun: a single mum has an affair with a man who turns out to be her new boss, then befriends his wife - BUT WITH A RIDICULOUS TWIST.
Resident Alien. This seemed like an old fashioned weird comedy about an alien crash landing in space and having to fit in with the locals, Northern Exposure or Due South-style, with trad. quirky characters, but then had subplots of domestic violence and threats to kill a child, making it a bit darker than the average fish out of water sitcom.
Flight Attendant. Hot mess/functioning alcoholic, Kaley Cuoco, wakes up with a dead man in her bed and, on becoming a suspect, has to solve the case herself with the aid of her frenemy, Rosie Perez, nonchalant lawyer, Zosia Mamet and GBFF, Griffin Matthews. It also features Ann Magnuson as mother of the dead man, whom older readers may remember as the cigarette girl in Desperately Seeking Susan.
Mare of Easttown. Hurrah for the Monday night date with marvellous murder maven, Mare. It was perfect TV, brilliantly acted with great accents and the Pennsylvania backdrop becoming part of the story itself - as it should in all good detective stories. As in most whodunnits, it's not who did the dark deed that's important, more the secrets exposed, the seedy underbelly revealed, the perfect lives shown to be a lie. MoET had all this and more: female bonds, dysfunctional families and of course Murder Durder.
Kevin Can Fuck Himself. Another high concept sitcom pastiche show. Alexis from Schitt's Creek plays a sitcom wife who is disparaged, ignored, and ridiculed on screen and going mad/murderous off screen. It was never quite clear if she was actually in a sitcom and we were seeing behind the scenes, the life of a minor character exposed, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern style, or whether the sitcom bits were all in her head. It was good to watch a feminist TV show that wasn't about rape and murder - Kevin doesn't beat Allison, he isn't violent or a drunk. What he does do is belittle her, disregard her and deride her to his best friend and father, with whom he prefers to spend his time. With a bright palette and a laugh track, this is funny, to us it's heartbreaking. The show seemed to be criticising traditional sitcoms as well as traditional man-child behaviour and Allison gets no help from the other women: the next door neighbour's sister puts up with the men's boorish behaviour to be one of the boys, her co-worker says she ought to "dress nicer. Kevin deserves it".
The Chair. Eve from Killing- (Sandra Oh) stars as the chairperson of an English department at an Ivy League college. The series featured a lot of inter-generational humour and conflict, firstly the half-dead boomer academics who want things to remain as they always have and don't understand their increasing irrelevancy or their students and overlook the up and coming BAME lecturers vs Gen X who want a more modern approach and then Gen X vs Gen Z as the students use their internet addiction and cancel culture to bring down a lecturer who didn't mean what he is accused of doing. Best character is Joan (Holland Taylor), who starts a bin fire in her office to set alight student evaluations and wildly flirts with anyone 30-40 years younger than herself. If you did an English degree, you should definitely watch it.
Back to Life S2 and Guilt S2. Usually second series after brilliant first seasons are disappointing. Not so these two. In both series, it seemed that the stories had wrapped after the final episode: in Back To Life, Miri found a kind of peace as she discovered why her best friend Lara had attacked her back in 2001, and she finally enjoyed an ice cream on the beach at Hythe with her on/off/on/off/on/off love interest. S2 stayed on the same path with more or less the same characters continuing the story, with the new big bad being Lara's father (Ade Edmondson, having a second career playing deadbeat dads) determined to get his revenge on Miri. A big TV show this year was Ted Lasso, which I tried and didn't like. The characters were cliched and the jokes mouldy (English people like drinking tea! And eating hot curries!) and the hey diddly iddly Flandersishness of the main character irritating. What it was trying to do - a basically decent, slightly bonkers person tries to do good in the world but is stymied at every turn by people and circumstance - was done much better in Back to Life (imo).
Not so Guilt. This was about a man who tries to do bad in the world. Again, S1 seemed to have everything wrapped up, the bad big brother took the rap for the younger, hapless sibling for an accidental killing. But now big bro is back, he's taken over a children's play centre to create a legal centre with a PI whom he once pushed off the wagon. and they're now dealing with a new story, which involves bent coppers, undercover alcoholics, money launderers, corrupt priests, dodgy planning deals. Never mind Succession and NYC, I was more interested in Edinburgh and whole load of Guilt.
Only Murders In The Building. I bought
davidnottingham 3 months of Disney+ so he could watch his superheroes and his star wars. I'm not that interested in Marvel or Millennium Falcons but I did like this comedy-drama of 3 true crime podcast nerds discovering a murder in their building (the beautiful art nouveau Upper West side Belnord) and vow to solve it, whilst keeping secrets of their own. Like Search Party with more babyboomers and less brunch.The Boys. More superhero stuff but in reverse. In this series the superheroes, who all work for a private company, are the bad guys, whereas the good guys are a ragtag bunch of vigilantes, desperadoes and New Zealanders doing bad English accents. I preferred S2 which was written and filmed before Trump was ousted and featured a new superheroine called Stormfront who at first seemed like a good kickass female addition to the gang, but soon turned out to be a lot more than she seemed, with a subtle nod to growing fascism in the US.
“You can’t win the whole country anymore. No one can. You don’t need 50 million people to love you — you need 5 million people fucking pissed."
”The entire concept of a hero who unites the world is dead in 2020. You have fans, I have soldiers."
