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Quaran-TV, part 13
Aug. 30th, 2021 11:41 amThis month's completed TV shows range from grim and dystopian to very very silly, and everything in between. Most were excellent, with a few exceptions.
Baptiste is a melancholy, grim, pan-European crime drama, now in its third season, which was mainly set in Hungary and involved far-right anti-immigration politics in that country. The show always has a great cast and excellent production values, and is full of twists and turns, but it's definitely not something to watch if you want to feel good about the state of the world.
The Handmaid's Tale latest season was a real mixed bag for me. The show is at its best when it sticks close to the themes of the book — the tiny ways disempowered people resist when all other options have been closed off to them, the hypocrisies of contemporary Western society (particularly 'white feminism' and the supposed egalitarianism of progressive men) laid bare. I'm less convinced when it morphs into a narrative of grand resistance with June Osborne at its head and heart — it leads to some dramatic moments of television, and it tells an interesting story of how one woman's righteous anger and fearlessness destroys everyone around here, but it's not the story I want to see told in The Handmaid's Tale and I'm increasingly convinced that the show needs to wrap up, rather than hurtling towards an inevitable overthrow of Gilead's dystopian regime.
I mentioned in a previous post that I had read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad after I began watching the TV adaptation, which I finished last night. The show is — with the exception of one episode, which I found unnecessary — a thoughtful and well-made adaptation of a great book. Everything from the casting to the cinematography and score to the sweeping arc of its characters' narrative journeys is stunning. The story, of course, is harrowing: violent, terrifying, and filled with every injustice experienced by black people in the United States over the course of their history in that country, but it never feels like voyeuristic misery porn, just searing, unvarnished truth.
I wasn't expecting much from Professor T, but it managed to sink below even my lowest expectations. Matthias and I always watch detective shows set in Cambridge, and they're almost uniformly terrible — if we're not howling in outrage when people cycle the wrong way down a one-way street, we're laughing hysterically at how badly they misrepresent student and academic life. This show — the gimmick of which is that the eponymous professor, a lecturer in criminology, assists police in solving crimes — was by far the worst in this regard that I've ever seen. For starters, there is no undergraduate degree in criminology at Cambridge, the criminology department looks nothing like the building in which lectures were shown to take place, he seems to be teaching outdated and discredited crimological theory (such as the broken windows theory) and the professor's head of department seems to be a colleague at his colleague instead of within his faculty. There's the usual nonsense Cambridge TV geography (someone starts walking through one building, emerges on the grass lawns of an entirely different building, and then walks out onto a street that is on the other side of town) as well. But even in addition to all that, the show is just bad. As well as being a criminology professor, the main character is depicted as being neurotypical in some way, but it's poorly done, both riddled with offensive clichés and never actually specified (is he autistic? does he have OCD? it's a mystery). All in all, a dreadful waste of time!
The third season of Wellington Paranormal — a spinoff from the What We Do in the Shadows film, in which a hapless police department attempt to solve crimes involving supernatural creatures — remained as delightful as ever, although I felt they were running out of material. It was still a lot of fun, and made me look forward to the newest season of What We Do In the Shadows, which is out very soon.
The White Lotus — a miniseries set in an exclusive hotel in Hawaii filled with eccentric and horrible guests — was this month's unexpected highlight. Your enjoyment will hinge on how much tolerance you have for terrible people being terrible — every type of awful wealthy American is on display, from the pampered scion of a rich family who's never had to work a day in his life to the 'lean-in' high-powered businesswoman, and from teen girls whose activism is theoretical and full of unexamined privilege to the drunken and emotionally vulnerable older woman who cluelessly uses and discards the hotel worker she takes under her wing. The lush surroundings are set in contrast to the injustices of Hawaii's recent history, the luxurious hotel staffed by people who could never afford to stay there, some of whom were even displaced from their own homes by its construction. Everything is surreal and unsettling, and for much of the time I watched through my fingers, frozen with secondhand embarrassment. The Australian hotel manager is the highlight of the show.
Finally, we have The Chair, a six-part miniseries in which Sandra Oh is the chair of a struggling English faculty at a US liberal arts college. As someone who has a PhD in the humanities, who works in academic librarianship, with most of my friends humanities academics, the show was a) spot on, if broad-brush in places and b) painfully close to the bone. Sandra Oh is fantastic, and I loved that the show allowed us to spend time not only with her professional trials and tribulations, but also with her multigenerational family. I highly recommend this show.
Baptiste is a melancholy, grim, pan-European crime drama, now in its third season, which was mainly set in Hungary and involved far-right anti-immigration politics in that country. The show always has a great cast and excellent production values, and is full of twists and turns, but it's definitely not something to watch if you want to feel good about the state of the world.
The Handmaid's Tale latest season was a real mixed bag for me. The show is at its best when it sticks close to the themes of the book — the tiny ways disempowered people resist when all other options have been closed off to them, the hypocrisies of contemporary Western society (particularly 'white feminism' and the supposed egalitarianism of progressive men) laid bare. I'm less convinced when it morphs into a narrative of grand resistance with June Osborne at its head and heart — it leads to some dramatic moments of television, and it tells an interesting story of how one woman's righteous anger and fearlessness destroys everyone around here, but it's not the story I want to see told in The Handmaid's Tale and I'm increasingly convinced that the show needs to wrap up, rather than hurtling towards an inevitable overthrow of Gilead's dystopian regime.
I mentioned in a previous post that I had read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad after I began watching the TV adaptation, which I finished last night. The show is — with the exception of one episode, which I found unnecessary — a thoughtful and well-made adaptation of a great book. Everything from the casting to the cinematography and score to the sweeping arc of its characters' narrative journeys is stunning. The story, of course, is harrowing: violent, terrifying, and filled with every injustice experienced by black people in the United States over the course of their history in that country, but it never feels like voyeuristic misery porn, just searing, unvarnished truth.
I wasn't expecting much from Professor T, but it managed to sink below even my lowest expectations. Matthias and I always watch detective shows set in Cambridge, and they're almost uniformly terrible — if we're not howling in outrage when people cycle the wrong way down a one-way street, we're laughing hysterically at how badly they misrepresent student and academic life. This show — the gimmick of which is that the eponymous professor, a lecturer in criminology, assists police in solving crimes — was by far the worst in this regard that I've ever seen. For starters, there is no undergraduate degree in criminology at Cambridge, the criminology department looks nothing like the building in which lectures were shown to take place, he seems to be teaching outdated and discredited crimological theory (such as the broken windows theory) and the professor's head of department seems to be a colleague at his colleague instead of within his faculty. There's the usual nonsense Cambridge TV geography (someone starts walking through one building, emerges on the grass lawns of an entirely different building, and then walks out onto a street that is on the other side of town) as well. But even in addition to all that, the show is just bad. As well as being a criminology professor, the main character is depicted as being neurotypical in some way, but it's poorly done, both riddled with offensive clichés and never actually specified (is he autistic? does he have OCD? it's a mystery). All in all, a dreadful waste of time!
The third season of Wellington Paranormal — a spinoff from the What We Do in the Shadows film, in which a hapless police department attempt to solve crimes involving supernatural creatures — remained as delightful as ever, although I felt they were running out of material. It was still a lot of fun, and made me look forward to the newest season of What We Do In the Shadows, which is out very soon.
The White Lotus — a miniseries set in an exclusive hotel in Hawaii filled with eccentric and horrible guests — was this month's unexpected highlight. Your enjoyment will hinge on how much tolerance you have for terrible people being terrible — every type of awful wealthy American is on display, from the pampered scion of a rich family who's never had to work a day in his life to the 'lean-in' high-powered businesswoman, and from teen girls whose activism is theoretical and full of unexamined privilege to the drunken and emotionally vulnerable older woman who cluelessly uses and discards the hotel worker she takes under her wing. The lush surroundings are set in contrast to the injustices of Hawaii's recent history, the luxurious hotel staffed by people who could never afford to stay there, some of whom were even displaced from their own homes by its construction. Everything is surreal and unsettling, and for much of the time I watched through my fingers, frozen with secondhand embarrassment. The Australian hotel manager is the highlight of the show.
Finally, we have The Chair, a six-part miniseries in which Sandra Oh is the chair of a struggling English faculty at a US liberal arts college. As someone who has a PhD in the humanities, who works in academic librarianship, with most of my friends humanities academics, the show was a) spot on, if broad-brush in places and b) painfully close to the bone. Sandra Oh is fantastic, and I loved that the show allowed us to spend time not only with her professional trials and tribulations, but also with her multigenerational family. I highly recommend this show.