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March TV shows
Mar. 31st, 2023 09:56 amJust a quick post today to wrap up the month of March in TV viewing. I finished six shows this month, most of which were pretty good, and almost all of which were crime dramas. They were:
Better, a show about a corrupt police officer who has been in the pay of the local gang leader for at least a decade, and who now wants to get out. The idea and cast are good, but I felt the writing was a bit uneven, with characters making sudden and inexplicable decisions solely to move the plot along in the necessary direction.
The Gold, a fantastic BBC miniseries dramatising the real-world Brink's-Mat robbery of 1983 — a bank heist in which the robbers intended to rob a bank near Heathrow of several millions of pounds worth of currency, but instead walked away with tens of millions of pounds worth of gold and diamonds, which they then needed to figure out how to get rid of without attracting attention. Essentially, if you bought any jewellery in the UK in the following decades, it's likely to have contained some of the gold from this robbery, and the proceeds also funded the gentrification and construction work in London's docklands area. The show revels in its 1980s setting, and follows both the thieves' complicated efforts to launder the proceeds of the bank theft, and the police attempt to catch them and recover the gold, with both groups struggling to achieve their aims. This was probably the best thing I watched all month.
Unforgotten, the latest season of a crime drama focusing on a team of police who solve cold cases. The lead cast member left the show in the previous season, and I'm not altogether happy with the attempt to replace her — the writers seem to have gone out of their way to write a character completely opposite to the previous protagonist, with some unfortunate implications (most egregiously, the fact that the show essentially seems to blame her career-mindedness for her husband's infidelity), but the mystery itself was interesting enough to keep me watching.
Carnival Row, a Netflix steampunk fantasy series in which various supernatural beings live a squalid and increasingly precarious existence as refugees among humans who dislike them. This season, I would say the discrimination against the fae characters tips from apartheid into outright fascism — they're herded into a ghetto, blamed for all social ills, treated unequally before the law, killed with impunity after show trials, and so on. The show then explores the characters' reaction to this — ranging from acquiescence to the creation of resistance movement. I find it hard to explain why this show works for me — I generally hate supernatural/superpowered characters being used as a metaphor for real-world discrimination — but somehow the whole thing hangs together.
Paris Police 1905 is a follow-up to a previous series set in 1900. This series involves unravelling a conspiracy in which a group of people (including corrupt police, members of the church, judicial, and political hierarchy, and various opportunistic hangers-on) entrap gay men and then extort them for money to keep their sexual orientation a secret. The tone is grim, the outlook is bleak, and even the characters who are good are not particularly nice people. I liked it, but wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for something uplifting.
Shadow and Bone, the second season of the adaptation of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse YA series. I'm never going to be reconciled to the choice to smush together two separate series — the fantasy chosen one story of Alina Starkov, and the Six of Crows heist novels — as it results in something that can never quite focus on either, overloaded with characters, and with Crows characters having to experience character development and revelations of their motivations far earlier than they should. However, unlike many other people who read the books first, I actually do like the series in general. The departures from the books in terms of Alina's arc in particular seem to me to be an improvement (I hated where she ended up in the books). The changes from the Crows books irritate me a bit more, but I can see they were necessary given the fact that the show is a portmanteau of two book series and certain character developments need to be sped up, or made more obvious to viewers — particularly given Netflix's tendency to cancel shows, meaning further seasons are in no way a given.
And that's it for March TV.
Better, a show about a corrupt police officer who has been in the pay of the local gang leader for at least a decade, and who now wants to get out. The idea and cast are good, but I felt the writing was a bit uneven, with characters making sudden and inexplicable decisions solely to move the plot along in the necessary direction.
The Gold, a fantastic BBC miniseries dramatising the real-world Brink's-Mat robbery of 1983 — a bank heist in which the robbers intended to rob a bank near Heathrow of several millions of pounds worth of currency, but instead walked away with tens of millions of pounds worth of gold and diamonds, which they then needed to figure out how to get rid of without attracting attention. Essentially, if you bought any jewellery in the UK in the following decades, it's likely to have contained some of the gold from this robbery, and the proceeds also funded the gentrification and construction work in London's docklands area. The show revels in its 1980s setting, and follows both the thieves' complicated efforts to launder the proceeds of the bank theft, and the police attempt to catch them and recover the gold, with both groups struggling to achieve their aims. This was probably the best thing I watched all month.
Unforgotten, the latest season of a crime drama focusing on a team of police who solve cold cases. The lead cast member left the show in the previous season, and I'm not altogether happy with the attempt to replace her — the writers seem to have gone out of their way to write a character completely opposite to the previous protagonist, with some unfortunate implications (most egregiously, the fact that the show essentially seems to blame her career-mindedness for her husband's infidelity), but the mystery itself was interesting enough to keep me watching.
Carnival Row, a Netflix steampunk fantasy series in which various supernatural beings live a squalid and increasingly precarious existence as refugees among humans who dislike them. This season, I would say the discrimination against the fae characters tips from apartheid into outright fascism — they're herded into a ghetto, blamed for all social ills, treated unequally before the law, killed with impunity after show trials, and so on. The show then explores the characters' reaction to this — ranging from acquiescence to the creation of resistance movement. I find it hard to explain why this show works for me — I generally hate supernatural/superpowered characters being used as a metaphor for real-world discrimination — but somehow the whole thing hangs together.
Paris Police 1905 is a follow-up to a previous series set in 1900. This series involves unravelling a conspiracy in which a group of people (including corrupt police, members of the church, judicial, and political hierarchy, and various opportunistic hangers-on) entrap gay men and then extort them for money to keep their sexual orientation a secret. The tone is grim, the outlook is bleak, and even the characters who are good are not particularly nice people. I liked it, but wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for something uplifting.
Shadow and Bone, the second season of the adaptation of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse YA series. I'm never going to be reconciled to the choice to smush together two separate series — the fantasy chosen one story of Alina Starkov, and the Six of Crows heist novels — as it results in something that can never quite focus on either, overloaded with characters, and with Crows characters having to experience character development and revelations of their motivations far earlier than they should. However, unlike many other people who read the books first, I actually do like the series in general. The departures from the books in terms of Alina's arc in particular seem to me to be an improvement (I hated where she ended up in the books). The changes from the Crows books irritate me a bit more, but I can see they were necessary given the fact that the show is a portmanteau of two book series and certain character developments need to be sped up, or made more obvious to viewers — particularly given Netflix's tendency to cancel shows, meaning further seasons are in no way a given.
And that's it for March TV.