December TV shows

We've still got a handful of other shows on the go, but I think at this point, we're not going to finish any more this year, so it's high time to post this month's round-up.

We completed five shows this month:

Shetland, the most recent season of the atmospheric, Scandi-noir-ish crime drama set in this remote part of Scotland, and the first without the character of Jimmy Perez (and his family) at its centre. It's always hard when a long-running and beloved mystery series has to replace its central character, and they did a pretty good job, although I don't find Ruth Calder — the new police detective — and her backstory quite as compelling so far. As with most Shetland mysteries, the central mystery this season appeared to involve the wider world intruding on the island and causing a string of murders, whereas the truth is much closer to home, with long-buried family secrets and pain bubbling to the surface, causing grief and havoc. I wasn't hugely convinced by the denouement this time around, and felt in general that the journey was better than the destination — but it's a journey I'm happy to keep following.

Vigil, a British crime drama/political thriller, whose central mystery hinges on messy geopolitics and the moral abyss that is the international arms trade. The previous season took place entirely on a sabotaged nuclear submarine, whereas this one takes place on military bases in Scotland and a fictionalised Middle Eastern country (a weird amalgam of Saudi Arabia and Syria) in which there is a British military outpost whose servicemembers train and 'consult' with the local military, and to whom a private British military drone company is seeking to sell arms. Everything of course goes horribly wrong, there's a conspiracy which must be unravelled, and although the final revelations aren't particularly groundbreaking, the whole thing is so well-made and acted that it doesn't really matter.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the anime adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim film and comics. I was a bit dubious about this to begin with — the film to me seemed so fixed in a specific place and time and I couldn't really see the point in doing anything more with the material, except to milk people's nostalgia for a cult classic. But the anime (voice acted by all the original film cast) very quickly makes clear that it's doing its own thing, and it has more space to flesh things out that in the film were just weird throwaway lines. The animation is great, the soundtrack is excellent, and the cast seem to be having a fantastic time getting the old gang back together. As someone who saw the original film at precisely the right time — i.e. at exactly the same age as the characters — and who found its message about the messy selfishness of life in one's early twenties incredibly resonant, I found it somewhat relaxing to be able to look back with nostalgia at that period of life and feel a huge sense of relief that I'd left it all behind! If you enjoyed the original film and/or the comics, I'd give it a try.

Reservation Dogs, the second season of this exquisite slice-of-life story about four Native teenagers trying to navigate life in the titular reservation. This is honestly one of the highlights of the year for me in terms of TV — I'm blown away by how good it is. It draws you in thinking it will be a quirky comedy about a group of teenage friends and their wacky hijinks, but it quickly becomes apparent that something deeper is going on. Ultimately, it's the story of people who are haunted: by grief, by guilt, by regrets and lack of opportunity, and often quite literally by the embodiment of recent and more distant friends and ancestors. It's about people whose lives are already post-apocalyptic, living in the dystopia left behind, building community, strengthening connections, and dreaming about the future in a world that does its best to prevent them from doing such things. Every character — from the central quartet of teenagers, to their families and other neighbours — is brilliantly written and acted, and the show is an exquisite and heartbreaking portrait of life on the margins. I recently read a book (about which more in another post) which praised and drew connections between this show and Derry Girls, and it's a really apt comparison: stories about people living their lives in really specific times, places and cultural milieux, created and given life by writers, directors and actors who have that cultural specificity to do so in a way that is rich, nuanced, clever, and three-dimensional.

Murder Is Easy, this year's cosy Christmas Agatha Christie adaptation, in which a chance encounter on a train leads our protagonist to solve a series of murders in a picturesque 1950s English village. I don't know the original, but I suspect our hero — an upper class young Nigerian man who has travelled to the UK to work in the upper echelons of the civil service — has been changed somewhat from the original text, in a way that works really well. The hostility, snobbishness, and petty racism that lies beneath the genteel veneer of leafy green village life is brought to the fore in a very unsubtle way, and it also gives the miniseries a tone that is part oversaturated verdant folk horror, part Get Out. This is — unsubtle commentary on the horrors of 1950s Britain and empire included — fairly undemanding stuff, with lots of familiar staples of British TV in the cast: the perfect thing for these lazy days of late December.

Friday open thread: setting things down, carrying on

This is the last open thread of 2023, and unlike the cliché, this exhausting, difficult, complicated year has felt very, very long indeed. No rushing passage of time for me, no I can't believe it's almost 31st December, this year.

Today's prompt is the one that I always have on the mind this time of year:

What is something you want to carry forward with you into 2024, and what is something you want to leave behind?

One of the best revelations of 2023 was how good I was at building certain habits, and sticking to them. I supplemented what were already pretty solid habits — swimming four times a week, yoga every day, certain habits in relation to work — with additional routine activities. These included two hours of fitness classes at the gym — picking things up and putting them down (aka pump class) and very silly dances (aka zumba) — which have had a profoundly beneficial effect. I'd like to keep these things going, and add to them with further habitual activities.

I've also, finally, managed my relationship with social media in a way that protects my mental health. I left Twitter, and felt as if a weight had lifted from my shoulders, and made the decision not to replace it with any similar platform. I'm still on Facebook and Instagram, but the former is mainly friends and family posting updates about their daily lives (family photos, pictures of their pets, renovations, holidays and so on), and the latter is something I ruthlessly curate, and leave for weeks at a time if it's getting too much. All this is a very good thing, and I will definitely carry on with it in 2024.

One of the worst revelations of 2023 was the slow realisation that the pandemic has exacerbated some of my worst tendencies: inflexibility (and really bad reactions when this inflexibility is challenged), hermit-like retreat into my own, controllable little world, a gradual shrinking of in-person social activities to the point that they are basically non-existent, and tense anxiety hovering in the background at the slightest hint that this safe little bubble was pierced. It's led to the point that all this tension is written into my body: my jaw and shoulders are almost permanently tense (even when I sleep), and I had a massage last week which did nothing, because I tensed up involuntarily every time the masseuse touched me, and couldn't relax. My neck, shoulders and jaw are always painful.

I don't know yet what I need to change, but I know that something has to. It's hard to know exactly how to get the balance right — I'm someone who's very good at building and maintaining routines (and as I've said I want that to continue in certain areas), but I think I also take it to such extremes that my world has shrunk to a space that's entirely, rigidly bound by routines, and any spontaneity seems like a terrifying threat. I want to find a way to leave that behind — I want better coping mechanisms, and I want my life to open up in ways that I seem to have closed off without realising in the past four years. I just haven't landed on the right way to do so. I have some ideas, but nothing final — and I suppose, in some ways, that leaving this post inconclusive is exactly the kind of flexibility and openness that I'm trying to bring into my life.