August TV shows

Just three things completed this month, and it's something of a miracle that we managed even that, what with all the visitors and travel. Those three shows were:

My Lady Jane, an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, YA fantasy reimagining of the life of Lady Jane Grey, set in a world in which a persecuted minority of people have the ability to transform into different animals. I enjoyed a lot about this — the quippy dialogue, the over-the-top YA melodrama histrionics, the pointed use of contemporary pop music — but overall felt that it was trying to be too many things at once: YA fantasy, gleefully ahistorical historical drama (along the lines of The Great), political saga about the machinations of amoral, power-hungry people, and spread itself too thinly as a result. And the decision to replace the religious tensions of the Reformation in England with yet another supernatural-powers-as-metaphor-for-persecuted-minorities felt really frustrating to me (although it led to some superficially surreal and ridiculous moments). It's unfair, as if I'm berating the show for not being what I wanted it to be, but I increasingly feel that the total lack of inclination to explore religion (in historical settings where religion played a huge, foundational role in individual people's lives and the collective sociopolitical situations of their communities) is a lazy cop out. It's as if contemporary showrunners, authors, filmwriters, etc cannot actually conceive of a world — medieval, early modern, classical, etc — in which people actually believed in the religions to which they were adherents.

The Turkish Detective, which, as the title suggests, is a crime drama set in contemporary Istanbul. It's a blend of case-of-the-week with an overarching mystery, the latter of which is what drew Mehmet, the main character, back from Britain (where he was raised) to the country of his birth. To be honest, I actually think the show would work better as a cosy ensemble cast case-of-the-week mystery series and dispense with Mehmet, his manpain, and this broader arc altogether. Apart from anything else, this would mean that the whole show could be done in Turkish, as opposed to Mehmet being employed by the Turkish police, and the bulk of the dialogue (between him and his colleagues, and the suspects and witnesses they encounter) taking place in English, which was both annoying and ridiculous. Istanbul is a very pretty city, and I enjoyed that — and the soundtrack of Turkish pop music — but beyond that I probably wouldn't recommend this series.

The Jetty, a four-part miniseries in which a true crime podcaster shows up in a picturesque northern English town in an attempt to solve a decades-old murder, and dredges up a lot of buried secrets. The show isn't saying anything particularly new here — it's about the toxic nexus of misogyny and stifling small town life, and the corrosive damage they cause — but it's written and acted well, and makes seeing this familiar ground retrodden a pleasing experience.