January TV shows

In spite of having a fair amount of free time, I've only finished watching three TV shows this month. They were:

Interior Chinatown, a humorous, meta miniseries about formulaic, tropey storytelling (in this case, American police procedurals, and East Asian martial arts movies), the rigid boxes into which this places its characters, and real-world individuals, and what might happen when characters try to break free from these constraints. It's written with thoughtfulness and affection, the dialogue and characters are great, but I felt that ten episodes were slightly too many, and I'm not quite sure it stuck the landing.

Season 2 of Dark Winds, an atmospheric, noirish mystery series set on a Navajo reservation (and the wider region) in the 1970s. The writing and acting in this is superb — every character is haunted and traumatised in some way, and this is allowed to suffuse with slow subtlety, as viewers are gradually let in on the various secrets. This is a series that is exactly as long as it needs to be — unlike a lot of TV shows, which I find (see above, for example) feel overstretched, Dark Winds needs room to breathe, and uses this slow pace to perfect effect. The dramatic landscape — and the hostility and violence to which it treats its white antagonists, in contrast with its Native characters, for whom its every contour is known and familiar — is almost like another character in the show. This is absolutely exquisite TV, and the only sour note this time around is its cartoonishly grotesque villain (psychosexual issues with his mother, gleefully carnivalesque violence, etc).

The final season of What We Do in the Shadows, a comedy mockumentary spinoff of Taika Waititi's comedy mockumentary film about housesharing vampires in New Zealand, about housesharing vampires in Staten Island. There were still some absolutely hilarious moments, and great lines in the script, but I couldn't help but feel that this was dragged on for too long, until it got a bit tired.