January (plus early February) TV shows

I mostly finished five TV shows in this past month, but left it until today to write everything up as the final episode of one show only aired on Friday. As is common with my TV viewing, it was a mixed bag of genres. The shows were:

The Lowdown, a tale of local political corruption starring Ethan Hawke as a local journalist and secondhand bookshop owner attempting, ineptly, to uncover the truth behind the suspicious death of one of the members of a wealthy, prominent family. It's run by the same showrunner behind my beloved Reservation Dogs, and written with the same blend of offbeat surrealism, slightly sentimental affection, and incisively sharp focus on the poverty, deprivation and racism festering in declining American cities and towns.

Season 2 of A Thousand Blows, Stephen Knight's take on the nineteenth-century East End. As with the previous season, it's a wild, lurid tale of audacious heists, rival criminal gangs battling for dominance, boxing matches offering opportunities for the show's impoverished characters to claw their way into financial security, and larger-than-life people with larger-than-life emotions, told with a comic book sensibility. As a standalone series, I would have enjoyed this, but as something following on from Season 1, I found it a bit lacking. It was as if all the previous season's character development was reset, and there was never any sense of real risk: characters felt protected by plot armour from suffering any consequences.

I Love LA, a comedy miniseries about a group of self-absorbed Gen Zers trying to make it in the entertainment industry (social media influencer, manager of said influencer, costume designer to pop stars, nepo baby daughter of successful actor), which was almost painful in its humour. It's brilliantly acted and written, but excruciating if you find secondhand embarrassment at the obliviousness of characters always on the brink of disaster hard to watch.

Season 2 of The Night Manager, which picks up close to a decade after the previous season (an updating of a Le Carré novel for the Arab Spring era) finished. This new tale of twenty-first-century spycraft deals with corruption, international arms dealing, and external attempts to meddle politically in Colombia, and is well written and well acted with its stellar cast, even if some elements strained credulity. It's a wild ride from start to finish — tense and engrossing, with some incredible and audacious twists. Bring on Season 3!

Spartacus: House of Ashur, a spinoff from the cult favourite Starz series about the revolt and subsequent crushing of enslaved gladiators in ancient Rome. I have to say I thought the concept was a bit far-fetched and ridiculous (a canon-divergence AU in which a secondary character — who died towards the end of Spartacus — gets offered a second lease of life in the afterlife, and lives again as a freedman, the client of Marcus Crassus, and the owner of the house of gladiators in which he, and Spartacus were previously enslaved), and I'm still not sure why the show exists, but I can't deny it was entertaining. It has the same wall-to-wall gratuitous violence (slow-motion, comic-book style punches and blows by sword and spear, rivers of blood spraying around the screen), nudity (equal opportunity) and sexposition, the same bizarre dialogue choices (all the characters speak without the use of definite and indefinite articles, and absent possessive pronouns, as if translating directly from Latin — I honestly wonder how the actors are able to speak such contorted lines without difficulty), and, underneath all the sex and violence, a serious story about the limits of respectability politics. (In other words, a marginalised person can expend all his energy adopting the trappings and values of those privileged in his society, swallow every insult, and do everything in his power to cater to their whims and give them what they want, and it will still never be enough for him to gain material comfort, safety, or their acceptance of him as their equal.) I assume it goes without saying that if you're looking for historical accuracy, or even a sense of internal narrative coherence, this is not a show I'd recommend: it's 90 per cent vibes, and you just have to go with that. In the show's final five minutes, it makes a narrative choice so wild and so left field that I was almost astonished by the audacity, making it clear that — if it does return for a new season — it will be operating not just in canon divergence, but in full blown alternate history.

I feel as if the common thread tying together all these shows is character who think they are very clever constantly worsening their own situations due to their inability to think more than one step ahead, and making poor, reactive decisions instead of pausing and trying to think more strategically beyond their immediate circumstances.

Bottles are emptied, to be filled up with tears

I spoke with sister #1 on Friday morning, and for various reasons the conversation left me with lingering miserable feelings for most of the weekend, and a real lack of motivation to do much. Nevertheless, I persisted and tried to do happy things in spite of myself.

Yesterday, Matthias and I caught the train and then the bus out to St Ives for another beer festival held in a church. The weather outside was miserable, but the atmosphere indoors was bubbly and cheerful. People brought their small children, and dogs of various sizes, and sat around chatting in the pews. We bumped unexpectedly into R and K, two former students from our niche subject department in Cambridge (the pair started their undergrad degrees the same year I started my MPhil, and I attended all the undergrad medieval Welsh classes at the same time as R) and their toddler son. They live in Windsor now, and I don't think I'd seen them since before the pandemic, so it was somewhat surprising to see them at a random beer festival in St Ives! The world is at once big, and small.

Matthias and I finished up our St Ives excursion with a drink in a tiny cocktail bar (the whole space only has about twelve seats in it), then a very hasty dinner in a restaurant in order to catch our bus back and make it home at a reasonable time. I do enjoy these days out to nearby towns and villages, and should remember to do things like this more often.

Today — because I was trying to be kind to myself and my bad mood — I cancelled my 8am swim and had what passes for me as a lie-in (i.e. I still woke up without an alarm at 7am but lay around in bed until 8am instead of immediately getting up), before going on a walk with Matthias. Without a car, there aren't many options in terms of walking (there are about four routes we can take), so it was the same loop walk we did on New Year's Day, which goes along the river, then through leafy suburban streets, before ending up in the market square, taking just over an hour. We drank hot drinks from the coffee rig, and sat in the crisp wintry sunshine, watching the world go by.

Other than that, it's been a day for pottering about at home with the Winter Olympics on in the background. I haven't really been able to focus on reading (although I did finish a reread of Vanessa Fogg's beautiful little fairytale of a novella, 'The Lilies of Dawn,' while eating lunch, and I enjoyed Rebecca Ferrier's The Salt Bind — nineteenth-century smugglers, miners and Cornish folklore, with the sea an ambivalent and constant presence — earlier in the week), and in general I just feel a bit scattered and unfocused. But I've got hibiscus tea, later I'll light the wood-burning stove, and yesterday was the first evening of the year in which the sun set at 5pm, and that's enough light and softness on which to build.