Quaran-TV, part 7
Dec. 29th, 2020 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This is my last TV roundup for the year, and for obvious reasons (no travel, mid-way through a three-week holiday at home), I have watched a lot of TV this month. Some of it was fantastic, some diverting, some a bit disappointing.
The highlight of the month (and possibly of the year) was definitely Warrior. This is a show that few people seem to have heard of, but it's excellent: it's set in Chinatown in 19th-century San Francisco, and it's very much a story of immigration, and the experiences of various groups of migrants struggling to find their feet in a new country — and viewing each other with suspicion, rather than making common cause. Historically accurate this show is not — I'd probably describe it as a martial arts western — and visually it's very like Peaky Blinders, all hellish industrial sites and slow-motion strutting bands of squabbling gangsters, each fighting for a tiny scrap of power from the margins. The show deals bluntly with the racism of the setting, with no subtlety — but subtlety is not really what I'm looking for in a show like this.
Valhalla Murders is yet another show from the Scandi-noir assembly line, this time set in Iceland. It's got every cop show cliché in the book, and doesn't really do anything particularly original with its material, but it's still fun to spend a few hours in the stark Icelandic landscape.
Evil is a particularly silly police procedural — in this case about a (lapsed Catholic) psychological profiler teaming up with an exorcist from the Catholic Church to determine whether particular individuals are possessed, or whether there is a psychological cause for the crimes they have committed. There's also some background Dan Brown-style shenanigans with ancient manuscripts and mysteries in the Vatican. The show is clearly going for an X Files vibe with a sceptic and a believer, but the underlying explanation for the supernatural goings on is unsatisfying, in my opinion.
The second season of the Charmed was released in early December, with one episode airing each day for three weeks. I never saw the original Charmed, but I'd been enjoying the reboot, particularly the new three sisters, and most of the other characters. This second season suffered from a degree of incoherence — it felt as if it couldn't figure out who was the ultimate Big Bad the sisters should be fighting — and this meant it seemed to lack focus. I still enjoyed the sisters and their relationship, however.
Industry is a prestige drama that's been airing on the BBC, following the misadventures of a hapless bunch of graduates working in the City in financial services. Most of them are the usual mix of privileged and clueless, handed way too much power and ill-equipped to handle it, and none of them are particularly nice people, although their behaviour and personalities make sense given what we learn about them. I'd recommend this show to people who enjoy stories of amoral people wreaking havoc — along the lines of Succession — there's very little kindness or warmth here.
The Mandalorian's second season, in contrast, is an absolute joy. I'm not sure I can say much more about it that hasn't been said. I'm a sucker for stories of found families, and of detached, dispossessed people finding causes and human connection worth fighting for, so as you can imagine I thoroughly enjoyed the show. I'm only a casual, superficial Star Wars fan, so I'm sure I'm missing a huge pile of references and allusions, but as a piece of media on its own, The Mandalorian certainly holds up well.
The Alienist's second season was a fairly good successor to its predecessor, although I have to say that of the trio of shows I've watched in which a Freudian psychologist teams up with the police to fight crime, I enjoy Freud the most.
Matthias and I finished our rewatch of Borgen last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed the show the second time around. That being said, given it is now ten years old, its politics — a celebration of coalition governments, compromise, and government based on policy, rather than popular sentiment — rings a little false. 'This is the future liberals want,' perhaps, but the past ten years have proved it's unlikely to be the future we get. I still adore Birgitte Nyborg, though.
Over the past three days, Matthias and I have been watching Black Narcissus, which is a BBC adaptation of Rumer Godden's novel of the same name. It's an overwrought, gothic story in which a group of nuns try to set up a convent and school in a remote village in the Himalayas, in the 1930s, but they find the place haunted by its painful past. I like Godden's writing in general, although I'm more familiar with her children's books than her fiction for adults, but I think this adaptation would be better served if it leaned further into the gothic tropey-ness of the story it's trying to tell.
Finally, we've been watching Bridgerton, which certainly cannot be accused of failing to lean into tropey-ness: not a Regency romance trope is left unused, and the result is a ridiculously enjoyable piece of froth — deeply silly, but gorgeous to look at, and exactly the right thing for these dark, idle days.
Have you finished any TV shows recently?
The highlight of the month (and possibly of the year) was definitely Warrior. This is a show that few people seem to have heard of, but it's excellent: it's set in Chinatown in 19th-century San Francisco, and it's very much a story of immigration, and the experiences of various groups of migrants struggling to find their feet in a new country — and viewing each other with suspicion, rather than making common cause. Historically accurate this show is not — I'd probably describe it as a martial arts western — and visually it's very like Peaky Blinders, all hellish industrial sites and slow-motion strutting bands of squabbling gangsters, each fighting for a tiny scrap of power from the margins. The show deals bluntly with the racism of the setting, with no subtlety — but subtlety is not really what I'm looking for in a show like this.
Valhalla Murders is yet another show from the Scandi-noir assembly line, this time set in Iceland. It's got every cop show cliché in the book, and doesn't really do anything particularly original with its material, but it's still fun to spend a few hours in the stark Icelandic landscape.
Evil is a particularly silly police procedural — in this case about a (lapsed Catholic) psychological profiler teaming up with an exorcist from the Catholic Church to determine whether particular individuals are possessed, or whether there is a psychological cause for the crimes they have committed. There's also some background Dan Brown-style shenanigans with ancient manuscripts and mysteries in the Vatican. The show is clearly going for an X Files vibe with a sceptic and a believer, but the underlying explanation for the supernatural goings on is unsatisfying, in my opinion.
The second season of the Charmed was released in early December, with one episode airing each day for three weeks. I never saw the original Charmed, but I'd been enjoying the reboot, particularly the new three sisters, and most of the other characters. This second season suffered from a degree of incoherence — it felt as if it couldn't figure out who was the ultimate Big Bad the sisters should be fighting — and this meant it seemed to lack focus. I still enjoyed the sisters and their relationship, however.
Industry is a prestige drama that's been airing on the BBC, following the misadventures of a hapless bunch of graduates working in the City in financial services. Most of them are the usual mix of privileged and clueless, handed way too much power and ill-equipped to handle it, and none of them are particularly nice people, although their behaviour and personalities make sense given what we learn about them. I'd recommend this show to people who enjoy stories of amoral people wreaking havoc — along the lines of Succession — there's very little kindness or warmth here.
The Mandalorian's second season, in contrast, is an absolute joy. I'm not sure I can say much more about it that hasn't been said. I'm a sucker for stories of found families, and of detached, dispossessed people finding causes and human connection worth fighting for, so as you can imagine I thoroughly enjoyed the show. I'm only a casual, superficial Star Wars fan, so I'm sure I'm missing a huge pile of references and allusions, but as a piece of media on its own, The Mandalorian certainly holds up well.
The Alienist's second season was a fairly good successor to its predecessor, although I have to say that of the trio of shows I've watched in which a Freudian psychologist teams up with the police to fight crime, I enjoy Freud the most.
Matthias and I finished our rewatch of Borgen last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed the show the second time around. That being said, given it is now ten years old, its politics — a celebration of coalition governments, compromise, and government based on policy, rather than popular sentiment — rings a little false. 'This is the future liberals want,' perhaps, but the past ten years have proved it's unlikely to be the future we get. I still adore Birgitte Nyborg, though.
Over the past three days, Matthias and I have been watching Black Narcissus, which is a BBC adaptation of Rumer Godden's novel of the same name. It's an overwrought, gothic story in which a group of nuns try to set up a convent and school in a remote village in the Himalayas, in the 1930s, but they find the place haunted by its painful past. I like Godden's writing in general, although I'm more familiar with her children's books than her fiction for adults, but I think this adaptation would be better served if it leaned further into the gothic tropey-ness of the story it's trying to tell.
Finally, we've been watching Bridgerton, which certainly cannot be accused of failing to lean into tropey-ness: not a Regency romance trope is left unused, and the result is a ridiculously enjoyable piece of froth — deeply silly, but gorgeous to look at, and exactly the right thing for these dark, idle days.
Have you finished any TV shows recently?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-29 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 12:59 pm (UTC)I think the reboot sort of faded after it got released — certainly in the UK it aired according to a strange schedule, and didn't seem to get much publicity or fannish buzz.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 11:08 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdRj_d7_skE
no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 01:01 pm (UTC)