dolorosa_12 | October TV shows

I finished six TV shows this month, covering a fairly broad range of tones and genres.

Karen Pyrie, a mystery miniseries about a police officer in St Andrews in Scotland reopening a cold case from the 1990s — along with the incompetence, corruption, and possible police complicity that led to the murder being unsolved in the first place. It does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of small, insular university towns — the tensions between town and gown, the stifling knowledge that everyone knows everyone else's history and business, the various painful secrets that come to light when an event of such rupture as a murder takes place. The characters all felt a bit like stock figures, but it was still pretty well done.

She-Hulk, Disney+'s latest Marvel adaptation. Orphan Black is one of my favourite TV shows, in large part due to the wonder that is Tatiana Maslany, so I had high hopes for this series, which attempted to tackle themes of misogyny, revenge porn and incel culture through the lens of a legal comedy with superheroes. When reading this description, you probably get an idea of the potential problems — all this is a lot, and it's a challenge to get all the parts fitting together in a coherent way. There were some funny moments, and fun cameos, and Maslany did her best with fairly one-note material, but the whole thing felt a bit unsubtle. At this point, I think it's unlikely that we'll ever get a Marvel TV adaptation of the quality of the shows we got on Netflix.

Rings of Power, the Lord of the Rings 'prequel' was a surprising hit with me. I need to preface this by saying that I am basically the furthest thing you could get from a Tolkien purist, and I tend to treat the film adaptations as their own separate thing, like fanfic of the written work, and assess them on their own merits. With this adaptation, I was completely swept away by the sheer lavish beauty of the whole thing — the gorgeous landscapes and sets, the costuming and design, and the massive scale and stakes of the story. I liked the sense of different peoples having different understanding of the passage of time, and how this played into their very different responses to the thorny in which they found themselves, and their painful, tentative steps towards making common cause in the face of destruction. I went into the show expecting it to be an over-the-top expensive folly, and ended up enjoying it a lot and looking forward to the next season.

Borgen, the revival of the early 2010s Danish political drama, was something I'd really been looking forward to, since the original was basically a love letter to my own values — politics as coalition-building and compromise, rather than dramatics and demagoguery. The revived series takes place around a decade after the previous one ended, and instead of tackling a single political issue per episode, it focuses on a larger issue — the discovery of oil in Greenland — over the course of the whole series. The series was made last year, but a lot of it is remarkably prescient to our current times: covert Russian and Chinese military activity in the Artic, the weaponisation of fossil fuels, formerly colonised countries having little patience with the pieties about democratic values being spouted by their former colonists, the dependence of European NATO countries on the US (and the things that are demanded of them in return) — all play a role. In addition, as in the previous series, there are subplots about Birgitte's family, and about the difficulties of providing good quality political journalism in the twenty-first century. I really, really enjoyed the elements focusing on the geopolitical and diplomatic headaches being solved, and on Denmark's relationship with Greenland (although I assume it was somewhat simplified), but I really could have done without the show's insistence on having Birgitte relearn what she already exemplified in the previous series: that politics involving compromise, collaboration and rational discussion will always produce better results than larger-than-life individuals going it alone.

Only Murders in the Building, the second season of the show which pokes gentle fun at true crime podcast culture (and New Yorkers). Our intrepid trio of neighbouring misfits find themselves falsely accused of another murder in their apartment block, and get to work trying to clear their name, digging up various scandals and secrets. It's the cast that makes this show, and it remains a delight.

Heartbreak High, a Netflix remake of a popular Australian teen soap opera from my own childhood. I never saw the original (although it was definitely something watched by a lot of my high school friends), so I have nothing to compare it with, but the revived version sees a bunch of awkward teenagers deal with all the trials and tribulations experienced as they navigate their romantic and sexual lives. One thing the original emphasised heavily was Australian multiculturalism, and the new version certainly keeps that focus, but I imagine that it does a much better job than its predecessor of depicting a broader range of sexualities and genders — many of the characters are gay or bisexual, there's a nonbinary character and an asexual character, and in general all the characters (with a handful of obvious exceptions who are immediately called out for it) are extremely, enthusiastically accepting of queerness. Based on the musical choices, and a lot of blink-and-you'll-miss-them throwaway references to 1990s pop culture, I suspect the intended audience is the Gen Y nostalgia crowd, rather than current teenagers of the age of the characters in the show — which is my impression of a lot of media with teenage characters at the moment. For me, I have to admit the highlight of the show was playing spot-the-Sydney-location — it had a really strong sense of place, and if you know Sydney well you will recognise a lot of familiar places.

October TV shows

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