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dolorosa_12) wrote2023-07-02 11:15 am
dolorosa_12) wrote2023-07-02 11:15 am
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June TV shows
This post is a couple of days late, due to the incredibly busy weekend I've been having (of which more in a later post). We finished watching five TV shows this month. All were excellent, although I'd have to say that some of them ruined things somewhat by very disatisfying endings. The shows in question were:
Blue Lights, a contemporary crime drama set in Belfast, following a number of new police recruits as they undergo their training and become caught up in trying to solve a high-profile case involving organised crime. It's a good social portrait of Northern Ireland in general, and Belfast in particular.
Interview with the Vampire, an adaptation (part of) the first book in Anne Rice's series. I came to the books at exactly the right age and demeaner — eighteen years old, and very melodramatic — and loved them a lot during the time I read them. The changes the showrunners made from the books in terms of Louis's backstory and ethnicity work really well, and serve to even better emphasise the unequal, messed up, codependent relationship between Lestat and Louis, and later Lestat, Louis and Claudia. I'm less convinced that the changes made to the timeframe — pushing everything forward in time from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century — works well, although I assume it was necessary if the show wanted Louis to be Black, but to have been born free rather than enslaved. In any case, the show hit exactly the right tone — the same purple prose, the same self-absorbed melodrama, the same lurid excess, and is to my mind a fantastic adaptation.
Daisy Jones and the Six, another adaptation from a book, and another story about self-destructive codependent relationships. This is the story about the titular band, and Daisy Jones, a singer who joins them later, and their journey as they make it big as rock stars in the 1970s. The cast in this is fabulous, the songs are great (and are sung and performed by the actors), and it's thoughtfully done portrait of a very specific time and place, and of the beauty that can be created by incredibly damaged people, and the damage that they can do to themselves and each other. The one sour note is the show's ending, which pulls the rug out from under the viewer in terms of the frame narrative (of a retrospective series of interviews for a documentary about the band) in a way that I found sentimental and unsatisfying.
Infiniti, a French drama about astronauts travelling to the International Space Station, and a strange series of murders taking place in Baikonur (the city in Kazakhstan that is home to the Cosmodrome spaceport from which Russian- and international-crewed human space flights were launched until very recently). I really liked the portrayal of space flight (although I had to switch off the part of my brain that knew no country's space program would send such psychologically unstable people as the show's characters into space), life in Kazakhstan, and the weird social and political tensions that come from the region's Soviet legacy, and the Cosmodrome's weird political status as an entity on Kazakh territory, but leased to Russia until 2050. However, I wished that the show had stayed in the realms of crime drama and geopolitical thriller, whereas instead it was determined to incorporate multiverse shenanigans, which I almost always hate, because in the hands of most writers, multiverse nonsense renders all character deaths meaningless, and end up implying that characters' choices are set in stone and don't matter. Other than that, a very good show, and I enjoyed its multilingualism.
Count Abdullah, another comedy from the same writers who brought us We Are Lady Parts. In this show, a young NHS doctor of British Pakistani descent ends up transformed into a vampire, making his already complicated and stressful life even more complicated and stressful. As with We Are Lady Parts, this is a comedy about British Muslim life made by people from that community, and I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious.
June was definitely a high point in terms of TV shows, that's for sure!
June was definitely a high point in terms of TV shows, that's for sure!
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So glad you enjoyed IWTV. The changes they made really sing for me. It's odd how little I've seen it mentioned, considering the IP and also gay vampires.
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It's really fun — I definitely recommend it!
I agree with you about Interview with the Vampire — I saw a handful of people people posting about it initially, but then not much. It doesn't help that in the UK at least, it is not available through any streaming service and instead had to be bought from Amazon to watch.
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Wait, what?
I love vampire comedies (What We Do in the Shadows film and TV series)
and I love We Are Lady Parts.
I must track this down!
Have you seen the film Polite Society, which was made by the same people as We Are Lady Parts?
https://youtu.be/TRFM7HQmkH0
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I haven't yet seen Polite Society, although it's on my list — my husband and I are waiting until it's cheapish to rent or buy, or available on a streaming service that we pay for.
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and I would happily watch another six! ^_^
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some of them ruined things somewhat by very disatisfying endings Always frustrating when a show you're enjoying doesn't stick the landing. ):
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Indeed.
I hope you enjoy Count Abdullah — it's a lot of fun.
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Nope! He easily could have been a free person of color earlier than that since it's set in New Orleans!
Infiniti sounds really interesting--I hadn't heard of that before.
I don't know if I would watch a vampire comedy ordinarily but FROM THE WE ARE LADY PARTS PEOPLE? SIGN ME UP!
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You're absolutely right (I mean, I've read enough Benjamin January to know that), but I just feel that the showrunners wanted to deal with racism, but not slavery, and pushed the show forward in time in order to handwave it away as anything other than background history. (Louis in the books was a plantation owner when he was a human, and I can really see the writers not wanting to deal with that in any way.)
I don't know if I would watch a vampire comedy ordinarily but FROM THE WE ARE LADY PARTS PEOPLE? SIGN ME UP!
I on the other hand would watch a vampire anything, but it being a show by the We Are Lady Parts people makes it even better!
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