dolorosa_12 | July TV shows (Reply)

I've been frantically busy for the past week, hence being rather scarce in these parts. Hopefully I'll have time to catch up on my reading list after finishing this post.

Thankfully, I've only completed two TV shows this month, meaning this monthly round-up post will be pretty brief. Those shows were:

Champion, a British drama about a family in London (two adult children — a brother and sister — their parents, plus various close friends, partners, and one grandchild) trying to, respectively, revive a successful career as a rapper after a stint in prison, build her own music career after a lifetime spent in her brother's shadow, exploitatively manage his son's career, and hold the family together while dealing with a lifetime of squandered dreams and unacknowledged labour. It's soap-operatic, with some fairly obvious tropes and reveals, but it's got great music, and a lot of heart, and is essentially a love letter to British-Caribbean immigrant communities, and the lives they built for themselves and their descendants, particularly in London.

The Secret Invasion, the latest Marvel Disney TV series — this one focusing on Nick Fury, and attempting to strike the tone of a spy thriller. Unfortunately, in spite of a pretty stellar cast, this was really, really bad — it felt as if most people were phoning it in (the AI-generated credits sequence art set the tone in this regard), and was riddled with offensive implications (in my opinion, it's impossible to tell a story of a secret alien community, living undetected among ordinary humans, infiltrating the halls of power, with designs on world domination, without it being wildly antisemitic; on top of that, the whole thing felt like a clunky and unintentional metaphor for the founding of the state of Israel, Marvel is always terrible when it comes to stories of refugees and this one is no different, and to top things off the show came very close to implying that Chornobyl is located within Russia). To be honest, although some of the later shows have had fun moments or good individual episodes, I really haven't cared much for any Marvel show since they stopped being on Netflix, and this one certainly didn't do much to increase my enthusiasm.

I've got a couple of other shows on the go, but none finished so far, so those two are it for this month.