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dolorosa_12) wrote2025-02-27 08:23 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2025-02-27 08:23 pm
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February TV shows
I finished three TV shows this month, which ran the spectrum from 'staggeringly good' to 'mediocre, but in a beautiful landscape'. They were:
After the Party, a New Zealand family drama miniseries about a middle-aged woman who accuses her husband of sexually abusing a teenage boy (which she discovers at the titular party), and then has to contend with the fallout, first after the boy refuses to confirm her accusations and her husband leaves, and then, after he returns, several years later. It's incredibly tense to watch, and the multigenerational dysfunctional family relationships make a tense, painful situation even more so. My genuine worst nightmare on an interpersonal level is being disbelieved by the people to whom I'm closest, so I almost watched this between my fingers, it was that stressful — but it was also warm, and even funny at times. The writing and acting are superb.
An t-Eilean, a crime drama set in the Hebrides, done multilingually in Scottish Gaelic and English. At its heart is a dysfunctional aristocratic family, and when one of them is murdered in the first episode, all the tensions and secrets come bubbling to the surface. As I said in my preamble, the setting is gorgeous, and the fact that it's partly in Gaelic (although, to my ear, the actors sounded slightly lacking in fluency; my very rusty knowledge of Irish came rushing back, and it was pleasing to see how mutually comprehensible the two languages are) is great, but I felt the show itself was clichéd and soap operatic.
Unforgotten, the latest series of this crime drama in which a police unit solves long-dormant cold cases. The formula for this series is that a body is discovered, and viewers follow three or four other characters, all of whom have a connection with the murder victim, all of whom have secrets, and at least one of whom is guilty of the murder. I generally like this, although I found that the stories of the various characters (a university lecturer at risk of being 'cancelled' by her students for alleged racism, a gay Afghan refugee, an autistic youth who was at risk of being radicalised by the incel alt-right manosphere, and a far-right TV celebrity working on a stand-in for GB News or similar) rather superficially done compared to previous seasons. (A review described them as being 'the embodiment of a Daily Mail comments section,' which was apt.)
And that's February's viewing.
And that's February's viewing.
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There's something about the slow, plodding nature of Unforgotten that I really like. It doesn't rely on dramatic interviews with suspects or chases, just methodical police work. That being said, I agree about the various characters feeling more like mouthpieces for particular ideas (or ideas being critiqued) rather than actual characters.
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