April TV shows

[dolorosa_12]

It's been a busy month (about which more later in a further post), and that's meant I've only managed to complete three TV shows, all of which were fairly short in length. These shows were:

The latest season of The Capture, a BBC crime/spy/political thriller whose premise is that the British police and security services have been engaged in a clandestine programme of 'correction' — planting nonexistent deepfake evidence in order to convict people of crimes for which there is no real evidence, supposedly justified as serving some greater security or political good. At the end of the last season, this was all exposed and out in the open, and the latest season deals with the ongoing messy fallout (surprise surprise, simply revealing the shadowy iniquities perpetuated by the British political and security elite does not result in an immediate transformation of the country for the better). In this season, along with the deepfakes, there's generative AI to contend with, and everything proceeds at breakneck pace with terrifying consequences. The sense of not having a solid grip on observable reality, and the sickening ease with which the characters justify the unbelievably unethical things they do is terrifying. The acting and writing are as sharp as ever, and the show is the televisual equivalent of a page-turner, but I couldn't help but find the plot completely ludicrous: not because the UK police, military, or security services wouldn't be attracted to doing all the dodgy technological things they're portrayed as doing, but because their competence at doing so and seemingly bottomless funds to support these actions strained the bounds of credulity.

Kleo, a surreal, darkly comedic spy thriller set in the dying days of partitioned Germany, in which the titular Stasi assassin gets framed and thrown into prison by those above her in the chain of command, released several years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and immediately sets about trying to hunt down those responsible for the stitch-up and attempting to uncover the larger political reasons why it happened. The story barrels along on an international chase, zipping from a Berlin left reeling at the overwhelming political and social changes bursting forth, to Spain and Chile, filled with a fabulous cast of characters (the side characters are particularly fun), against a backdrop of crumbling modernist architecture and an absolutely glorious soundtrack. I enjoyed this immensely.

Midnight at the Pera Palace, a Turkish historical drama in which Esra, a struggling journalist, gets assigned to write a puff piece about the history of a (real) luxury Istanbul hotel, and gets sucked back in time to 1919, where she has to foil a nefarious British plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal. I wanted to like this more than I did: it has all the seeds of a silly piece of popcorn TV (ludicrous premise, the potential for lots of humorous time-travel shenanigans — to be fair there were some of those, like the point at which Esra needs to read a plot-relevant diary, but can't, as it is in Arabic script, which got replaced by Latin script as part of the reforms introduced in the wake of the founding of the modern Turkish state — a gorgeous setting, and a glimpse back into the cosmopolitan world of this hotel in its heyday), but it was just a bit too melodramatic and overacted for my taste.