Beyond Selidor

It's blowing a gale in my part of the world, which seems a suitably stormy end to the working week. I hope everyone else in the UK is safe from the two named storms which have swept through over the past few days!

This week's Friday open thread is in honour of the fact that I've been rewatching the first season of Peaky Blinders. Although I will watch the forthcoming sixth (and final) season when it airs, in general I have no desire to rewatch any season other than the first. I feel the show worked best when its ruthless, ambitious, traumatised Birmingham gangsters were fighting for what felt like proposterously small things: control over a few streets and warehouses, the right to operate their gambling business legitimately at one racecourse — and as they sought more and more grandiose things over the subsequent seasons, things became increasingly ridiculous. There's still plenty to enjoy, but Peaky Blinders is one of the many shows that I feel has a perfect first season, and could have said everything it needed to say in those six episodes.

So my question to you is this: what TV shows do you feel are perfect at one season, and then could (or should) have ended?

Other than Peaky Blinders, I feel this applies to Veronica Mars, the BBC Musketeers and Robin Hood shows (both of which are very silly, but were the correct kind of silly in their first seasons), and the original British series of Broadchurch. I feel that popular British miniseries are particularly at risk of this — showrunners get the go-ahead to produce six episodes, they make something that ends up being a huge hit, and then people want them to make more, when the original show was complete in and of itself.

Thank you also to everyone who left comments on my last post. I'm not going to go back and respond directly, but I'm grateful for your kindness.

I think I'll change the name of these TV roundups next year, unless the UK goes back into anything resembling a genuine lockdown, since although my social life is very circumscribed, I can hardly view myself as living in anything close to quarantine. In any case, this month has been a bumper TV-watching time, with shows ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

The sublime

What We Do in the Shadows. The third season of this absurd, slice-of-unlife comedy following a quartet of vampires (and their human familiar-turned-bodyguard) day-to-day in their Staten Island sharehouse remained as hilarious as ever. As always, the combination of sharp writing, brilliant comic timing, and ridiculous, self-referential scenarios was an utter winner, and the final episode pointed towards a fourth season filled with fresh ideas.

It's A Sin. This miniseries follows four gay men (and their straight female friend) over the decade stretching from 1981-1991. It covers both the joy and beauty and sense of community that was queer life in London during this period, and also the misery and cruelty of the AIDS epidemic. It's told with a deep sense of compassion and — because it's a Russell T. Davies show — sentimentality, and does a great job of conveying the sense of solidarity and found family within the LGBT community at a time when the world was telling them they deserved everything they got, and their own families-by-blood were rejecting them or forcing them to live compartmentalised lives, hiding huge segments of their selves from their families of origin. For obvious reasons it reminded me very much of the movie Pride, and it's definitely one of my contenders for TV show of the year.

The Girl Before. This BBC miniseries is a modern reimagining of both Rebecca and Jane Eyre (the former, of course, itself being a reimagining of the latter), with a stellar cast and some inspired twists on the original (for example, Mrs Danvers the housekeeper is now a 'smart' virtual housekeeping system). The show has a great sense of suspense and atmosphere, and does a wonderful job of translating the gothic horror of its source material into a minimalist London flat.

Succession. The third series of this blackly tragicomic story of four mega-rich and entitled adult siblings jockeying for control of their father's media empire lives up to the sense of expectation and anticipation promised in previous series. The writing is sharp and brutal, the sense of secondhand embarrassment is strong, and everyone is awful in a way that remains compelling to watch.

A Very British Scandal. While this miniseries — based on the sordid 1960s divorce case of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll — is pretty conventional in terms of its storytelling and the conclusions it draws, it's elevated by a good cast (led by Claire Foy and Paul Bettany) and a great sense of the atmosphere and mood of the period in which it's set.

The servicable

Impeachment. This is the latest in the series of 'American Crime Story' shows, and, as the title suggests, it takes as its subject matter the Monica Lewinsky affair and the drawn out attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. The series doesn't break any new ground, but it does a good job of showing the monstrous injustice done to basically every woman involved in the impeachment circus (and indeed almost every woman tangentially involved with Clinton himself), and the specific cruelty done to Lewinsky herself by both the media, the political establishment, and the various right-wing activists and opportunistic fellow travellers who attached themselves like vultures to the case. There are a lot of sly little asides foreshadowing the current right-wing trashing of American democracy, and highlighting the hypocrisy of virtually everyone involved in this particular moment in American political history.

Hawkeye. I've always found Clint Barton to be the most uninteresting MCU Avenger, and I actively dislike Jeremy Renner, so I was primed to dislike this Disney+ series. Imagine my surprise when I found it to be enjoyable cheesy fun! I'm sure my enjoyment hinges a lot on the fact that the show wisely decides to focus on Kate Bishop rather than Barton himself, and because it doesn't try to make the series anything deeper than an action-packed superhero origin story set in a chocolate boxy New York at Christmas time. I'm shocked to say that this is my favourite so far of the Disney+ Marvel shows.

Paris Police 1900. Part mystery, part political thriller, this French show follows the titular Paris police as they try to solve a gruesome crime and deal with the fallout of the Dreyfus affair. It had rather too many gratuitously naked female corpses for my liking, but I loved the characters and hope the show returns for a couple more seasons. Due to the subject matter, antisemitism obviously features heavily, so do take note if that's something you'd rather avoid.

Vienna Blood. One of three shows I've encountered in the past few years in which an odd couple featuring a Freudian psychotherapist team up to solve mysteries. Vienna Blood has always been the weakest of the three, although it's a perfectly serviceable buddy cop crime series with a fun cast of secondary characters, and I'll no doubt continue to watch any subsequent seasons.

The ridiculous

The 100. Oh God, why? I don't think any fan of this postapocalyptic YA show liked this final season, and I'm no different. The fact that the show aired early last year in the US but took until November this year to make it to the UK (with at least one switch in channel happening after a release date had been finalised) suggests that the network airing it was less than confident it would find much of an audience, and I suspect they were proved right. Matthias and I watched out of a grim sense of completionism. The show had always been very silly — a ludicrous premise, and what I call a 'CW hot' cast of blandly pretty people in their 20s playing teenagers — but it had a kind of core idea which resonated in interesting ways: on a postapocalyptic Earth, with scarce resources and various communities of traumatised people, the only way to ensure survival is to put aside all differences, no matter how immense, and make common cause. Every season, new communities of survivors were discovered, and the characters had to learn all over again that their survival depended on recognising everyone as human, and working together. The show worked well when it was firmly grounded in this idea — essentially when it found new ways to ask the question, who gets to be human? and answered, we ALL must be human, or else we perish. As soon as it got more supernatural and mystical than that, with tech that basically became magic (cryogenics, generation ships, travel through wormholes, uploading one's consciousness into some sort of transcendental void), I was out of there. This season was particularly stupid, but I felt it jumped the wormhole, so to speak, the instant the characters left Earth for good. Any story that imagines an apocalypse, in my opinion, takes a cowardly way out if it implies any solution — distant terraformed planets, transcendance, Elon Musk's colony on Mars, whatever — that does not keep our feet firmly planted on Earth. For us there is no elsewhere, I believe in the same way that I believe I need air to breathe and potable water to drink, and we must always, always build the Republic of Heaven where we are. Anything else feels like giving up.

This month's completed TV shows range from grim and dystopian to very very silly, and everything in between. Most were excellent, with a few exceptions.


Baptiste is a melancholy, grim, pan-European crime drama, now in its third season, which was mainly set in Hungary and involved far-right anti-immigration politics in that country. The show always has a great cast and excellent production values, and is full of twists and turns, but it's definitely not something to watch if you want to feel good about the state of the world.

The Handmaid's Tale latest season was a real mixed bag for me. The show is at its best when it sticks close to the themes of the book — the tiny ways disempowered people resist when all other options have been closed off to them, the hypocrisies of contemporary Western society (particularly 'white feminism' and the supposed egalitarianism of progressive men) laid bare. I'm less convinced when it morphs into a narrative of grand resistance with June Osborne at its head and heart — it leads to some dramatic moments of television, and it tells an interesting story of how one woman's righteous anger and fearlessness destroys everyone around here, but it's not the story I want to see told in The Handmaid's Tale and I'm increasingly convinced that the show needs to wrap up, rather than hurtling towards an inevitable overthrow of Gilead's dystopian regime.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad after I began watching the TV adaptation, which I finished last night. The show is — with the exception of one episode, which I found unnecessary — a thoughtful and well-made adaptation of a great book. Everything from the casting to the cinematography and score to the sweeping arc of its characters' narrative journeys is stunning. The story, of course, is harrowing: violent, terrifying, and filled with every injustice experienced by black people in the United States over the course of their history in that country, but it never feels like voyeuristic misery porn, just searing, unvarnished truth.

I wasn't expecting much from Professor T, but it managed to sink below even my lowest expectations. Matthias and I always watch detective shows set in Cambridge, and they're almost uniformly terrible — if we're not howling in outrage when people cycle the wrong way down a one-way street, we're laughing hysterically at how badly they misrepresent student and academic life. This show — the gimmick of which is that the eponymous professor, a lecturer in criminology, assists police in solving crimes — was by far the worst in this regard that I've ever seen. For starters, there is no undergraduate degree in criminology at Cambridge, the criminology department looks nothing like the building in which lectures were shown to take place, he seems to be teaching outdated and discredited crimological theory (such as the broken windows theory) and the professor's head of department seems to be a colleague at his colleague instead of within his faculty. There's the usual nonsense Cambridge TV geography (someone starts walking through one building, emerges on the grass lawns of an entirely different building, and then walks out onto a street that is on the other side of town) as well. But even in addition to all that, the show is just bad. As well as being a criminology professor, the main character is depicted as being neurotypical in some way, but it's poorly done, both riddled with offensive clichés and never actually specified (is he autistic? does he have OCD? it's a mystery). All in all, a dreadful waste of time!

The third season of Wellington Paranormal — a spinoff from the What We Do in the Shadows film, in which a hapless police department attempt to solve crimes involving supernatural creatures — remained as delightful as ever, although I felt they were running out of material. It was still a lot of fun, and made me look forward to the newest season of What We Do In the Shadows, which is out very soon.

The White Lotus — a miniseries set in an exclusive hotel in Hawaii filled with eccentric and horrible guests — was this month's unexpected highlight. Your enjoyment will hinge on how much tolerance you have for terrible people being terrible — every type of awful wealthy American is on display, from the pampered scion of a rich family who's never had to work a day in his life to the 'lean-in' high-powered businesswoman, and from teen girls whose activism is theoretical and full of unexamined privilege to the drunken and emotionally vulnerable older woman who cluelessly uses and discards the hotel worker she takes under her wing. The lush surroundings are set in contrast to the injustices of Hawaii's recent history, the luxurious hotel staffed by people who could never afford to stay there, some of whom were even displaced from their own homes by its construction. Everything is surreal and unsettling, and for much of the time I watched through my fingers, frozen with secondhand embarrassment. The Australian hotel manager is the highlight of the show.

Finally, we have The Chair, a six-part miniseries in which Sandra Oh is the chair of a struggling English faculty at a US liberal arts college. As someone who has a PhD in the humanities, who works in academic librarianship, with most of my friends humanities academics, the show was a) spot on, if broad-brush in places and b) painfully close to the bone. Sandra Oh is fantastic, and I loved that the show allowed us to spend time not only with her professional trials and tribulations, but also with her multigenerational family. I highly recommend this show.

For various reasons, I didn't end up completing a huge number of TV shows in June — just four of them. However, those four covered a pretty broad range of genres — cooking/social history/memoir, fantasy, and historical drama between them.

The shows in question were:

Domina: a historical drama set during the end of the Roman republic/assassination of Julius Caesar/early years of Augustus' time as emperor, depicting events from the perspective of Livia Drusilla. This is very much of the Game of Thrones prestige HBO drama with lots of sex and violence TV genre, which I found mildly amusing given it was in some ways HBO's Rome series in the 2000s — which covered the same historical period — that began this particular trend.

The Nevers: the Victorian fantasy series about (mainly) women who develop supernatural abilities, and the persecution they experience at the hands of the state as a result. This was the show that was somewhat tainted by Joss Whedon's involvement (he has subsequently left the project), and it's certainly quite a Whedon-y affair: quippy dialogue, superficially feminist, tropey, etc. I have to say that I quite enjoyed it — James Norton was great as a scenery-chewing, bisexual, aristocratic hedonist, I liked that there were basically three or four different tropey Victoriana stories running concurrently, and most of the characters were a lot of fun. That said, the final episode had a really stupid twist that I felt undermined everything that had come before it, and made me retrospectively annoyed with the show.

High on the Hog: a Netflix show which is part culinary history, part social history, and part personal history about Black cuisine in the US. The first episode looks at the interconnectedness between African cooking (specifically that of Benin) and Black cooking in the US, the second episode mainly focuses on North Carolina, the third is about cuisine in the north of the country (mainly New York, DC and Philadelphia) and the fourth is focused on Texas. It's not really a cooking show — in the sense that although there is a lot of cooking and eating, it's not teaching viewers how to cook the recipes showcased — it's really about the history of Black people in the US, using food as a window. I highly recommend it!

The Ghost Bride: a Malaysian TV series set in Malacca in 1890 about a young woman who becomes caught up in various supernatural and afterlife shenanigans after a wealthy family asks her to become the ghost bride of their deceased son. I found this show delightful, and loved every single character — and it also made me really hungry!

It's the end of the month, so it's time for another viewing wrap-up.

( Five TV shows )

( Four films )

We woke up to a world blanketed by mist — a real surprise, since I'd figured it was too warm for that to happen again this year. By 10am or so, the mist had all burnt away, and Matthias and I spent a couple of hours in the garden, weeding the very overgrown vegetable patch and flower beds, and clearing all the bits of random rubbish that the previous owners left behind. Things are definitely now on track for us to start growing vegetables!

We didn't watch a huge amount of TV this month, but we did finish some stuff.

( Five TV shows behind the cut )

( Three films )

This is my last TV roundup for the year, and for obvious reasons (no travel, mid-way through a three-week holiday at home), I have watched a lot of TV this month. Some of it was fantastic, some diverting, some a bit disappointing.

( TV shows behind the cut )

Have you finished any TV shows recently?

And, like much of the rest of Europe, back we go into lockdown. To be honest, given I've been working from home throughout the entire period in which the lockdown was supposedly lifted, and barely left the house, not much in my immediate life will change. What's more worrying is that this second lockdown is happening without the furlough scheme. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely need to go into lockdown — there were more than 20,000 new cases in the past twenty-four hours — but we can't just close the entire retail and hospitality sector with a shrug of the shoulders. (Edited to add that it looks like the furlough scheme is being relaunched for workers in the affected industries, so that's at least one positive.)

I've spent most of this morning prodding at my Yuletide assignment. I think I've written about a third of it, although I was focusing more on just vomiting words out onto the page, so what exists will need substantial editing. I always find it easier to just write as quickly as possible, and focus on the editing later, though, so I feel like I'm moving at exactly the right speed.

In terms of a media roundup for this month, I've not finished very much in the way of TV — just two shows (although Matthias and I have a lot of ongoing series on the go at the moment).

( Two TV shows and a book )

( A video essay about Fury Road costuming, and the latest bizarre real estate listing )

I hope everyone's being kind to themselves in these darkening days.

July was, mostly, a good month for TV. I've already discussed some of the things I've watched (such as the rather dreadful Eurovision film, and the much more excellent The Old Guard), so this represents a roundup of everything else.

( A lot of small screen )

And that's my month in TV. What have you all been watching?

I wrote a review on my Wordpress blog about Peaky Blinders, a gangster miniseries set in Birmingham in 1919.

That’s not to say there aren’t tensions. The young Shelby men have returned, traumatized, from the battlefields of World War I, only to find that the women – shrewd, tough-as-nails Aunt Polly, and angry, romantic Ada – have been running things just fine, if not better, on their own. Tommy Shelby, who views himself as the gang’s de facto leader, has to reconcile his own grand vision for the Peaky Blinders with the more limited, but safer, scope planned by his aunt.

At the same time, the gang relies on its ability to control the shifting network of alliances of the streets, contending with IRA cells, communist agitators attempting to unionize the factory workers, Traveller families who control the racetrack, Chinese textile workers who moonlight as opium den operators, and, one of my favourite characters, an itinerant fire-and-brimstone street-preacher played by Benjamin Zephaniah. It’s a complicated balancing act of carrot and stick, and when it works, it works because the various players have understood correctly the psychology, needs and fears of their opposite numbers.

The review's a bit late - the first season aired some months ago - but if my description piques your interest, it might be worth catching up, as there aren't that many episodes, and the new season is due to air soon.

This is one of my favourite times of the year, because IT'S EUROVISION TIME! I have a deep and daggy love of Eurovision, but luckily, so do my partner Matthias, and many of our friends. This time last year, we had a Eurovision party, but we were unable to do the same this time around, as most of our Eurovision-loving friends were away. Our friend B did come over, and we had a great time snarkily deconstructing all the acts. My greatest triumph of the evening? Inventing the Tumblr tag 'erotic milk-churning' to describe the Polish act. Honestly, it has to be seen to be believed. I was very happy with the act that eventually won, and a good time was had by all.

ETA: I made a new mix on 8tracks. It's called 'Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again and Again and Again', and consists of the best cover versions of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', as well as the original. Because I'm cool like that. (Bizarre story from my past: one night, my dad and I did nothing but listen to every cover version of this song, drink red wine and generally work each other up into such a frenzy of maudlin feelings that we both ended up crying our eyes out. Good times, 2007. Good times.)

Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again and Again and Again from dolorosa_12 on 8tracks Radio.