Beyond Selidor

Four shows finished this month, as always a mixture of quality and genre.

Escaping Utopia, a documentary about the New Zealand-based Gloriavale fundamentalist Christian cult. Like almost all cults, the arc of this one's existence (founded in the 1960s by idealists seeking utopian communal living, a beacon for vulnerable drifters, the inevitable sharp turn towards physical and sexual abuse and financial exploitation) is familiar, with the usual threats against those wishing to leave that they will be blocked from any contact with their families. The documentary truly succeeds in the emphasis it places on the network of people — both ex-cult members, and univolved individuals (such as the middle-aged couple who live in the farm next door) — working diligently to help convince people to leave Gloriavale, and provide safe haven once they've made the decision to do so. I found their dedication to this long, difficult task truly impressive.

Towards Zero, a three-part adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. I haven't seen the original, but judging from comments by people who have, it took massive liberties, to the detriment of the story. While the basic shape of the narrative — a murder takes place in a stately home on the southwest coast of England, with a collection of guests who each have plausible motives for being the murderer — is solid enough, some of the characterisation felt unearned or implausible, as if it had been carried over from a preexisting series of books/shows about the same characters and audiences were expected to have seen/read them. All in all, not a strong adaptation in my opinion.

Dope Girls, a miniseries set in the seedy underbelly of London's Soho in the aftermath of World War I, with various bar owners, nightclub dancers, gang leaders, and corrupt police struggling to get by, and to navigate the labyrinthine interpersonal politics of their circumscribed world. The magnitude of the post-war death and trauma hovers, unacknowledged, over all proceedings. To me, this felt as if it occupied the overlapping centre of the Venn diagram of Peaky Blinders and Babylon Berlin, while never quite reaching the heights of either. It was still very enjoyable, however.

Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries about a 13-year-old boy accused of a classmate's murder. I'm always dubious going into something with so much hype, but in this case, the hype is well and truly justified — this is an early contender for my best TV show of the year. Each of the show's four episodes consists of a single shot, and they follow the progress of the case into three institutional settings (police station when the boy is arrested and charged, secondary school where the police attempt to interview classmates and teachers, secure facility where the boy is held before trial and interviewed by a psychologist) and one domestic (the boy's family home and local town, where his parents and older sister are trying to deal with the fallout of the accusation). It reminded me a bit of Line of Duty, in that there is a lot of focus and detail on institutional rules and procedures, and it's very tightly focused on a small handful of characters, with the plot and emotional developments moved along by verbose, almost theatre-style, dialogue-heavy interactions. ( Spoilers )

The writing is exquisitely good, and the cast is fantastic, in particular the child actor playing the accused teenage boy — everything hinges on him, and the success or failure of this kind of show was dependent on the strength of the actor in this role, which he plays with extraordinary talent and perception. I cannot recommend this series highly enough, although it's not a cheerful topic.

In spite of having a fair amount of free time, I've only finished watching three TV shows this month. They were:

Interior Chinatown, a humorous, meta miniseries about formulaic, tropey storytelling (in this case, American police procedurals, and East Asian martial arts movies), the rigid boxes into which this places its characters, and real-world individuals, and what might happen when characters try to break free from these constraints. It's written with thoughtfulness and affection, the dialogue and characters are great, but I felt that ten episodes were slightly too many, and I'm not quite sure it stuck the landing.

Season 2 of Dark Winds, an atmospheric, noirish mystery series set on a Navajo reservation (and the wider region) in the 1970s. The writing and acting in this is superb — every character is haunted and traumatised in some way, and this is allowed to suffuse with slow subtlety, as viewers are gradually let in on the various secrets. This is a series that is exactly as long as it needs to be — unlike a lot of TV shows, which I find (see above, for example) feel overstretched, Dark Winds needs room to breathe, and uses this slow pace to perfect effect. The dramatic landscape — and the hostility and violence to which it treats its white antagonists, in contrast with its Native characters, for whom its every contour is known and familiar — is almost like another character in the show. This is absolutely exquisite TV, and the only sour note this time around is its cartoonishly grotesque villain (psychosexual issues with his mother, gleefully carnivalesque violence, etc).

The final season of What We Do in the Shadows, a comedy mockumentary spinoff of Taika Waititi's comedy mockumentary film about housesharing vampires in New Zealand, about housesharing vampires in Staten Island. There were still some absolutely hilarious moments, and great lines in the script, but I couldn't help but feel that this was dragged on for too long, until it got a bit tired.

Just three things completed this month, and it's something of a miracle that we managed even that, what with all the visitors and travel. Those three shows were:

My Lady Jane, an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, YA fantasy reimagining of the life of Lady Jane Grey, set in a world in which a persecuted minority of people have the ability to transform into different animals. I enjoyed a lot about this — the quippy dialogue, the over-the-top YA melodrama histrionics, the pointed use of contemporary pop music — but overall felt that it was trying to be too many things at once: YA fantasy, gleefully ahistorical historical drama (along the lines of The Great), political saga about the machinations of amoral, power-hungry people, and spread itself too thinly as a result. And the decision to replace the religious tensions of the Reformation in England with yet another supernatural-powers-as-metaphor-for-persecuted-minorities felt really frustrating to me (although it led to some superficially surreal and ridiculous moments). It's unfair, as if I'm berating the show for not being what I wanted it to be, but I increasingly feel that the total lack of inclination to explore religion (in historical settings where religion played a huge, foundational role in individual people's lives and the collective sociopolitical situations of their communities) is a lazy cop out. It's as if contemporary showrunners, authors, filmwriters, etc cannot actually conceive of a world — medieval, early modern, classical, etc — in which people actually believed in the religions to which they were adherents.

The Turkish Detective, which, as the title suggests, is a crime drama set in contemporary Istanbul. It's a blend of case-of-the-week with an overarching mystery, the latter of which is what drew Mehmet, the main character, back from Britain (where he was raised) to the country of his birth. To be honest, I actually think the show would work better as a cosy ensemble cast case-of-the-week mystery series and dispense with Mehmet, his manpain, and this broader arc altogether. Apart from anything else, this would mean that the whole show could be done in Turkish, as opposed to Mehmet being employed by the Turkish police, and the bulk of the dialogue (between him and his colleagues, and the suspects and witnesses they encounter) taking place in English, which was both annoying and ridiculous. Istanbul is a very pretty city, and I enjoyed that — and the soundtrack of Turkish pop music — but beyond that I probably wouldn't recommend this series.

The Jetty, a four-part miniseries in which a true crime podcaster shows up in a picturesque northern English town in an attempt to solve a decades-old murder, and dredges up a lot of buried secrets. The show isn't saying anything particularly new here — it's about the toxic nexus of misogyny and stifling small town life, and the corrosive damage they cause — but it's written and acted well, and makes seeing this familiar ground retrodden a pleasing experience.

I didn't finish enough TV in January to justify a separate post, so everything watched in the past two months has been rolled into one. This adds up to eight shows — a variety of genres, although oddly three of them are about Indigenous people in the United States, and the combination of deprivation, intergenerational trauma, and strong sense of community that shape their experiences (and all with Zahn McClarnon in the cast), so that's been something of a theme of the viewing schedule this year so far. The shows are:

The Last King of the Cross, a dramatisation of the gang wars and organised crime that flourished in Sydney's King's Cross red light district in the 1980s, centred on John Ibrahim, a 'nightclub owner', his brother and enforcer Sam, and the various other characters who found a home in that specific seedy underbelly. Given that Ibrahim was a producer on the show, it's a pretty whitewashed version of his own history, in which he emerges essentially blameless for any of the real-world violent crimes around which the show's story unfolds, but as long as you go into the show keeping that in mind, it's got a good sense of dramatic momentum. It uses every predictable gangster drama cliché, and at first I thought I'd find it a bit of a chore, but in the end I found it compulsively watchable. Amusingly, that specific part of Sydney is just around the corner from where my mum and sister live (and where I spent my undergrad years); two of my aunts either currently or previously lived in that part of Sydney as well, so I'm very familiar with King's Cross, although its 1990s and early 2000s (to say nothing of its 2010s and 2020s) incarnations were much tamer than the picture painted in the show.

The third and final season of Reservation Dogs, the first of the aforementioned shows about the experiences of Indigenous people in the United States. This show is a strong contender for my show of the year, and definitely has a slot in my top ten shows of all time: it draws you in thinking it will be a light-hearted comedy about the wacky hijinks of a group of teenage friends, and turns out to tell a deeply affecting story about the pain and grief of a community, and the deep love and connections between the people who make up that community. The first season introduces us to the central four characters, their lives on the reservation — and the reasons both historical and personal why they are so hurt and broken. The second season shows us how those four characters heal and put themselves back together. The third season builds on hints and asides viewers have witnessed in the earlier two seasons, and introduces us in detail to almost all the secondary characters — the parents, extended families, and broader community of the four teenagers — and shows us why they are so hurt and broken. And it goes beyond that, and allows the teenage characters to start the work of healing the hurts of the people around them, and, if not repairing the world, at least repairing their community. The show is not so trite to suggest that individual empathy and kindness is enough to overcome the aftereffects of colonisation, dispossession of land and identity, and systemic racism, but it is written with exquisite compassion and generosity of spirit: everyone has a story, and simply listening to and understanding those stories goes a long way. The acting and writing is simply top notch — highly, highly recommended.

Last Stop Larrimah, a two-part documentary about a murder that took place in a remote Australian outback town — a town so small, so off the beaten track that it has only eleven inhabitants (or ten, after the murder). As you can probably imagine, the sorts of people who choose to live in such places are best described as 'characters,' to put it mildly — they are the sorts of pathologically eccentric people who do not get on well with others, move somewhere remote to be away from other people, and find themselves in a situation in which they're thrown into constant close proximity to the same cast of very difficult characters. The documentary involves lengthy interviews with almost every resident of the town, plus local police, journalists who reported on the murder, family members, etc, and it teases out the simmering tensions and soap operatic dramas seething beneath the surface of the town. I found it an engaging story, although it deliberately withholds information from the viewer in order to reveal it at the point of maximum dramatic impact, which some may find contrived and annoying.

The Diplomat — the Netflix political/spy thriller starring Keri Russell, not the British drama starring Sophie Rundle. This is, quite honestly, ludicrous trash — the newly appointed US ambassador to the UK finds herself at the centre of a crisis involving escalating tensions between NATO countries, Russia and Iran — but it's my kind of ludicrous trash, and although I found myself constantly yelling 'that would never happen!' at the TV, I also found myself unable to look away. Some of the characters are very obvious analogues for real-world individuals (the British prime minister and US president are essentially a more ruthless version of Boris Johnson and a less gaffe-prone version of Joe Biden), while others (such as the British foreign secretary, played here as a cerebral, cautious figure doing his best to rein in the BoJo character's hawkish impulses, whereas his real-world equivalent at the time would have been ... Liz Truss) are entirely fictional. If you want to spend a few hours with pretty people in lavish settings with much better dialogue than which their real-world counterparts are capable, and if you're able to switch your brain off, this is good fun.

Echo, that rarity — a Disney Marvel show that I actually enjoyed — the second of the aforementioned shows about Indigenous communities. Like most superhero shows and films, it's the origin story of the titular character (who in addition to being Indigenous is also Deaf and communicates exclusively in sign language) — we see her childhood, the series of deaths that leave her a vulnerable orphan, her early adulthood in New York working as hired muscle for crime boss Wilson Fisk, and her return to her home town and extended family, seeking answers. This is not an easy homecoming — the grief and ruptures of Echo's childhood are an open wound, and her problems in New York follow at her heels — but the show's conclusion is ultimately hopeful and life-affirming, with ties rebound, offering a vision of superpowers that are made stronger when they are shared communally.

Matthias and I have been undertaking a rewatch of Foyle's War (a cosy British crime drama set in Hastings during the Second World War) for many months now, and we finally finished all episodes a couple of weeks ago. This is a show I first started watching as a teenager in Australia; I introduced Matthias to it at some point, by which stage WWII was over and the title character (a police chief superintendant during the war) had been recruited to the security services in London during the early years of the Cold War, and we decided that it was high time to watch the whole thing from the beginning. This is, in many ways, extremely undemanding TV — each episode is self contained, with its mystery solved, and justice done — but its pleasure lies in the central characters (all flawlessly acted), and its relentless emphasis on its core theme. This theme — hammered home with gentle, stiletto sharp politeness by Michael Kitchen as Foyle in every episode — is the tension inherent in the wartime setting, in which authority figures are constantly demanding that Foyle turn a blind eye to more everyday crimes of greed, corruption and murder, and Foyle's insistence that his country's war against fascism makes adherence to the law, and justice done to those who break it even more important. There's always some senior military or political figure asking Foyle just to let things go 'because there's a war on,' and every time he refuses. The setting of Britain during the Second World War (the wartime series range from 1940 to the end of war in Europe) is richly mined, with both the broader military and political backdrop (Italy's entry into the war, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Polish political exiles in Britain, the treatment of Jewish refugees, the presence of US troops on British soil, D Day, etc) and the smaller scale experiences of the British civilian population during the Blitz forming the scaffolding on which the individual mysteries of each episode hangs. I personally feel the later seasons set during the Cold War are weaker, since they necessitate a more murky morality at odds with the conscience and clarity of the earlier seasons, although the historical setting and newly introduced characters are still a lot of fun. Like so many long-running British crime series, it's also a great exercise in 'spot the famous British actor in a bit part,' — the first episode includes James McAvoy and Rosamund Pike, for example, although my absolute highlight in this regard was Laurence Fox playing (decades before he revealed himself as such) a contemptible posh fascist.

Domino Day, pretty much your quintessential low budget BBC 3 fantasy YA miniseries. The title character has magical powers which must be sustained by draining the life force of human beings; she achieves this by going on dates with the worst men she can find on dating apps. Eventually, her behaviour draws the attention of the council of witch elders in Manchester, who seek to both destroy her and steal her power, and, with the help of a newfound group of allies in the form of a local sympathetic witch coven, Domino battles enemies both personal and supernatural. The show ends with hints at another season, but we'll see if this gets renewed.

Dark Winds, the final of the three shows with an Indigenous focus, and again of extremely high quality. The first of its three seasons is a noirish crime drama (with some supernatural elements) set in 1970s New Mexico, with two interconnected crimes — a bank heist via helicopter, and the murder of an Indigenous woman and her grandfather. The show has an incredible sense of place and community, the writing and acting is superb, and I am very much looking forward to watching the following two seasons.

All in all, a very high standard of TV these past two months.

We only finished two TV shows in October, so I decided to roll them into November's log, and then we only finished the last November show on 30th. As a result, I'm writing this post in December, which is not normally how I like this stuff to be done! Nevertheless, the post — though late — is here. We finished six shows (or individual seasons of shows) in the past two months, which are as follows:

Lidia Poët, a historical drama about the first woman to receive a law degree and practice law in Italy. This is, shall we say, very Italian — everyone is ridiculously beautiful, everything is incredibly melodramatic — and presumably quite changed from the actual experiences of the real 19th-century Lidia Poët. But if you want a fluffy, case-of-the-week show in which a feisty, relentless woman fights institutional sexism against a soapy backdrop of romantic entanglements and family conflicts, this is the show for you.

Reservation Dogs, a show about Native American teenagers living their lives on the titular reservation, struggling with the past and present, and dreaming about the future. The tone is surreal and comedic, but there are some pretty heavy themes here, and although I find it life-affirming due to the love all the characters have for each other and the sense of community spirit, I wouldn't say it's a happy show. The writing is sharp, the young actors are fantastic, but don't go in expecting a gentle comedy.

What We Do In the Shadows, the most recent season of the mockumentary about vampire housemates living in a sharehouse in Staten Island. This is more what I'd recommend if you're wanting low-stakes comedy. At this point, I'm not sure I have much more to say about the show — it's still fun, and can obviously be spun out indefinitely, although whether that should happen is another question entirely.

The Newsreader, an Australian drama about a fictional TV newsroom in the 1980s. I absolutely loved the first season of this show, and would recommend it unreservedly to anyone feeling the loss of The Hour, another historical drama that weaves real-world moments in current affairs with the interpersonal stories of its fictional characters. The Newsreader had an added charm for me in that both of my parents were Australian journalists — my father as one of the country's best-known TV political correspondents for over twenty years, including in the time period covered by the show — and a lot of it rings incredibly true to the point of being too close to home! However, I feel that in the second season the balance between real-world Australian current affairs and the struggle to report TV news shows thereof, and the characters' soap operatic lives, is no longer right — by the end of the show, the emphasis was very much on the latter, which was not to my liking.

The Great, an irreverent and smutty black comedy about the reign of Catherine the Great. I enjoyed this a lot in the initial seasons, and the chemistry between the two leads, and many of the actors playing secondary characters, was excellent and carried what would otherwise be quite a one-note story, but I have to say that I think it ended at the right time — on a high. I also feel that by the end it was hard for me to feel enthusiastic about a show whose premise was essentially 'Russians are so violent and imperialistic, hahaha!'

Lupin, on the other hand, has been cruelly cancelled before its time. The third season remained its usual delightful self — with its protagonist 'gentleman thief' engaging in every more audacious and absurd heists and trickery — but the stakes were much higher (essentially the safety of Assane's entire family depended on his ability to pull off these various heists), and caused temporary ruptures in a lot of the show's key relationships, so there was much less of a sense of play than had been present in previous seasons. The show ended on a cliffhanger and then was cancelled by Netflix, which is incredibly disappointing.

And those are the TV shows I've seen over the past two months. Did any of you watch any of these?

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. ( I'll cut my further comments as I really didn't like it and it feels unfair to people who did )

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

We finished six shows this month, and as always it was a good spread of genres, with a higher proportion of really good quality stuff than usual. The shows in question were:

Beef, a black comedy in which two strangers' reactions to their road rage incident spirals to ever-increasing degrees out of control. It's brilliantly written and acted, covering everything from Millennial ennui to the intergenerational tensions of East Asian immigrants and their Asian-American children (the two main characters are Korean-American and Chinese-American, respectively), and incredibly over-the-top (the situation swiftly becomes ludicrous), but with a strong underlying sense of truth. I think it will resonate most with you if you are a) a Millennial and b) incredibly, incredibly angry.

The Power, an adaptation of Naomi Alderman's dystopian science fiction novel in which all people assigned female at birth suddenly develop the ability to shoot electricity out of their hands, and the way this slowly — and then very quickly — upends the social organisation of the whole world. The first season of the TV show is 10 episodes and is still incomplete in terms of covering the content of the book, so it's a lot slower and more ponderous in terms of letting the story unfold, and I feel in some ways that this has led to a degree of subtlety which isn't really present in the book, which is as blunt as an anvil to the head in terms of what it's saying about power, and its connection to the ability to mete out terrible violence. In some ways, though, this greater breathing space has allowed the show to explore things that Alderman was either uninterested in, or didn't have the space to cover, such has how this newfound power affects trans and intersex people.

The latest season of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, a series in which a police officer and woman private detective solve crimes together in Victorian London. This third season is to my mind an improvement on the previous two, since a big part of it hinges on its assumption that the two title characters are a bantering couple whose bickering hides their sexual attraction, whereas I never felt they got this balance right (he just seemed downright rude and dismissive towards her) — until this season. This is not a serious show, and we use it as a sort of palate cleanser if we've been watching something more emotionally wrenching.

Yellowjackets, which I felt came close to jumping the shark this season. The flashback timeline in the 1990s following a teenage girls' football/soccer team try to survive in the wilderness after a plane crash is still told well, but I'm less impressed by the present-day timeline in which the various traumas they experienced after the crash finally escalate and start to ruin the lives they've carefully built. I really think American showrunners need to start thinking on a smaller scale, and trying to write stories that can be told in six episodes, or ten, rather than assuming they'll have endless seasons in which to stretch things out. This could have been complete — and exquisite — in one season, but it's beginning to feel bloated.

Succession, about which I don't feel I need to say much, since the internet is awash with thinkpieces. Suffice it to say that I felt it was a satisfying conclusion, that most characters got what they deserved, but not all, which — given that it's a show that invites viewers to wallow in the grimy mean-spiritedness of Murdoch-esque media billionaires, insincere American politicians, and startup tech bros — is probably pretty true to life.

Colin from Accounts, the dark horse favourite of this month. It's an Australian romantic comedy miniseries in which the two main characters — both kind of hopeless people in various ways — have a meet cute in which she flashes him while walking down the street, causing him to accidentally hit a dog with his car, they both end up responsible for caring for the injured dog, and chaos ensues. I thoroughly enjoyed this — the writing is great, the actors have fantastic chemistry, the secondary characters are wonderful, and the Sydney setting was exactly what I needed, since I've been missing the city terribly since I left at the end of April.

These shows between them are definitely an argument — if ever one was needed — for the importance of TV writers, and the need to compensate them fairly for their work.

As always, a mixture of genres, and, this month in particular, wild divergence in terms of quality! I finished five shows, which were:

Fight the Power, a three-part documentary about the history of hip hop music. It had a lot of archival footage (both of live performances and video clips through the decades, and of other political and cultural events of note during the time period covered) and interviews with prominent figures within the genre. It fleshed out a lot of things that I already knew, and did a particularly good job of tying the music to specific periods of history in various American cities.

The Witcher: Blood Origin, a prequel to the Witcher Netflix series. This was, quite honestly, too stupid for words, and too ridiculous even for me (and I'm someone who likes silly low-budget fantasy films and TV shows). I'm embarrassed on behalf of Michelle Yeoh for being a part of this.

Happy Valley, the concluding season of this phenomenal family saga/crime drama. The previous seasons of this show aired quite a while ago, and the showrunner — though presumably deluged with offers to make more — was apparently determined to wait until the child actor playing one of the main characters had grown up to be old enough for the story she wanted to tell. Thankfully, the actor in question — now an older teenager — was happy to return, and had grown into a good enough actor to handle the role that was written for him. This show kind of masquerades as a noirish crime drama, given that the protagonist is a police officer and there's usually a violent crime she has to solve, but it's actually really a story about family — both blood and chosen — and the messy, tangled webs of love and history and obligation that tie us all together. At its heart is our main character — a middle-aged woman, raising her grandson (a child in the earlier series, a teenager here, and the result of the rape of her daughter, the culmination of an abusive relationship which led the daughter to take her own life), and dealing with the fallout of her decision to do so. The thing I like most about this series — other than the warmth and chaos of these various family connections — is the fact that it's not (as so many police procedurals are) starry-eyed about the police. Indeed, they're generally portrayed as being woefully incapable of dealing with the numerous injustices and social ills that plague the community for which they are supposedly responsible, and the final confrontation between our protagnist and her main antagonist ends up being an anticlimactic chat around the kitchen table, rather than an orgy of retributive violence. I have a couple of minor quibbles about how some narrative threads were tied off, but over all, it was a great conclusion to a fantastic series.

North Sea Connection is a show set in a tiny Irish fishing village in Galway, in which two adult siblings — who have long had a nice little sideline in smuggling contraband cigarettes into the country — end up smuggling more serious drugs, and at the mercy of some very scary people. Every decision they make to try to extricate themselves from the situation sees them fall into deeper and deeper problems, making a bonfire of all their various relationships and the easy, predictable lives they'd been building for themselves. The show tends to swing between shocking dramatic moments (there's one choice made by one of the characters towards the end of the show which is so profoundly messed up that it kind of left me speechless) and a more whimsical tone, and its ending is open-ended, which may mean we're in for another season.

Lockwood & Co is a Netflix adaptation of a YA fantasy series in which ghosts plague the living in contemporary Britain, and society has reshaped itself in various ways to deal with this. The two biggest changes: only children and teenagers can see ghosts, and the country's technological development seems stuck at something equivalent to the 1970s or 1980s — there are landlines, but no mobile phones, there are colour TVs and tape recorders, but no digital music and no internet; research is done in libraries and archives, looking things up in card catalogues. (This gets around the endless problem of high-stakes situations which could easily have been solved if characters had mobile phones.) The fact that only young people can fight the country's supernatural problem has inevitably led to terrible exploitation, with children and teenagers recruited into dangerous work removing troublesome ghosts from haunted buildings. The whole thing has a very Dickensian vibe. Our title characters are a trio of teenagers working independently in their ghost-hunting agency (rather than being employed and exploited by adults), and their life is a constant battle to keep their heads above water. I found the whole thing delightful — the right mix of emotional drama and humour, and actors with good chemistry.

On balance, a good bunch of TV shows, but do not, under any circumstances, bother with The Witcher: Blood Origin!

I finished four TV shows this month, which is a bit less than my normal average, but the second half of the month was kind of a black hole on terms of media consumption. Each show ended up being wildly divergent in terms of tone and genre, so that was nice!

The absolute standout show of the month was the second season of The White Lotus. I'd been dubious when I heard it was making a return — the first season was perfect, and self-contained, and this felt like cynically cashing in, but I shouldn't have worried. Season 2 moves the action from Hawaii to Sicily, and again has a death at its heart which we discover in the first episode, but do not know who has died and how until the final moments of the show. If I had to sum up this series, it's a black comedy about all the different ways wealthy American tourists can be awful, in idyllic locations where there is vast income inequality between tourists and locals (whose economy is largely based on tourism). The world is full of such places, and in fact Matthias correctly predicted that a third season should take place in Thailand (rumoured to be in the works) — my suggested location was somewhere in the Caribbean where cruise ships dock. If you don't mind a lot of secondhand embarrassment and humour based on cringeworthily awkward scenarios, and a show where — barring a handful of local Italian characters — everyone is awful, it's a whole lot of fun.

The Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, needs to really wrap things up. The first season, which was basically an adaptation of the book, was great, and several following seasons which created new material after Atwood's had run out were also pretty good, but it's getting to the point where it's hard to believe that any of the main characters are still alive, and they seem to take turns at having total personality tranplants. There were some interesting moments (elements of Serena's arc this season were very cleverly done), but a lot of the writing seemed merely designed to manoeuvre different characters about so that they ended up in specific physical locations at specific times. They've got a great cast that does a good job with very uneven material.

Entrapped is a follow-up of sorts to the Icelandic crime drama Trapped (the reason for the name change being that the previous two seasons worked with a contrivance of characters having to solve a mystery while trapped by the harshness of the Icelandic landscape and unable to receive any kind of outside help; this season featured no such constraints and characters came and went at will from the northern town in which the murder took place). As in the previous seasons, the show has an almost saga-like quality, with everything hinging on family tensions, ownership of land, and cycles of revenge and violence.

Warrior Nun is a very silly Netflix teen drama about a secret order of — you guessed it — demon-fighting warrior nuns locked in an endless cosmic battle against the forces of evil. The second season was as ridiculous as the first, with handwavy science, cosmology, and Catholicism. None of this matters — the silliness is the point.

I finished six TV shows this month, covering a fairly broad range of tones and genres.

( Six shows )