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Things What I've Been Watching
Mar. 10th, 2014 09:21 pmTelevision that I've been watching! I haven't posted about it in a while. I haven't posted much of anything in a while, I'm afraid. Perhaps I should try to post a bit more regularly... Anything you lot would be interested in hearing about?
But for now, television!
1. Poirot, otherwise known as "my new favorite show everty-ever." Well, maybe not quite that much. But I like it a lot! I watch it after work with a cup of tea and a treat, and it is the best show for unwinding. I like Poirot's ridiculousness and Captain Hastings' easy-going good-nature; I like that Chief Inspector Japp is actually pretty sharp beneath his surface buffoonery, and I like all the English countryside, and the interwar setting, and really everything.
2. A Young Doctor's Notebook, which is weird. It features a young Russian doctor (played by a surprisingly good Daniel Radcliff), posted to an obscure Siberian hospital in the 1910s, who keeps a journal of his early cases and also is occasionally visited by his older self, who only he can see.
The show has no interest in explaining how this happens. Is the older self remembering his younger days? Hallucinating under the influence of morphine that he's interacting with his younger self? Time-traveling to actually visit his younger self? The first two seem more likely, but he sometimes gives himself advice which saves the situation, so...
The show is only somewhat engaging, so if it were longer I would probably drop it. But there are only four episodes on Netflix so far, so I'll probably finish just for it's weirdness.
3. Don't Trust the B--- in Apartment 23, the strange doppelganger of 2 Broke Girls. Both are comedies about odd-couple female roommates in New York City; or at least Apartment 23 is allegedly a comedy, although it didn't make me laugh very much. I think the writers forgot that, while main characters can be broadly drawn types in the pitch ("A wholesome Midwestern fool rooms with a savvy New York con artist! Brilliant!"), they need to become actual characters in the show itself.
Admittedly, I only got three episodes in, so maybe they do develop actual characterization later. But the show didn't have other good qualities to make me hang around to see.
4. And finally, Fingersmith, which I thought did the mystery aspect pretty well, but the romance, not so much. Or rather, I thought the first part of the romance was fine, but the end was rushed: after all the hell they've put each other through (I don't want to spoil it, but seriously, hellacious hell), I felt like there needed to be a bit more to the reunion in a sunlit library to convince me that their relationship could really work - that their past actions wouldn't make it impossible for them to trust each other and spoil any future their relationship had.
But for now, television!
1. Poirot, otherwise known as "my new favorite show everty-ever." Well, maybe not quite that much. But I like it a lot! I watch it after work with a cup of tea and a treat, and it is the best show for unwinding. I like Poirot's ridiculousness and Captain Hastings' easy-going good-nature; I like that Chief Inspector Japp is actually pretty sharp beneath his surface buffoonery, and I like all the English countryside, and the interwar setting, and really everything.
2. A Young Doctor's Notebook, which is weird. It features a young Russian doctor (played by a surprisingly good Daniel Radcliff), posted to an obscure Siberian hospital in the 1910s, who keeps a journal of his early cases and also is occasionally visited by his older self, who only he can see.
The show has no interest in explaining how this happens. Is the older self remembering his younger days? Hallucinating under the influence of morphine that he's interacting with his younger self? Time-traveling to actually visit his younger self? The first two seem more likely, but he sometimes gives himself advice which saves the situation, so...
The show is only somewhat engaging, so if it were longer I would probably drop it. But there are only four episodes on Netflix so far, so I'll probably finish just for it's weirdness.
3. Don't Trust the B--- in Apartment 23, the strange doppelganger of 2 Broke Girls. Both are comedies about odd-couple female roommates in New York City; or at least Apartment 23 is allegedly a comedy, although it didn't make me laugh very much. I think the writers forgot that, while main characters can be broadly drawn types in the pitch ("A wholesome Midwestern fool rooms with a savvy New York con artist! Brilliant!"), they need to become actual characters in the show itself.
Admittedly, I only got three episodes in, so maybe they do develop actual characterization later. But the show didn't have other good qualities to make me hang around to see.
4. And finally, Fingersmith, which I thought did the mystery aspect pretty well, but the romance, not so much. Or rather, I thought the first part of the romance was fine, but the end was rushed: after all the hell they've put each other through (I don't want to spoil it, but seriously, hellacious hell), I felt like there needed to be a bit more to the reunion in a sunlit library to convince me that their relationship could really work - that their past actions wouldn't make it impossible for them to trust each other and spoil any future their relationship had.
