2017 TV Shows

[osprey_archer]

One last round-up post for the new year, and then I think I’m caught up! (Or so I like to hope.) I have been disgracefully lax about posting about TV shows this year, which is too bad because I’ve watched a lot of really good television.



Brideshead Revisited: I watched the 1981 Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews all the way back in last January and I meant to post about it ever since because I loved it so much, but I never did get around to it. It starts off golden and beautiful (“Et In Arcadia Ego” is the name of the first episode, and never has anything been more aptly named) and becomes incredibly sad.

Gankutsuou: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO IN SPAAAAAAAAACE, which somehow manages to be even more extra than the book EVEN THOUGH THE BOOK IS ALREADY THE MOST EXTRA THING EVER WRITTEN. I totally recommend it although it will probably make you cry.

It’s a surprisingly faithful adaptation (given that it’s set in SPAAAAACE) that pulls the nifty trick of telling the same story while giving it a totally different moral spin, simply by shifting the focus. The main characters here are the younger generation, the sons and daughters of the men who ruined Edmond Dantes’ life, and whose lives will be ruined in return by the Count’s revenge.

Also, there’s a mecha battle (WHY? BECAUSE WHY NOT, THAT’S WHY) and ridiculous self-sacrifice and SO MANY EMOTIONS.

The Good Place, season 1: You have probably heard good things about this show and they are all 100% deserved. The ensemble cast is amazing – I love Eleanor, Chidi, Michael, Tahani, and Janet – the worldbuilding is tight, and the ethical discussions are both thoughtful and lots of fun. I am SUPER looking forward to season 2 whenever Netflix gets it.

Grantchester, season 2 & 3: Sidney Chambers is an Anglican priest in 1950s Cambridge who becomes an amateur detective. I really like stories with religious themes, but they often strike me as anodyne – the characters get easy outs or pat answers to their dilemmas, which are meant to affirm their faith but really only show that their faith hasn’t been truly tested. American shows seem particularly prone to this, perhaps because there’s a certain audience in America that might be offended by characters who truly wrestle with their faith – who might genuinely be in danger of losing it.

This is not a problem in Grantchester. The murder mystery aspect means that the show’s moral dilemmas come to a real point (they make wonderful use of Sidney’s sermons in this regard). And the show is simply really well done in other regards, too: the characters are sharply drawn and the mysteries well-plotted. I thought they did a particularly fine job with Leonard, Sidney’s curate, who is gay and really struggling to reconcile that with his faith and with the expectations of the church.

He’s also very fond of obscure philosophical sermons and at one point attempts to give a Brechtian retelling of the Nativity play. This is exactly as hilarious as you might imagine. The show is not all serious moral pondering and murder all the time: there are also some wonderful humorous bits and also a few luminous moments where the characters are simply having a good time together.

Also, beautiful settings, beautiful costuming, lovely English countryside. The show is a feast for the eyes.

The Librarians: Honestly I’m not too thrilled with this show. The worldbuilding is shoddy and I have become actively averse to Flynn, which is unfortunate because the showrunners love him. But Julie likes it and, you know, there’s Jenkins, so probably I’ll be watching season 3 this month.

Parks and Rec, season 2-6: I’ve tried to get into this show before and always bogged down in season 1, but Julie insisted we could skip straight to season 2 and after that all was smooth sailing. This show is a joy and a delight and I love pretty much all the characters, although my favorite is probably Leslie because she is like a bulldog in human form, if bulldogs are both incredibly friendly and unbelievably stubborn.

I also enjoy the faint absurdity of Pawnee – the way that the writers use it as a microcosm of American politics, so that (for instance) it has its own newspaper and tabloid and its own version of the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though in reality one small town probably couldn’t support all of that. The writers just run with it and it’s fun.

The one thing I don’t like about this show is that it has a mean-spirited streak that shows up particularly in the way the other characters mock Jerry, a long-serving Parks employee who is fat and clumsy and prone to mistakes, but basically good-hearted. This poor guy. I feel so bad for him.

Shetland: Another mystery show from the UK, this one set in the Shetland Islands. (And yes, there are lots of lovely shots of island scenery.) I picked it up because I was going through Grantchester withdrawal, but it’s almost too understated for me. The characters are calm, professional people, who don’t make big emotional declarations, and don’t have dramatic character arcs but just keep on keeping on and perhaps change a bit as they go.

There’s a certain realism to this that I admire, but it does have a distancing effect. Part of the draw of fiction for me is that you get to know these people, the way that in real life you only know your closest friends: their hopes, their fears, the moments when they break down. The characters in Shetland are more subdued – more opaque.

Underground, Season 2: Shows that have a really stellar first season (which Underground did) often struggle in the second – which Underground definitely did; I realized that they had definitively lost all sense of pacing when the show stopped dead for an entire episode midseason as Harriet Tubman gives a speech.

You may think that I am exaggerating. Allow me to assure you that this is literally true. I do not understand why they decided they needed to devote fifty minutes to the thrilling spectacle of a woman giving a speech in a barn. Surely they could have cut it down to fifteen minutes and thereby left space for some of the season’s many, many other subplots to advance. Maybe used the action and character development in those subplots to underscore Harriet Tubman’s points, even!



I also watched The Crown, but I ended up moving that one to a separate post because I went on about it so long. Watch this space!

Comments

[lilysea]

The Good Place Season 2 is up on Netflix now. ^_^

[osprey_archer]

Really? WHY DOESN'T NETFLIX TELL ME THESE THINGS. I feel like it would only be common courtesy if they would say "Remember that show you were watching? WE HAVE THE NEXT SEASON NOW."

[the_rck]

I think I have to see the Brechtian Nativity play. The drama program where I went to university was really, really into Brecht in a snobby, not for the common people, clove cigarettes and black turtlenecks way (which I only realized later was really funny because he'd have loathed that).

One warning to other people about Gankutsuou-- The animation was migraine inducing for me and may be for other people. For me, I'm pretty sure the problem was the large blocks (mostly clothing) filled with weird patterns that didn't move the way my eyes expected them to when the blocks moved.

Flynn is boring. I like the other characters quite a bit, though. The Librarians is generally (apart from Flynn) in a sweet spot for me between embarrassment humor that makes me flee and various other anxiety inducing things that would make me flee. I won't try to claim that it's not exceedingly silly, but apparently it's what I need in a show.

[osprey_archer]

The Brechtian Nativity play is hilarious because Leonard is reading about Brechtian theories of theater so he knows that this is supposed to impart political messages to the common people somehow... But the common people are in fact flummoxed, and any sensible person could have warned Leonard of that from the start.

Flynn would be less boring if the writers didn't so clearly expect us to find him fascinating. He's gone for whole seasons at a time, showrunners! Why am I supposed to be pleased when we drop everything every time he returns?

[asakiyume]

The Good Place grew on me. The first couple of episodes didn't win me over: it was only literally EVERYONE OF MY ACQUAINTANCE talking about how good it was that made me push on, and by the time I got to the reveal about Jason, I was won over (although only to the level of enjoyment, not super-devotion). I do love Janet; she's wonderful, and I loved the flashbacks to Tahani's sister, who was a wonderfully awful person to have to be in competition with. Tahani was probably the character who grew on me the most. (Janet I liked pretty much from the start, Jason I liked in the initial reveal, but then I thought they dumbed him down too much.) Chidi is a very agreeable straightman, though I don't really believe in his failing. For me, Eleanor is merely okay, but "okay" is not bad!

[osprey_archer]

POOR TAHANI, oh man. Growing up with a sister like that explains a lot about her and makes the humble-bragging much easier to understand (although probably it would still be nearly unbearable in real life). I think the real cherry on top is the fact that she projects this air of obliviousness, so it's hard to tell if she's name-dropping on purpose or if she just doesn't realize how she comes across... It's that uncertainty that makes her fascinating as a character and would probably make her extra grating as an acquaintance.

Chidi's failing felt sort of like a retcon to me, honestly. This crippling indecisiveness didn't seem to trouble him when he was deciding whether to help Eleanor - it took him some time to decide but he didn't agonize over it, and once he made the decision he stuck with it. So it seems to come out of nowhere at the end of the season.

[sovay]

and at one point attempts to give a Brechtian retelling of the Nativity play.

I don't suppose that's been excerpted anywhere on the internet?

[osprey_archer]

Not that I know of, no.

[littlerhymes]

I, too, am stunned by the idea of the Brechtian nativity play. AMAZING.

Gankutsuou is so! good! I haven't seen it in years but it was suuuch a good adaptation. (I can't remember - have we ever discussed Nirvana in Fire? The Chinese historical drama which starts from a Count of Monte Cristo premise, though it strays from that as it develops. It might be of interest.)

[osprey_archer]

I have heard of Nirvana in Fire and I would probably love it (there's also a lot of loyalty stuff going on there, isn't there? Princes and betrayals and so forth) buuuut there doesn't seem to be an easy way to access it and I am the laziest person on earth so I probably won't watch it until either Netflix or the library gets it.

Gankutsuou is ludicrously delightful and made me cry, which is unfair. ALBERT. THINK ABOUT YOUR LIFE. THINK ABOUT YOUR CHOICES.

[littlerhymes]

Ha, yes. It's wall to wall loyalty, honour, court intrigue, and improbably attractive people in gorgeous clothing in sumptuous palaces.

I watched it all free & legit with English subs at Viki.com so I'd give that a go if you one day wanna try it. Some shows are blocked in some regions, so IDK.

[brigdh]

Gankutsuou (which I can never remember how to spell) is so good! And so absolutely beautiful; I love the style of the animation.

I agree with a lot of your thoughts on Underground. The Harriet Tubman speech episode was a big deal when it first aired – there were a lot of interviews about how it was such a grand moment for the actress, and they tried to make it a whole media event with twitter hashtags and loads of advertising, but... I just don't think it was the best storytelling choice. Oddly, I think it might have worked better with an original character? Anyone likely to be watching Underground in the first place probably knows the basic narrative of Tubman's life, and so it was an hour (or more – I believe the episode was slightly longer than normal) of restating facts we already had.

There were a lot of plots and moments I absolutely loved in Underground Season 2, but I agree that the pacing was way off.

[osprey_archer]

I have to look up Gankutsuou on Netflix every time I need to write it anywhere. I always get tangled up in all those Us. But such striking animation! I've never seen anything like it: it must have been so difficult to do.

Oh God, the speech was not just an entire episode, but an extra-long episode? Oh dear. I'm really curious about the process in the writing room that led to this; did they all just get so excited and caught up in the idea that no one thought "Hey, maybe there's a reason why television shows don't usually have an entire episode devoted to a character giving a speech! Even The West Wing usually cut Bartlet off after a few minutes."

The West Wing did have a stunt episode where the show's two presidential candidates did their debate live, though. Maybe the makers of Underground were acting in a similar spirit of "No one's ever done this before! It'll be ground-breaking and different!"

The season had a lot of good parts - they just all needed more room for breathe. The first part of the Cato plotline was great (OF COURSE he used his money to make himself a fancy gentleman), killing off John in the first episode was a gutsy movie and also freed up the show to focus a lot more on the women, which I liked - even the big antagonist, Patty Canon, was a woman - although, again, I thought her and Cato's plotlines both suffered when they intersected, because by then the overall pacing had gone off.

James' fate back at the plantation: a real punch in the gut. Stine's story, also a punch in the gut. I was a little sorry we didn't get to see any of Boo's new life in Canada, although the season was already pretty full and there wasn't a natural place to put it, so that's understandable.

[brigdh]

Oh God, the speech was not just an entire episode, but an extra-long episode?
Yeah. It was only 5 or 10 extra minutes, so not particularly long, but enough to have to rearrange the TV schedule that night. Here's an interview with the producers where they talk about their reasoning.

The season had a lot of good parts - they just all needed more room for breathe.
AGREED. I was also really into the new characters, particularly Devi (Cato's girlfriend) and Corra (the young woman Ernestine was sort of mentoring), but they both kinda disappeared from the show without resolutions.

They were obviously trying to get to the Harpers Ferry Raid for Season 3, and I would have loved to see that – I'm really curious about how closely they planned to stick to actual history vs changing things up – but it did mean a lot of the original plots just didn't get the time they needed.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! I really would have liked to see more about Devi. It's not too hard to fill in the blanks, I guess, about her probably future life, but... I still would have liked to know more.

Or Corra, now. Terrifying. That whole scene where she thinks she's just given Ernestine poison, and she's just sitting there avidly watching Ernestine's face so she can see the moment when it takes effect, and then Ernestine gives her line about how she's been making cocktails for years and never thought to add lemon and sage (or whatever it was) - don't try to play a player, Corra. Ernestine has forgotten more about wielding power than you've ever learned.