Generation Kill bears an uncanny resemblance to Jarhead. Yes, it’s a different war. And yes, these soldiers actually do get to fight. But we are still following overly intelligent but somehow still dehumanized, over-trained soldiers given inappropriate missions and placed in bizarre situations that don’t make any sense, even in the context of their mission (and outside of that context, make far less sense).
This show is obviously a little more expansive. More of an ensemble piece. A little more interest in the “why are we here” angle. But it’s it still echoes the Sam Mendes movie. And honestly I think that’s a good thing.
These people have been trained to kill. They are so good at killing they don’t really sustain casualties. And yet their operation is a model of incompetence. And when they are done they will be unbelievably fucked up. And essentially that’s what we need to convey. No matter how much you perfect this, it’s still a terrible thing to subject anyone (victim or victimizer) to.
I don’t know what I would have thought about this when I was 20, but now it feels like a missed opportunity. There is a lot to work with here, but instead we get a typical situation comedy, hiding behind animation and a really wacky premise. (I felt like I was watching the logical conclusion of one of the “Premise Beach” ideas from Kids in the Hall.)
It’s only mildly amusing – I think I laughed, on average, once to twice an episode – and I just feel like there is so much potential here. It’s really too bad.
So I must say I knew nothing about this. I actually thought it was a science fiction comedy. So, I really knew nothing about it.
What it actually is is a sitcom without a laugh-track and with a really distinct visual style, borrowed from films and animation. That style is actually really jarring initially, given its vintage, and I was kind of not sure what to think. (Again, not realizing it was just a quirky sitcom.)
But pretty soon I became kind of delighted with it. It’s aggressively different from your average sitcom – at least your average American sitcom – and that feels more fun and entertaining than it does dated. (Though it does feel dated because technology has improved greatly.) The style can get too much, such as in the opener of the second season, which felt like it would give me a seizure. But, mostly, it works. And it really singles it out when the situation itself might not have.
I also feel like this show has been hugely influential on other shows. For example. though Family Guy is obviously indebted to The Simpsons first and foremost, and though it premiered before Spaced, I can’t help but think that Family Guy incorporated ideas from Spaced. (Given McFarlane’s habit of stealing gags, I’m very willing to believe the relationship goes this way and not the other. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.)
Not every episode works, though I do appreciate that they try to do some other things than a normal sitcom. I should emphasize that I haven’t seen enough ’90s UK sitcoms and it’s possible that this show is less risky than I think. But I can’t really think of a comparable live-action sitcom from earlier in the decade that is this aggressively stylized and referential. So I’d probably rank it even harder if there weren’t a couple episodes that didn’t work for me.
Still, really unique and probably hugely influential. Oh yeah, and very funny. I think I forgot to mention that.
I watched this earlier than I planned in part in getting impatient for the American season 3 to start, and in part because I heard rumours of no more BBC programming on Netflix. Watching both series is very illustrative.
The original British mini series (the first season) is considerably more realistic than the American show, though this realism goes off the rails a little bit in the subsequent series.
But it is clear to me that the American show has learned lessons from the British one, and from the intervening “Golden Age” of American television that has occurred since the British show first aired. For one thing, the characterizations beyond Francis are far, far superior in the American show: everyone has a back-story. In the British version, there are some with back-stories but far more cardboard cut-outs.
But the American version also goes way deeper into US politics than the British does to British politics. By that I mean that, though both are based in a relatively realistic political setting – I speak in a legalistic or institutional sense, and not in a characterization sense – the American version deals much better with the minutiae. For example: as a Canadian, I do not exactly know how F.U. could get the King to abdicate and it is never explained. It just happens. The American version handles this stuff better. The American version also keeps its actors on, so there aren’t massive changes in cast from season to season, which is something that feels weak about the British version.
Of course the American version also stretches our credulity much more openly than the British version, so that’s something in the original’s favour. And we must remember how old this show is. Frankly, I know of nothing else like it when it originally aired and it has to be regarded as some kind of landmark in British television – at least, regarded as such by someone who doesn’t know enough British television – in part for thankfully departing from the typically paint-by-numbers approaches of so many British mysteries and thrillers made for television.
On the whole it’s quite good. It’s hard to remember standards were different once, but if you can – if you’re willing to remember that TV hasn’t been like movies for very long – you’ll be pleasantly surprised. (It’s probably better to watch this version first, though, unlike me. If I could do it all over again, I would absolutely watch the British version first.)
Canada's Monty Python. After Flying Circus and SCTV, probably the most important sketch troupe show, right?
Had I encountered this remarkable TV miniseries in my 20s, when I had my highest tolerance for meta commentaries on storytelling, I might have lost my mind over it. However, that tolerance has waned over the years and I struggled with it instead.
So the first thing we have to get out of the way is the likelihood that nobody had ever seen anything like this on English-language TV before. I should point out, though, that I have not seen Pennies from Heaven, only scenes from the Steve Martin bomb that was adapted from it. Still, I feel pretty confident in saying that nobody had seen anything like this before. There’s Berlin Alexanderplatz but very few English-speakers had seen it and, moreover, that is a straight narrative and this is not. The show is probably the most daring thing attempted in English language TV prior to the Golden Age of Television of our century.
At its best, the show is extremely clever, pretty funny, and fairly engrossing. At times, the satire of film noir conventions and the meta combination of struggling to write a film noir with that satire is incredibly well done. I would gladly watch a film adaption of this that just focused on the meta noir satire. (I assume the poorly reviewed American film remake is broader.)
But, watching this series in 2021, having seen an awful lot of attempts at meta commentaries on storytelling, and having seen a lot of satires of film noir, and having a declining tolerance for things too far up their own ass, I have a number of serious quibbles with this show:
It was very clearly made for UK TV in the 1980s and absolutely does not benefit from bingeing: The show assumes viewers are not able to watch the previous episode right before the current one and so there are endless callbacks and repeat shots. It gets boring pretty quickly.
It is way too ambitious and self-involved for its own good: I suspect the story of how Potter wrote this is a fascinating one (and I guess I could have watched the extras about it if I wasn’t so happy to be done with it) but there is too much material here. All of the material about the protagonist’s childhood could be excised and I am pretty sure the show would be better (not to mention shorter!). Besides helping to explain how unlikable our protagonist is, and why his character sings, it doesn’t add enough to other plotlines and doesn’t make the metaness of everything any more compelling. At its worst, it’s All That Jazz but funnier.
The main character is awful: Sure, I would have tolerated this guy a lot more in my 20s but I’m kind of tired of difficult men.
The jokes have often dated very horribly: There is plenty of humour here that was acceptable in the UK (among “polite society” anyway) in 1986 but it is outright racist now. That just makes for a bit of an awkward watch and it makes it less funny.
The music is all of a certain time, a time before I was born and much of it from a time before my parents were born. That doesn’t make it particularly relatable to me now.
The overall result of all of this is that I laughed a lot less than I should have. Because I was annoyed at the callbacks, the length, the stuff with Phillip the child, and the racist jokes, I missed so many of the actual jokes. And that’s too bad because I suspect one reason it has such great reviews and ratings is because it’s very funny, particularly for a show this meta. (Ambitious meta-narratives often suffer from a lack of humour.)
I can’t say I enjoyed it. And I wish I had been in a more receptive mood to all the jokes. But I can’t help but acknowledge how undeniably distinct and unique and path-breaking it is. There was nothing like this on TV in the 1980s (at least in English). And there wouldn’t be again for a very, very long time.
This is a nearly unprecedented 700 minute TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It is about as good as it gets for these British “chamber” TV shows, and is a reminder (when you watch it) that we are seriously missing out because more classic literature isn’t adapted into TV miniseries.
I am not a Catholic and tend to think their sect is on the more ridiculous end of the Christian spectrum, so I struggled with my enjoyment of parts of this story. But it is, on the whole, affecting, even if it is very much the struggles of the idle rich (and the wannabe idle rich).
But, for me, the real value is its nearly unprecedented demonstration of the possibilities of television. I say nearly unprecedented because Fassbinder made Berlin Alexanderplatz, a longer, more ambitious TV adaptation of classic literature, a year or two prior. And this is no Berlin Alexanderplatz, it adheres too much to the cliches of British TV dramas of this ilk (or, perhaps, it helped establish them) and whoever directed it is no Fassbinder. (Who is Fassbinder’s equal, really?) But I still think there’s pretty much nothing like this in English television or film prior to its release and, as such, it’s a true landmark.
Watching it I couldn’t help but think about all the novels I wish creative people would adapt to 7000 minute TV one-off series. I wish that A Song of Ice and Fire wasn’t the only thing we’d get to watch.
For me, that’s the value of watching this – being reminded of the still yet unfulfilled possibilities of TV.
If you thought the 2011 remake was deliberate well, this is a deliberate six episode miniseries adaptation of the John le Carre novel. It takes its time. And if that’s a problem for you, I highly recommend avoiding this version. But, if you are interested in TV adaptations of novels and you like slow-burning plots, this is very well done for the era.
This really does feel like an attempt to adapt the entire novel, as there are multiple flashbacks and there is also much of an episode’s worth of denouement. But it feels much closer to a complete story and I was constantly wondering about how much was left out of the movie remake. (It’s been 6 and 1/2 years since I’ve seen the movie.) The only thing feels much more novel-like than a movie and more of a complete story rather than a cool plot.
It’s pretty well made, too. It’s clear that British and European TV was mostly superior to American TV in the ’70s as it’s hard to imagine something of this quality on American TV. The opening scene is particularly great. Sure, there are silly moments – Scotland does a poor job of substituting in for Czechoslovakia and some of the overly filmic elements feel cheesy – but on the whole it’s well shot and well made given the constraints. Oh and a lot of it feels nearly naturally lit, though some of it clearly isn’t as well.
The score is a little derivative and a little much at times. (As if they weren’t sure if you would be aware something is important or “tense” without the score.) And the repetition of the cliffhanger scene from the end of each episode at the beginning of the next is really, really annoying. (Clearly bingeing wasn’t even a thought in 1979.) But these are nitpicks.
On the whole, if you can stand the deliberate pace, it is one of the more noble attempts of its era to properly adapt a novel. And it mostly works. Oh and it stars Alec Guinness, so there’s that too.
PS Did I mention a certain famous English actor has a wordless cameo? Both Jenn And I were like “Wow that guy really looks like [redacted]” and then IMDB revealed that it was indeed him.
I watched the pilot of the original Battlestar Galatica the other night [in 2012]. And then I removed the series from our Netflix queue immediately. Even the completist in me doesn’t care that I haven’t watched the original before I properly watch the reboot of the show. This stuff has not aged well. It just goes to show you how much American TV standards for fictional programs have changed in the interim. Just awful. Here are some of the major problems:
Because the show was well before the golden age of television, there are some really terrible but traditional American TV faults such as:
no back story on any of the characters,
no real character development,
no moral ambiguity to speak of, etc.
one scene is shot exactly like a soap opera, I kid you not.
The effects are also pretty atrocious. The use of models is fine (and honestly no worse than A New Hope) but the moment models of ships are combined with drawings of planets (as opposed to models of planets), it becomes very obvious you are watching something made in the ’70s with a TV budget.
The effects would be excusable (as they are with the original series of Star Trek) if there was something else to gravitate to. But there isn’t. The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. Moreover, until the bad guys did that low-down, dastardly thing, the good guys apparently experienced little conflict outside of what you might experience growing up in a 1950s sitcom.
I don’t know when the first English-language TV adaptation of a novel or series of novels was, but I suspect this has a claim to be one of the earlier ones. Even if we spread out to movies, there were very few thorough and complete adaptations of novels, as movies were just too short. So, whatever else we may think of this, it’s incredibly ambitious and arguably hugely important in the history of English-language TV.
But, as you know, things have changed a lot in TV in the last 45 years. And what was once trailblazing, ambitious and, for many people, one of the greatest things they had ever seen, is now dated, obviously low budget and not entertaining enough. Time has not been kind to this. So let’s try to get the problems out of the way:
It’s very clear that what passed for a decent sized TV budget for the BBC in 1976 pales in comparison to even the smallest TV show budgets now. And yes, technology has improved and CGI can fix many things now, but the lack of budget is never not apparent:
The sets are tiny and it really feels like a play (many of them appear to be re-used)
Sound effects are used in lieu of things like crowd scenes
Many characters are wearing wigs and the wigs are bad
The makeup is extremely noticeable (presumably picture quality back then was bad enough that nobody could notice), you can see where it ends and begins, you can see the skull caps, you can see where it’s applied to thickly where it has dried, and so on.
And the casting is not good when it comes to age. I understand that nobody had IMDB or Wikipedia in 1976 but even then the audience must have noticed how hilariously wrong the ages of some of the actors were in comparison to each other. It’s far worse when you can look them up and have your suspicions confirmed, but it’s still pretty obvious that the actor playing Tiberius is older than the actress playing his mother (for example).
The script very much feels like a play, not a film. Just about everything takes place in camera, as it were, with only a few exceptions (though there are more exceptions as it goes on). And the way people talk is just so very British. I understand it’s a British TV show adapted from British novels but it feels like there has been very little effort to actually set this in Rome, rather than a post-Victorian vision of Rome. This is most notable in the morals and customs but also in how they speak to each other. They sound like we’re watching a movie set in the 1930s in the UK.
And that brings us to the story itself. Graves seems to have relied primarily on Tacitus. I don’t know exactly when the history revolution of the 20th century occurred but it appears to have happened after Graves went to school. Graves takes every rumour at face value. The villains of the piece are Livia and Messalina and Caligula. But Caligula is insane and so he’s sort of given a mulligan whereas the conniving women are just ambitious women. Most of what Graves wrote about the villains in particular doesn’t seem to have much basis outside of unreliable Roman historians with political axes to grind. And the portrayals of Livia and Messalina in particular come off as extremely sexist.
But some of the male characters don’t make much sense either. Augustus is a bit of a buffoon but Livia was his third wife. We’re supposed to believe she was the reason for his success and his downfall but what did he do before he married her? He only became the first emperor in Roman history. Watch this particular portrayal and reconcile that.
And it’s not super entertaining in the 21st century. Both in the initial episodes and the final episodes, it’s kind of dull, again a bit like a play. Things improve markedly when John Hurt shows up and starts chewing the scenery as Caligula but he is really just playing full on crazy. It’s fun, but it’s also not necessarily good.
But, despite all of that, this is still one of the earliest attempts to adapt literature faithfully to English-language TV that I’m aware of. (And only a few movies precede it, too.) It was extraordinarily ambitious for its time (and its budget, frankly). And you do have to give it points for being, if not first, then close to first. Despite all its very obvious flaws, it’s a landmark, it expanded the possibilities of television and it set some standards for TV storytelling that it took a long time to meet. Yes, the people who think this is one of the greatest TV shows of all time must have grown up with it. But it does have an important place in history.
Well someone really hates British small towns…
At least up until its final episode, this is the best directed piece of British TV I have ever seen. There’s an artfulness and purpose to the shots in the early episodes that is movie quality. And that’s not to say that current British TV is poorly directed, it’s just it’s clear that this guy knows what he’s doing. It was then absolutely no surprise to find out that he was a good filmmaker – this is the man behind Martha Marcy May Marlene which, if you haven’t seen… well, you should get on that. Durkin brings a touch rarely seen in British TV.
The performances are also uniformly strong and their are moments of great emotional power and pathos.
The thing that keeps me from absolutely raving about this as the best piece of British television I have ever seen is the final episode – pretty much, anyway. The non-linear narrative – and the repetition of key moments, as if we were reading a poem – almost disappears entirely from the finale. And I struggle to see what the “One year later” thing adds to the show. There’s curious, contrived plotting that doesn’t really help us any. Sure, we understand that everyone is very upset. But we knew that already. And the attempts at closure (or other such things) by some of the main characters feel forced. That they are presented far more traditionally than the rest of the show also weakens their impact in my mind.
But otherwise this is a pretty outstanding program full of strong performances and a willingness to treat such a terrible tragedy in a human and realistic way. I grew up in a big city so I cannot speak to what it is like to grow up in a claustrophobic small town, and perhaps they take that a little too far – the shooting is, for example, barely connected to what was the more likely cause, military service – but I don’t think that weakens the performances or the artful way in which 75% of the show is presented.
I finished this show a while ago but, convinced there was a third season for some reason, I didn’t write my review at the time. That’s unfortunate, because I feel like I had some things to say, most of which escapes me now.
I watched the first season of the original show and liked it for a while and then hated where it went. I had heard good things about the second season of the American remake to the point that I committed myself to watching both seasons.
For some reason, I could handle the insane plot twists of the first season more the second time around – it’s almost as if, having had the plot ruined for me by the original, my expectations were so low that this time I wasn’t offended or annoyed by where things went. And this makes me think that maybe I was a little hard on the Danish version.
But my big issue with the either version of the show remains and did not disappear in the second season of the American version: this show requires too much suspension of disbelief concerning the central mystery of the first season. I had issues along those lines in the second season as well. Alas, I did not write down notes and I’ve forgotten most of what I was annoyed about by this point.
But, for the most part, this was better than many other critically acclaimed shows on at the time, and I was willing to watch a third season that I believed existed.
This is a hyper-stylized, science fiction-adjacent British conspiracy thriller that has feels really unique but slowly devolves into the kind of silly plotting you get in shows and movies where there are too many twists. I found the final episode of season 1 so frustrating that I will not be watching the second season.
SPOILERS
At the beginning of this show, I didn’t know what to make of it. The colour palette is insanely overly saturated giving the whole show a sense of unreality, which suits it given what happens. The opening of the show is really wild, and that first episode just grabs you with how crazy it is. As Jenn noted, the show has some (minor) similarities with Fargo in terms of how it combines dark comedy and cartoonish violence. (The actual style of both shows is extremely different.)
I found the show quite unique in the early going and genuinely enjoyed it. The conspiracy is far-fetched, sure, but the hyper-stylization made me forgive it, for most of the first season. I did find it getting a little more far-fetched as we learn more and more about the plot, but I was mostly willing to put up with it.
Now, the actual conspiracy is second rate Bond-villain stuff that we’ve seen way too much, but it’s kept enough of a mystery for the first part of the season that you don’t have to worry about it. But this whole plot has dated rather horribly, given what happened with the vaccines for COVID but of course they couldn’t have know that at the time. Also, what happened with the vaccines undermines this conspiracy but, again, they couldn’t know that.
One of the things that started to get on my nerves was Wilson’s heel turn. Jenn had a decent explanation for it but it wasn’t one that was, as they say, “in the text.” There were some other things that ate at me but this one was the one where I was really worried about where it would go. But I was still mostly enjoying the show.
But things really go off the rails in the final episode. I can’t prove it, but it feels like they engineered the final twist once they found out they were getting another season, because we get no hint it’s coming into the final episode. (At least I got no hint.) And the final reveal makes a lot of stuff not make any sense, both from who the real villain is and where the molecular information was really located. The latter makes sense given Arby’s refrain, but that’s the only way it makes sense.
The final episode of season left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I decided I didn’t want to watch the second season.
6/10 because of how distinct it feels in the early goings
This show is pretty brilliant, it is both extremely cringey and also a very revealing satire of late capitalism. But it I found it a little too cringey for my mood at the time.
This is a mostly excellent British serial killer drama that manages a lot despite the reveal of the killer as one of the two main characters in the very first episode. The show plunges us into Northern Ireland with a great sense of place and little regard for our knowledge of how these things work over there.
Some particular strengths of the show include moments of tension only bettered in TV by a show like Breaking Bad. I’m serious about that. There incredibly tense moments in this show. Another major strength is the preponderance of strong women characters – there are at least three major female characters who are notably the best at their jobs. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen another show – certainly not another crime mystery / drama – with so many powerful women and so many flawed, partially competent men. It’s utterly refreshing and should serve as a model to future TV programs of this type. Hell it should serve as a model to all future television in this regard.
The rest of this review contains spoilers.
Also, the show wisely avoids the confrontation we have been taught to expect. It teases us to expect it over and over and then nicely subverts the genre.
Unfortunately there are a number of major problems that keep me from giving the show full marks, something which, at times – specifically in the tensest moments – I really wanted to do.
One problem is the scope of the show: it begins as a serial killer drama but soon expands its reach to being also about Belfast political corruption, or so we think. But by the second “series” that aspect has almost disappeared – presumably because members of the cast did not return – and there is no explanation to us as to why. Most of the competing storylines – save one – die after “series” one. And that’s to the shows detriment, I think.
Also, despite Gibson’s status as a “Top Cop” and despite the general competence of many of the police, it seems like this is kind of a terrible investigation. Triangulating the killer’s base of operations occurs in “series” two, whereas my (limited, completely media-derived) understanding of serial killer investigations is that this should have been done the day they established there’s a serial killer. I understand that some of these depictions of the police procedure are located where they are in the show for pacing purposes, but honestly it makes the cops look incompetent that it takes them so long to do some things that crime drama viewers would see as the ABCs.
The killer himself appears to have huge resources, beyond his salary. This is so typical of so many serial killer programs. Very rarely is the serial killer depicted as having regular, human amounts of money. This guy stumbles upon one hideout, sure, but he is also able to rent a cottage and take time off work, and he is further able to seemingly rent or own a garage. How does he do it all? The show doesn’t care to illuminate this and I think it’s just a typical assumption of the genre.
Finally, there is one brief, stupid indulgence of the “Every woman is secretly bisexual” nonsense that finds itself in so many TV shows and movies and this nearly completely undermines the strong female characters. Can’t these women just have drinks at a bar and talk about the case? Honestly. Fortunately, it’s dropped as quickly as it is brought up and we can forget about it.
Despite these issues, the show is almost entirely excellent in every other aspect and is as close to a must watch as any British show I’ve had the pleasure of seeing recently.
Burning Bush is a 21st century version of those unaccountably good European TV mini series which are released in North America as films (often in abridged form). Though we have been living in a golden age of television in North America since right before the beginning of this century, it wasn’t always like that here. But it has been like that in Europe for quite some time – various European countries have been making quality adult mini series for decades. However we have to go out of the way to get our hands on them. My understanding is that, when Burning Bush was shown in theatres (or maybe on TV) here, it was abridged, like so many of these mini series in the past, which is a shame. Fortunately, you can watch the whole thing on DVD.
Though this film is based on a historical event, I have reason to suspect a fair degree of liberty has been taken with some of the details of the characters. Though set in the late ’60s, the lead lawyer particular feels very modern. But I’m not sure these liberties detract from the story, which is well told, albeit conventionally told.
What is that story? In 1968, a Czech student burned himself to death to protest the invasion. (Others did so too, though he was most famous, apparently.) The next year, his mother sued a member of the government who had publicly claimed it was a stunt and he didn’t really burn himself alive. Though I have never lived through anything like that invasion, the film does a good job of getting audience members like me to be able to feel what it must have been like to live through something like this.
The movie uses legal drama tropes to set out expectations a certain way and then the truth of the story hits that much harder. Though the film is fairly conventionally told, the story is powerful, the acting is good and it does feel as though it is a story that should be remembered and I suspect it will remain relevant for as long as people are dying as martyrs and as long as legal corruption exists (i.e. forever).
This is, on the whole, a pretty good murder mystery. It features a compelling storyline that unfolds slowly, perhaps at the speed of a real police investigation, and universally great performances. Also, unlike American shows – and I’d be willing to guess, unlike the American remake – it features people who look like real people, which is always so refreshing.
For the most part, it transcends the cliches of the British murder mystery. Whereas usually, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, this time there is enough going on, enough backstory, enough mystery that you don’t really notice that, for the most part, the same formula is being played out: brilliant-but-troubled detective, numerous suspects, only Our Hero will be able to solve it, etc.
Unfortunately the final reveal reeks a little too much of the genre, but I won’t go into that because it would contain spoilers.
I must say that when I learned of a second season I was severely disappointed. We can’t leave well enough alone.
In 2014, when Hannibal was in its second season, four different publications listed it as the best show of the year. It made many other Top 10 lists. The first season had made some Top 10 lists as well. In 2015, it was again declared the best show of the year by at least three publications. Two publications claim it is the best show of the decade and a few others put it on their Top 10 list of the decade. The accolades are extensive.
So my question is, what the fuck is wrong with all of these critics? Did they watch the same show I did?
SPOILERS
I mostly enjoyed the first season of this show. I definitely had a few issues – such as how bad the FBI were at keeping out a certain reporter (and anybody else who wants to come) from getting into every crime scene, and how the pathologists also appear to be cops. But once Jenn convinced me to suspend my disbelief a little I mostly enjoyed it. This feeling continued into the second season before everything went off the rails.
Before I get to that, I will deal with the good stuff: This is an extraordinarily pretty show, certainly one of the most attractive TV shows I’ve ever seen. Much of the staging is extraordinarily creative. Some of that is necessitated by the fact that this is a network TV show but that might have helped it be more creative in terms of hiding the gore (at least initially). The soundtrack is mostly great (like, kind of stupendous) ranging from less well known baroque (Bach mostly) and classical music to some modernist stuff and horror movie soundtrack stuff, as well as more percussive music. The cast is mostly excellent and the deep problems with the show are not because of the actors.
So, up to episode 20, I enjoyed it enough. I definitely did not think it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, but I understand thinking it was “really good for a network show”. And I understand being kind of blown away by the production values, again especially for a network show. It was fine. It might have been better than that. I was leaning to a 7/10, I think.
And then shit went off the rails. Shit had already gone off the rails before, and people who value realism as much as I thought I did would have given up long ago. (That’s not the point of this show, of course. From nearly the first episode realism was out the window.) There are already hints that things were going to make less and less sense, but it’s with Chilton getting shot that I started to lose patience. (Remember, he was already disemboweled.) I have given up on shows for (a lot) less.
The list of things wrong with this show, particularly between episode 20 and episode 33, is so long that I don’t thing I can remember everything. I should have taken notes. The craziest part of all this for me is that it’s the second and third seasons that are the best reviewed. People liked the first season – the one that makes sense!!! – the least! What is going on?!?!
Here are just some of the things that I disliked:
Every season we’re told Will Graham might actually be a killer but we know he’s not. This is the plot of the first season, it’s part of the plot of the second season, it’s part of the plot of the third season.
At the beginning of the second season, they show the initial stages of the confrontation between Hannibal and Jack and then spend the entire season trying to convince us that Jack doesn’t believe Hannibal is the Ripper. That is just terrible from a narrative point of view.
Character development – if you can call what happens to Will Graham “development” – is limited to Hannibal, Will and Jack. Basically everyone else is not given much to work with.
Far more time is spent on the elaborate killings – the raison d’etre for the show, but which disappear by the end of the show, by the way – than on worrying about why people do things. Will is the worst example of this. If anyone can explain to me what he’s doing sailing – sailing!!! – to Italy and teasing Italian cops that he might be actually be a serial killer, please do tell me.
The pseudo-philosophical discussions are not compelling and they get really tiresome the more they occur. Psychiatrists are not the smartest people in the world. (This silly idea is on Harris, but it’s also on this show.) If you want to actually see what psychiatry is really like, watch In Treatment.
Chilton is killed three times and never dies. Most other characters are killed once and only one actually dies. As Jenn says, this is “consequence-free” serial killer entertainment. One major character dies in the first two seasons. Only a few with speaking roles ever die. (That doesn’t mean they aren’t injured, though!) This persists until the finale. Remember, this is a show about a serial killer who is killing more people than anyone in US history.
When the show was tackling generic serial killer investigations, it was reasonable entertainment. Every time it strayed from that, it became incoherent.
Red Dragon is parachuted into the narrative halfway through the third season. It feels like they got instructions from on high to wrap up. (This is actually a blessing but it’s nearly as clunky as when this happened in Rome. It feels like season 3 is really season 3 and 4, stuck together. Season 4 is better than season 3.)
Is Hannibal so charismatic you’d let him convince you to cut off your own leg and prepare it for him to eat? No, no he isn’t.
There’s much more but, honestly, I didn’t take notes.
The complete disregard for coherence and character – in the case of Will and Bedelia, in particular, but also in Alana’s case – would be fine, perhaps even enjoyable, if the show had a sense of humour. But the humour is sprinkled throughout the show, mostly confined to Scott Thompson and the other Canadian’s little quips and their bickering – and those guys disappear for many episodes – and only occasionally popping up in the odd other place. This is a show that takes itself very seriously, as far as I can tell. And it’s utterly ridiculous.
There are many worse shows than Hannibal. And I must admit that I have given up on better shows than Hannibal because a) I knew Hannibal was only 3 seasons and b) Hannibal is on Netflix. But I’m not sure I’ve watched a recent TV show this critically celebrated that was this much of a mess. (Again, mostly for about 13 episodes in the middle.)
5 feels charitable but I’m going with it because I enjoyed the first season well enough and because I enjoyed parts of the second season (though not much) and some of the third season before the dumb climax.
The Americans is a show that I stuck with sometimes in spite of myself, a show that has a lot going for it but struggled at times with believability. I don’t think I quite liked it as much as most critics and fans, but I did end up finishing it, despite having the ending spoiled for me by Firefox’s pocket tool, which showed a description of the climax of the final episode of the show in its preview of an article. Sigh.
SPOILERS
On the positive side of things, the show has an excellent cast and an excellent sense of place.
The cast is pretty much uniformly excellent, and I’m not sure there’s a weak link, certainly later in the series once some of the actors who might have been weaker links get eliminated. I appreciate that the Russians are Russians, and it’s about time that an American show with so many foreign characters trusted its audience to tolerate subtitles.
The sense of place is also incredibly excellent. I’m not sure I ever doubted the time period once throughout the show. That’s a pretty great accomplishment for a show that ran as long as this.
There are moments of extreme tension that are often done very well, not Breaking Bad tension, but pretty great tension nonetheless.
The biggest problem for me is how the show stretches credulity at times, particularly early on. It’s been so long now, I can’t quite remember, but either the season finale of Season 1 or Season two is utterly ridiculous and the kind of thing that would have made me quit a show normally, only everyone kept saying “It gets better” as it goes along.
And, unfortunately, the tension I should have been feeling in those final episodes was undercut by the internet spoiler I accidentally read while trying to navigate to a new site.
Still, there were moments throughout that tested my patience, and some storylines got difficult to believe or take. There were times I thought about quitting but figured I was too invested.
On the whole though, this is pretty well done. And I’m mostly glad I spent the time to watch it.
The show is ultimately about how personal relationship triumph over national interests, which is a lesson that we all need to remember a little more every day.
I have only watched the first season of the show. Why should become clear.
SPOILERS
If you wanted to make a show about a wrongful conviction in the USA, you should probably pick a character who is representative of those people. The vast majority of people in the United States who are wrongfully convicted are people of colour and/or poor. They are not, normally, white and middle class. White, middle class people rarely get railroaded by the US justice system. They do, on occasion, but hardly ever. If this show wanted to make a statement, it would made Daniel and his family black, latinx, or poor, or both poor and not white.
The one thing the show does get right is Daniel is weird. (Well, he’s male. That’s the other thing.) That’s the one commonality Daniel has with all the victims of the numerous wrongful convictions I’ve heard of through listening to Undisclosed (and related podcasts, and movie and TV documentaries). If you’re not black, and you’re not poor, and you get railroaded by the US justice decision, then you’re likely really weird. (If you’re weird and poor or black and poor or black and weird, and you happen to get accused of a crime, good luck.)
Anyway, I think the show would be a lot more powerful if had a better grasp on your average wrongfully convicted American. But that’s not why I’m not going to continue watching the show.
The show is oddly low-stakes. I think this is actually kind of refreshing though I’m not sure I care enough given what I said above. Certainly in the first season, until episode 5, it felt like the stakes were extremely low: Daniel might be retried, he or his family might the victim of some minor violence.
But then episode 5 happens. And this is where the SPOILERs really come in. I have been trying to find out whether or not this “did he? didn’t he?” is a real thing the show is going to pursue. The moment he put Teddy in that chokehold, I wanted to check out. And this is why: every day, Americans are wrongfully accused by police of crimes they didn’t commit. Every year, many people are wrongfully convicted of minor to serious offences and this continues to happen because the police pretty much suck at the job of solving crimes. (There’s a lot of data to back this up.) The last thing any of these people need is a popular show suggesting that a man who got his conviction vacated due to newly discovered DNA evidence might have actually committed the crime. Now, maybe this is not a consistent theme of the show, but even just the suggestion of it I found quite offensive. I understand this man doesn’t know how to behave around people, but surely there is a way of suggesting that better than having him cut off the airway of his step-brother. I have ZERO interest in watching a show that wants to have the audience unsure of whether or not someone who was “wrongfully convicted” might have actually done it. That is the last thing that needs to be on TV.
Other stray things that don’t make sense that I’m just nitpicking because I decided to quit on the show:
Hal Halbrooke’s character says his assistance (or whoever) lost Daniel’s file after he’s already had his conviction vacated! Are we to believe that Daniel’s lawyer has never had any access to any of Daniel’s trial files and still somehow got the conviction vacated solely on DNA evidence? What world is this show happening in?
The diner lady works the night shift. She owns it but would she really work that long? This is the minorest of minor nitpicks, but I still thought it was a little weird.
I think the show was fine, prior to that one scene in episode 5. Maybe it’s fine going forward. I think it would have been a lot better if it had the courage to make the main character and his family less middle class and white but it also might be just totally fine going forward if it doesn’t keep suggesting he might have done it. But, frankly, I’m not interested in finding out any more.
The following review contains major SPOILERS!!! Do not read it if you haven’t finished Season 3.
Even after I had watched only a few episodes of the American version of House of Cards, I told myself I wouldn’t watch a fourth season if they made one. I made that resolution because of a particular phobia I have with shows that run too long. This comes from two beloved shows that were ruined by running too long: the original The Prisoner (not the bizarre remake) and Twin Peaks. Both were limited ideas that were expanded because of ratings (i.e. money) and both were semi-ruined in the process. (Both shows start off excellent, for their time, and eventually have moments that qualify as terrible.) These beliefs have only been confirmed of late, with good and excellent short series being extended simply because they were successful – and sometimes also because the cast just wants to keep working together. These shows are extended past their premises, all to their detriment. I am thinking of shows like The Bridge, Broadcurch, and The Fall. I gave up on the latter two despite really enjoying them and recommending them to others.
And so, well before I ever watched the British version of House of Cards, I knew it was only three “series,” and so I knew the American one should only be three seasons or fewer, really, as it’s already way, way longer than its source.
And now, after watching the finale of the American season 3 last night, I find myself annoyed because I believe that they want a season 4, even if it hasn’t been announced yet. Everyone who has already finished this season has come to a similar conclusion, because if you google “House of Cards season 4” you find all sorts of speculation about a 4th season, because, of course, the finale leaves you with a strong belief that there will be a 4th season – and a strong desire for a 4th season, I suspect, if you haven’t watched the British version. And that’s because this version of the story fails to kill off Underwood in the finale.
Now, I don’t pretend to claim that the end of Urquhart in the original is particularly believable. And I have not read the novels and I do not know whether or not it’s close to the novel. But this show is not particularly believable and, frankly, it’s run its course. The third season of the American version is the least interesting, the least effective and the most directionless. But, despite all that, they still want to make us sit through another 13 hours after that?
I am not amused. Frankly, because I idiotically watched the British version before I got this far, I spent the entire 3rd season waiting for Stamper (or someone else, potentially) to kill Underwood. And instead all I get is a breakup.
Not all changes in source material are bad, but arguably this has already strayed very far from the source and the metaphorical house of cards feels like it is slowly sliding down on to the table, not collapsing as it would – and as it does in the British version.
This is a very, very stupid show about an arrogant and not very good actor and his foibles trying to stay employed in London. But it knows it’s really dumb, and it leans into it fully; it can be very, very funny.
This is one of those shows that milks so much out of so little – the premise is pretty thin but they turn so much of it into effective comedy, whether it’s the voice innumerable and interminable recording sessions or his rivalry with Purchase. I’m not always a fan of catchphrases but this one has some really great ones, none better than “Yes I can hear you Clem Fandango!!!”, which I kind of want on a t-shirt. [Update: got a t-shirt.]
Also, they make pretty good use of their cameos and guest stars. I think the Jon Hamm episode of these might be best but I generally liked that aspect of the show.
One thing that doesn’t work is the musical numbers. The show writers just don’t have a knack for writing songs, though that could just be because I’ve watched too many episodes of Bob’s Burgers and maybe my standards are too high. Though the songs are too brief to really catch on, they also don’t seem to serve much of a purpose. More than in other comedies with musical numbers, they just feel completely arbitrary and superfluous.
And there are definitely episodes which work less well than others, where the shtick feels tired or the story doesn’t feel strong enough to hand the dumb humour on. It’s probably a good thing there are only 18 episodes because it’s hard to imagine them wringing much more out of this.
But, on the whole, I laughed out loud a lot, and I definitely enjoyed the rhythms of the show and its ridiculous characters, even when I wasn’t laughing as much in some episodes as others.
It’s finally over. It took a very long time to get here.
SPOILERS needless to say
Before I talk about the show specifically I just wanted to say that one of the great things about it is the potential it’s unleashed. Now we know the possibilities of the medium. Literature has long been adapted into movies, most of them unsatisfactory. Occasionally literature has been adapted into TV miniseries, but now we see the full possibilities: literature can be adapted into TV shows relatively completely, far superior to a movie or series of movies. The time has come for more of these adaptations and I hope the industry follows through on the potential. (My favourite pet project is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays as one TV series though I know it would never get made. [Note: It has sort of been made by the British.]) If nothing else, Game of Thrones has shown possibilities in TV rarely glimpsed of before – the ability to tell the kind of stories only literature was capable of before, full of deep characters and with lots of nuance.
Now on to the actual show:
I am not a fan of the fantasy genre. I don’t like it for many reasons but two of the reasons can be summed up in the way characters are used, both in how they behave and what happens to them. In fantasy, characters are either good or bad. Good characters can be corrupted or misled, and bad characters can be cured of their badness but nobody is normal or real. And then the are the character arcs, where the good protagonist follows a story arc that involves defeating the main evil character with the world being restored to its natural state. It’s the stuff of children’s stories as far as I’m concerned.
But The Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are about overturning or subverting these aspects of fantasy, and many others, at least at first.
The first thing that appealed to me about Game of Thrones were its characters, so much more nuanced than any I had ever encountered in the fantasy genre. Though it’s not necessarily clear immediately that the genre is being completely subverted in this way – as it feels as though there are good and bad families in the first season – at least the characters are nuanced in ways in which fantasy characters rarely are. One of the strengths of the show is how everyone is flawed, and the characters we initially think are bad or good turn out to be just human and flawed, some more likable than others. One of the great things about the books, which I never finished, is how Tyrion and Littlefinger are introduced, as a sniveling minor bad guy and a sycophant respectively – both introductions feel like incredible sleights of hand given how important they both are to the plot. The show doesn’t quite commit to the same levels of sleight of hand with Tyrion but it still does introduce these two in ways in which you could not possibly anticipate their arcs or their significance. And this is even more true with Jamie, who is so unbelievably evil early on but is sympathetic, despite his flaws, for most of the show. This kind of thing is done mostly really well and is pretty incredible.
But I think I still wouldn’t have fallen for the show if the characters had just been nuanced. What really got me is that moment in the first season when you realized No One Is Safe. It was absolutely shocking and incredible and the moment at which you realized you were watching something unique in the history of fantasy. (Had I read the books first, I’m sure it would have been just as shocking in the book.) The show kept this up for a number of seasons, and I loved its lack of loyalty to major characters. (The books make it clearer who is safe and who isn’t so I actually found watching it first more rewarding in this regard.) For me, such a big appeal was not knowing what was going to happen next, and not having the whole thing completely telegraphed out by a prophecy and the goodness and badness of the characters. (Think about how this kind of thing happens in The Lord of the Rings and you get a sense of how incredibly unconventional A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones truly is. Imagine Aragon or Frodo getting his head chopped off in the Fellowship of the Ring.)
But 8 seasons is a long time and over this time the show has definitely gotten repetitive, frustrating and at times boring. There are a few things which I think were not handled well, especially as the show progressed.
For one thing, there is a lot of people sitting around or travelling and never getting there. Daenerys sits around or takes circular journeys multiple times throughout the run of the show, and we’re never sure exactly why she’s doing either. (And, speaking of repetition: how many times do Daenerys or forces get ambushed per season? I think it’s at least two times per season in the latter seasons.) Many other characters take forever to get places, none more than the White Walkers, who walk slower than the old Ukrainian ladies in the neighbourhood I grew up in. Other characters go on circular arcs like Daenerys, where they encounter similar issues from one season to the next, sometimes in the same place, sometimes in a new place, but always with echoes of previous travails. (This critique obviously doesn’t apply to early on in the show when there were more characters, and when characters were having their first adult experiences.)
Then there’s the trope that really drives me crazy: a particular army or force is presented in the show as powerful and it is then beaten (regularly ambushed) by another force which is somehow superior, even though nothing in the show has indicated that this other force could in any way be superior. This happens so many times it actually starts happening multiple times a season. It’s basically the equivalent of killing off a major character, but using characters we don’t care about, and preserving major characters, which makes it annoying. The forces that (briefly) triumph always appear out of nowhere and feel like Deus ex machinas. (And they feel this way whether or not they are military forces as this trope occurs with the religious zealots too.) And there are always more soldiers after the fact. No matter how many soldiers die, there are more soldiers in their place. Between the general incompetence of the heroes and the infinite number of faceless soldiers that can be rallied to turn the tide of a battle, it’s a wonder anyone we care about is still alive. But the show doesn’t care about this. As the show generally doesn’t care about the logistics of anything – be it creating armies, travel, building ships or (especially) rebuilding destroyed buildings. (Winterfell and the Red Keep sure look good awfully quick after they get ruined.)
Also, the longer the show has run, the more it has leaned in to the very conventions it was ostensibly trying to overturn, and nowhere is this more clear with how John Snow keeps surviving impossible odds. Given that John Snow is one of the least likable of the characters who make it to the final season, this is particularly aggravating.
And just a note about time: when it suits the show, it takes people forever to get anywhere. When it doesn’t suit the show, they get there quickly. The White Walkers are the slowest but humans can be super slow too. And then, all of a sudden, someone appears impossibly, at least impossibly based on the show’s own concept of time. If you think about the journeys throughout this show of many journeys, many of them don’t make sense if the others are to make sense.
Anyway…as I joked on social media, I was on #teamwhitewalker. I wanted the show to truly be an allegory for climate change, one that humans lost or barely survived. That didn’t happen, but I knew it wouldn’t. As my friends pointed out, they did indeed hint strongly that the White Walkers would not win, even if they were regularly presented as being the ultimate challenge to the humans. So I’m okay with this and with the overall ending of the show.
I think most people didn’t get upset until the final season, or season 7 at least, but I was upset well before that. But to just mention the biggest thing everyone is upset about with the ending: This show is so damn long, I think we all could have used more of a set up for the biggest heel turn. And I don’t think the show needed more episodes to do that, I think they just needed to make the change more gradual, or make her “true nature” more obvious (less subtle) early on. I think I have spoken to one person who thinks this heel turn was earned – everyone else didn’t buy it. That says a lot about how this show has handled the last few seasons, even while most people were completely fine with the way it was handled. But I actually found the final episode about as satisfying as I could imagine it being, given how I’ve felt about the last few seasons, and given that I wanted the White Walkers to triumph, so I think this is more a manner of a flaw in the execution of the show, rather than in the story itself, and the heel turn.
It likely sounds like I didn’t like the show but that’s only partially true. I loved the show for its first half or so, and I think it is a great accomplishment. But at some point it just went on too long for me, and its virtues disappeared or turned into vices. I wrote most of this after suffering through episode 4 of season 8, where the show threw logistics out the window to a new degree but also time and sense, seemingly cutting a few shots which would have explained what the hell happened to one of the major characters, who somehow got herself executed. (Also, like so many people I was very annoyed at how many people survived the Battle of Winterfell.) What I am trying to say is that my memories of loving the show have dwindled under the onslaught of mediocrity that was the latter seasons.
If the show had been cancelled after its first season, I think I would have given it a 9 or a 10, 10 for “transcendent” or 9 for “near transcendent” or “great”. The 9 probably would have held through Joffrey’s death, at the very least, and probably significantly longer. As the show went on longer, and the things I liked about it began to fall by the wayside, I was still thinking I owed it an 8, for “very good.” Seasons 7 and 8 really hurt how I felt about the show, even more so than the previous season or two, and I was really leaning strongly towards rating it a 7, for “good.” However, the final episode was the rare final episode of a long-running TV series that did not leave me extremely frustrated. I still had complaints – I thought the small council scene should have been last though I understand that, at bottom, this is about the Starks and they have to be last, and I had a few other quibbles, particularly about a certain chair surviving the Keep getting burned – but on the whole I felt it was as good a job as could be done of wrapping up, especially given the missteps earlier in the season. So I’ve got some goodwill right now.
PS Can someone please put on a fucking hat? It’s cold out there.
This is yet another pretty good Attenborough nature documentary. However, there is a strong sense of deja vu. I feel like I've seen these scenes before. I probably haven't but you can always watch so many documentaries. But it's pretty.
My favourite part was the last episode, actually, which was more interesting and unusual for one of these documentaries, given that it focuses on humans. I learned something!
I liked this much less than most people. Not that I didn’t like it, but I find it weird that this is the one everyone thinks recommends the show.
I unfortunately didn’t write reviews of the individual episodes as I went through it. I wish I had done so.
I am the rare person who thinks the show got better when it went to Netflix, I think.
I normally don't write reviews of the reality TV I watch, usually because I don't consistently watch every season of the few shows I like and I half-watch plenty of reality TV Jenn watches. It feels like I cannot really do these shows justice. But I make an exception for travel shows, at least ones I manage to complete entire seasons of. (Never completed any of Bourdain's many shows, so that's why there are not reviews.) I guess that's because I really like travel shows and because many of the ones I find are reasonably short compared to the usual reality TV show episode onslaught.
This is a great one. Travel show, I mean. Imagine the old Top Gear specials (or current episodes of The Grand Tour) with minor British celebrities (many of whom have since been on Taskmaster) and without the silly tasks, and you get some idea of World's Most Dangerous Roads.
[This review only applies to the original seasons, not the revival.]
Each episode, two British celebrities us in North American have never heard of (unless you watch Taskmaster or other British variety shows) tackle some crazy roads in some part of the world. It’s a great concept that I wish they had invested more in. I also think it would work wonderfully in the States, with either celebrities or even just race car drivers, but I feel like this is the kind of content that US insurance companies (who insure the celebrities/athletes) would never allow. (Though some Americans do find their way onto Running Wild so maybe I can hope.) Imagine this show with like, Taylor Swift and LeBron James. That would be a popular show. I know it will never happen.
“Alaska”
Charlier Boorman (of Long Way Round/Long Way Down and now Long Way Up fame) and Sue Perkins drive the through Alaska to the Dalton Highway. Though Boorman, who knows his way around a dangerous road, claims it’s one of the scariest things he’s ever done, Jenn and I ended up thinking this was probably the least stressful drive of the show. We have both driven through whiteouts, but these two didn’t even know to turn their flashers on! (If you don’t know, I guess, you don’t know.) Of all the roads on this show, this is the one I have actually thought of doing (though not that this time of year) and I found it the least intimidating. (If you don’t know, I’ve driven my share of crazy roads though nothing like the ones on this show.) Still, it’s a fun episode.
“Nepal”
This episode, featuring future Taskmaster host Greg Davies and future Taskmaster contestant Rhod Gilbert, is the first of the remaining episodes of the show that we’ve watched where, at some point, we both decided we wouldn’t want to do it. In this case, the hardest part involves landslides. A crazy one but then, they’re mostly crazy.
“Peru”
This one features both insane cliffside drives like Nepal (without the rain) and also incredibly mucky jungle, like the future Madagascar episode. While watching it, you will swear it’s the most dangerous of the series but, then, you’ll watch another episode.
“Siberia”
No sheer cliffs but a different kind of danger: you can never turn off your car because you will never be able to restart it. The danger here is the cold and they stuck in a ditch more than once. It’s far from the most nerve-wracking episode but it’s arguably as dangerous as anything else other than the Alaska episode.
“Ho Chi Minh Trail”
This one made me miss Vietnam. The river crossings in this episode are the stuff of nightmares but, in retrospect, it might be one of the least treacherous drives of the show if only because of the lack of cliffs. (Though there are unexploded bombs everywhere.) Sue Perkins strikes back.
“Ethiopia”
This one has some really crazy cliffs as well as some scary facts about the drivers you meet along the way. (In more than one of these the locals say the biggest danger is other drivers.) I’ve long wanted to go to Ethiopia and this just reemphasized that. Just stunning views. (That’s most of this show, though.)
(IMDB claims there are two more episodes to season two, but I think this is a mistake by the user. Wikipedia lists the usual three and the show I can find covering the episode titles is clearly not this show, but some other show.)
“Madagascar”
Though one of the episodes with the fewest cliffs, along with the Alaska and Siberia episodes, this one has the most epic mud, worse than any other episode, as well as some crazy ferries and river crossings. The mud on these “roads” has to be seen to be believed and we both wonder if this drive might have been the most tiring just because of their pace and all the mud.
“Georgia”
Even before I saw Taming the Garden, I was interested in visiting the Caucasus but that film solidified Georgia as a destination for me. This one just reinforces it. Some crazy cliffside drives here for sure, but absolutely stunning scenery.
“Bolivia”
This episode features the World’s Scariest Carwash in addition to some crazy cliffside roads and an incredible drive across some salt flats.
We loved this show. It’s exactly our catnip. And I’m so happy to learn there is a season 4 (though I don’t know where to stream it) and season 5 is coming any day.
I only have two quibbles:
The first is that each of these episodes could have easily be more than one episode. You can’t tell me they didn’t have enough footage but my guess is the contract was a 3-episode season. But you don’t get as complete an experience as Long Way Round/Down/Up or even The Grand Tour. It would be nice to see more, especially of the people and food.
The second issue is that every single pair thinks their drive is the absolute craziest. One of them is surely right but it would have been cool to see one through-driver per season, where they could have said, “You think this is bad, you should have seen [enter country here].” That perspective is missing, though it’s hardly a huge problem.
Make more of this stuff, TV people. (Especially American TV people, who don’t seem to understand how to make shows like this.)
Metal Evolution is an in depth examination of metal by the man most associated with covering metal on film – though I have yet to see either of his movies.
The positive side of this show is that it is a landmark: I don’t think there’s another documentary series out there which focuses on just a single genre of pop rock music. It’s an in depth look and it’s informative. It’s also enjoyable, which is important for something this long.
The negative: Despite it’s length, it somehow manages to miss a bunch of major sub-genres: There’s little acknowledgement of Black Metal, Death Metal, Stoner Rock/Metal, Grindcore, Drone Metal, Groove Metal and probably other sub-genres which I’m not even aware of. Basically there’s one episode on all of these and it doesn’t really get into much of it at all. And it also feels cursory in its examination of some major bands. I for one was annoyed about how little time was spent on Faith No More but I could understand why nobody else would care about that. Also, the script, such as it is, is awful. Sam says “But what I wanted to find out is…” and various variations of that, multiple times every episode. And there are other stock phrases.
But I think these are minor nitpicks. If you’re into metal, or if you’re into music history, you should watch this.
Prohibition is the shortest Burns mini-series yet, and I am tempted to say it is the best, or at least the most consistent of the mini-series he has helmed to date. It also feels the least mythological, which is refreshing coming from Burns, a man who can never avoid mythologizing or re-mythologizing his country’s history.
Though I knew a fair amount about the era, it’s safe to say there is still plenty to learn about it in such an intensive treatment – it is about 6 hours long or thereabouts – and, as always, Burns provides interesting personal stories and interesting insight from people who have thought about this a lot more than you or I.
This era stands as a lesson to pretty much anyone who wants to change behaviour and it feels particularly relevant given the moralizing of a certain portion of Americans, who are always trying to tell other Americans (and the world) how to live. The fact that they constitutionalized this moralizing and it was an abject failure should have convinced people that these kinds of moral crusades don’t work. Alas.
Anyway, it’s well worth you time.
Let me be clear: I didn’t want to make it one season. However, since I got the show from the library and I figured since I had it, I might as well…
But from the very first episode I knew this was not for me: silly interpersonal drama and ghosts – in the very first episode! (Of course, it’s a new ghost every episode, so that’s necessary…) This is just one of those shows where we’re expected to get attached to all the characters – though one of them is rather awful – and then enjoy their adventures every week, with guest-stars and guest-ghosts (and the mysteries therein).
As I said, had this been on a streaming service, or had I other movies from the library, I wouldn’t have watched another episode after the first one. But it was something stupid to have on while I uploaded podcasts and did maintenance on my website.
PS The things this show thinks are creepy are rarely, if ever, creepy, as they’ve already been used a bunch of times in better movies.
