TV roundup
18 September 2018 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've actually been watching more TV than usual (usual being next to none) this season, as various new series have started/been recommended by the newspapers.
Results so far:
Results so far:
- "The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco" -- abandoned after one episode. I enjoyed the original "Bletchley Circle", but this one has dropped half the characters and become clunkingly politically correct by adding American race issues into what was originally a more subtle feminist subtext ('women code-breakers make good detectives in a man's world" being a basic concept that didn't really need liberation issues hammered into it). And the killer problem was that it was not only annoying but not very interesting -- lots of lurid things going on, but cardboard characters whom it was hard to care about and a plot that failed to snag you in.
- "The Bodyguard" -- widely feted by the newspapers in the weeks since it started (Jed Mercurio, having written earlier hit shows that I didn't watch, is now being hailed as a TV genius), but after a genuinely gripping first episode it started to go downhill for me. It went very definitely downhill when the eponymous protagonist suddenly decided to sleep with his employer, a development that seemed to make no sense (he doesn't even like the woman personally, he harbours a political grudge against her, she's got to be at least ten years older than he is, he is clearly still in love with his (separated) wife, and it's not only ethically dubious but a stupid thing to do from the point of view of carrying out his actual job, which requires him to be alert and ready to protect her at all times), and in addition to all this doesn't even seem to serve any purpose from a plot point of view.
Everything we've seen so far (and I haven't seen the latest episode, because it's now being scheduled directly against "Vanity Fair" -- see below) would work just as well if the protagonist's motivation were a purely professional one -- his assigned duty pulling against his personal preferences, topped by a sense of guilt when he fails to keep her safe. The sex doesn't seem to perform any function in the plot at all other than reader titillation, and it actively interferes with the credibility and (in my case at least) reader ability to identify with the character. I can see that she's desperate, scared and man-hungry, and I can credit that she would make a pass -- but why on earth would he be so unprofessional as to take her up on it? She's not exactly an irresistible prospect.
Apparently I was the only viewer in Britain to be not shocked but delighted when she was killed off :-p
However, I am still persevering with the series, despite the potential for excuse of a scheduling clash with ITV's "Vanity Fair"; I do want to know what the story is behind the apparent framing of the token Muslim researcher as the fall guy, and just what the Home Secretary was really up to that she was trying to keep secret from the police. As I said, there was a lot of interesting plot there -- the sexual interludes just appeared to be an unwelcome distraction from that element! - I was a bit sceptical about yet another "Vanity Fair" (having said that, I don't think I've ever actually watched any of its predecessors on screen, and despite having read the book I don't remember anything about it). And this again was being billed as 'a Becky Sharp for the modern age' with the intention that we should admire her as a resourceful and liberated woman instead of an unprincipled schemer; from my rereading of Thackeray (taking care not to proceed beyond the event of the current episode!) it is certainly humanised from Thackeray's caricature, where characters' names more or less sum up their role on the scene -- Miss Schwarz is the West Indian heiress, for example, while Captain Dobbin is devoted but dumb. But not being a devotee of the original novel I didn't particularly object to the changes that were made to make the characters nicer all round: the only one that really jarred on screen was having Mrs Sedley apologise to her black footman Sam for a guest's racist remarks, which as I suspected certainly did not happen in the book. (And it turned out the character's name is really Sambo, for obvious reasons -- evidently the fact that this was a very popular name to give your black servant was deemed absolutely beyond the pale for broadcast...)
The important thing about this adaptation was that it actually made me care about the characters, which is something that neither of the two programmes previously mentioned achieved; I actually became invested in what happened to them and found myself picking favourites and cheering them on (anyone who seems to see through Becky's stratagems, for a start :-p) Given the choice between watching "Vanity Fair" or "The Bodyguard" at 9pm, I found I had absolutely no qualms about opting for the former, the presence of adverts and critical opinion notwithstanding.
The most recent episode (alas, poor George -- I never deluded myself that he was of particularly strong character, but I thought that if anything his weaknesses lay in the direction of self-preservation!) reminded me strongly of Georgette Heyer's "An Infamous Army", with the famous Brussels ball setting and Becky playing the part of Lady Barbara to Amelia's little brown Harriet; since Thackeray's novel was well-known in Heyer's day the homage is presumably a conscious one from her direction. And of course both books regularly get cited (along with Les Misérables) when people are listing novels that famously include the battle of Waterloo... - "The Frankenstein Chronicles": I'm not sure if this was the series that was strongly recommended by someone commenting on Fantomestein, but that was why I bothered to watch the first episode -- and despite missing the first few minutes (leaving me rather confused as to just who John Marlott was and what authority he held), it grabbed me and convinced me to go on watching. The late timeslot helped (during the summer I was often outside watering plants until ten pm or so), although the show has now been bumped even later to 11·15pm, possibly heralding a bid by ITV to drop it altogether :-(
This one got to me because it was clever, and subverted expectations in something of the same way that "The Bletchley Circle" would like to be doing but wasn't. It wears its history lightly, but the initial set-up is all based around the passing of the (historical) Anatomy Act and the activities of the 'resurrection men' who stole corpses for dissection, along with a young journalist who introduces himself by the pen-name of Boz, while the second half deals with the beginning of the new police force, the 'Peelers', taking over from the old Bow Street Runners; real people such as Sir Robert Peel feature alongside a cast of (presumably fictional) surgeons and policemen, and the result is that the casual student of history can never be quite certain whether, for example, Percy Shelley was really involved as a student with a group of friends investigating the origins of the human spark of life (probably not, but I don't absolutely know for certain).
The 'Frankenstein' connection is tenuous at first (we are in the world where the real Mary Shelley wrote a book of that name, not one where a real Victor Frankenstein pursued and was pursued by a humanoid creature of his own making), but becomes more apparent, ending in a twist where the protagonist himself becomes not the detective but the monster. It plays satisfyingly with the viewer's expectations: the 'dangerous quacks' opposing religious bigotry to what we, with hindsight, think of as the obvious necessity of the Anatomy Act, turn out a couple of episodes later (via a little elegantly casual allusion to a cure made from bread-mould) to be more medically advanced than the 'progressive' doctors pushing to have it passed. Our perceptions of the different parties in the debate shift as Marlott passes through the whole thing just trying doggedly to do his job: characters are opponents, then allies, then opponents, few people are seen in absolutes of black and white, and the ultimate solution is rarely the obvious one. And it's pitched at the level where the viewer can occasionally jump to the right conclusion (it was the pump!) just a few moments before the characters also do so, which is as ever highly satisfying: any slower and you get frustrated at their plot-induced obtuseness, any faster and the plot feels like cheating without enough clues.
It manages to explain away convincingly its anomalies (e.g. how you engineer in plausibly a black character to the 'closed shop' of the Georgian Bow Street Runners), and having the protagonist dosed with mercury (against syphilis) in the opening episode -- along with the accompanying warning that this may cause hallucinations -- is a highly ingenious way to ensure that neither he nor we can ever be entirely certain of the reality of anything odd that seems to happen on-screen. (And if Marlott's case of the pox -- presumably acquired from loose women -- resulted in the death of his wife and child in consequence, it's not surprising he is carrying a burden of guilt.)
By disposing of the viewpoint character the show is taking a big risk; but the second section, with the two main characters from the first half working the same investigation from opposite ends as enemies, is so far just as compelling as the first. It is highly gory and psychologically gruesome, and remains so from the start -- there are a lot of corpses involved, and worse things than mere dispassionate death.
I've also ended up watching several episodes of ITV's "The Imitation Game", which is being run directly after "Vanity Fair"; unfortunately it does rely very heavily on viewers' familiarity with the people being imitated, and the subjects have a tendency to be celebrities whose tics I wouldn't recognise in the first place, but it's mildly funny when you do know who the people are.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-22 01:23 pm (UTC)