Archive for category: Television Series

As a fan of Japanese history and culture and having read positive reviews, I was looking forward to spending the next couple weeks watching the ten-part Shogun. Episode 1, however, left me annoyed, despite the wonderful costumes and pageantry.
How could John Blackthorn emerge from the wasted schooner, where starvation had struck the crew, with a body-builder’s body and no apparent ill effects, physical or psychological?
Why did the Japanese adopt Blackthorn almost as an equal?
The retainer who speaks out, bringing extinction on his family line, makes a point about honor in the society, but we’re given no context.
The Japanese dialogue is easier to follow, because it’s subtitled. I frequently couldn’t understand the speech of Rodrigues, the Portuguese pilot – why make it so hard for the viewer?
The death-by-boiling-water episode was meant to show how casually cruel the Japanese could be and their lack of respect for foreigners, but the method chosen made little sense: the lord said he wanted to see how a man handled death; boiling in water was hardly instructive of anything.
The whole climbing down the rope episode made no sense: there’s no way the Japanese lord would have undertaken the task himself, or felt challenged to do so by the foreigner, especially if the object was rescuing a Portuguese.
In short, the verisimilitude of the set was belied by the lack of realism in the plot. I sense a costumed soap opera coming

We watched both six-parters in tandem as they were released Sunday nights on, respectively, HBO and PBS. As usual, the American series was populated by broad caricatures, while the British presented complex and real people. White Lotus can be forgiven its lack of subtlety, as it aimed for social satire, and a week at the Four Seasons Maui is not the setting you’d choose for reality. In fact, the entitled Shane Patton was such a melodramatic villain one almost hissed in enjoyment each time he appeared. On the flip side, some of the relationship subplots, of which I counted ten, were cringe-worthy, notably those involving Tanya. Pretty much all the relationships taxed the imagination, which meant that the viewing pleasure depended on how much one enjoyed a particular character, or the scenes of Hawaii. For the record, my favorites were the luscious Rachel and Armond, the general manager who seemed to have been trained at Fawlty Towers.
One thing both series shared was expressive faces of people under stress. In Unforgotten, however, they were nuanced characters, most of whom had the normal quotient of good qualities to go along with the dark secret in their pasts. And the ancillary problems they faced in their current lives were recognizable: a parent with dementia, a child-to-be diagnosed with down’s syndrome, a mortgage payment to be met. Nicola Walker’s Cass was a suitably charismatic lead detective, and her team was remarkably devoid of the drama we’d come to know with the crew in Spiral. Unlike the vacationers in Hawaii, I’d be happy to spend more time with this group.
As for the respective plots, both shows opened, per usual, with evidence of a murder, the details of which, when revealed, were rather disappointing. Coincidentally, at the conclusion of both series the lead actor had been killed, in a way that was completely tangential to the main thrust of each story. What we took away from both was our experience with the cast of characters: Mark and Nic, Olivia and Paula, Shane and Rachel; and Liz, Fiona, Ram and Dean, Cass and Sunil.

I can’t gainsay the quality of the acting and the production, but the ten episodes of Season 4 left an uneven impression. Each episode was its own self-contained story. Those that mixed British politics with Royal Family matters–such as the superb finale–were deeply rewarding. Those that focused on the Royals’ dysfunction–such as Princess Margaret’s search for meaning in her life–were less so. Tobias Menzies’ Prince Philip got to play the sane one–quite a switch from his predecessor in the early years who was a total cad; but all the characters were rather one-dimensional. Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth confused me: she could be quite sensitive one moment, then unaccountably brusque and rude the next. How hard it must be to inject flesh and blood into someone we know as the picture on a postage stamp! The other character worth noting was Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher. She struck me as a caricature, but what do I know?

Kudos for telling a complex story of human and political intrigue involving two dozen characters in four packed episodes. Holding it together was a usually brilliant and compelling performance by Hugh Laurie. No matter the bad things he did or that happened to him, I never worried too much, because he, Peter Laurence, was Hugh Laurie and he could take it. I guess the American equivalent is Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, but Roadkill was more pointed and less smarmy. The title refers to all the women left on the side of the road as Laurence motors to 10 Downing Street, a nice theme that leaves something to think about as the story ends. Only drawback: instead of ending, the writer left one unlikely hook open to let us know there will be a Season 2.

A brilliantly acted and mercifully short story of three young adult children coming to grips with their mother’s late-in-life affair with a suspicious widower, played with equal parts sleaze and menace by a wildly-maned Stephen Rea. Somehow in four episodes we were given relatively nuanced and complete stories of each offspring’s romantic relationship; their relationships with each other and their mother; a vivid busybody who lived next door (Imelda Staunton); and a convincing mystery around the mother’s suitor. Oh, and a criminal investigation that weaved throughout. All the characters were deeply flawed and not terribly attractive, but in a way that wasn’t offputting (unlike, say, Succession or House of Cards). And the failure to tie everything up at the end was somehow satisfying.