Tag Archives: *TV*

Capturing The Golden Girls: My Sample Script

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The Golden Girls is one of the funniest sit-coms ever written. Its dialogue zips, licks, and zings, each performance by the members of its main cast a masterclass in marrying archetype to authenticity to create larger than life characters that never-the-less still ring true in the real world.

The Golden Girls showed older women leading rich, fulfilling and interesting lives: pursuing relationships, nurturing friendships, wise-cracking, problem-solving, and enjoying full and healthy sex lives – not laying down and preparing to die, or fading into thankless quasi-matriarchal obscurity. At a time, and especially in an industry, where executives weren’t overly inclined to put older women front-and-centre, here was a group of older female actresses who were not only carrying a successful prime-time comedy show, but one of the most successful prime-time comedy shows of all time. The legacy of The Golden Girls, and that talented quad of actors, is the laughter that still rings in the air – from generations old and new – many long decades later.

I loved The Golden Girls as a kid, and I love it still. My partner and I recently started a re-watch, and we’re re-hooked. Even my 8-year-old caught an episode and chortled heartily at these women 55 who were years+ his senior.

I got into the rhythm and cadence of the show so much that I started hearing fresh dialogue in my head. I decided to get it all down, and see if I could pull off a successful facsimile of a ‘new’ episode. Not a whole episode, mind. Just a short sequence. You can access it in PDF form by clicking on the link immediately below:

GOLDEN GIRLS

I know it isn’t formatted correctly, especially the dialogue, which shouldn’t run along the lines as far as it does, but the exercise – for me – was to see if I could successfully capture the show’s tone, and the characters’ voices.

If you’re a fan of The Golden Girls, I want to know if you can see and hear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia in your mind’s eye as you’re reading along.

Let me know. I fancy tackling Red Dwarf next.

Stranger Things S4: Praise and Predictions

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The length of TV episodes used to be dictated by the strictures of schedulers and advertisers. Netflix and its streaming stable-mates have made these curbs unnecessary, though budgets, production costs and the attention span of the average viewer has kept the length of most dramatic series sitting somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes. That’s probably the sweet-spot, the boundary beyond which you start to bore your audience or reveal your short-comings. Or both, as happened when Kurt Sutter was given free reign with Sons of Anarchy. Not that the show was exactly Shakespeare to begin with. Season four of Stranger Things, however, takes this rule and wipes its hive-minded bum with it. Even at an average length of 90 minutes the episodes still don’t feel long enough, simply because every aspect of the production, from the writing to the acting to the design to the creature effects, is par excellence.

Stranger Things is both a tribute to and a subversion of the sorts of slick, high-concept, high-spectacle, Spielbergian melodramas that wowed cinema-goers in the 1980s. It treads the line perfectly between verisimilitude of setting, and nostalgia safariing, choosing to warmly bathe rather than drown its audience in tropes and pop-culture references. The show’s characters are distinct, rich, well-drawn and entertaining, comprising a symbiotic ensemble that contains few dud pairings or groupings. The show is fast when it needs to be, slow when it needs to be. It seamlessly blends action, adventure, heart, horror, and comedy; tears with laughter. Not many series can run the tone gamut from ET to Nightmare on Elm Street and make it work, but Stranger Things doesn’t just make it work: it makes it look easy. And that’s before we even talk about the perfect pacing; the skilful use of tension; or the way an episode’s separate stories dovetail and interlock in the most satisfying of ways.

Upside down, show you send me…

With the concluding four hours of its fourth season just days from dropping on Netflix, Stranger Things is enjoying the sort of blanket coverage, critical acclaim and mass appeal that once propelled Game of Thrones to its unassailed status (give or take an eighth season) at the top of the pop-culture totem pole. Everyone is talking about the show, even if they’re just asking people to stop talking about the show so much. People are probably going to start calling their kids Nancy, Elle and Jane; Dustin, Lucas and Mike; and possibly even Vecna, and Demi-Gordon. ‘Who or what is Vecna?’, Season 4’s central mystery – more visceral and compelling than the unsolved shootings of any number of prominent Texan oil tycoons – has already been solved, and the relieving news is that Stranger Things avoided becoming another Lost with aplomb. The Massacre at Hawkins Lab not only neatly closes the season’s narrative circle – clearing the decks for the finale’s inevitable confrontation between One and Eleven – but answers questions about the origins of Hawkins’ inter-dimensional trouble we never even knew we wanted to ask. It all makes sense, at least in terms of the rules of its own fictional world. Mercifully, nobody in Stranger Things is doing the equivalent of causing plane crashes above hidden tropical islands to help protect a magic plug-hole from a smoke monster.

On the contrary, Stranger Things‘ writers know exactly what they’re doing, even if our current destination was never the original plan. They’re smart on a smaller scale, too. They know the building blocks they’re working with – the tropes and archetypes – and they’re deft at reassembling them on the hoof to keep things fresh and surprising. And they know that we, the audience, know the building blocks they’re working with, too. Consequently, and cleverly, then, they take great joy in subverting that awareness. Case in point is this season’s mile-high battle between Joyce, Murray and Yuri on a plane somewhere above eastern Russia. All signs point to the disappointing yet strangely comforting realisation that Murray’s martial-art prowess will ultimately only prove effective against child opponents. We fully expect Joyce to emerge from off-camera and incapacitate Yuri herself. However, at the last moment, Murray demonstrates his innate bad-assery, even if his bad-ass-ed-ness is more in spirit than in deed, and more through luck and enthusiasm than skill.

The episode Dear Billy, featuring Max’s near-death at the hands of Vecna, was executed particularly skilfully. Those familiar with the language of television would have been instantly pessimistic about Max’s survival chances on the basis alone that Sadie Sink – whose character Max was an important though hitherto peripheral main character – was getting a meaty chunk of the spotlight to herself, along with more challenging and emotional scenes than she’d ever been given before. That’s often a sign that the writers are giving a character a long goodbye; a last victory lap before forced retirement. It’s such an ingrained trope that I found myself genuinely unsure if Max was going to make it out of the episode alive, and almost rose from the couch and on to my feet in step with the climbing tension.

Kudos, also, for making the Demogorgon scary again. The story-line that follows Enzo and Hopper on monster death-row is part Alien 3, part Prison Break, and all thrilling.

Endgame and beyond

Now that Vecna’s identity and modus operandi have been revealed there’s no direction left for the narrative to travel except straight to the final confrontation between good and evil; it won’t follow a straight line, of course, because there are still dangling plot threads by the dozen, not least of which are the US Military’s El-shaped endgame; Nancy’s mental imprisonment by Vecna; Mike’s mission to find El; Hopper and Co’s escape from Russia; and the murderous intentions of Hawkins’ townsfolk, who have been whipped into satanic panic by jock-cum-avenging-angel Jason Carver.

Still, with no surprises of Vecna’s magnitude left to uncover (though I could be sorely wrong about that) the only truly surprising thing left is to kill off a main character. We’ve been teased with this many times before, through the hanging fates of Will, El, Hopper and, most recently, Max. However, the more times a show teases a major death without following through, the less effective that narrative trick becomes. Keep doing it and you risk alienating your audience, and, worse, making them feel cheated (accusations that were thrown at The Walking Dead during its Dumpster-Gate moment). I truly believe that someone big is about to go six-feet upside down. But which characters are Stranger Things most likely to sacrifice?

Let’s take the long way round. It seems almost certain – to this writer, in any case – that the fifth and final season will take place in Hawkins: the place where it all began, featuring all of the characters we’ve come to know and love, each with an axe to grind. There’s a neatness to that; a feeling of having come full circle. For that to be the case then Joyce, El, Will and Jonathan will have to leave California (possibly – nay, hopefully – with Argylle in tow). Now, sure, if Joyce and Hopper were to hook up – supposing they survive Russia – Joyce might consider returning to Hawkins with her clan to be with Hopper, but she might just as easily decide to convince Hopper to leave behind the Hawkins house of horrors and join them all in the sunshine. So something has to give. I doubt they’d kill Hopper at this point, not so soon after his first ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’. I do, however, think that Joyce is a possible candidate for erasure. Her death would not only force the California gang back home, but also transform Hopper into a molten copper with the safeties off; The Punisher with a supernatural twist. And that would be a sight to behold, grief and sadness notwithstanding.

But even as I write that, I talk myself out of it. Joyce has been through a hell of a time. She suffered the trauma of a missing child, had to help that same child rid himself of inter-dimensional possession, watched her romantic partner die, watched Hopper ‘die’. It would seem rather cruel to cap off her arc with a sad and tragic death. Doesn’t mean they won’t. But, as happened with Dear Billy, the show’s got me racked with doubt. The only certainty, to my mind, is that Hopper will live long enough to overcome his past trauma, and prove his love and parenting credentials through saving El – and I don’t foresee that happening this season.

Something terrible was always going to happen to El. She won’t die, but, by god, she’ll suffer. The particularities of this suffering are legion, but here’s a handful of potential scenarios: El defeats Vecna (possibly by drawing on the inside help of the ‘souls’ Vecna has already absorbed, like happened to Freddy Krueger on Elm Street, and Peter Kay on Doctor Who) but gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but takes his place, and gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but the force with which they do battle tears a hole in the interdimensional fabric between universes, and the upside down bleeds into and merges with the real world, possibly just affecting Hawkins, but potentially the entire world. I guarantee that whatever happens, Hopper will enter Hell for El in season 5, whether that hell is in another dimension, or here on earth. Which it just might be. Probably the most likely scenario is that the US military, who have been tracking El all season, leaving murder and torture in their wake, will snatch El at the finale, and spend season 5 trying to use her as a weapon. Maybe they’ll combine that with the bleeding of universes. Maybe we’ll see the return of the Mindflayer, but this time it’s the size of Wales.

Dead-pool 2

You can lay easy bets on which part of El’s wounded psyche Vecna is going to try to use to break her (literally and figuratively): her guilt both at releasing Vecna from his powers, and at opening the first portal to the upside down, and all the deaths that flowed from those two events. Maybe to counter this attack El will try to harness her powers from a memory that makes her sad and angry, like the death of Hopper, only to have her burgeoning powers slapped down to nothing once it’s revealed that Hopper is still alive. Maybe the memory that gives El the power to perform a killing strike will be the recent death of Mike? The gangly Ghostbuster is surely in the top tier running for early check-out. The continuation of Mike’s time in the show wouldn’t add a great deal to its overall worth, but his death certainly would. Then it would be El who turned avenging angel. Equally, though, it might make her do a Scarlet Witch and become next season’s big bad.

The smartest money in the great Stranger Things‘ dead-pool, however, is on Steve. He’s a great character, but he’s literally got nowhere left to grow (sic). Yes, there are hints at a rekindling of the romance between Steve and Nancy, and while that story-line certainly has potential, whether Jonathan lived to see it happen or not (because he’s got to be on the chopping block, too), I think the most likely – and possibly powerful and affecting – scenario is that Steve will somehow sacrifice himself to save Nancy. He’ll go out in a way that would have surprised his younger self, and everyone who knew him: a brave and selfless hero.

I hereby announce that Murray, Dustin, Eddie, Argylle and Erica have been awarded indestructible plot armour. They now occupy the same exalted status as Carol and Daryl in season 4 of The Walking Dead. Nobody better muss so much as a hair on their heads. We’re not playing here.

In summary, then, I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going to happen next. But it’s fun gazing into the portal the first volume left in its wake, and wondering just what the hell’s going in there, because the suspense is killing you.

The clock is ticking.

Dexter finally gives us the finale we deserve

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When Dexter (Michael C Hall) returned for New Blood in 2021 he became the last of the great TV anti-heroes of the 2000s still standing. His unstable stable-mates were all gone. Walter White met the business end of a Nazi shoot-out, spending his last moments tenderly caressing a meth lab. Tony Soprano ascended to that great gabagool jewel in the sky after being gunned down in a diner (and, yes, that’s what happened: please ignore the outrageous blasphemies proffered by rival sects). And Vic Mackey, neutered and out-manoeuvred by his own greed and hubris, suffered a fate worse than death: a desk job.

All of these characters were afforded a reckoning that rang true with their trajectories and psyches, and the shows that spawned them got to close off their thematic circles in ways that felt earned, earnest and fitting.

Dexter Morgan, on the other hand, got to become a lumberjack.

Dexter’s original series finale (season eight, episode twelve, ‘Remember the Monsters‘) – the agony of which has now mercifully been dulled by the show’s successful second stab at getting things right – was a masterclass in poisoning the chalice. It retrospectively made the whole series weaker, and effectively removed Dexter from the lips of all those who might have recommended the show as a compulsive and accomplished piece of television. Game of Thrones‘ swan-song looks positively sanguine when set against the relentlessly wrong-footed, legacy-wrecking dreck that is ‘Remember the Monsters’.

The ending seemed ridiculous; incongruous; written with a shrug. What were we to make of lumberjack Dexter’s lot? That removed from his life, his friends and family, he would suffer as Vic Mackey did? Unlikely. He’s a serial killer with shallow affect and a lone-wolf outlook. This wasn’t hell for Dexter. Life would go on. Were we to infer that Dexter deserved his life more than Tony Soprano? More than Walter White (who at least chose to sacrifice himself, and in the process soften the worst excesses of his arrogance and murderous pride)? After all the damage that Dexter had done to those closest to him, after all of the good lives he’d taken or caused to end through obedience to his Dark Passenger… he just got to walk?

Thus, with a course correction that’s been a long time coming, Dexter: New Blood returns to the saga with the renewed convictions that not every expectation has to be subverted, and that just because Dexter’s death seems like the obvious choice… doesn’t mean that it isn’t also the right one.

The more things change…

New Blood tells a self-contained story, with a looping narrative that circles back snugly around on itself by the final episode, but it also serves to close off nine seasons worth of tragedy and legacy – The Bay Harbour Butcher; the Trinity Killer; Rita; Harry; Dexter’s old life at Miami Metro; his sister, Debs; his estranged and now returned teenage son, Harrison; La Guerta; Batista – in a way that’s emotionally and thematically satisfying. That’s not to say that this season isn’t without its fair share of crazy contrivances and cack-handed short-cuts, a trademark of Dexter that’s always remained constant, but when the end result is as powerful as the (new) series finale, Sins of the Father, it’s easy to forgive a few indulgences along the way.

~

Dexter – now living in the snowy surroundings of the quaint little town of Iron Lake – isn’t even Dexter when we first meet him (again). He’s Jim Lindsay, a charming and unassuming man who works behind the counter of the local gun shop, and plays happy families with Chief of Police Angela Bishop (Julia Jones) and her daughter, Audrey (Johnny Sequoyah). Jeff Lindsay, of course, is the name of the man who wrote the novel series from which the show was adapted, so Dexter’s new moniker is both an easter-egg-y nod to his literary creator, and a hint as to the likely direction of the Dexter/Harrison dynamic – in the novels Dexter begins to mentor Rita’s young kids, the children he helps to raise, in the ways of the Dark Passenger.

Dexter’s dearly departed sister, Deborah, is now his Dark Passenger, a signal that Dexter is carrying a few hefty body bags of guilt following the long-ago events of season eight. Whereas Harry used to echo his role in life as Dexter’s enabler, Debs just wants Dexter to stop, calling bullshit on his web of self-serving justifications.

New Blood, then, is the natural conclusion to Dexter’s saga, but it’s also a different beast. That’s also patently clear from the title sequence: namely the lack of one. Dexter of old possessed one of the greatest title sequences of all time, one that spoke to the truth of Dexter’s duality, and of the brutality that lurked behind even the most banal of routines and gestures; all scored to a jaunty, slightly-sinister, plinky-plonk theme that encouraged us to revel in the more mischievous aspects of Dexter’s darkness. Not so here. This, we quickly learn, is no place for wry asides, coal-black chuckles or twisted hero worship. This is a new game: the endgame.

The idea of finality is baked into New Blood. The shadow of death casts its shape over every frame. Dexter’s new home of Iron Lake is entombed within snowy upstate New York, a far cry from the stuffy, sun-sheened streets of Miami. While the location further serves to separate the ‘classic’ Dexter from the ‘new’ – visually, tonally, and, of course, climatically – it’s also deliberately on-message with the series’ closing themes: it’s cold, isolated, redolent of death. Dexter might as well be living within Robert Frost’s most famous poem. Miles to go before he sleeps? Not as many as he’d imagine. Iron Lake is a town where ancestral ghosts haunt the hills, where the snow might just be human remains, and where hitch-hikers come to die.

The scenery also invites comparison with Walter White’s sojourn into a snowy wilderness late in the final season of Breaking Bad. Walt chose exile – a cold place to die – but a mixture of ego, shame and regret propelled him back to the only life that would have him, if only just long enough to secure his legacy, his family, and maybe even his ‘soul’. Dexter, of course, doesn’t have a ‘soul’. Or, rather, he does, but it’s only in, and through, death that he discovers it.

The end is the beginning

New Blood at first looks set to explore Dexter’s relationship with his estranged son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), perhaps even giving the semi-retired serial killer a redemption arc. But echoes of Dexter’s inevitable downfall are embedded in the narrative from the beginning.

One of New Blood‘s first scenes sees Dexter pulled over at the side of the road and ‘arrested’ by the Chief of Police. We quickly realise the two are a couple, and what we’re seeing is nothing more than good-natured banter and sexy role-play. Of course, in the finale Angela arrests Dexter for real, after discovering that not only is he the man responsible for killing local douchebag Matt Caldwell, but also Miami’s very own Bay Harbour Butcher.

In episode one of New Blood, Dexter falls off the whacking wagon in style, breaking the rules of his own kill-code by murdering Matt Caldwell in the woods for the crime of killing an innocent deer. In the finale, Dexter kills Sergeant Logan, a decent man, in order to escape from prison, and flee town with Harrison. This murder becomes the reason that Harrison shoots and kills his dad. Logan is to Harrison what the deer was to Dexter – innocent and undeserving of his fate. Unlike Dexter, Harrison is completely justified in pulling the trigger, at least according to Dexter’s ‘code’. In a way, the entirety of New Blood is the story of Dexter setting himself up as the perfect first victim for his son to dispatch. In teaching Harrison to kill Kurt Caldwell – both the father of the man Dexter murders, and a particularly prolific and heinous serial killer – Dexter is inadvertently leading Harrison towards fratricide, and himself towards symbolic suicide.

Live by the code: die by the code

In Dexter’s final scene with Harrison, and his final scene overall, the character is laid bare: to himself, and to the audience. We acknowledge that what Harry did to and for Dexter wasn’t good parenting, but warped, misguided and abusive – whatever gossamer-thin strands of good intentions may have been woven into the horror. Harry made Dexter into a serial killer, one who came to believe in his own twisted, sanctimonious notions of superherodom, which in turn caused Dexter to react to his own grown son’s anger and mental health problems not with tough love, understanding or therapeutic intervention, but by trying to mould Harrison into an avenging serial killer just like him. Not even Kurt Caldwell did that. And, in the final analysis, is Dexter really all that different from Kurt? Or Trinity? Or his own brother? Here, Dexter is stripped back to his irreparably damaged core: an addict and a narcissist who fools himself with rituals and others with his charm, but, ultimately, would turn on anyone who threatened his secret life or freedom, no matter how much he claimed to love or admire them. When Angela arrests him in his kitchen, there’s a moment where we see Dexter’s and Angela’s reflection in a metallic surface, a caddy of knives tantalisingly within reach, and it’s obvious that Dexter is calculating how to use them: on the woman he ‘loves’; on the woman whose daughter his son, Harrison, is very much in love with.

In the past we’ve applauded Dexter’s ingenuity in extricating himself from all manner of tricky situations, cheered him on in his dark endeavours. But the man being interrogated by Angela in the police station isn’t some righteous, charming, relatable, friendly neighbourhood serial killer, but a dangerous, ugly, manipulative psychopath who will stop at nothing to deceive and destroy both the innocent and the guilty alike. It’s impossible to root for him this time, if it ever was in the first place.

Dexter does, however, get his redemption – of sorts – in death. Harrison is headstrong. Angry. Zealous. But he’s still a confused teenage boy who just wants his dad to want him, to love him, to do what’s right. Dexter easily could have manipulated this final confrontation to his advantage, told Harrison what he wanted to hear in order to get close enough to disarm or kill him. And in the end, isn’t this the way that Dexter shows affection? By deciding not only not to kill someone close to him, but choosing to die at their hands in order to make things easier for them?

It’s fitting that as Dexter becomes his own final victim, surrounded by the faces and memories of his past victims, he finally realises the extent of his capability and capacity for love and selflessness.

As for Harrison… is his trauma at an end or is it only just beginning? Both Harrison and his dad were ‘born in blood’, as Dexter would say, witnesses at a young age to the horrific murders of their respective mothers (Harrison’s suffering compounded by the eventual realisation that Dexter’s lifestyle put a target on his mother’s back). But is Harrision suffering from PTSD that could be healed with time and effort, or does a dark passenger whisper within him, also? Did he kill his father because it was the right – or maybe the only – thing to do, or did he kill his father because Dexter satisfied ‘the code’ and Harrison wanted to feed his murderous urges? As good as Jack Alcott was as Harrison, I hope we never find out. Harrison’s final run from town was reminiscent of Jesse’s in the closing moments of Breaking Bad. Better to let what happens next to Dexter’s nearest and dearest live and twist in our imaginations, and not cheapen this very effective, very fitting finale by giving Harrison his El Camino moment.

Goodbye Dexter. You’re finally in prestige-show heaven; if not alongside shows like Breaking Bad, The Shield and The Sopranos, then incredibly close to them. And that’s something most of us never thought we’d get the chance to say.

The Most Disappointing TV of 2020

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2020 will be remembered for a great many things, few of them sanguine. The year began with Australia burning, and ended with Donald Trump trying to smash democracy using other people’s money and temper tantrums. Wedged between those two terrifying totems was the coronavirus, an invisible and deadly assailant that first inexplicably robbed us of our toilet paper, then our freedom, then our collective sense of objective reality. That spectre of lost lives and lockdowns is still with us, and the virus itself only seems to be getting stronger, more deadly and more widespread, like some hideous airborne variant of Mrs Brown’s Boys. As a consequence of the endless upheaval, there wasn’t much to do in 2020 except panic, and watch TV. Thankfully, there was plenty of panic to go around, and a veritable smorgasbord of terrific TV to be sampled.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to talk to you about the shows that made me wish for some kind of retroactive coronavirus-related production disruption that would wipe from existence whole seasons of said shows, and, most mercifully of all, expunge them from my memory. I’m talking about the shows that felt fittingly 2020, in that they were a heinous assault on mankind itself.

The Middle

First, let’s look at a handful of shows that for one reason or another teetered on the cusp of entertainment oblivion, but never quite plummeted, or else started to nose-dive but managed to pull the stick back to achieve if not quite a loop-the-loop then at least a level flight.

Early in the year, Armando Ianucci’s hotly anticipated, space-based comedy Avenue 5 certainly elicited more bangs than whimpers; unfortunately, the bangs came as a result of people slamming their heads off of the nearest solid object in pained bewilderment that an Armando Ianucci project could be so insipid. I think much of the problem lay with the uncharted territory being explored, by creator and audience both. Ianucci usually satirises existing institutions and power structures for which we have countless frames of reference, even if we find ourselves ignorant of the minutiae of their functions. Without much foreknowledge we can get what he’s trying to do and trying to say, and who he’s trying to say it about. We understand the archetypes.

In Avenue 5, set aboard a futuristic luxury space-liner, the institution and target was more opaque, and it took some time for the pieces to fall into place, more time than many viewers were willing to extend. Which is a shame, really, because after a somewhat shaky start – initially, the characters felt oddly broad, and the humour fell a little flat – the show unfolded into a delicious, hilarious farce. Its message on the madness of crowds was moulded, I would guess, with the rise of bumbling populist power-mongers and their slavishly devoted minions in mind, but the year’s events transformed the show into a prescient, scathing, very timely satire on how societies behaved, and continue to behave, during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully the second season can hit the ground running… if the coronavirus doesn’t stop them from filming it, that is.

Red Dwarf could easily have ended up slap-bang in the middle of 2020’s dreck list, but it managed to dodge that fate largely thanks to low expectations. Few expected it to be good, even – perhaps especially – childhood fans like me. It still pains me to say it, but Red Dwarf hasn’t been truly noteworthy since its sixth season. Every few years it returns with just enough nuggets of what made it beloved in the first place to justify its continued existence. It’s like a slightly shambolic, age-faded uncle whose hoary old jokes you tolerate because he used to tell you funny stories when you were young. And so it proved with Red Dwarf: The Promised Land, a feature-length special that largely squandered the long-anticipated return of the cat people, especially with its damp squib of a generic villain, but squeezed a lot of laughs out of Lister’s reluctant ascension to godhood (and Rimmer’s reaction to it). There were also a few stellar scenes the dialogue from which wouldn’t have felt out of place in the show’s golden era. Red Dwarf needs to re-learn that it’s always at its best when it trucks in pathos, and lets the laughs flow from character rather than trying to force them through innuendo and crudity.

And now, as promised, the year’s biggest failures and most crushing disappointments.

How the West was Lost

Westworld season one was a brilliant piece of story-telling: dense, rich, mysterious, confounding, thought-provoking. Its second season took a few stutter-steps and stumbles – adding fuel to the fire of those who’d derided the show for over-staying its welcome rather than taking a one-and-done approach – but still turned in powerful, and emotionally resonant sequences and episodes. Then came the third season. Gone were the slow-burns and puzzles, here to stay were the whizz-bangs and non-stop robot ass-kicking. The difference in tone and quality was as pronounced as the difference between Alien and Alien vs Predator 2; Terminator 2 and Terminator: Genysis; and a kiss on the cheek and a thunderous kick in the balls. Westworld has become more like a bad, generic Terminator sequel than the inventive and reflective mind-bender it was when it began. In mulling things over before writing this article, I realised I’d completely forgotten Aaron Paul’s prominent role in season 3; I only remembered once I started grabbing screenshots. This highlights the season’s worst, most unforgiveable, crime: it’s forgettable.

Star Drekking

I was accompanied on my voyages through adolescence by the starships Enterprise, Defiant and Voyager, a triumvirate of overlapping Trek shows (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager respectively) that got me hooked on televised science fiction, and opened my mind to the richness and possibilities of its story-telling.

Sci-fi these days, though, can’t be allowed to revel in its cult status. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry thanks to the likes of Star Wars and Marvel and Disney. Sci-fi is now for the masses, and they want blockbusters, all of the time, whether the screen is small or cinema-sized: big explosions, big emotions, big lens flares, and loud and manipulative musical scores.

Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point. It looks great. Some of the visual effects, particularly in its third season, have been breath-taking. But I can’t help but feel that the aesthetics have been dialled up at the expense of the writing, and somewhere along the line the show has lost its grip on what makes Star Trek ‘Star Trek’. I know times change, and with them budgets, attitudes, audience habits and technology. What might have worked in the 60s (even the 80s) wouldn’t necessarily work today; a lot of it definitely wouldn’t. I know Star Trek has evolved, and has to evolve, to stay relevant. I just wonder if the show has changed too much, to the point where Star Trek: Discovery isn’t just a bad Star Trek show, but a bad (or, if I’m being generous, a mediocre) show, full-stop.

I say this not only as a borderline fuddy-duddy who looks back fondly and perhaps with a sense of protectiveness on the halcyon days of Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, but also as someone who watches, and often critiques, an unhealthy amount of television. I’m not operating in a vacuum here. I know what a good Star Trek or, more broadly, a good sci-fi series looks like, and I know what a good TV show looks like. And Discovery doesn’t look like any of it.

Season three saw our plucky crew following Michael through a wormhole into the far-future, acting as custodians of data that a malevolent AI had tried to use to end all sentient, organic life in the universe.

The season started well, with an opener that was entertaining and luscious to look at, if a little vacuous and whizz-bang, followed by an effective episode that saw the crew having to extract the ship from a tomb of fast-replicating ice. Things quickly went downhill after that. The season’s premise, that the Federation of the future was a spent and rag-tag force, a shadow of its former self only kept alive by hope and goodwill, was a strong one, though, as usual, Michael Burnham’s habit of instantly saving the universe just because she’s Michael Burnham rather robbed the story, and the new universe, of its chance to grow in depth and complexity.

Myriad complications face the crew in this new far-future universe, chief among them the cataclysmic event that occurred 120 years before the Discovery’s arrival. This was ‘the burn’, an unexplained phenomenon that caused all dilithium in the galaxy to spontaneously combust, killing untold thousands and rendering most spaceships incapable of fast interstellar travel. Again, fantastical and implausible as this notion was (and I clearly say that in my capacity as a qualified astro-physicist…) there was great potential here for complex conflict and drama that was unfortunately side-lined in favour of slick and shiny whizz-bang, and the sacrificing of all ancillary characters and themes on the altar of Michael Burnham.

You could lay some of the blame for Discovery’s problems on its serialised format – the shift away from the standalone episodes that were once Star Trek’s bread-and-butter – but that would be to deny Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s phenomenally successful forays into that type of long-form story-telling. Even when dealing with war and hopelessness and loss DS9 never lost its essence, its hope, its intrinsic sense of the wider canvas – and franchise – in which it existed.

It helped that DS9 had layered, flawed and fully-fleshed-out characters. Discovery has, at its core, Michael Burnham and Saru (I loved Georgiou, but she’s been spun off into her own spin-off series now), maybe, at a push, Book, Stamets, and Culver, and I wouldn’t include any of them, barring Saru and Georgiou, in the top 50 of Trek’s best characters. I’m still not entirely sure of the names of most of the bridge crew. Very few supporting characters enjoy much in the way of development in this show, and if they do it’s either to service the plot, or service the universal constant that is Michael Burnham – usually the latter. This is not an ensemble show: this is the Michael Burnham show, with occasional not-so-special guest stars.

Season three had so many cynically manufactured emotional beats it was almost a percussive symphony, a dirge scored to the background wail of crying. Jesus, they cry a lot on this show, a lot more than any group of people I’ve ever encountered in life or fiction. And they affirm each other a lot, too, whether it’s earned or not. There were so many bullshit inspirational speeches that I started to think I was watching The Walking Dead In Space. Hugging and crying, crying and hugging, feeling and being in touch with feelings. Signalling to the audience, ‘You should feel this NOW and now you should feel THIS’: telling not showing; shouting not whispering.

Whereas Trek spin-offs like The Next Generation had consultants on hand to advise on the plausibility and logistics of the scripts’ speculative science, Discovery is content to cleave closer to mood and magic. The emphasis is always on feeling over thinking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the revelation that ‘the burn’ was caused by a sad and angry Kelpien child reacting to the death of his mother under extraordinary (and extraordinarily stupid) circumstances. I’m afraid so. This is no longer a science-fiction show. It’s like something written for the CW by someone who used to write fantasy for children, and doesn’t really like Star Trek, or science-fiction, all that much. I never get the sense, like I did with previous incarnations of the show, that the characters live on the ship. The ship doesn’t feel like a home to them; more like a spaceborne feelings’ factory, or a mobile exposition unit. When the characters appear on-screen – usually running, frequently crying – it’s as though they’ve just entered stage left. Not real people but actors, ciphers. Surface. It’s all just surface.

If you want good small-screen sci-fi, watch The Expanse; if you want good Star Trek, watch 80s and 90s Star Trek, or even watch The Orville, a gem of a show that’s managed to capture the ethos and feel of a modern Star Trek show while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Whatever my interpretation of (or ‘feelings about’ if you want a little sliver of irony) Discovery, a crime hasn’t been committed here. It’s just a TV show, and if people enjoy it or take comfort from it, then who am I to judge them? In any case, I’d take Discovery over Star Trek: Picard any (and every) day of the week.

Christ, Picard felt like a kick in the nuts; a kick so hard it sent my nuts thundering up my body like two errant pinballs, which then ping-ponged between my skull and amygdala until my brain died. Sometimes, as Fred Gwynne said in Pet Sematary, dead is better, and that’s certainly the case here, both in relation to the show itself, and to the fate of Jean Luc Picard at the season’s end.

On reflection, all of the things I enjoyed about Picard season one were rooted in nostalgia. I liked the opening dream sequence aboard the NCC-1701; I liked Picard reuniting with Riker and Troi; I liked seeing Hugh and Seven of Nine again; I liked Data’s (now second) final death scene. But I only liked them in the same way that I would like the sudden waft of a smell that reminded me of being a kid and visiting my dearly-departed grandparents. Running with that memory-sparking theme, then, I would have to say that the experience of watching season one of Picard is like someone reanimating your dead grandparents and having those hitherto sweet, wise and gentle figures hurl foul abuse at you, screaming until they’re hoarse that the world is an irredeemably ugly place and we all deserve death, before beating you senseless and attempting to extract one of your eyes with a dessert spoon (unless your grandparents were like that when they were alive, in which case please pick another analogy from the pile). Gone, also, is the Picard we remember from active duty; here instead we have a walking fan-fic who’s presumably been written by an overly sentimental sado-masochist. The Picard of this show is just a broken old man who seems to spend most of his time being told to fuck off.

I know genre shows like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica have upped the ante, opening the door to dealing with adult themes and content in a commercially successful way, but Star Trek shouldn’t try to compete with them on that battleground. They’re their own thing, and Star Trek is its own thing. By all means re-invigorate Star Trek, but, again, don’t lose sight of the sort of show it is and always has been, and don’t transmogrify it into ‘Quentin Tarantino in Space’.

Star Trek: Picard is gritty, dark, spectacularly and incongruously violent, full of swearing (people say fuck in Star Trek now), sombre and miserable. It falls light-years short of the success and quality of The Expanse, and in so courting that audience-base at the expense of its life-long fans fails at being a Star Trek show. The worst of both worlds, if you like.

Oh, Doctor Who. What’s happened to you? I was never a huge fan of the show as a child. I was aware of its place in the cultural consciousness, knew the contemporary doctors of my era, and enjoyed it whenever I watched it. I was too young to deduce the death throes the show had entered into under the helm of controversial show-runner Johnathan Nathan-Turner, and didn’t particularly mourn its passing when the original run ended in 1989. As an adult, I enjoyed the show’s new iteration, starting with Christopher Eccleston and running all the way up to Peter Capaldi. As I had started writing for Den of Geek I thought it criminal I wasn’t fully au fait with the show’s long history, geek behemoth that it is, so took to bingeing it from the very beginning. My kids came along for the ride, and fell in love with Doctor Who, almost to the point of fanaticism. They now know every era, every doctor and companion, and almost every story from the Classic series to the present day, up to and including the 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.

And this era is the one they’re least enthusiastic about. I feel the same. Again, the special effects are, in most cases, better than they’ve ever been, but everything just feels a bit flat, from the performance of the central character to the villains to the alien worlds and wonders we’re invited to explore. It’s like the showrunner Chris Chibnall, despite being a fan of the show since childhood, has forgotten the essence of what Doctor Who is. The show has become more like a series of facile morality plays with sprinklings of Quantum Leap than a show about a space cowboy rolling into town in his rusty blue wagon, righting wrongs, fighting evil and trying to leave the universe a better place than when he found it.

This latest season was an improvement on last year’s season 11, but that’s like saying Jeffrey Epstein was an improvement on Jimmy Savile. In fairness, the opening two-parter, Spyfall, was actually a lot of fun, and I loved the new, wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Master (Sacha Dahwan). The Haunting of Villa Diodati, too, was a strong outing, with an intriguing premise and a commendably eerie atmosphere. Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, was, as always, a rare chink of light in the darkness, a warm and engaging companion. Jo Martin’s incarnation of the Doctor, pursued to rural England by the Judoon, was a similar joy to watch, proving that the Doctor’s gender isn’t the real, or at least the greatest, problem with the current manifestation of the character. But, despite little flashes of competency here and there, the season got bogged down in boredom, preachiness, and insipid story-telling, very much wearing its politics on its sleeve, shaped like a giant mutated fist. There was also Orphan 55, one of the worst ever episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the worst ever episodes of anything ever. And that’s before we even consider the canon-smashing sledgehammer of the season’s closing two-parter that makes Jodie Whittaker’s version of the character not the 13th, but approximately the 1,000,013th.

This show is dying, despite its occasional grand gestures and increasing attempts at fan service, and I don’t think I care anymore. And my kids don’t either. Which should be a little worrying for the BBC, given that my kids, and thousands like them, are the show’s primary target market.

Spitting Image is the spitting image of a very bad show. I used to love the series when I was younger, and now find myself wondering if the ‘satire’ was always this broad, the jokes always so cheap. Much of the problem lies with many of the show’s targets being beyond parody, especially Donald Trump, who is already a malevolent puppet. Elsewhere in the show, though, the writers seemed content to take lazy, tabloid-style pops at their targets, most notably Harry and Megan, a duo, and a representation of them, sure to please the Daily Mail crowd. Just leave them alone, for Christ’s sake. The characterisation of Joe Biden, too, could have been ripped from tweets written by Trump himself. And as much as I loathe Prince Andrew, having the punchlines to his appearances be literal punches and head-battings rather lowered the satirical tone to sub-Punch-and-Judy levels.

I liked Dominic Cummings’ pulsating-headed alien, and, contrary to my comments on Prince Andrew, it’s always a joy to see James Corden being viciously beaten, but beyond that the show either punched down, or couched its punches in soft velvet gloves. Puerile, unfunny and a wasted opportunity for some political satire with some real heft.

What shows do you think missed the mark in 2020? Or do you disagree with my sh*t-list? Tell me in the comments below this article.

Everything I Watched and Read in 2020

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Another year, another pointless list of the media I’ve consumed that no-one really cares about, but that I’m foisting on you nevertheless. I started keeping these lists as of the beginning of 2019, and give a lengthier account of my motivations HERE. Suffice to say, I’m really rather anal. Without any further ado, then, here are my lists, with a little blurb at the end of each to spraff about some of the entries and crown my favourites.

Books

The Strange Death of Europe – Douglas Murray Beloved – Toni Morrison Abandon – Blake Crouch
The Art of the Deal – Donald Trump The Radleys – Matt Haig The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The Secret Life of Cows  – Rosamund Young Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All – Jonas Jonasson The Long Utopia – Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett
The Long Cosmos – Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett The Death of Expertise – Tom Nichols Storm of Steel – Ernst Junger
Slapstick or Lonesome No More – Kurt Vonnegut Captive State – George Monbiot Hastened to the Grave – Jack Olsen
The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney Monday Begins on Saturday – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Everything She Ever Wanted – Ann Rule
On Palestine – Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe The Institute – Stephen King Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
The Fault in Our Stars – John Green In the Still of the Night – Ann Rule Love in the Present Tense – Catherine Ryan Hyde
The Caves of Steel – Isaac Asimov Occupation Diaries – Raja Shehadeh Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
Scratchman – Tom Baker (AUDIO) Winter Moon – Dean Koontz Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen – Brian Masters
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

I absolutely adored Girl, Woman, Other. Unsentimental, unpreachy, utterly convincing. It’s astounding how well Bernardine Evaristo embodies such a wide cross-section of female characters, of all different ages, classes and ethnicities, managing to pull together their (seemingly) disparate stories – powerful enough as vignettes in their own right – and interlock them into a strong and hopeful coda. A real eye-opener.

If we’re talking powerful, what a punch Beloved packed. Toni Morrison tells a visceral, haunting story that makes you sick to your stomach then sick to your soul; a tale of brutality and escape and birth and death and sacrifice and stolen humanity, the horror of it all wrapped in language so incongruously eloquent and beautiful that it serves to amplify the agony and accentuate the senselessness. It always astounds me that people dismiss slavery as if it weresome biblical indiscretion, when its horror is achingly recent. If some Scots still carry the faint scars of Culloden, then I think African Americans are entitled to their pain, given that the path from slavery to the civil rights movement to last year’s BLM has given the wound plenty of chances to re-open and bleed afresh.

The Fault in Our Stars … what an unexpected delight. It’s funny, raw, honest, real, and tragic, and laced through with almost molten layers of humanity. Five stars out of five. No faults there. Very few books have made me cry, and this was one of them, and then some.

Now, on to sci-fi, a genre of which I’m exceedingly fond. Monday Begins on Saturday is a strikingly novel work of the imagination, but it was rather too dense for my liking. Better were the simpler stories and stripped down prose to be found in Finney’s seminal sci-fi classic The Body Snatchers – a real paranoia-filled page turner – and Asimov’s The Caves of Steel – some real thoughtful, engaging, golden age sci-fi.

The funnies? The Radleys is a blast. It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant tale about discontented suburban vampires reckoning with their pasts, that has a lot to say about teenage kicks, mid-life crises and the ticking time-bomb of truth that sits at the hearts of even the most seemingly mundane of middle-class families. Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All is a brilliant, laugh-out-loud farce, peopled with fascinating and frustrating characters. If you like swipes at organised religion and the gullibility of the masses served with copious amounts of booze and underworld hitmen in rural Sweden, then this is the book for you.

The best book I read this year, though, was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m in awe of her prose. Every page is a delight. At least once every few phrases or passages I found myself muttering internally that it was time to quit writing, because I’d never be able to conjure such rich images or evoke such real and strong feelings as Margaret Atwood. Plus, the chilling world she conjures, and the small degrees by which we’re separated from worlds like it, seems all too frighteningly plausible in 2020/1. The book is as much a work of peerless literary genius as it is a stark warning.

Graphic Novels 

Zenith: Phase Four – Grant Morrison/Steven Yeowell Pussey – Daniel Clowes
Rumble – Volume 1: What Colour Darkness – John Arcudi/James Harren/Dave Stewart Deadpool: Volume 6 – Duggan/Posehn/Lucas
The X-Files/30 Days of Night – Niles/Jones/Mandrake I Hate Fairyland – Volume 2: Fluff My Life – Skottie Young
I Hate Fairyland – Volume 3: Good Girl – Skottie Young AD: After Death – Scott Snyder & Jeff Lemire
Doctor Who: Third Doctor: Heralds of Destruction – Paul Cornell/Christopher Jones Postal: Volume 4 – Matt Hawkins/Bryan Hill/Isaac Goodhart/K. Michael Russell
Preacher: Volume 1 – Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon Preacher: Volume 2 – Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon
The Boys Omnibus: Volume 1 – Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson Doctor Who/Star Trek: The Next Generation: Assimilation2 Volume 2 – Tipton/Woodward/Purcell
Infidel – Pichetshote/Campbell/Villarrubia/Powell Chew: Volume 1: Taster’s Choice – John Layman/Rob Guillory
Chew: Volume 2: International Flavor – John Layman/Rob Guillory Transmetropolitan Vol 1: Back on the Street – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 2: Lust for Life – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson Transmetropolitan Vol 3: Year of the Bastard – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 4: The New Scum – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson Transmetropolitan Vol 5: Lonely City – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Avengers vs X-Men – Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis et al Southern Bastards Vol 1: Here Lies a Man – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour
Southern Bastards Vol 2: Grid Iron – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour Southern Bastards Vol 3: Homecoming – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour

There’s an embarrassment of riches out there in comic-land and I’m still very much playing catch up with compendiums from years gone by. What I can say is that I picked up some volumes of Preacher and I bloody love it, more so than it’s TV adaptation. Ditto, so far, with The Boys, although the TV version of Homelander still reigns supreme.

The seedy, grubby, gory, all-out bonkers future world depicted in Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, in which half-mad gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem plies his trade with the help of rivers of raging bile  and a steady supply of narcotics is a non-stop thrill-ride of invention, heart, hilarity, caustic commentary on contemporary ills, and some truly disgusting shit. It’s like 2000AD meets George Orwell on methamphetamine.

The best graphic novel I read in 2020, though, was Southern Bastards. I didn’t want it to end. It’s what Elmore Leonard would’ve produced if he’d written graphic novels. It cleaves just close enough to cliche to make you think you know what it’s all about, and what’s coming next, but it’s resolutely its own, very modern, beast. Compelling; compulsive; cinematic; dark and deliciously morally grey; it’s both an earnest love-letter to and a big fuck you to the deep south of America. Read it.

TV Shows

Old (watched in 2020 but older shows that didn’t debut in 2020)

The Man in the High Castle S4 Documentary Now S3 Outlander S4
Schitt’s Creek S1 Schitt’s Creek S2 Schitt’s Creek S3
Schitt’s Creek S4 Schitt’s Creek S5 The Expanse S4
The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S2 The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S3 The Purge S1
The Purge S2 Limmy’s Show S2 Don’t F*** With Cats S1
Final Space S1 Final Space S2 The Boys S1
The Umbrella Academy S1 You S1 You S2
The Witcher S1 What We Do in the Shadows S1 Derry Girls S2
The Confession Killer S1 Good Omens S1 Love on the Spectrum S1
Cobra Kai S1 Cobra Kai S2 Good Girls S1
Good Girls S2 Doom Patrol S1 Making a Murderer P1

It’s all about Cobra Kai, right? A show that on paper looked like a sure-fire dud, but defied expectations to become one of the best and most popular new shows of recent years. Who would have thought that the Karate Kid had so much mileage in it, and that Johnny Lawrence – a walking 1980s time capsule – would become a hero for our times? Elsewhere, I gorged on, and loved, The Boys, kicking myself for not having watched it sooner. Likewise Schitt’s Creek, which quickly became one of my favourite comedies and possibly one of my favourite shows, full-stop, of all time. I also disappeared down the Making a Murderer rabbit-hole a few years later than everyone else. I’ve since watched the second season, too, and while I believe that the police and the prosecution team are hiding something, and there are gaps a mile-wide in the evidence and the timeline, I’m not sure I believe that Avery is innocent. That trailer park of his is like The Hills Have Eyes. Is it possible he did it, covered his tracks and then the police moved the ‘evidence’ into place, planting a few bits and bobs along the way, to secure conviction?

New TV Shows 2020

The Good Place S4 Vikings S6 Part 1 Doctor Who S12 The Outsider S1
Bojack Horseman S6 Avenue 5 S1 Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 Star Trek: Picard S1
Tiger King S1 Modern Family S11 Red Dwarf S13 Better Call Saul S5
Ozark S3 Brooklyn Nine Nine S7 The Conners S2 After Life S2
Future Man S3 Westworld S3 The Simpsons S31 Bob’s Burgers S10
Locke & Key S1 Rick and Morty S4 Space Force S1 Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich S1
Schitt’s Creek S6 Floor is Lava S1 Fear City: New York vs The Mafia S1 What We Do in the Shadows S2
The Midnight Gospel S1 I May Destroy You S1 Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD S7 The Umbrella Academy S2
Muppets Now S1 Mrs America S1 Des S1 Jurassic Park: Camp Cretaceous S1
South Park Pandemic Special American Murder: The Family Next Door The Boys S2 Star Trek: Lower Decks S1
The Walking Dead Season 10 Part 2 Ratched S1 Lovecraft Country S1 Archer S11
The Haunting of Bly Manor S1 Last Week Tonight S7 Good Girls S3 Real Time with Bill Maher S18
Spitting Image 2020 S1 Fear the Walking Dead S6 Part 1 Truth Seekers S1 Vikings S6B
The Mandalorian S2 Big Mouth S4

I’m not going to say too much about 2020’s new shows, because I’m going to be covering these in more depth in the next week or so. Make up your own mind for now.

Movies (all movies, not just those new in 2020)

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019) The Money Pit (1986) The Birds (1963) The Addams Family (2019)
Sponge Bob Square Pants: Sponge Out of Water (2015) Ready Player One (2018) The Death of Stalin (2017) Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Playmobil: The Movie (2019) Pacific Rim: Uprising (2017) Modern Times (1936) Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)
The Lion King (2019) Knives Out (2019) Terminator Dark Fate (2019) Sonic the Hedgehog (2019)
City Lights (1931) The Mummy (1931) The Gold Rush (1925) Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) Star Wars: Episode VII – The Last Jedi (2017) The Boy Who Would Be King (2019) The Circus (1928)
Blackfish (2013) Jo Jo Rabbit (2019) Abducted in Plain Sight (2017) Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
Onward (2020) Megamind (2010) My Neighbour Totoro (1988) Doctor Sleep (2019)
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) Mean Streets (1973) Scoob (2020) Crawl (2019)
Train to Busan (2016) Teen Titans Go To The Movies (2018) Two by Two (2015) The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)
I See You (2019) Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (2004) The Conjuring (2013) Curse of the Scarecrow (2018)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Rampage (2018) Annabelle (2014) Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)
Johnny Gruesome (2018) Coraline (2009) Venom (2018) Spongebob Squarepants: Sponge on the Run (2020)
The Platform (2019) His House (2020) The Silence (2019) Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
Alien Xmas (2020) Soul (2020)

A lot of disappointments for me this year. Zombieland 2 was more like a hollow amateur cover album than a continuation of the fun, kinetic spirit of the original. Star Wars continues to tank on the big screen, at least in the opinion of this former goggle-eyed kid of the 80s (thank Christ for The Mandalorian). Borat 2 had some funny moments, and a good pay-off, but felt, overall, a bit inconsequential, which is something I never thought I’d say about a Sacha Baron Cohen project. Thank God, then, for Train to Busan, a movie I missed the first time around, and which was every bit as good as I’d been led to expect. Just when you think the zombie genre has had its day, along comes this nightmarish motherfucker to reawaken parts of your adrenal gland you’d long thought were shut off. Netflix’s His House was really good, a highly effective, well-acted horror with powerful messages about love, loss and identity along the way. Jo Jo Rabbit, of course, was fantastic, but you probably already know that. Hitler has never been so much fun; although the trailer belies the tragedy and pathos that form the spine of the film – as well as being funny, it’s also deep and richly moving. For feel-good laughs and a strong performance from Shia LaBeouf that reminds you he’s so much more than the dude from Indiana Jones 4 and Transformers, I entreat you to seek out The Peanut Butter Falcon, even if it does have an implausibly saccharine ending (maybe I’m just an old cynic).

I watched a lot of old(er) movies with my young kids, including a raft of Charlie Chaplin flicks I’d never seen before. Modern Times is the one that made them laugh the hardest, especially the scenes in the factory at the beginning. It’s nice that some things really are timeless. We also watched Rabbit Proof Fence early in the year, and even today, without prompt, my eldest son, Jack, asked me how many miles the girls walked in the movie. It’s obviously stuck with him, just as it’s stuck with me. It’s a beautiful movie that provides a happy, hopeful ending that wasn’t really matched by the reality that followed its events. Even still, inspirational stuff, and bravura performances from the mostly young cast.

Movies watched before/again

Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
The Fifth Element (1997) Avengers Endgame (2019)
Ghostbusters (1984) Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
Back to the Future (1985) Back to the Future 2 (1989)
Back to the Future 3 (1990) The Muppets (2011)
The Karate Kid (1984) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Groundhog Day (1993)
A Muppet’s Christmas Carol (1992)

I watched most of the above with my kids. I can’t tell you the joy it brought me to see them start spouting catchphrases like ‘Great Scott!’, ‘He slimed me’, ‘Wax on, wax off’, ‘Party on, dudes’ and ‘Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own URINE?’ Okay, I probably shouldn’t have let them watch Dodgeball, but there you go.

Groundhog Day is one of my favourite movies of all time. Again, it felt nice to see my eldest son so enraptured by it, and so receptive to its message of always trying to better yourself as a person.

It’s Time TV Went to the Right

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Erroneous, or at least exaggerated, reports recently circulated claiming that the incoming Director General of the BBC was going to correct the BBC’s supposed long-standing left-wing bias. So let’s just imagine what it would be like if all of British TV shifted to the right. What sort of programmes could we look forward to?

The Radio Times

Pensioners in England reminisce about the better times when the only entertainment in the home was the radio. Bill in Surrey remembers: ‘My mam would listen to seven ‘ahs of Vera Lynn, then anover twelve ‘ahs of ‘er Majesty the Queen, and we never even ‘ad a fakking radio. She was just nuts, san. Still betta than all these bladdy TV shows full of foreigners and bladdy pooftahs these days.’ To be followed by our nostalgic look back at Thatcher’s glorious economic reign in the 1980s, The Only Way is A-Fax.

The Sooty Show

Britain’s most loveable bear makes a snowflake-defying comeback after his cancellation last year on the grounds that the word ‘sooty’ was‘a bit racist’. Sue’s out: there’s no room in our precious children’s minds for backdoor Chinese propaganda, thank you. And Sweep now speaks proper English. Focus groups felt that, you know, he’s been here long enough, he should speak the fucking language. Watch in delight as Sooty uses his magic wand to do things like remove free school meals and ‘get Brexit done’.

Come Whine With Me

A group of Brexit voters take turns to host each other for a fish and chip dinner, while having illuminating conversations about the Britain they remember.

‘Of course, in my day you could call them ***** ***** ******* without any of this PC nonsense.’

‘Yes, I remember that, you’d just shout, ‘***** ****** *******’ at one of them, and do you know what? They’d shoot you back a big happy smile.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. But never mind that, these days you can’t even call them a ******* ******* ****** ******, or a **** ******* ***** ****** ***** ****** ****** ******* ****** ***** without some leftie do-gooder jumping down your throat.’

‘I heard the other day they were going to ban flags. Or was it lettuce?’

‘They banned Wednesday last week. Too white apparently.’

‘Who banned it? Was it the *****, the ******, or the ******? I’ll bet it was the fucking *****s?’

‘I went into work the other week dressed like Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls movie, you know, with that Union Jack dress? And do you know what they did? Bloody sent me home.’

‘You don’t really have the hips for that though, Clive.’

‘Quick question on that subject: which toilet would you have used?’

‘Don’t get me started on that caper, I’ll choke on me bloody takeaway. Perverts.’

‘Course, you’re not allowed to say ‘takeaway’ anymore…’

 It’ll Be All White on the Reich

A studio audience, dressed in ‘All Lives Matter’ T-shirts, erupts with riotus laughter as they watch hilarious outtakes of unarmed black people in America being shot dead by police. Followed by a bit of old school comedy genius, with Matt Hancock’s Half Hour. This week, that classic episode, The Press Conference.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

An hour of Ant and Dec watching repeats of themselves on TV as they enjoy a Chinese takeaway, which they repeatedly and unapologetically refer to as a ‘ch*nky’. Followed by another episode of White Van Man Der Valk in which the famous working-class British detective tracks down rogue immigrants by pointing at every non-white person he passes in his van and going, ‘There’s another one.’.

Undercover Racist

The white owner of a factory secretly joins his ethnic work-force on the shop-floor for a week, sharing their hardships and agonies, before tearfully announcing to them all on day seven how much he’d gladly send them all back home, if only he didn’t rely on their cheap labour so much.

‘But we’re all from Dudley,’ says the foreman.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand anything you people say,’ he replies.

Followed by Corona Nation Street. Tonight the residents tear down a 5G mast and have an illegal street party to celebrate.

The BreX Factor

Simon Cowell introduces the singing talent show where every contestant has to sing the British national anthem, even though not a single one of them actually knows the words.

Doctor Red-White-and-Blue

This week the Doctor takes the Tardis on holiday to Benidorm, and decries the lack of any decent Bovril.

Jamie on the Box: Muppets Now

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Disney’s first stab at the muppets post-Henson, the 2011 feature film The Muppets, was almost immaculate. The character of Walter was a master-stroke, both an entry-level proxy for the new generation of kids encountering Jim Henson’s phantasmagoric creatures for the first time, and a reminder to old fogeys like me of how much the muppets meant to them and how excited we were to see them again.

The muppets themselves weren’t quite as anarchic or unpredictable as they’d been in their 70s/80s heyday – alluded to in the movie itself through Animal being constrained from indulging his destructive impulses by way of self-help therapy – but what the movie lacked in chaos it made up for in reverence, well-earned sweetness, a plethora of genuinely catchy musical numbers and laugh-out loud moments. Disney had captured lightning in a bottle, but didn’t appear to know what to do with it once they had it, as evidenced by 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted, a sequel that was watchable, though lacklustre and lacking in heart.

ABC’s The Muppets – the 2015 behind-the-scenes mockumentary that was cancelled after one season – showed staggered promise, but, again, the showrunners fatally misunderstood the property. The result was an ill-judged, frequently insipid, tonal mish-mash that alienated long-time admirers like me, and failed to ignite adoration in those coming to the muppets cold. Instead they were left cold. What I want to know is, who looked at the muppets and thought, ‘I know what’ll reinvigorate this franchise: multiple references to Kermit the Frog’s sex life.’ In the end, The Muppets new TV series wasn’t bold or edgy enough to work as an all-out, adults-only entry in the canon, but it was too adult to appeal to children. So who the hell was it for?

And now we have Disney’s Muppets Now, a show perhaps cynically designed to capitalise on the Zoom-era zeitgeist at a time when most TV shows have been crippled, cancelled or postponed by the creep of the coronavirus.

The show follows Scooter’s attempts to cobble together an online extravaganza from the filmed segments sent across to him by his co-stars, uploaded before our very eyes as we watch the episode, while Kermit frets and frowns.

The first of these segments is Life Sty, wherein Miss Piggy explores beauty, style and showbiz pizzazz, featuring guest appearances by actor/singer Taye Diggs and actress Linda Cardellini. Next comes little Walter’s showcase of his fellow muppet’s lesser-known talents, this week turning the spotlight on Kermit’s almost supernatural talent for photo-bombing. The Swedish chef is next, hurdy-gurdying through a cook-off with celebrity chef Carlina Will, before Kermit tops it off with a one-on-one (well, several-on-one) interview with Ru Paul.

And it was, you know… Okay. A bit flat. I watched it with my two young kids, 5 and 3, and they were bored for most of it. Things weren’t much better over on my side of the age divide; I sat stony-faced for the most part. I enjoyed bits of it, but again I was left wondering, ‘Who is this for? What is this for?’

The Piggy segment was one-note and predictable. The cooking segment – by far the worst – felt like exactly that: a cooking segment; an insipid piece of fluffery you might find on a magazine show like The One Show or Saturday Morning Kitchen, but without even those show’s intermittently successful attempts at good-natured humour. The Swedish chef seemed incidental to his own showcase. He was no longer the agent of chaos I’d enjoyed watching as a child (and an adult, I hasten to add). He Just seemed disgruntled and mean-spirited.  More inexcusably still, he just wasn’t funny. My kids agreed.

And what the hell has become of Kermit? I’m a Henson purist, but even still I came to appreciate and enjoy Steve Whitmire’s take on the world’s most famous amphibian. Matt Vogel is the latest actor to puppet and voice Kermit following Whitmire’s acrimonious departure from the franchise in 2017, and he’s just not Kermity enough. Vogel’s evocation/impression – whatever you want to call it – is poor to the point where I think I would be better at it, and his attempt to capture the character leaves Kermit’s green feeling distinctly grey.

Did Kermit turn to valium after his last show was cancelled? Is that the in-show explanation?

It’s telling that the strongest segment is the photo-bomb one; a segment containing two muppets and precisely zero humans. It’s very funny, and uses its characters well. Likewise, the interplay between Uncle Deadly and Miss Piggy is a genuine joy to behold. Again, it’s an interaction that doesn’t need a celebrity guest to make it work. It’s already there in the script.

Disney seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that it is the muppets’ celebrity guests that have always made the brand work; made people watch. Sure, the original Muppet Show had a different celebrity cameo every week – everyone from Elton John to Steve Martin to the cast of Star Wars – but the appearances never felt like celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake. While the show’s guest stars added a direction, a feel and a flavour to their particular episode, people would watch it whether they were there or not: there was never any doubt that the muppets had top billing. There’s something depressing and par-for-the-course about the modern iterations of the muppets trying to shoehorn in as many celebrity appearances as possible. Even when the original series featured a star that few people had heard of, the magic was still there. Not so now.

While I agree that change and re-contextualisation often can re-invigorate a long-running property, not every revived show needs I-Phones, shaky-cams, Zoom calls or numerous nods to contemporaneous social mores. Call me a cranky cultural conservative if you like. I suppose I am when it comes to the muppets, the first show I remember watching as a very small child.

I hope the next five episodes of Muppets Now contain something to make this old man and his own little muppets chuckle, or even smile. But if that turns out not to be the case, then let’s hope that someone at Disney works out that the best way to capture the energy and essence of these furry, fuzzy, fun-lovin’ little critters is to let them come home. Put them back in their theatre, re-cast a credible Kermit, and then, frankly, leave them the fuck alone to do their thing.

Jamie Does… Love Island

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I’ve never watched Love Island.

Mind you, there are a lot of things I haven’t done: stapled my testicles to my left thigh; performed a bungee jump using a bunch of dead snakes tied together; covered cereal boxes with black masking tape, strapped them to my body and ran through an airport shouting ‘bomb’. I guess what I’m driving at is: not having done something isn’t always a strong argument for doing it. Some things are better left un-done.

Still, my shtick is to see or do something new with a view to writing about it in an excoriating and/or self-deprecating manner, and what better opportunity for malice and mirth than having a crack at what I’m sure is one of the dumbest, most shamelessly hedonistic sex-a-thons the world has seen since Charlie Sheen got his knob stuck in the air vent at his local swimming pool.

So I watched Love Island. Three episodes to be precise.

And I think that was enough.

And by ‘enough’ I mean ‘too much’. And by ‘too much’ I mean I think I’m going to take my eyes out and roll them around in broken glass in case I’m ever tempted to watch Love Island ever again.

Though I’d never watched the show before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And lo and behold, shocking precisely no-one, least of all me, the title sequence was a montage of attractive, deeply conceited people casting off their clothes in slow-motion to the kind of music that suggested a sense of grandeur unlikely to be matched by the reality of a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around a pool trying to fuck each other.

First up, the girls.

There was Siannise, a Beauty Consultant from Bristol with the intonations and mannerisms of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She said she wanted someone family orientated and respectable, which begged the question: what the fuck was she doing on Love Island?

Then there was Paige from West Lothian, an ex of Lewis Capaldi’s, who described herself as loud and a drama queen, as if those were in any way positive attributes. I wish people would realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy: “I’m horrible, me. I wet myself on purpose every time I’m on the bus. I strangle turkeys for a laugh. My favourite show is Mrs Brown’s Boys.”

Leanne from London promoted herself as the life and soul of the party, a rather trite and vacuous thing to say, but I could tell that beneath her shallow and hedonistic veneer lurked the soul of a true romantic. “Might as well go for a handsome guy, because ugly, handsome, they’re all assholes,” she told us, “But it burns more when you get cheated on by an ugly guy.” Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said that first? Although Jane Austen probably wouldn’t have gone on to say that she loved builders.

Next there was Shaugna, a Democratic Services Officer who didn’t seem to understand exactly what she did for a living. She was a little more certain in her opinion of plumbers: she liked them. Sexually, one would assume, rather than just admiring their work ethic.

KNOCK KNOCK

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a me, it’s a Mario!”

SLIDES KNICKERS OFF.

I’ve got a little tip for you, Shaugna and Leanne. If you’re asked to list three of the most interesting things about yourself, and one of those things is that you like to fuck tradesmen, you could probably do with taking up a few more hobbies. Even try shagging a few scientists and people who work in the customer service industry to even things out a bit.

Sophie from Essex blathered on about the colour of eyes she wanted her babies to have. Yeah, Sophie, I’m sure the pulsing meatheads about to swagger into the pool area can’t wait to have a long chat about your maternity plans.

‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE GORGEOUS!’ the women all shouted at each other, as I smirked and thought to myself, ‘These women will fucking HATE each other in 3 days time.’ Turns out I was wrong.

It only took a day.

I think ‘Love Island’ does a great disservice to the word ‘Love’. I wish they’d just be honest and just call it FUCK ISLAND, and invite contestants of more average body types to participate. “Ah’m big Sharon fae Paisley, and ah fuckin’ love chips and gettin’ ma hole claimed.”

Next came the guys. There was Nas from London, a builder (yeah, I know, seemed like a dead cert with the ladies, being a tradesman and all, but none of them liked him). He kissed his ‘guns’ and stood with his hands on his hips looking all pouty, before revealing that he was after ‘a good set of eyebrows’. If he’d been on Take Me Out, they would have buzzed him into oblivion, jammed the buttons so hard it triggered an earthquake that swallowed the studio down into the hungry jaws of the earth itself. Still, he seemed like a nice guy, which again begs the question: what the fuck was he doing on Love Island?

Callum the scaffolder from Manchester was a little more on-message with his cry of ‘Get me in there. I want to see what the talent’s like!’ He never said as much in his intro-tape, but it goes without saying that he’s probably got Chlamydia. And such a vicious strain that his cock is now possessed by the virus, glows green and calls itself ‘Evil Claude’.

Ollie was next, a young, posh heir to a fortune and a Lordship who looked like Martin Clunes and sounded like George Osborne doing a Mr Bean impression. He announced that he was a cheater, and lived next door to Charles and Camilla, possibly labouring under the misapprehension that the wow factor of the latter cancelled out the disgrace of the former, when in reality the cheating bit was probably more palatable than his being neighbours to that pair of horse-faced weirdos. Ultimately, no-one really liked Ollie, mainly because he was a surly, brooding, conceited ball-bag. In any case, he was swiftly axed from the show when news broke in the real world about him molesting antelopes or shooting tortoises through the brain or something. I’d still maintain that murdering an animal isn’t as bad as inviting a girl over to your house only for her to glance outside and see Camilla putting the washing out.

Then there was Connor from Bolton, a chiselled but goofy-looking young man who looked like Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black mixed with David Walliams, a look that he topped off with the hair-cut of a monk. He very quickly revealed a whole deck of ‘RED FLAG’ playing cards, delighting the young woman who showed an interest in him by getting drunk and starey-eyed, before aggressively brushing her hand away and claiming that she hated him already. To paraphrase Paddy McGuinness: “Let the island… see the love!” Where’s the love?

Mike the police officer was last to arrive. His ‘aw shucks’ smile and gift of the gab did a lot of heavy lifting to off-set the predatory energy bursting out from his steely, tiger’s gaze.

The pairing system and the ‘getting to know you’ games seem to eschew the current trend for open and honest dialogue between the sexes in favour of a Weinstein-esque, Lack-of-Consent-a-thon, which is of course why the infernal shite gets so many viewers. I guess it isn’t called ‘Respect Everyone’s Boundaries Island’ for a good reason. Who would watch that?

When the guys first arrived, the women had to stand behind some love hearts, and step forward if they wanted to be coupled with the man on display. Poor wee Naz the builder struck out, with not a single lady even flexing their toe in his direction (if I was a contestant on that show, the five women would have poured petrol on the love hearts, set them alight and then retreated behind the safety of the flames).

Here’s the kicker, though. Even though Naz was regarded with shrugs of ambivalence from the girls, he still got to choose one with whom to couple up. “Well, Naz, none of them has given consent, so which one would you like to compel to share a bed with you?” Christ.

A later game involved the presenter reading out a fact about one of the contestants, and then asking a member of the opposite sex to passionately kiss the person to whom they thought it referred. It was all getting a bit too rapey for my liking.

I won’t deny that there was some small part of me – some sad, primal part of me – that started to get into the show, fooling myself that I was embarking on a psychological dissection of the mating rituals of the under-30s. When the twins bounded in with their blonde locks and big boobs, I correctly predicted almost instantly that they’d end up with Mike and Callum. I felt like a Club 18-30 Freud.

But by episode three I’d had enough. We all like a good gossip, men as much as women in my experience (although men pretend they aren’t gossiping), but after a while my brain started to rebel against the steady diet of intellectual nothingness I was feeding it. And, sure, there were some beautiful girls there, but if carnality’s your thing it’s best to either find a real woman, or thump yourself half-blind to porn.

I tend to resist the current trend towards inter-generational conflict. ‘OK Boomer’, Millennials, all those assorted generalisations and stereotypes. And I try hard not to sound too curmudgeonly or out of touch. Times are different. We’re reasonably free from strife. That’s great. Past generations suffered to make this world better and easier for the generations to come, not so they could make us feel guilty for being free or prosperous. But even still, I found myself sitting there shouting things at the screen like: ‘A good war, that’s what’ll sort out these preening fucking layabouts.’ And ‘Try doing your eyebrows in a trench, you oily, tattooed numb-nut!’ Conveniently forgetting the fact that my adolescence was spent playing computer games, drinking to excess, spending money on drugs and inflatable furniture, and sabotaging my romantic and sexual couplings at every opportunity, with not a war or a rationing book in sight. I was once just as feckless, fatuous and reckless as these young whippersnappers, it’s just that significantly fewer people wanted to have sex with me, and now that number is somewhere in the low single-digits. One. Me. I still quite like to have sex with me, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to watch something a bit more worthy and important, to wash the stink of this fleshy tosh off my soul.

[cycles through Netflix for six hours]

[types FUCK ISLAND into Pornhub search box]

Jamie on the Box: The Good Place series finale

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A lot of shows this past year have ended their runs evoking loss, mortality and death. I don’t know if this surge of sombre feeling has seeped into pop culture because the liberal west has moved away from organised religion and towards secularism and needs to plug the spiritual gap somehow, or because a lot of the most recent crop of show-runners are feeling their ages, but, whatever the reason, shows as various as The Deuce, The Affair, Preacher, The Haunting of Hill House, Mr Robot, and Legion have used their final bows to remind us of ours.

It came as no real surprise when The Good Place – RIP – carried on the trend. After all, it’s pretty hard to set a show in the afterlife and avoid evoking loss, mortality and death.

The genuinely surprising thing about the finale of The Good Place was just how hard it hit me in the tear ducts; harder than all of the other shows I mentioned in the first paragraph combined. Sure, The Good Place has made me leak ocular fluid before – most notably when Chidi’s memories of, and love for, Eleanor returned mid-way through the fourth season – but it’s never made me almost drown in the stuff before.

For many hours after the end credits had rolled I was left with an over-whelming sense of life’s fragility and finality. I was drunk on a potent cocktail of love, loss, joy and sadness, trying to blink back rivers of blinding tears and failing miserably. I couldn’t concentrate on reading a book the rest of that night, not one sentence; I couldn’t watch anything else on TV; I struggled to process and convey the sheer range of emotions I was feeling.

It felt like I’d been to the funeral of a beloved grandparent. This was grief. Real, actual grief: terrible; life-affirming; harrowing; beautiful. What the fork was going on?

This is… A comedy, right?

The Good Place – from the mind and fingers of Michael Schur, who co-created both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation – has been one of my favourite comedies of recent years. It’s a perfect balance of farce, heart, slapstick, high-brow and low-brow humour, held together with whip-smart writing, hilariously detailed world-building, continually inventive and subversive twists, and, most importantly of all, a feast of rich and colourful, well-drawn characters who, by the end of the show’s run, feel like family: both each other’s and your’s.

Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani entered what they thought was heaven but was actually hell, teamed up with its architect, the demon Michael, to escape deliverance and chase redemption, uncovered an existential conspiracy borne of incompetence along the way, saved the world, learned how to be their best selves, and finally reached heaven – the titular Good Place – only to realise that it was more hellish than hell itself. It turns out that an eternity of butthole spiders and Richard Marx music isn’t nearly as blood-curdling a proposition as an eternity spent bereft of purpose and in possession of God-like powers.

The show raises as many laughs as it does questions. When you have the time and the power to do everything you want whenever you want, can anything in your life hold meaning? Is a life without struggle worth living? How long can we tolerate existence for existence’s sake?

In its final episode The Good Place eschews the whacky and the supernatural to make a convincing and beautiful case for humanism. Michael’s joy at being made human (his Pinocchio moment, his friends tell him) renews our own appreciation for the brief flash of existence each of us gets to call their own.

As each of the other characters either let go or level up, we’re left feeling a little less afraid of whatever it is that might lie behind that final door in the forest glade – whether we imagine ourselves as the ones walking through it, or the ones left behind to wonder.

The very last scene also suggests that the good we do in life, and beyond, will live on and touch the lives of others. I liked that, even if it seemed that humanity’s fate was to become benevolent space fertiliser.

The Good Place mulled over a great many theories and philosophies over its run, reflecting a shining kaleidoscope of pop culture in the process, but its finale left me most of all with a great and powerful impression of The Wizard of Oz.

Michael was the wizard with the booming voice, who ended up being a lot nicer and more humble than his disguise suggested (and it was such a good disguise that it took Michael a long time to realise he was even wearing one). Thanks to his love and devotion to Janet, Jason found his brain – or at least was able to teach his existing brain the value of patience and focus. Tahani found her heart. Chidi found his courage. And Eleanor found all three.

It was sad. It was beautiful.

It was perfect.

And did I mention it was forking funny?

There’s no place like The Good Place.

Take it sleazy, everyone.

Jamie on the Box: Star Trek Picard

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It’s been an exciting, almost boundless time for TV in general lately, but sci-fi as a genre has fared rather less well, the glittering exceptions being The Orville, The Mandalorian and The Expanse (and perhaps we can extrapolate from that roster of success that it’s simply a good time for sci-fi shows with the word ‘The’ in the title).

Star Trek: Discovery is certainly boldly going, as all good Trek series should, but many of the franchise’s fans have also boldly… just gone. Lost in Space is fun and frothy, but nothing more. Just last week there was yet another flashy but hollow outing for the thirteenth Doctor played by Jodie Whittaker (although last night’s Judoon-flavoured romp appears to have turned a few heads), plus a disappointingly lacklustre debut for Armando Iannucci’s new sci-fi comedy series Avenue 5 (let’s hope tonight’s episode kicks it up a gear).

There’s a lot of hope, then, riding on Picard (CBS All Access, streaming on Amazon Prime),  Sir Patrick Stewart’s first foray into the Star Trek universe since 2002’s disappointing big-screen outing ‘Star Trek Nemesis’. That’s right, baby: Picard’s back. Except he’s retired. And he needs a stunt double to run. And he’s re-programmed his replicator to dispense decaffeinated earl gray. But what did you expect? He’s an octogenarian now. (“Computer? Stool softener. Phillips’ Gel. Hot.”)

The show’s opening sequence takes place aboard the ship of our Star Trek dreams – which is also literally the ship of Picard’s dreams – the Enterprise D. The old bird’s looking as good as she ever did, hooking a hand-brake turn across a space-lane. On-board the dream-ship, the dearly departed Data is back where he belongs, playing poker against Picard.

If not for the etches on Patrick Stewart’s face or the chub on Brent Spiner’s very human jowls we could be watching an episode plucked straight from the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I guess that’s sort of the point. When Data asks Picard why he’s stalling, and Picard answers sadly: ‘I don’t want the game to end,’ he’s acting as a proxy for fans like me who’d rather remain on-board the old ship than wade into the unknown with a new crew and a new focus. But Picard has to wake up, and so too do we. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

We’re in France, actually, at Picard’s vineyard.

Picard now has a dog called ‘Number One’ who likes to jump up on his lap and lick him right in the mouth, which begs the question: why did he name the beast after his former first officer? I guess space must’ve been lonely sometimes.

I’m not sure how Riker will react to discovering that his old boss has named in his honour an animal that gets visibly sexually excited many times a day and presumably tries to hump anything it sees, but he won’t be able to deny that it’s an apt homage. Anyway, that’s probably more than enough words on Riker’s wandering glands.

Picard is having dreams and visions; so too is Dahj, a young woman who finds her Chuck-like killing-powers activated when a bunch of assassins beam into her apartment on date night and murder her boyfriend. Her visions are of Picard, a man she’s never met, so when she sees him giving an interview on whatever they call the telly in the far-future, she goes straight to Chateaux Picard to enlist his help.

‘I’m so confused,’ she tells him, weeping and neurotic, ‘I don’t know who you are. I just killed some men. I know your face. I can do kung-fu. I think I love you.’

‘Come here, you,’ says Picard, ‘And give your uncle Jean a big cuddle.’

OK, I’m paraphrasing a tad. Horrifically, though, it’s a close approximation. Too much of the premiere seemed designed to join the dots of plot, at warp speed and with scant regard for pacing or character. Granted, there was a lot to pack in – everything from the destruction of Romulus to a hot-potato refugee crisis to re-purposed Borg cubes – but more time could’ve been taken to set things up and orient us in this new world. Less jumping around and hashy-bashy dialogue.

Can we talk about the whole Data thing? That’s a rhetorical question; we’re already doing it. See, Dahj is Data’s daughter, which is why Picard and Dahj were so drawn to one another. Artificial life-forms were outlawed, but not before Data’s neurons were used to clone a daughter, because, you know, that’s how robots work. But they couldn’t just clone one, silly, he had to have two daughters, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THESE THINGS WORK. I can almost hear one of the show’s 80,000 producers asking another of the show’s 80,000 producers during pre-production:

‘You know how Star Trek used to stick as closely as possible to actual science, or plausible projections thereof, with very little in the way of ridiculously fantastical shit in service of quasi-mystical character quests?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well how about we get rid of that science shit?’

By the end of the episode Dahj is dead, but long live her sister, Dohj, or whatever the shit she’s called.

Patrick Stewart, of course, was… well, he was Patrick Stewart. When has that man ever turned in a poor performance? You could watch him taking a shit for twenty minutes and it would still be better than 90 per cent of anything you’d ever watched. Picard still possesses charm and wit and authority, but age has softened him around the edges; Stewart takes the veneer of vulnerability and warmth that always existed in Younger Picard and drapes it around Old Man Picard like a cosy tartan blanket.

That old dog can still bark though. When a TV interviewer probes him about Starfleet’s deplorable political stance in the wake of the android-orchestrated shipyard attack that left Starfleet unable – or unwilling – to come through on its promise to rescue refugees from the Romulan supernova (pauses to catch a breath before passing out from terminal exposition), he seethes that Starfleet’s decision to ‘abandon those people we had sworn to save was not just dishonourable, it was downright criminal!’

This is not the Star Trek we remember (see also Discover, Star Trek). Whereas the first clutch of series in the franchise (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT) cleaved closely to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future – despite occasional forays into the grey and dark areas of both the universe and the human heart – Star Trek: Picard firmly establishes itself as a vision of the future that takes as its root a post-colonial, present-day past (I know, I can hear it, too) in which populist demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro rule the world (Hell, out here in the real-world, in a case of life imitating art, Donald Trump has sanctioned the use of a logo for his Space Force that’s pretty much identical to the Starfleet logo).

Simply put: Star Trek is now a dystopia, in which almost all institutions are inherently and irreversibly corrupt. Most of the baddies from the other iterations of Trek are now the goodies, and most of the goodies are now the baddies.

It’s similar in a way to what happened with westerns. Once the genre had been around for a few decades, doing its thing of showing the rough and tough and noble American dream in its infancy, we started to get revisionist westerns, showing a dirtier and doubtless more accurate version of the Wild West: a world that was grimy, brutal, morally bankrupt, and occasionally genocidal.

Picard is revisionist Star Trek. A revision of the future before it’s even happened. A reversal of hope before we’ve even had a chance to feel it.

I’m willing to sit back and see where the show takes us. I love the character of Picard, I’m intrigued by the set-up, and if I was exasperated a few times, then I certainly wasn’t bored at any point. I guess I liked it? I feel a lot of good will towards Star Trek, having been a big fan of TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY as a teenager (much to the dismay of my balls, which would’ve liked to have been emptied into a woman a little more often). I want to love Picard. I just…

Well. Let’s see what’s out there.

Word of warning to you, though, Jean-Luc. This isn’t the 90s anymore, son. No mansplaining. No assuming anyone’s species. And don’t forget to check your human privilege before you go off and do something patronising or unforgivably offensive like save the day all by yourself.

Forget who you were. Remember who you are.

But whatever you do, don’t forget to engage.

The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2019

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2019 was another bumper year for TV. Each and every January I shake my head and think to myself, ‘That year must have been an outlier. The revolution ends here. We’re going to go back to mid-90s dreck again, I can feel it, and I’ll be able to concentrate on movies again, like I did when I was younger.’ But, no. Come every following December I’m totting up my watch-list and thinking to myself, ‘God damn and yee-haw, we’re living in a never-ending, televisual gold rush.’ Here’s my pick for the best show of the year, and the worst show of the year. More lists and effusive (and occasionally furious) analysis to follow over the next week.

The Best TV Show of 2019

Crowning the best show of 2019 was tough. Such a banquet-sized smorgasbord of returning classics and staggering debuts from which to pick, and on which to gorge.

Stranger Things made a stonking return to form in its third season, escalating and amplifying everything that was good about its maiden outing and erasing the missteps of its sophomore year. The Affair and The Deuce both bowed out with strong seasons, capped off with almost immaculate finales. The Expanse had a phenomenal fourth season in its new home at Amazon, a tense, trauma-filled exploration of new worlds and the new political paradigm ushered in by the ring gates.  Barry continued to impress with its slick mix of feeling and farce, comedy and tragedy, and death-dealing dilettantes. Fleabag’s triumphantly funny second – and we suppose final – season was rightly showered with acclaim and awards. Game of Thrones, em… happened. And, of course, there were  of terrific new shows like Watchmen, The Mandalorian, Undone and Russian Doll.

But it was Mr Robot, a show that rarely gets the attention and acclaim it deserves, that impressed from start to finish, turning in a master-class of twists, pathos, danger, tension, excitement, hope and heartache, showing real heart amid the source code. The show – endlessly inventive, potent, powerful and poignant – concluded its very human story of loss, love, tragedy, trauma, the lies we tell ourselves, the people we think we are and the people we want to be with a haunting final twist that served as both satisfying ending, and brand new beginning.

Every character got a chance to shine – from the world’s unluckiest FBI agent, Dom; to the damaged yet heroic Darlene; to the suddenly humanised yet still sinister and shadowy Whiterose – but it was Elliot who burned the hottest and brightest. That Rami Malek has managed to do so much to engender our sympathies and pluck our heart-strings with a character of such shallow affect is a testament to his skill and presence as a performer, the work of his magnificent co-stars (Christian Slater in particular) and the series’ consistently exquisite writing. All three of these winning elements came together with stunning, jaw-dropping effect in the season’s seventh episode, ‘Proxy Authentication Required’, undoubtedly the best episode of the season, and a strong contender for single best TV episode of the year. More on that later.

A sad, fond farewell to Mr Robot, then:  the show I put off watching for so long because I thought it was about actual robots, and thought that sounded pretty lame. I’ll miss you terribly.

The Worst TV Show of 2019

No contest. Fear the Walking Dead’s fifth season is an exercise in sado-masochism, for creators and audience alike, I’m sure. It’s an unrewarding slog, a penance, a drag, an artistic atrocity, an amorphous grey void of suffering and boredom. The show has risen and fallen more times than a rutting beast in Hell’s bordello, but this time it’s down and out, and incontrovertibly dead, it’s ugly, twisted corpse face down on the bed, putrefying in the fetid stink of its own spent juices.

After an inauspicious start, bordering on woeful, Fear the Walking show surprised fans and critics by dropping a bold, bravura, thrilling, lean and mean third season that was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best seasons of its parent show. Season four, which was ostensibly a soft re-boot, didn’t reach the same heights, but it was still very watchable. Its bleached and sombre back-drops, and host of new faces – The Walking Dead’s Morgan among them – allowed the story to spin off in some interesting new directions. With season five they didn’t so much drop the ball as drill a giant hole down to the earth’s core and propel the ball into its molten heart.

On paper, the narrative ingredients of the season look like they’d make for a delicious meal. There’s an plane crash; a nuclear power plant going into meltdown; irradiated zombies; hot-air balloon peril; a race to fix a broken plane; a daring escape from the blast zone; the return of Daniel; the arrival of Dwight from The Walking Dead; gunfights; dwindling resources; a zombie-killing Rabbi; a Wild West town; an evil cowgirl. It sounds more like a season of Z Nation than The Walking Dead, and I mean that as a compliment. When Z Nation went balls out, as it frequently did, it was a frenetic, bat-shit crazy delight.

Unfortunately, whatever Fear the Walking Dead gains in neat lists of disparate things, it lacks in believable character motivations, decent dialogue, adequate pacing, a plot that makes sense, tension and excitement. The whole season is unforgivably dull, empty, and infuriating. The show’s hitherto big hitters – most notably Daniel, Stroud and Morgan – are sullied and neutered by poor writing, and the new love story at the show’s core – between long-estranged lovers John and June – is wrecked by cack-handed, tell-don’t-show corniness.

A special dishonour must go to the tribe of armed, Lost Boys-style forest children that the gang encounter and rescue. Here’s a little tip for show-runners everywhere: if your show makes me cheer the potential horrible death of a group of children, then you’re probably doing something wrong. Either that or I’m a psychopath.

But worst – the VERY worst – of all is the season’s handling of Morgan, a character that’s long been in decline, but now, it seems, terminally so. Morgan used to be one of my favourite characters in the franchise, but his zen shtick – and his stick-shtick – has worn so thin that when he lay bleeding on a stoop at the close of the season, on the brink of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach, with baying zombies advancing upon him, I struggled to give even the faintest scintilla of a shit. I didn’t want a cliff-hanger. I was keen to watch my former favourite cast member being torn to shreds. Just to see if I could feel something about this show again.

F*** you, Morgan, I thought. And f*** you, Fear the Walking Dead. How dare you make me care again, just to snatch it all away from me. I never thought I’d say this, but they might as well bring Madison back. And do you know what? They probably will.

What do you think were the best and worst shows on TV this year? Let me know in the comments so we can all fight about it.  

Everything I Watched and Read in 2019

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At the end of 2018 I had a grand – and grandly anal – plan to document all of the media I absorbed over the coming year: every snatch of radio listened to in the car or in the kitchen; every newspaper edition skimmed or dissected; every scholarly or dastardly article accessed through social media; every movie, book, TV show and TED Talk.

OCD was a major catalyst, as was undoubtedly an almost volcanic geekiness, but I was also deeply interested in discovering whether the information and entertainment I absorbed had any influence over my beliefs and biases, or whether my tastes simply reflected long-ingrained patterns of thought and feeling. It was all set to be a fascinating experiment. There was just one flaw – a pretty significant one, as it turns out.

I simply couldn’t be arsed.

So what follows is a reduced list of only the main modes of media I absorbed, which will be of little to no academic use to anyone, and scarcely much use to me, the author. I suppose it’s useful as a yardstick to measure your own media use, and to work out if my tastes endear me to you, or make you want to smash me in the face with a dead shark. Books, then, and movies, and TV shows and stand-up performances. There will be no extended mention of the magazines and newspapers I read on a regularly basis – Private Eye, Empire, The National – or the websites I frequent – Rolling Stone, Den of Geek, The AV Club – or the radio stations I listen to – BBC Radio 4, The American Family Network (for a laugh). I’ve also left out the books I read to my kids every day, and the episodes of Classic Doctor Who we watch every morning over breakfast, plus the innumerable cartoons and dubious YouTube videos we watch together.

Without any further waffle, then, let’s dive in to 2019’s media round-up (with some best-of lists to follow in due course).

Books

The Sopranos Sessions – Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall The Long Earth – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
The Long War – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter The Long Mars – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
The Shining – Stephen King Doctor Sleep – Stephen King
The Flood – Maggie Gee Lust Killer – Ann Rule
The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole – Allan Ropper & BD Burrell
Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders – Terry Sullivan with Peter T Maiken Great Apes – Will Self
Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic – David Frum Where Men Win Glory – Jon Krakauer
The I-5 Killer – Ann Rule I Saw a Man – Owen Sheers
The Word for World is Forest – Ursula Le Guin The Incredible Adam Spark – Alan Bissett
Munich – Robert Harris The Secret Life of Movies – Simon Brew
TV (The Book) – Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall

Books in progress (I never read one at a time)

The Strange Death of Europe – Douglas Murray Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Art of the Deal – Donald Trump Storm of Steel – Ernst Junger
Captive State – George Monbiot On Palestine – Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe

Graphic Novels

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension Vol 1 Trees, Volume 1: In Shadow
Trees, Volume 2: Two Forests Zenith: Phase One
Zenith: Phase Two Zenith: Phase Three
Starve Vol 1 – Brian Wood Starve Vol 2 – Brian Wood
MARVEL: What If – With Great Power… Old Man Logan – Millar, Bendis & Lemire
Back to the Future: Untold Tales & Alternate Timelines Palestine – Joe Sacco
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

TV shows

New in 2019

The Walking Dead S9 Part 2 American Gods S2
True Detective S3 The Orville S2
Star Trek Discovery S2 The Good Place S3
Russian Doll S1 After Life S1
You’re the Worst S5 This Time With Alan Partridge S1
Santa Clarita Diet S3 The Tick S2
Gotham S5 Future Man S2
Modern Family S10 Bertie and Tuca S1
The Simpsons S30 Brooklyn Nine Nine S6
Game of Thrones S8 Barry S2
Fleabag S2 Designated Survivor S3
Stranger Things S3 Archer S10
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD S6 Orange is the New Black S7
Mindhunter S2 Krypton S2
GLOW S3 Undone S1
Legion S3 Fear the Walking Dead S5
Preacher S4 Bob’s Burgers S9
Surviving R Kelly S1 The Deuce S3
The Affair S5 Big Mouth S3
American Horror Story S9 Last Week Tonight S6
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S14 The Walking Dead S10 Part 1
Real Time with Bill Maher S17 The End of the Fucking World S2
South Park S23 Mr Robot S4
The Mandalorian S1 Watchmen S1

Older shows

Outlander S3 The Haunting of Hill House S1
Vikings S5 American Gods S1
American Horror Story S8 Fleabag S1
The Deuce S2 The Expanse S3
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S2 The End of the Fucking World S1
GLOW S2 The Affair S4
I Am a Killer S1 Doctor Who S11
The Dreamstone S1 Derry Girls S1
The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S1

TV Shows in progress (season incomplete)

Outlander S4E11 Documentary Now S3E5
Modern Family S11E8 The Conners S2E9
The Simpsons S31E10 Bojack Horseman S6E8
Bob’s Burgers S10E10 Rick and Morty S4E5
Vikings S6E4 Final Space S1E3
The Good Place S4E9 Schitt’s Creek S1E4
The Man in the High Castle S4E4

Stand-up

Dave Chapelle – Sticks & Stones (2019) Norm MacDonald – Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (2017)
Bill Burr – Paper Tiger (2019) Hannah Gadsby – Nanette (2018)
Chris Rock – Tamborine (2018)

Movies

First time

Bird Box (2018) What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Get Out (2017) The Public Enemy (1931)
A Dog’s Way Home (2019) Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992)
A Quiet Place (2018) Blockers (2018)
Captain Marvel (2019) How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018) Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019) Tangerine (2015)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009) The Strangers (2008)
Behind the Curve (2018) Toy Story 4 (2019)
North by Northwest (1959) Murder Mystery (2019)
Bumblebee (2018) The Queen’s Corgi (2019)
Shazam (2019) Trainspotting T2 (2017)
Creep (2014) Fighting With My Family (2019)
John Wick (2014) Child’s Play (2019)
Pacific Rim (2013) Spiderman: Far From Home (2019)
Philophobia (or the Fear of Falling in Love) (2019) Wild Rose (2019)
Joker (2019) Us (2019)
John Wick 2 (2017) Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
The Irishman (2019) You Were Never Really Here (2017)
The Drop (2014) Justice League (2017)
Paddington 2 (2017) John Wick 3 Parabellum (2019)

Already Watched, Watched Again

Hellboy (2004) Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008)
Toy Story 3 (2010) Trainspotting (1996)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002) Mrs Doubtfire (1993)
Kindergarten Cop (1992) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

See you back here next year, douchebags.

What not to watch with kids: a guide

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Half the joy of raising children is in reconnecting with your own childhood. Not for its own sake – which would be regressive, selfish and honestly a bit weird; a few steps removed from strapping on a nappy and supping from a giant milk-bottle as a prostitute becalms you – but in order to sieve out the things that gave you the most joy; your best and happiest memories, so you can pass them down the generational chain: places you went, games you played, movies you watched, books you read.

If you’re as hellishly impatient as I am you’ll want to hit your kids in the hippocampus with a megaton of memories all at once – every magical experience or mystical moment you ever experienced from the age of zero to fifteen – but you can’t. You really can’t. Nor should you. Not only because your kids are entitled to a childhood as free as can be from the benevolent dictatorship of your nostalgia, but also because four really isn’t a great age to be watching the Evil Dead movies.

Let’s keep things focused on classics and pop culture (and classics of pop culture).

What criteria should be used to judge how age-appropriate a cherished movie or TV show is for your little cherubs? After all, each kid has different triggers, thresholds and tolerances. Some kids might quiver at the mere mention of a monster; others might welcome a harrowing disembowelling scene with little more than a yawn (I swear Peppa Pig just keeps getting edgier).

Obviously, there are some lines that should never be crossed: for instance, it’s probably best to leave your extensive VHS collection of porn up the loft where it belongs. Arrange to have it donated posthumously to the ‘Museum of Vintage Depravity’ or something. But keep it away.

And it’s probably best to avoid movies that feature rape, torture, murder, abuse and realistically rendered sex scenes, unless you’re purposely trying to play chicken with social services (or preparing your children for life in Airdrie).

I think the trick is to temper your own selfish desire to fill your kids’ heads with the pop culture that shaped you, with the very real possibility that, seen too soon, some of that shit could have them reaching for the citalopram, or sharpening a set of steak knives in anticipation of a long career carving up the corpses of hitch-hikers.

I can understand the urgency, though. The longer you wait to introduce them to those dorky B-movies or old sci-fi and action series you enjoyed as a nipper, with sets as ropey as the dialogue, the more you risk your kid collapsing in fits of laughter at the sight of a polystyrene man having a fight with a rubber dinosaur, instead of cowering behind the sofa like they’re supposed to. The farther your kids drift from your parental tether, the more they’re exposed to the shiny and the new, and the less they need you and your hoary old ideas. One day you, and everything you represent, will be consigned to the bottomless chasm of uncoolness inside your kids’ heads. Best to watch episodes of old Doctor Who and The A-Team while you still can, as quickly as you can.

Obsolescence isn’t the only problem. Sometimes it’s tone. I’ve introduced my little guys to fondly-remembered, family-friendly classics from the 1980s only to find myself lost in a whirlwind of misogyny, violence, swearing, gun-play and smoking. I’m not a fan of the revisionist zeal that’s sweeping through our society at present, ‘cancelling’ those beloved old shows and movies that don’t conform to the strict dictates of our ‘enlightened’ new age, but, equally, I’m not a huge fan of having to contextualise casual domestic violence for a four-year-old child mid-way through a kids’ film. Thanks, Short Circuit.

Early on in Short Circuit a female character’s abusive ex-partner throws her down a hill and threatens to kill her dog, after which she just gets up, gives a goofy little smile and gets on with her day. It’s never mentioned again. Life lessons, huh?

There’s a tremendous amount of gun-play in Harry and the Hendersons, but that’s okay, because the movie smuggles a pretty hefty anti-hunting message across the finish line. A little harder to deal with Ray Stantz and Peter Venkman constantly smoking in Ghostbusters, though, and I don’t mean their over-heating proton packs.

‘But, Daddy, I thought you said that smoking was dirty and bad, but the Ghostbusters are goodies, aren’t they, so why are they smoking?’

‘…THE GHOSTS ARE FORCING THEM TO DO IT!’

I watched the Hellboy movies with Jack (5 now, 4 then), the Ron Perlman ones. Not exactly typical family-friendly fare, sure, but I figured that since ‘crap’ was the strongest swear word I could recall featuring, and the violence was mostly cartoonish, it would be okay. Regrettably, there was significantly more stabbing than I’d remembered. In fact, Hellboy’s surrogate father is stabbed to death by a hideous clockwork Nazi assassin. That doesn’t happen in The Fox and the Hound.

Despite the occasional flashes of inappropriateness, Hellboy was a good gamble. Jack emerged from the two movies with a magnified sense of wonder. He admired the tough-talking demon’s nobility, fragility, honour, and willingness to sacrifice his needs, even himself, for love and friendship. We talked about the motivations of the characters, and touched upon themes of sadness, loss, and when it’s acceptable to use physical force to defend yourself or others.

In any case, there’s a clear difference between movies like Hellboy, and movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hamburger Hill, the latter types I’d never dream of showing him until he’s at least eight… I’m joking, you turds (Ten). Common sense, and an honest and sensitive appraisal of your kids’ mental acuity and emotional maturity should serve as your guide. Within limits, of course. I refer you back to the porn in the loft, and the movies containing hard-core sex and violence. Even if your kid’s sitting there in a reclining chair at the age of seven smoking cigarillos and quaffing brandy, discussing interest rates for first-time buyers, you should still resist the temptation to show them the French movie ‘Irreversible.’

Sex vs Violence

For some reason, violence is a lot more palatable to parental sensibilities than sex. Well, to this parent anyway. Perhaps it’s simply a lot less awkward to explain why someone might feel moved to punch another person in the face versus why that woman keeps shouting ‘Jesus oh Jesus’ as the man behind her pulls an angry, sweaty grin and shouts ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’

Both Jack and Christopher loved Kindergarten Cop, but the movie had the rather unfortunate – and undeniably hilarious – side-effect of introducing Jack to the line, uttered by one of the kids in the movie: ‘My daddy spends all day looking at vaginas’ which he still occasionally quotes (though I counsel him never to repeat it outside the home). I’m readying a telegram of thanks to big Arnie S if Jack grows up to be a rich and successful gynaecologist.

My kids have also watched all three Austin Powers’ movies. Well, that’s not strictly true. They’ve watched all three Austin Powers’ movies minus the bits that feature coded and explicit sexual references, which I either fast-forwarded or babbled loudly over. ‘Daddy, what does horny mean?’ isn’t a question I’m ready to tackle, even though I already know the answer will be ‘ask your mother’.

Fat Bastard was quite a problematic character. I had to counsel Jack only to use the word ‘bastard’ in the context of this specific character’s name, and never to use that word outwith, or indeed inside, the home. Just don’t say ‘Fat Bastard’ is a pretty great rule, especially since he might one day use it on me. Still, both kids can do a mean impression of the fat bastard, and there aren’t many things funnier in this world than a 2-year-old angrily shouting, ‘I’M GOING TO EAT YER BAY-BEH!’ Ditto Dr Evil, whose ‘zip-it- and ‘shhhhhh’ shenanigans are always quoted whenever we want each other to shut up.

Both my kids have watched Drop Dead Fred, and both of them love it, especially our two-year-old, who’s probably watched Rik Mayall strut and sneer his way through Phoebe Cates’ second childhood/first breakdown about thirty times and counting. I don’t know how many times he’s pretend-wiped bogies down my cheek and called me ‘Snotface’, but I do know it’ll be a long, long time before I explain to them why the ‘Cobwebs’ line is funny.

Throw the book at them

If sex is worse than violence in terms of its visceral impact upon a child’s brain, then I’ve found that books are worse than movies. Words have more power than pictures, moving or otherwise, because words can burrow into your brain and conjure their own, darker and unbound, pictures. Books have a greater power to terrify and disturb than even the scariest and most shocking of movies – for those blessed with powerful imaginations, in any case.

My primary four teacher recognised that within my pigeon breast fluttered the soaring heart of a story-teller, so loaned me a book on Greek myths and legends to help my imagination take flight. It was a great honour, and I remember feeling very special indeed. The book definitely boosted my imagination, mainly because I had to completely invent and imagine every aspect of the Greek myths and legends from looking at the picture on the front cover. I never read the fucker, you see. The book itself has now passed into legend; I was supposed to return it, or pass it on to another clued-up kid, but it went missing. Maybe a three-headed dog ate it, along with my homework.

As parents, my wife and I read to our kids every day. They’ve got enough books between them to open their own library, but we still manage to come home from the actual library laden with teetering towers of books and comics. The more, the better, I’ve always thought, when it comes to books. You can overdose on a lot of things, but not words. Books aren’t just stories: they’re hives of information on how language works; how the world works; how people think and talk and behave; how different people see the world; the multiplicity of creatures, places and cultures on the planet past and present (and future, if it’s sci-fi). They teach us the benefits of pushing the boundaries of both the permissible and the possible.

Books expose. Books challenge. Books enrich and enliven. If you want to see the dangers of a world without books or, worse, a world with only one, then look at any society ruled by the iron-fisted acolytes of any of the world’s monotheistic religions (perhaps one in particular). Books are freedom, which is why they’re the first thing to burn when fascist, theocratic or totalitarian rulers seize control of a people or nation.

I saw a book on Greek Myths and Legends in the library a few weeks ago (toned down for children, of course). Let’s right those past wrongs, I thought. Let’s take home a book on this worthy subject and actually read it this time….

The next day I had to return it to the library. I’d only read ten or so of its pages to the kids. The casual violence, matter-of-fact savagery and brutal decapitation of the Minotaur story was more than their sensitive little souls could handle. And mine, for that matter.

I think we’ll just stick to Austin Powers and Hellboy for now.

The Use of Silence in TV Shows

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Silence isn’t just an absence of noise. It’s a tangible thing: heavy; sentient; alive. It can show us beauty in a smog-shrouded city-scape or death in the red sky of a savannah sunset. Through it we can commune with the majesty of God, or gaze into the eternal nothingness of His great echoing absence. It’s everything and nothing: a swallowing void into which we pour our deepest fears and the inexhaustible darkness of our collective imaginations.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that silence has traditionally found its greatest expression on the big screen. The cinema, with its pews arranged to face a window that looks out upon infinity, has always felt sacred and limitless: a place of wonder and worship; catharsis and contemplation; desire and dread: a holy cathedral to all that makes us ‘us’.

Cinema’s early audiences screamed as trains careened towards them from the other side of the screen; watched in a mixture of horror and wonder as workers toiled silently and hopelessly in the pits and caverns beneath the mighty husk of the metropolis; and giggled with glee as Keaton and Chaplin made an art-form of teetering precariously on the ledges of terrifyingly tall buildings.

Even when sound entered the medium, silence continued to steal all of the best scenes. Think of the absolutely staggering sequences that bookend 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the poignant and funny near-wordlessness that dominates the first twenty minutes of Wall-E, or the long, lingering shot on Jack Nicholson’s face as he sits by the asylum’s open window near the heart-wrenching climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

While cinema has always been the perfect conduit and capsule to conduct and contain the horror, majesty and beauty of silence, the TV was – in its early years at least – too small to hold it. TV was merely the noisy little contraption that chirped and chattered away endlessly in the corners of our living rooms. It sat there, yakking, chanting, warding off silence and its concomitant notions of death and infinity like a priest exorcising demons. It didn’t want to push the boundaries of the possible, or open our minds to infinity: it just wanted to distract us from the loneliness that marked our existence – and occasionally sell us cigarettes and washing powder.

It’s only relatively recently that advancements in technology, distribution and access have allowed TV to raise its ambitions and muscle in on the awe-game. While it’s true that TV can never compete with the sheer size and raw, herculean power of cinema, it’s also true that it doesn’t need to: TV incontestably plays the better long game. It can go further and deeper into the characters and worlds it creates, reaching into our souls and the darkest recesses of our minds and imaginations for weeks, months, even years at a time.

Our couches, arranged around the intimate half-dark of our living rooms, are our new sites of worship. The roles have been reversed: cinema is now the medium that seeks to sell us things in as noisy a fashion as possible – circus-style spectacles, franchise events, merchandising – while TV has become the portal through which we’re granted access to the whole beautiful ugliness of our humanity: to truth; to terror.

To silence.

A hush hits the box

Silence has a profound effect upon us precisely because it’s such a rare commodity in the blaring cacophony our modern lives have become. Human hubbub is ubiquitous, unbroken, and as addictive as it is wearying. Our homes thrum, hum and creak; our cities are non-stop symphonies of honks and thumps and clangs, and even the fabled semi-silence of the countryside is a myth belied by the daily background chitter of chirps, hisses, whines and trills: a city of hills and trees.

These days we actively seek out silence by going on retreats, but in our deep, primal past, silence was something to be retreated from; an unwelcome curse; a potentially fatal gap in our knowledge of the world and the moment. We scrutinised it for the faintest sounds of footfall, for the barest rustle or creak, never able to relax, perpetually wondering if it was our fate to have dinner, or become it. That’s why silence, when it comes, hits us like a hypnotist’s finger-click, snapping our senses to attention.

When writers and show-runners tap into this power it can yield striking results. Silence, when used sparingly and with purpose, can make a sequence or a whole episode stand out from the rest of the canon. It can highlight or strengthen a message; lend profundity to the smallest of gestures; or magnify a tone or mood, as the following examples show us:

Better Call Saul (and Breaking Bad before it) routinely lets its rich, luscious, uniquely-styled visuals say what needs to be said against a canvas of silence, in punchy and powerful sequences that are cinematic in both their scope and execution. The Americans, too, knows when to stop talking and let the music tell the story instead, most poignantly in its emotionally resonant series’ finale, ‘START’.

Patrick McGoohan’s wilfully baffling series The Prisoner used silence to amplify the strangeness of the village and highlight the hopelessness of Number Six’s predicament in its weirder-than-usual, highly atmospheric episode ‘Many Happy Returns’.

The Wire once pared down its dialogue to the point of near-silence to give us a memorably funny sequence featuring McNulty and Bunk solving a crime with only heavy, knowing looks and various whispered permutations of the word ‘fuck’.

No matter the reason it’s used, silence always has something to tell us.

The Fifth Dimension

While TV’s early years may have lacked a certain artistry there were still plenty of shows that pushed the medium to its limits, and weren’t afraid to use silence as a creative tool. Many decades before the X-Files was even a government-sanctioned twinkle injected into Chris Carter’s eye against his will, The Twilight Zone used silence both to disturb and distract.

In its second season episode ‘The Invaders’ a lone woman in an old wooden shack-house in the middle of nowhere receives an unearthly visitor of unexpected dimensions: namely, a flying saucer. It’s so tiny it’s able to land undetected on her roof.

The only sounds that can be heard for the bulk of the episode are the woman’s screams and shrieks as she’s hunted, prodded, shot and burned by the proportionately tiny invaders, and the zaps, bangs and crackles of their tiny weapons as they do so. The woman’s very pure fear – and by extension ours – is amplified by the silence, which drifts through the house like a gas, slowly suffocating our senses and cutting off our usual reserves of comprehension and comfort. Our own fear centre takes centre-stage as narrator of the piece, imagining the very worst of fates within that oppressive cloud of quietness.

The silence occupies our adrenal glands just long enough for the rug to be pulled out from under us in the closing moments of the episode, turning the tables on we the human audience and the tiny invaders both, who are revealed – in a sublime twist – to be one and the same.

Last year, The X Files – a show that owes an unimaginable debt to trailblazers like The Twilight Zone – also dedicated an entire episode to (near total) silence. The snappily-titled eleventh-season offering ‘Rm9sbG93ZXJz’ used silence to inject novelty into the show’s decades-old format, and to magnify the horror of one of the foremost terrors of our age: the rise of the machine.

Mulder and Scully spend most of the episode’s run-time fleeing from a succession of remorseless automata through a patchwork landscape of re-appropriated sci-fi tropes, with barely a word spoken between them until the final scene. Throughout their running of the gauntlet we meet a vengeful electronic waiter, an over-zealous computerised taxi-cab, AI drones that swarm like angry wasps, and a HAL-like house with murder on its mind. Most of the words spoken in the episode are issued by machines and appliances, all eerie facsimiles of the human voice.

Their voice – which is really our voice – has been foisted upon them to unambiguously establish their status as the new slave class. But who’s really calling the shots here? It’s a smart, stand-out episode that not only works as a cautionary parable about our relationship with technology, but also as a commentary on the mistreatment of human workers in the service industry. We mistreat them to our detriment and at our peril.

However, the real horror in Rm9sbG93ZXJz doesn’t come from the machines and their ever-evolving sentience, but from our own species’ tacit decision to abnegate our existence to them. The silence is apt because it echoes and reflects our own silence in the face of the gadgets and gizmos that have rendered us mute. For proof of this abnegation look no further than the street outside your home, or around the room at your nearest and dearest. Or even down at your own hands.

If machines one day have a louder voice than their human creators, it will only be because humanity made the choice to surrender its voice to them in the first place.

Muted Mirth

Silence needn’t always have ‘something’ to say, or at least something profound to say. Sometimes it can be used simply to make us laugh. In the Frasier episode ‘Three Valentines’ the show’s ever-clever dialogue takes a back-seat to a one-man, one-act bout of classic slapstick. Niles’ efforts to have the perfect Valentine’s Night are wrecked by mounting misfortunes that rise to a crescendo of chaos and culminate in a messy and mirthsome moment of tragedy. It’s a sequence that stands out and lodges in the memory, and that’s no mean feat considering that the body of work it stands out from comprises eleven seasons of one of the greatest and funniest sitcoms of the last fifty years.

Depending upon who you ask, you might get different answers to the question: ‘Why should silence make things funny, or funnier?’ Niles Crane himself might advance a psycho-philosophical theory, explaining that silence builds tension, and laughter vents it, so if someone’s anguish and misfortune is played out against a back-drop of silence it will always provoke a larger laugh response, provided the audience doesn’t become too accustomed to, and thus too comfortable with, the silence.

Bojack Horseman, on the other hand, might tell you that the only silence he’s interested in is silence from people asking dumb questions, and where’s the nearest bottle of vodka?

Bojack Horseman leaned into its whip-smart visual humour harder than ever in its refreshing, razor-sharp and almost entirely dialogue-free third season episode ‘Fish Out of Water’. It’s visually striking, unique, laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly rewarding, with gags planted everywhere you look (Mr Peanut Butter on an underwater bill-board: “Seahorse Milk: Keeps your seahorse baby from crying. Take it from me, a childless dog”).

While silence is of course used to convey Bojack’s sense of himself as a perennial outsider, it also serves to bolster the episode’s punchline. And what a bloody punchline.

The final stinger of Inside No 9’s first season episode ‘A Quite Night In’ fell somewhere in tone between the Twilight Zone’s and Bojack’s, but with an added barb of cruelty. Shearsmith and Pemberton, no strangers to the macabre and the hellish, confidently demonstrated with this episode that words aren’t necessary in order to craft something bleak, brutal, brilliantly observed, and – most crucially of all – incredibly funny.

You’ll definitely laugh at this episode: if only to break the unbearable tension of the silence.

The Sopranos and The Shield have nothing more to say

In life most of us abhor silence. We equate it with discomfort and awkwardness. We consider it dead air; a form of social suicide. I guess that’s why when some people come to re-imagine the world on television they leave it out.

Soap operas create universes where words pepper the air like automatic gun-fire. Some prestige dramas, especially those penned by Aaron Sorkin, advance the lie that our lives are an ever-spinning conversational whirlwind of whooshing dialogue and precision banter.

But real life is stitched through with – and often dominated by – silence, as anyone who’s ever been married will tell you. It’s normal, natural, perhaps even essential. David Chase knew this, and he let that truth bleed into the body of The Sopranos.

Chase described each episode of his show as a mini-movie, and that’s something that shines through in every aspect of the series’ production and presentation, from the award-winning writing to the exquisite cinematography to the pitch-perfect acting and directing.

Before its arrival in 1999, few drama series had been as cinematic in their scope or style. The Sopranos wasn’t burdened with antsy advertisers or interfering executives, and Chase was thus left alone to explore the full, gritty gamut of darkness, violence and silence in the hearts of both America and man.

Chase and his team would often linger on Tony’s hangdog expression, or gaze into, and sometimes through, his haunted eyes. Silence made Tony feel more real. One episode ended with Tony and his wife, Carmella, sitting across from each other at their breakfast table, suffering in the silence of the no-man’s land their marriage had become. And, lest we forget, the series itself was capped off with perhaps the most controversial stretch of silence that’s ever been committed to screen.

Shawn Ryan elected to end his great-and-gritty (and criminally under-appreciated) cop show The Shield on an ambiguous – but rather more conventional – note of silence, using it as a way to torture and imprison his anti-anti-hero (sic) Vic Mackey. While The Sopranos’ final scene is a masterclass in tension-building, and its climactic snap of silence a testament to David Chase’s brilliance, cunning and creative daring, it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Shield’s final scene in general, and its use of silence in particular, serves as a more fitting and affecting coda for its main character.

When you think of Vic Mackey, silent is perhaps the last adjective to spring to mind. Garrulous, manipulative, brash, swaggering, vengeful, cunning, bold, maybe. But not silent. Never silent. Much more than a gun, Mackey’s mouth was always his first line of attack – and defence, too; his mouth serving as both his baton and his shield.

Having recounted all of his many sins and criminal transgressions to Laurie Holden’s ICE agent in a bid to secure immunity from prosecution in the series’ penultimate episode, Vic had no justifications left to make, no lies left to spin. He had nothing left to say. More than that, though, he had no-one left to say any of it to. The members of his former strike team were either dead or in jail. His wife and children had escaped into witness protection – to be protected from him, no less – never to be seen again. He had turned in his badge. His former colleagues had turned their backs on him. Vic’s silence – both his own and that which surrounded him – was a manifestation of his isolation from everything he’d ever professed to love. It embodied and reflected his emptiness, his powerlessness.

You can see this in the final confrontation between Vic and Claudette. Vic sits across from Claudette in an interrogation room. She spreads photographs of Shane (former friend, accomplice and strike-team member) and his family on the desk in-front of them both. They’re dead. A murder suicide. Vic played his part in causing it, as Shane’s suicide note makes clear. Instead of using his gift of the gab to deflect blame and guilt, Vic sits, his grief, anger and loss rendering him mute. Finally, he explodes in anger.

As part of the condition of his immunity Vic has to take on a new job helping the government deal with organised drug crime. He doesn’t have a gun or a badge. He has a desk, where he’ll sit for years typing reports. No action, no duty, no badge, no power. Nothing.

For most of The Shield’s long final scene, Vic Mackey is alone in his new office. He’s completely silent. We don’t need to hear him talk. We can see it all in his face. He’s in prison. He’s in hell. He’s been personally and professionally castrated; reduced to human rubble. He’s become the very thing he’s always feared and hated: a faceless bureaucrat.

A siren wails outside his window. He opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a gun and heads for the door. You know he’s smiling.

There you are, Vic Mackey. There you are.

Sometimes silence can say things all the more loudly for not actually saying them at all.

Hear, hear.

Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

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TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affair’s (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

Jamie on the Box – Fear the Walking Dead, Stranger Things

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TV Review: Stranger Things; Fear the Walking Dead

Eleven out of ten for the Mind-Flayer, but Morgan’s crew must try harder

Stranger Things’ first season slammed down into the cultural consciousness like a nostalgia bomb dropped by Steven Spielberg. It was quirky, kooky, spooky, funny, tense, scary, effective and electric, one of the strongest shows of 2017. Netflix had a hit on its hands: a water-cooler show that alternately warmed the heart and made it beat like a haunted timpani drum.

Season two proved to be that ‘difficult second album’ of cliché. This time around, instead of slamming down, the show slithered back into the zeitgeist like a Demogorgon’s dying tentacle, and, a few thrilling set-pieces and emotional moments notwithstanding, barely registered a tickle upon the amygdalas and funny bones of its fans.

It was a pleasure to discover, then, that season three is everything the first season was and more, not only catching lightning in a bottle, but bottling that lightning, transferring it into an industrial-sized cylinder and using it as a weapon to zap anyone who ever doubted its pedigree. Season three re-frames season two as a stutter-step on the road to greatness. Its pair-offs and team-ups make for rich and rewarding story-telling. We get to explore new relationships with new characters, and see fresh spins on existing dynamics. Each set of characters holds a different piece of the narrative puzzle, and their season-long journeys towards the truth and each other are perfectly paced, building to a thrilling climax and a fitting, melancholic coda.

Along the way the show generates dizzying levels of dread, mystery, levity, and tension, in just the right amounts, and at exactly the right times, knowing just when to make you laugh, gasp, wince, quiver, cower or cry. One minute it’s a buddy comedy; the next it’s a sci-fi body horror. One minute it’s a cold-war thriller; the next it’s a 1980s family-friendly fantasy flick. Throughout every second it’s a genuinely affecting, genre-vaulting, trope-tastic summer treat.

The creature effects are terrifying and disgusting in equal measure. Lucas’s mouthy little sister and Hopper’s nutty friend, Murray, generating great, gut-busting laughs in most scenes they’re in – as well as stealing them. The endless 80s pop-culture references are a joy to discover, decode and decipher. Watching the season feels like eating a nutritious three-course meal that just happens to taste like your favourite chocolate.

Everyone gets a chance to shine. Joyce gets to ditch her worried mum act and become a warrior mum; Steve gets to be the hero and get the girl (not in the sense of shallowly seducing and discarding her, which he couldn’t do in this case even if he wanted to, but of ‘getting’ her – really getting her); El gets to explore the powerlessness and heartache of being a regular teenager; the gang gets to prove they can fend for themselves (to a point) without El’s super-powers; Nancy gets to put one in the eye of the patriarchy; and new character Alexi gets to break our bloody hearts.

There’s a part of me that wants Stranger Things to quit while its ahead, but the greater part of me hopes that it becomes a never-ending story.

From the Upside Down to the zombie apocalypse, where stranger things give way to stranger danger, in season five of Fear the Walking Dead.

I’ve been on something of a critical and emotional roller-coaster with this show. Prior to the third season premiere I wrote an excoriating piece itemising everything that was hoary, dreary and dreadful about it (which you can read HERE). I then had to do a full about-turn when the third season defied expectations by being not just good, but occasionally great, producing along the way one of The Walking Dead franchise’s very best episodes, the Daniel-centric outing ‘100‘. My sheepishness and surprise moved me to write a piece for Den of Geek entitled, ‘Is FTWD now better than the main show?’ (which you can read HERE). I genuinely believed that it was.

Season four was a bold and interesting move for the show, bringing Morgan (Lenny James) across from the mother-ship, bleaching the landscape blue and grey, and adding a handful of compelling new characters to the mix. Yes, the villains in the first half of the season were nonsensically lame, and the show still sometimes veered in eyebrow-raising directions, but over-all it was solid, sombre, grounded and well-executed. Nick’s death hurt. Madison’s death made me feel sad – and I fucking hated Madison. Well played, FTWD. Well played.

While Morgan’s quest to be the nicest man in the apocalypse could be a little grating at times, there was no question that Lenny James was leading-man material. Season four also produced another best-of-the-franchise, this time with its fifth episode, Laura, a quiet, touching character study that chronicled the bitter-sweet backstory of noble cowboy John Dorie and his dashing (as in ‘off’) soul-mate, Naomi.

Unfortunately, season five seems like a return to the bad old days. It’s a messy splodge of a story always teetering on the brink of implausibility, crammed with so many potentially interesting scenarios and perils that it’s almost a crime for it to be as boring and maddeningly frustrating as it is. All the plummeting planes, rumbling nuclear power-stations, irradiated zombies, mysteries, comebacks and betrayals in the world can’t balance the scales when it comes to bad dialogue and sloppy story-telling. And those kids… man, those kids are irritating as shit.

The realisation of FTWD’s massive drop in quality hit me in increments. I wasn’t aware of just how much I disliked this season until my brain’s niggling negativity centre reached saturation point about five or six episodes in, and flooded my body with a sense of incredulity and disbelief. I wondered if I was watching some awful, zombified hybrid of Lord of the Flies and Under the Dome commissioned by the CW channel. The threats seemed confusing and inconsequential. I couldn’t really understand why their very survival depended upon a plane – why there was no other way for them to escape the irradiated landscape – beyond the fact that the writers must have thought, ‘This will be neat.’ My wife said the season reminded her of the half-arsed essays she used to write during her short-lived university days, where she would select a handful of random quotes from the source material on the basis that they sounded cool, and then write two-thousand rambling, incoherent, lacklustre words of filler around them.

Back in Fear the Walking Dead’s middling days, its biggest flaw was repeatedly to set up interesting ideas and premises, and then burn through them in an episode or two. Season five manages to go one worse by hinting at interesting ideas and premises, and then never delivering on them at all. While there have been some undeniably fun, surprising and engaging moments here and there, most notably the tongue-in-cheek show-down in the Wild West town, Althea’s episode-long encounter with one of the mysterious helicopter people, and the visual spectacle of the makeshift runway fringed with Christmas lights, disappointment and frustration have been the over-arching constants.

Episode eight showed definite signs of improvement, and there’s more skullduggery and intrigue ahead. I hope the show finds a new lease of life again. I’d hate to see it rot.

PS: Kill those kids.

PPS: Hopper isn’t dead.

Jamie on the Box – Game of Thrones

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My pictorial review of Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 3

‘The Battle of Winterfell’

Jamie on the Box – Barry, Game of Thrones

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, Barry

Westeros gears up for death, while Barry tries to stall it

HBO used to dominate the prestige TV market, and it very much knew it, even going so far as to rub the networks faces in it with their slogan, ‘It’s not TV: it’s HBO’.

HBO was entitled to crow. After all, it gave the world Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, and many more ground-breaking smash hits besides.

Unhampered by network focus groups or the vested interests of advertisers, HBO could afford to take greater risks with its output. Once show-runners, writers and producers had been freed from the burden of having to please most of the people most of the time, or of having to play to the lowest (or most conservative) common denominator, creativity became king.

The televisual landscape is different since HBO’s heyday, seismically so. Network television has upped its game, and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are taking the sorts of bold risks that used to be HBO’s exclusive calling card. It’s a testament to HBO’s enduring creative clout that even among this dizzying proliferation of content two of the best shows currently on TV – Game of Thrones and Barry – come from the HBO stable.

As Game of Thrones enters its endgame, it’s gifted us the most hotly anticipated team-up this side of Infinity War. Every hero, villain, vagabond, brother, bastard, king, queen, drinker, thinker, miscreant, meanderer and murderer that ever lifted a banner or a broadsword is assembled in Winterfell for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which basically serves as an hour-long breather (and an opportunity for us to hold our breaths) before a wave of wights and walkers descends from the north to reduce all of Westeros’s problems to one: survival.

An episode of Game of Thrones never feels as long as its run-time. Whether it lasts 48, 58 or 90 minutes, the narrative always twists and clicks around as fast as a man having his neck broken by the Mountain. In the beginning I attributed the greater share of that feat of time-dilation to the show’s vast and sprawling geography – the action flitting from desert to forest to castle to cave over distances of thousands of miles, essentially telling six or more loosely interlocking or wholly separate stories within each episode; keeping the pace brisk to distract us from any mounting sense of boredom – but it quickly became clear that the thing keeping us hooked was purely and simply the sheer, breath-taking quality of every element of the production.

There’s no flitting between locations in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole hour (an hour for us, a day for the characters) unfolds in and around Winterfell, where the characters meet, talk, drink, lament, commiserate, drink, and drink some more. There are no battles or blood-shed, but the episode holds us utterly spellbound as it weaves together and pays off dozens of plot-lines, reunions and partnerships, sometimes calling back to feuds and fuck-ups way back in the first season.

There’s not a word or gesture out of place. Everything counts, everything builds, everything works. As always with the show, the rich dialogue springs from character, not circumstance. Some characters are clipped, some garrulous, some truthful, some false, some terse, but every word that comes out of a character’s mouth sounds and feels like it belongs there.

Emotional responses from the audience – whether they be joy, panic, relief, fear, tears or sadness – are worked for and earned. Shows like Star Trek Discovery and The Walking Dead might roll out some emotionally manipulative montage over-played by some puffed up, expository, wholly contrived speech in a bid to stir our souls, but Game of Thrones can provoke the same response with a word, a grunt, or even just a look.

If we became misty-eyed when Brienne of Tarth earned the respect and recognition of her friends and peers, felt touched yet again by Arya and the Hound’s rather gruff and grudging father-daughter act, laughed when Tormund told tales of suckling milk at a giant’s breast, and shouted ‘no’ at the screen as Arya’s final layer of innocence was stripped away, think how we’re going to feel next week when everyone starts dying. I trust you, Game of Thrones, but I’m not ready. Can’t it be summer again?

When you start to describe Barry to someone who’s never seen it, you become conscious of the molten gimmickery at the show’s core. Isn’t this just a Saturday Night Live sketch with too thin a premise to sustain a whole series? (apposite, as the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Hader, is a SNL alumnus). Barry seems like the kind of crazy idea two friends would cook up one night between bongs and back-to-back episodes of Rick and Morty.

‘So there’s this guy, right, and he’s called Barry, and he’s a cold-blooded killer, right? I mean he does it for a living. And this one time he wanders into an acting class when he’s stalking a target, and he decides he wants to become an actor, give up the killing business. But he has to kill someone in the class, that’s his target, right, but he falls in love with this acting chick who’s friends with the guy he has to kill, and he ends up betraying the Ukrainian mob, and his handler won’t let him quit, and the police are hunting him and every time he tries to walk away from killing and murder he gets pulled in ever harder and… em… [scratches head] are there any more Cheetos?’

Barry, though, is much more than just a quirky premise. It’s a smart, wicked, wickedly funny show that’s got just as much room for fatal and farcical shoot-outs and misunderstandings as it does meditations on mortality, culpability, life, love, death and fate. Grim reality goes toe to toe with macabre fantasy in a heightened world populated by characters both urgently real and grotesquely cartoonish. Instead of conflicting with each other, all of these elements coalesce into something beautiful and funny and horrifying and black. It’s a show that makes you feel. Really feel.

Season two is all about redemption, betrayal and root causes. Can Barry be redeemed after his multitude of murderous sins, the first of which – his first government-sanctioned kill – is coaxed out of him at acting class by his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Gene uses Barry’s pain as a way to explore and over-come his own; the grief he feels at the disappearance of his girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, was dispatched by Barry at the close of the first season. Gene, too, is trying to redeem himself. He’s reaching out to his estranged son, who Gene abandoned long ago in pursuit of his own selfish wants, needs and aspirations. Meanwhile, Barry and Gene continue to develop a deep bond, more father-and-son in nature than mentor-and-student. Given that Barry is the root cause of Gene’s pain, he may be looking for love and absolution in a particularly ill-advised place.

Barry (the show) is good at making you feel complicit in the crimes of its eponymous lead. A few episodes ago, Barry decided against carrying out a hit, and we applauded his personal growth. Then, he declined to pull the trigger on Hank (the hilarious Anthony Harrigan), even after the metro-sexual mafioso had just tried and failed to assassinate him. Again, we admired his restraint. Good for you, Barry, we said. But, in episode four, What?!, when Sally’s abusive ex shows up, we found ourselves cheering ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’

It’s a delicious irony that Barry – an angry, empty, clinically-depressed man with PTSD who’s probably murdered far in excess of 100 people – has more scope for redemption and capacity for empathy than the wannabe actors with whom he shares a class, especially his girlfriend, Sally, who is so self-absorbed that she can walk into a room that’s been riddled with bullet-holes and not even notice.

The whole show is a joy to watch, and Henry Winkler and Bill Hader continue to turn in exceptional performances. Westeros may be preparing to draw the final curtain, but I hope there’s plenty of life – and death – in Barry’s future. If the rug-pulling ending of What?! is anything to go by, I’d say the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

Jamie on the Box – Santa Clarita Diet

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TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet 

Netflix’s popular zomcom is back for its third season, and it’s bloody good

Years ago I worked with a lady in her early sixties, who told me that the secret to her long, stable and happy marriage had been variety, pacing and always having something to look forward to. She and her husband courted, they married, they got a house, they had kids, they moved, they grew, they became grandparents – the beats of their lives perfectly timed and arranged to minimise monotony and banish boredom whenever it threatened to rear its head.

Variety, pacing, something to look forward to. See? The secret to a successful marriage.

It’s also the secret to a successful TV show. The best ones keep moving – quickly, powerfully and with purpose – forking off at just the right times and in just the right directions to keep the journey rolling forwards and the scenery fresh. In gourmet terms: giving you just enough to fill your belly, but never enough to make you sick.

Two recent shows that have been exemplars of this pattern are the super-slick, high-concept comedies The Good Place, and Santa Clarita Diet. The former is due a welcome return later this year, while the latter dropped its third season on Netflix at the end of March: even zanier, funnier, and gorier than ever before. This time around there’s also a surprising amount of heart to proceedings, and I don’t just mean the kind that’s ripped from a victim’s chest and snacked upon by the ravenous undead.

The aftermath of Officer Anne’s desert-based pledge to serve as Sheila’s disciple (season two’s cliff-hanger) is dealt with in typical fast and funny fashion, paving the way for this season’s trio of real and credible dangers: the FBI, sniffing around Eric and Abby’s explosive political statement; the Knights of Serbia, an ancient order dedicated to the eradication of the undead, in town to ply their post-fatal trade; and Dobrivoje Poplovic, the Serbian colonel who wants to capture Santa Clarita’s ‘zombies’ and subject them to a fate worse than… well, undeath.

As always, Santa Clarita Diet deals zippily with its many perils and conundrums, putting them front-and-centre just long enough to wring the maximum amount of interesting and hilarious moments from them, but always wrapping them up and burning them off before they threaten to become humdrum.

This season’s enduring philosophical and ethical question centres on the morality of immortality, specifically if it’s ever right to pass zombiehood on to another person, even with their consent. As the season unfolds it’s clearer than ever before that the power of life over – and life after – death is a heavy burden to bear, for biter, bitten and bystanders all.

Good old Gary

Jonathan Slavin is brilliant as former mental-patient Ron – a maniacal, bug-eyed cross between Peter Capaldi and the Dean from Community – who dupes literal talking-head Gary into biting him, before going out proselytising in the name of zombiehood. Despite Joel and Sheila’s very active opposition to Ron’s reckless behaviour, Sheila has a crisis of conscience when she meets Jean, a prickly old lady with a terminal illness. Jean’s prickly because she won’t live long enough to see her first grandchild born. To bite or not to bite. That is the question… the question that Joel and Sheila have very different answers to.

And Joel finds himself under increasing pressure to join the ranks of the undead, so he and Sheila won’t find themselves separated by his inevitable natural death. Will they or won’t they renew their wedding vows to read ‘Til undeath do us part’?

Incidentally, having loved and admired Timothy Oliphant as seasoned tough guys in both Deadwood and Justified, it’s a joy to see how good he is at comedy. He’s pretty much done a reverse Brian Cranston.

One of the many brilliant things about Santa Clarita Diet is how the big questions about and dangers to Joel and Sheila’s marriage are dealt with as if they were the sort of minor irritations more typically encountered on tea-time soap operas. In Santa Clarita, as in real life, we absorb the horrors of our lives and shrink and tame them until they seem as ordinary to us as Uncle Frank farting at the Christmas dinner table. The very funny juxtaposition between the absolute, blood-splattering insanity of the undead life-style and Joel and Sheila’s sanitised, almost cliched existence in middle-class suburbia is made funnier still by the couple’s tendency to react to the misfortunes and people around them with the forced jollility and fixed smiles of a cutesy couple in a 1950s sitcom.

Laughs, gore, fun, shocks, head, heart, soul: Santa Clarita Diet’s third season has got the lot. Not to mention a healthy, hefty dollop of empowerment.

While representation in media is important, the recent glut of male-to-female character transformations on the big and little screens has felt less like a cultural revolution and more like an effort on the part of media financiers to adjust to the shifting demographics of cinema attendance and merchandise spending. In short, they’re going where the money is. And all the while radical feminists, right-on lefties, chauvinist assholes and slobbering incels battle each other beneath market capitalism’s steely glare…

Santa Clarita Diet proves that you can approach the whole subject of gender and representation without being gimmicky; without even making it obvious that’s what you’re doing. It’s quietly subversive; a highly polished, very funny, wildly entertaining show that just happens to have strong female characters at its helm. And not strong in a ‘look, I can bench-press a body-builder, and I know 6 kinds of karate’ sort of a way, but strong in a ‘we’re regular women surviving and keeping our family afloat in these unique and highly dangerous circumstances, and sometimes we fuck it up’ sort of a way.

Sheila and her daughter are the lynch-pins of the show: strong, flawed, fierce, funny, likeable women who drive the action forwards through a combination of their tenaciousness, kindness, curiosity, compassion, intelligence, impulsivity and thirst for activism. In contrast the men – while also very likeable, and occasionally heroic in their own bumbling way – are neurotic, over-cautious, angst-filled, and frantic. Joel and Eric evoke the Jay Pritchett and Phil Dunphy dynamic, except both of them are Phil Dunphy.

Toxic masculinity – whether it’s located in lecherous lotharios, serial abusers or actual Nazis – is always punished, and always fatally. It doesn’t get much more right-on than a recently empowered woman literally devouring the very worst the patriarchy has to offer. I look forward with great relish to see how the squeamish and squirrelly Joel reacts to joining the ranks of the post-living.

Here’s to the variety and exquisite pacing of season four. To Joel becoming Sheila’s newest pupil, to Abby embarking upon a fledgling romance with Eric whilst rising through the ranks of an ancient order of zombie-killers, to Sheila’s new ass-kicking team of an old lady, a camp coward and a reformed zombie killer.

Definitely something to look forward to.

Jamie on the Box – American Gods

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TV Review: Puny Gods

A half-time appraisal of American Gods’ second season

Last week I said that Ricky Gervais’s new show After Life was greater than the sum of its parts. This week I’m here to tell you that American Gods (Starz, Amazon Prime) is less than the sum of its parts.

Two seasons and five episodes in, I’m yet to make a meaningful connection with its main story or its characters. That’s not to say that it’s a bad show. It’s not. It just doesn’t inspire awe or devotion, which is a grave sin indeed for a show about old Gods battling new for their share of mankind’s awe and devotion.

On the plus side, American Gods looks fantastic. The direction and cinematography are always exquisite; the weird hybrid worlds of man-and-God-hood are mesmerisingly realised and intricately rendered. There are no clunkers among the central or peripheral cast either, whose performances range from perfectly serviceable (Ricky Whittle as central cipher Shadow Moon; Peter Stromare as Czernobog) to terrific (Orlando Jones as Mr Nancy) to tremendous fun (Pablo Schreiber as Mad Sweeney and Emily Browning as Laura Moon/Dead-wife) to, appositely enough, God-like (Ian McShane).

Securing Ian McShane as Mr Wednesday/Odin was a major coup for the show. Like most discerning pop-culture fanatics out there I’d happily watch Ian McShane in pretty much anything: a ten-hour-long art-house movie called ‘Ian McShane Sleeps Peacefully for 12 Hours’; the new 22-part Netflix documentary series, ‘Ian McShane Silently Making Cups of Tea Before Surrendering to the Inevitability of his Morning Shit’. Anything.

McShane is captivating and commanding; his face hangs rich with menace, even when he’s playing relatively benign characters – not that he’s called upon to play many of them these days. His cat-and-mouse/man-and-God game with Shadow has provided most of the best lines and moments in the show so far. My only worry is that Shadow has been denied depth and agency for so long that the de facto star and audience proxy is in danger of being eclipsed by the far more dazzling ensemble around him.

I said American Gods was less than the sum of its parts. But, boy. What parts. The show has a masterful line in cold opens: beautiful, brutal chunks of phantasmagoria that blend fact and fiction, truth and legend, love and horror; powerful polemics on race, greed and corruption; haunting paeans to loss and pain. We’ve had Vikings slaughtering each other on distant and unforgiving shores; Mr Nancy addressing a doomed galley-ship full of slaves; the sad story of Techno Boy’s electro-literate musical prodigy, and, most recently, the tragic tale of a black man being snatched, strung up and burned by a confused and hateful mob, only for his death to carry the flaming torch of hatred far into the future. Each of these artfully-crafted short stories packs more of a visceral, lasting punch than some whole episodes or seasons of other shows.

Like FX’s series about lesser-known X-Men, Legion, American Gods is often a triumph of style over substance. At times the series feels like a patchwork of uber-cool vignettes; mini music-videos and visual slam-poetry that’s been stitched together by a mad Swedish auteur. That, believe it or not, is a compliment. I only hope that the narrative ups its game so the show can coalesce into something truly special.

Later this weekend we go from Gods to monsters, with season 3 of Santa Clarita Diet