Years And Years

Sometimes watching TV can be torture.  Granted, it often comes with the accompanying sentiment that you could be doing something better with your time: connecting with family members, perhaps, or making a difference in your community by volunteering to help those in need.  Once you’ve quashed those feelings by persuading yourself that you’ve worked hard enough all week and you’re perfectly entitled to exist inertly on the sofa while images are beamed into your head for the purpose of entertainment though, it’s the content on that hypnotising and paralysing screen that can cause untold pain.  Whether it’s the bodies on Love Island that you will never have, or the bright young things who are already better than you on University Challenge, the sought-after escapism can sometimes give way to unavoidable introspection, leading to an analysis of your reality that makes you feel worse than you did when you popped the telly on.  Enter, then, Years And Years.

An evening peak drama of course has the artistic license to fabricate a world where things happen that are more interesting than daily life.  Downton Abbey mixed ye olde moral compass with the foibles of servant management.  Line Of Duty poses the question: what if all those coppers are bent?  Either way, they offer distance from our humdrum existences, making the characters’ often terrible experience seem exciting and diverting.  Conversely, Years And Years can only fill its audience with dread.  Its narrative device?  It’s set a little bit in the future.  Not quite the virtual reality-dominated future of Black Mirror where attaching little metallic discs to your temple is all you need to enter wholly into an alternative reality.  No, we’re talking a few months’ away.  Things that might happen next year, and the year after, and then, as a result, a few years after that as well.

Why would this be so terrifying?  Two things: not actually knowing what will happen and fearing that the worst-case scenario will win out over the best.  And it’s so near that it’s not a single future that’s been imagined and will affect subsequent generations.  It’s what we ourselves might have to go through as our lives progress.  2019 headlines veer from climate crisis to Brexit farce via alt-right resurgence, neoliberal inequality and the rejection of truth in favour of malleable feeling.  Our future is not looking bright, it’s looking orange (if there’s more Trump and that).  Weathering this onslaught of one thing after the other, our everyman Lyons family boldly goes where a pessimistic media has long predicted we will all end up.

But the Lyons aren’t like most families.  This is because they talk on the phone in group chats all the time.  My own family mostly communicates by a Whatsapp group I set up a few years back.  In it, my sister and parents coordinate my niece’s schedule of educational and extra-curricular activities, my niece herself hijacks the group to use all the emojis at once or to leave voicenotes of her wailing comically, and my mum plumbs new depths of autocorrect mayhem that I am now expert at deciphering.  Conversely, the Lyons, who are split into the five constituent units of four adult siblings and their grandmother, chat through their latest news, pass comment on the world around them and pursue passive-aggressive banter.  In the first example of future technological advancement, they do all this through the voice-activated Signor service, a kind of Alexa-type gadget that actually seems to serve a purpose.

Now, if you thought I was going to make a comment on the family’s diversity, you can get off now.  The Lyons’ ticking of every box in this area might be a socially conscious casting director’s wet dream, but each Lyon is so much more than an exercise in representation, even though their very visibility on screen is significant to communities that don’t always see themselves reflected in their own entertainment.  If, along the way, even some viewers move beyond seeing people as categories and instead view them as individuals, then it can’t hurt for Years And Years to avail itself of the full spectrum of human potential.  So, who are these Lyons onto whom the near future is projected?

Our grand-matriarch comes in the form of Anne Reid (a favourite from dinnerladies), providing a lens on the encroaching of the future into family life that has both the confusion and the liberal attitude of old age.  Rory Kinnear is Stephen Lyons, the settled wealthier son, husband and dad of two, contrasting with his sister, Edith, who has been off around the world on moral missions (played by Jessica Hynes, whose amazing performance as Cheryl in The Royle Family I am currently reliving to great joy).  Feisty younger sister Rosie, meanwhile, succumbs to a more reflexive response to the events that engulf the family, while Danny Lyons, played by Russell Tovey (who should be in more, if not all, things) has a more idealistic approach to the ensuing calamity.

And calamity is what does ensue.  Each episode is interspersed with a number of montages that take us through the course of time, showcasing the family birthdays that mark each passing year as we journey into 2020 and the decade beyond.  Sound-tracked by a choir singing, this change of pace propels us into disaster each time – so much so, in fact, that you begin to dread its every appearance.  I now have a phobia of choirs singing, as they herald bad things.  Inhumane legislation creeps in, international tensions escalate, environments are plundered and, throughout, the British media and public make multiple catastrophic decisions.  Punctuating each of these current affairs round-ups is Emma Thompson (as if the cast weren’t already strong enough), having the time of her life as Vivienne Rook, some sort of Lady Farage (yet, here’s a lie) whose emergent and morally ambiguous political party gradually grows from a fringe movement to a mainstream force for wrong (ring any bells?).

Not only is there the human drama of the Lyons, then, with arguments, infidelity and deep-rooted resentment, but this is compounded by the consequences of the future’s news.  And the nature of compounding, is that it happens over and over (like in The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver).  Each montage screws them more than the one before, and in every area of their lives: employment, freedom, healthcare, housing, human rights etc.  Very occasionally, the relation of this back to the storyline is a touch wedged: some clunking lines swing in overhead to set out the wider political context.  Parts of the technological advancement also tip things unnecessarily from thought-provoking drama to science fiction fantasy, but there’s no reason a TV show can’t be both.  Whatever this is, it’s wildly entertaining, if you can stand the torture.  We’re not yet through all six episodes, but you always know something bad is going to happen, just like with the future in real life.  I’m pinned into my sofa at each viewing on BBC iPlayer and almost crumble under the tension of every time-accelerating montage – here we go again… to oblivion.  It really is potluck who will make it through each episode.  Just like it’s potluck who’ll make it through our real future.

The Rain (Regnen)

63 posts in and I’ve done my best to balance out American shows with British ones, and even thrown in some Australian (shout out to Summer Heights High), but I’ve been hugely neglectful from a linguistic perspective.  Besides some subtitled Spanish in Fear The Walking Dead, and some other bits and bobs, everything has been an English-language production.  How can I hope to guide people through the world of boxset quality (and boxset trash) if I just stick to my mother tongue?  Given this blog is also dominated by me talking about myself, we should acknowledge that a defining feature of mine, alongside lacking human emotion and laughing too loudly, is my multilingualism.  We’ll go into that in more detail another time, as I know readers are keen to hear about my voyages into French and German.  Instead, the first foreign language show to make it into Just One More Episode is actually Danish.  Readers, I give you The Rain (Regnen, in Danish, but it seems the Danes also just call it The Rain).

And no, this isn’t the 1997 hit my Missy Elliott with brackets after it containing the words Supa, Dupa and Fly.  It’s a real Netflix original production.  English speakers have traditionally shunned foreign-language productions from mainstream consumption.  Subtitles require reading, and reading feels, for some people, too much like trying to watch a book.  The effort required is not given easily, as we Brits are indulged by the rest of the world speaking our language, and are therefore too lazy to make any effort in the other direction.  However, Netflix seems to have versions of all its foreign-language programming dubbed into English.  While this removes a barrier, it adds the new one of lips not matching to sounds.  I’ll happily read thousands of words of subtitles to avoid the distraction of bad dubbing – it can drag down any drama, making it feel like some sort of pan-European lemon Cif advert.  Watching with subtitles has another benefit if you can’t understand the language at hand.  The constant reading requires more attention than just listening, helping to keep those tippy-tappy fingers off your smartphone and your terrible second-screening habits.  So, with full focus, let me transport you to a dystopian Denmark.

As I said in the last paragraph, before heading off on a wild tangent, it’s about the rain.  There’s nothing worse in life than getting soaked in the rain, even though it’s our natural state as Brits.  However, the rain in, er, The Rain, carries a virus.  So, not only do your jeans get damp, not only does wet sock (a fully recognised condition first discovered when you’ve just put on fresh socks and then accidentally tread in your housemates’ shower puddles, requiring a second pair of fresh socks) upset your toes, but you also die a horrific death.  In episode one, at first, the rain is on its way.  We watch through the eyes of our heroine, Simone, as her father cryptically gathers the family from their normal lives to whisk them to safety.  The times he spends saying “there’s no time to explain” is technically a perfectly sufficient period in which to give everyone the full lowdown on what’s occurring.  But that wouldn’t be any fun.  The clouds gather, people get the washing in off the line, and Simone’s family are hunkered down in a conveniently located bunker.

I’m obliged not to give too much away, but most of the action then proceeds six years later.  Simone has raised her little brother, Rasmus, in Fritzl-esque isolation, but how will the siblings cope back in the real world?  As I said with Black Mirror, I love a dystopian future.  In this one, you stay out the rain, you’re chased by people with drones and you end up in a ragtag band of young survivors, the bright colours of whose cagoules are only matched by the strength of their hormonal yearnings for each other.  There’s Jean (which sounds delightfully like Sheen in Danish) who’s all curly hair and glasses, another one with a bad attitude and backwards baseball cap signifying his bad attitude, and also a blonde girl with traintracks, which you don’t see much of these days.  And many more.  Like any young group of Europeans, they squabble, swear and have an open-minded approach to nudity.  They may also be an allegory for how a new generation must clean up after their parents’ mistakes, but I’ll try not to make everything about Brexit…

The whole series carries the tension of a summer BBQ: everyone hopes it’s not going to rain.  Simone seems to be able to navigate around all of Denmark’s rural areas from memory, conveniently coming across further bunkers in order to replenish the group’s stock of cereal bars.  In between, back stories illuminate elements of our characters’ personalities, though the effects of six years in a bunker seem completely overlooked for Simone and Rasmus, but they’re probably busy focusing on the array of threats a post-apocalyptic Denmark offers.

You’ll feel intellectual for consuming a boxset in a different language, though Danish does sound curiously like English with all the effort removed, a sort of aspirated sigh from the back of the throat.  Have fun spotting words that are similar (to go seems to be “go”) while the fun of trying to match the sounds to the subtitles gradually wears off.  As the series went on, I found it harder and harder to remind myself that I didn’t speak Danish, forgetting to read the subtitles as if there had been a sudden comprehension miracle.  Sure, I missed some plot points, but we all know I do this in English anyway.  Turns out I don’t listen, no matter what the language.

Right, so that’s a fourth country of origin added into the fold here, and there’ll be more to come.  Let’s not see the multitude of European tongues as a barrier to union.  Let’s look for what we have in common.  Some people don’t like reading subtitles.  Most people don’t like getting soaked in the rain.  And everyone hates a wet sock.

Altered Carbon

I’m hip; I’m cool.  I can react to current trends with this blog, rather than just running through things I liked on the telly when I was 12 years old.   A few weeks ago, my Facebook feed was awash with people talking about Altered Carbon.  And by awash, I mean there were about two posts from friends I suspect to be fans of this sort of science fiction thing anyway.  Nevertheless, the show was unavoidable on Netflix for more or less a whole evening and I weakly succumbed to the power of suggestion and clicked play on the first episode.  I’d get through the ten-part series in no time at all and crack out the freshest post this blog has ever seen.

Weeks later, I’ve only just limped to the end of it.  I didn’t like it.  Critics of this blog (and most of you only say nice things (or point out my typos with a glee that can only be built up from years of me criticising every apostrophe misuse you have ever committed)) will note with rolling eyes that I seem to like most of the things I write about.  That’s why I write about them: to share them (and my opinions; oh, and to seek attention).  But I hated Altered Carbon.

I don’t say this lightly.  I wanted to love it.  On paper, it’s 100% my type.  I love zombies.  I love high schools.  I love a period drama.  But, I also love dystopian futures.  It looked slick and stylish and I had naively begun to think that Netflix only greenlights top-notch entertainment.  So gather round everyone, while I, with all my experience of working in an office, take you through my subjective ranting.

So why’s it called Altered Carbon?  I literally don’t know.  I’m also not going to Google it as I’m not really interested.  Next we must ask what it’s about.  Altered Carbon is a series of well-lit scenes where the unclothed body of actor, Joel Kinnaman, looks redunka-dunkulous.  I clutched my own belly paunch in despair that all my gym efforts so far have failed to get me in anything like that sort of shape (along with my own Netflix series).  Kinnaman is Takeshi Kovacs.  Well, kind of.  Kinnaman plays the body that the character of Takeshi Novacs has been put in.  Confused?  Panic now.

The key premise of Altered Carbon is that, in the future, humans will contain hardware that their whole being can be downloaded into.  If their body dies, they can then be put in another body, or sleeve.  You can even back yourself up to a Cloud like an iPhone.  This is at the centre of everything about the plot.  If you don’t buy this, then you can just give up.  Just think of all the human interaction complication that can arise from this.  If you’re wealthy, you can just buy new bodies (or clones of yourself) and live forever.  Race, gender, age, religion all become abstract constructs that you can alter at will.  For the casual viewer, it’s a lot to keep up with.

But then, we are talking 350 years into the future.  This is an embarrassment of future to handle.  Body-swapping is just the beginning, but it gets very disorientating when everything you think you know about human morality is called into question as a result of all this sleeving and re-sleeving and double-sleeving, not to mention keeping track of which character is in which body in this very complicated plot.  The temporal plains of action are wide and varied.  Let’s face it, I just wasn’t intelligent enough to follow this, so I lost interest.

With any vision of the future, the glimpses into how the rest of the world looks are always, for me, the most intriguing.  I might have fallen asleep in Guardians Of The Galaxy (as I do in all Marvel films – sorry, Black Panther) but I remember being most interested in all those people walking around in the background.  You know, on those walkways as if the future was simply an outdoor shopping centre.  In Altered Carbon, Bay City (which is San Francisco in hundreds of years’ time) is seen either in micro or macro detail, but the lack of in between prevents it ever seeming real.  It does rain a lot, though, if you enjoy Blade Runner getting ripped off.

In addition, every camera effect ever is used in a tick-box exercise to help the viewer navigate between the past, the distant past, the present, virtual reality and fantasy sequences.  This does little to give the show any edge, and in fact dilutes the impact of its excessive sex and violence.  Initial episodes are a bit like early Game Of Thrones when there could be a boob or willy at any moment.  The only edge seems to come from the fact that, despite all this technological advancement, the main character is still smoking.  What a rebel!

The characters all seem to be stock fodder, lifted from other pop culture works and dropped off without any depth.  Even Kovacs seems to be nothing more than a lot of witty quips, but his voice is so deep from all the smoking that I found it really hard to understand any of them.  They probably weren’t funny anyway.  Given the plot revolves around him waking up after 250 years of being in storage, he doesn’t seem at all arsed by the future in which he finds himself.  Again, too busy smoking, quipping and being in flattering lighting whilst scantily clad.

I’ve ranted so much I’ve forgotten the storyline.  Effectively, it’s a whodunit murder mystery, but with everything else thrown in too.

So there we have it.  Hopefully proof I don’t just love everything I watch.  I want to avoid being an internet troll, though.  Altered Carbon had so much potential, but something about it just didn’t work for me, and this led to each thing about it getting more and more annoying until it all snowballed into the vitriol I have thrown up here.  I probably therefore shouldn’t have continued to put myself through the whole ten hours of it, so that’s my mistake right there.  Maybe there’ll be another series and maybe everyone will love it.  I hope so on both counts.  I just won’t be watching (especially if it clashes with series two of Survival Of The Fittest).

The Handmaid’s Tale

One of the best dramas of 2017 slipped onto our screens almost unnoticed.  The internet was abuzz with teasers and trailers and stills of this long-awaited adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel.  The author herself could barely contain her excitement in her social media feeds, and rightly so.  But, I asked myself, what on earth is this Hulu thing it was going to be appearing on?  Did I need another subscription alongside Amazon Prime, Netflix and Sky?  But we don’t have it here, so what about people in the UK?  How were we going to watch it?  This, in itself, was a reminder of how long we used to have to wait for entertainment to reach our shores from North America until the internet made most things immediate.  At the last minute, Channel 4 acquired the rights and with little ado, the show made its Sunday evening debut.

I’ve talked before of that final hour of Sunday being a key slot for comfort programming: nostalgic period pieces or luscious footage of natural history.  Snuggled on sofas, we’re at our most vulnerable and will do anything to soften the blow of Monday morning.  The Handmaid’s Tale was having none of it.  Every harrowing moment brought the crushing reality of how awful life can be straight to every Sunday evening viewer.  Suddenly, the TV boxset was a terrifying place.

Atwood has pointed out that there is nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that isn’t already happening somewhere in the world.  When I first read the novel, it was the very feasibility of Gilead, a religious-fundamentalist state where parts of the USA used to be, that chilled me the most.  I couldn’t shake the concept.  In it, women are objects to be possessed in service to men.  The entire system is based on faith.  It’s over thirty-two years since publication (and twenty-seven years since a 1990 feature film adaptation where everyone’s hair was too big) and faith still abounds in the modern world as a tool to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behaviour.  If enough people believe something, then it must be right, right?

I’ve managed to get to the fourth paragraph without saying dystopian, but it’s the essential descriptor here: in this dystopian vision of the future, (wo)mankind’s fertility is running out.  Handmaids, as the last remaining group that can bear children, are envied by barren women and punished for their fecundity by both genders.  Love doesn’t come into it, as they are assigned to wealthy and powerful childless couples, solely for the purpose of conceiving, birthing and giving away their progeny in a series of ceremonies that display inconceivable brutality.  Yet, in real life, inconceivable acts are justified by faith every day.  So far, so hauntingly realistic.

Our focus is Offred/June, a Handmaid who cannot reconcile her role in Gilead’s society with the life she had before.  The drama is deftly woven with flashbacks to the breakdown of America, the somehow plausible emergence of Gilead through a gradual erosion of women’s rights.  Nothing is ever explained properly.  Instead, we are granted the credit to piece together this society and culture from the evidence presented.  As such, we share June’s horror as she peels back layer after layer of cruelty.  It is Elisabeth Moss’s outstanding performance that heightens not just the credibility of each scene, but the acute suffering June must go through as she becomes Offred.  Yet, she never lets us in that far.  We must guess her next move as much as any other character must, which prevents The Handmaid’s Tale, thankfully, from ever descending into mundane predictability.

The supporting cast is studded with further quality.  Yvonne Strahovski plays the wife to whose family Offred is assigned and bristles with the internal conflict her Handmaid’s role causes her.  The other Handmaids each invite untold curiosity: cruelty begets cruelty.  In addition, Amanda Brugel as the household’s Martha (multipurpose maid, also barren) positively seethes with quiet dignity.  So, not only is the concept utterly gripping, its execution is almost faultless.  My only niggle is that a lot of bumping into each other takes place in Gilead, as if there is only one shop or something, but I will honestly forgive this programme anything.

The medium of a ten-part series has allowed the show’s makers to mine the book’s material in order to expand and enrich the universe Atwood first created.  Carefully teased into tense drama that hooks a viewer within minutes only never to let them go (a housemate got totally sucked into the sixth episode after walking into the room ten minutes in), Channel 4 had an absolute touch sneaking this into their schedule.  And it turned out to be one of their highest rating shows of the year.  The teasing out has paid off as a second season is in the works, so I can only beg as many people as possible to make sure they have seen the first ten episodes before more are unleashed on us.  This show and what it has to tell us cannot go unnoticed.