This Country

Now that Just One More Episode is approaching 4,000 reads, it’s time to start acting like the major media platform that this has become.  Like all media, it needs to tap into current trends, desperately trying to second-guess what people want rather than staying true to any real values.  I’ve therefore decided people want to know about This Country, as this unassuming sitcom has come from nowhere to be the talk of the office.  Anyone who’s anyone is declaring for all and sundry to hear which episode they are up to, before entering into best line riff offs in order to prove their viewership.  And there was me, silently hoping nobody would ask me if I had ever seen it and force me to reveal I had never even heard of the show.  How had I missed this one?  I’m supposed to be a guiding light in the field of boxset navigation, and there was me, wondering why everyone was doing West Country accents and chuckling so much.

But how would I catch up quickly enough?  There are two series (with a third due next year) and I’d already spread myself very thinly with shows on Netflix and Amazon.  I spend weekends at friends’ weddings and weekdays avoiding grinding poverty by doing emails and that in a grown-up office.  When would I fit in another show?  Luckily, it’s a BBC production.  This means it’s on iPlayer.  iPlayer is an app on my phone.  I spend a lot of time on buses.  I normally read books on buses.  But I had run out of library books.  And due to the emails and that in the grown-up office, I’ve not snuck out to Camden Library at lunchtime (don’t tell them I live in Lambeth) to restock.  So I got organised and downloaded the first few episodes to watch at 6.15am on board my beloved 137 while it stops at Sacred Heart House to deposit old people who like to be out and about early.

This Country is like a cross between The Office and Nighty Night.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I love both, so it’s no surprise that I’m going to recommend This Country with some hearty emphasis.  Like The Office, it’s a mockumentary.  Like Nighty Night, the regional accents of the Cotswolds and beyond provide a lot of the comedy.  The documentary side of things is set up and contrived as a study into deprivation among the young in rural communities.  Statistics about issues in the countryside (such as loneliness, unemployment, lack of opportunities) flash up on screen accompanied by nothing more than birds tweeting.  The episode then sets about showing how this affects the mock element of the equation, rooted in the characters of the Mucklowe cousins.

First, there’s Kurtan Mucklowe.  His style goals seem to have been generated by The Office’s Gareth Keenan if the hair is anything to go by, but any similarities in his personality fade away as we get deeper into his character.  His maintenance of a close friendship with cousin Kerry is something Gareth would never have managed.  Kerry Mucklowe is exactly the type of girl you have seen while driving through regional towns, sauntering along a pavement in an unflattering football top and baggy trousers.  They come as a pair as there is nothing else to do in their village but hang out with each other, whether this is in a bus shelter, in the woods, Kerry’s mum’s kitchen or in Kerry’s brilliantly observed bedroom (nailing the tragedy of an adult inhabiting their childhood room).  Their dynamic adjusts throughout the series, with the role of the rational one switching between the two, though typically each is always as bad as the other.

Around them is a village cast with a right bunch of countryside characters.  There’s the well-meaning vicar whose patience they test.  There’s Mandy, a local hard-woman who’s not to be messed with.  There’s their pal Slugs who they actively try to avoid.  Kerry’s parents take the biscuit for the most gruesome creations.  Her dad avoids her around the village, prioritising his new family or, more accurately, himself, but this doesn’t stop Kerry dropping everything to play on his flight simulator with him.  Her mum never seems to leave her bedroom upstairs (“Kerry!”, “What?”), but this doesn’t stop her shouting down the stairs to join in any conversation she fancies.

There’s a bittersweetness to Kerry and Kurt.  We root for them, but they’re terrible people.  It’s not their fault, but they could make a bit more effort to get on.  They’ve got nothing going on for themselves, but somehow they’re charming and you love following them around with the camera crew.  They’re at their best when revealing embarrassing secrets about each other to the never-seen documentary makers, and below is a list of my top ten obscure references that revel in the show’s Britishness (or British experience of imported American culture) and the fact the characters of This Country actually live in the same country as us:

1. The Queen’s Nose
2. Computers for Schools vouchers
3. The leftover Bounties in a box of Celebrations
4. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
5. Emmerdale continuity errors
6. Dr Barnados
7. Throwing plums at someone’s house
8. Uncle Fester
9. Papa Roach
10. GiffGaff

I’d always thought my sister and I are pretty funny when we get together, but we’ve seemingly got nothing on Daisy May and Charlie Cooper, the sibling creators, writers and stars of This Country.  Not only have they brought us something deliciously entertaining and uniquely British, but they have crafted it to deliver just the right amount of acerbic punch to reflect the hopelessness of being a young person in rural Britain today.  Issues-based comedy?  Surely it’ll save this country.

The Office

“I couldn’t watch it because my dad wanted to watch The Office.”  It was 2002.  I remember it exactly.  I had asked a friend whether they had seen something on TV, something that was essential viewing in those days (though I can’t remember at all what it was now).  We were on our way to Scouts, because that was a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing at the age of 17 in Surrey.  “Well”, I thought to myself, “what a parent-y and adult-y thing to want to watch.  I’ll never be like that.”

Sixteen years later, I’m writing a blogpost about why The Office is one of the most significant works of comedy I have ever seen.  I may not be a parent, but I’m definitely an adult.  Last week I asked someone to let me finish a cup of tea before I would do anything else.  I think about coffee a lot of the time.  I wake naturally just after 5am.  These are all things I never thought would happen to me.  The other thing I failed to consider becoming a part of my everyday life, but which has in fact defined it for the last eleven years, is office work.  So let’s begin this discourse by acknowledging the irony.  Not only am I unable to remember the other show I loved so much when I was younger, while scoffing at grown-ups watching boring programmes about their places of work, but I have self-fulfilled the prophecy: my adult life has been spent as an office drone.

I eventually first watched The Office while still in education.  Too many friends were quoting it to me for me to be able to bear missing out.  It portrayed an alien world, mostly because full-time working life is so much worse than school.  I remember afternoons dragging till the bell went at 3.30pm, but now I’m rooted to a desk till 5.30pm at the earliest.  School terms were punctuated by lengthy holidays, but time off as an adult comes in the form of just a handful of weeks.  Unless punished with detention, school enforced breaks and full lunch hours.  I now shove food in my face while trying to stay on top of emails (occasionally carving out time to write this stupid blog).  So now, that alien world is my life, but it’s actually made each subsequent re-watching of The Office all the more artful in how it captures what we are sadly destined to become, as our schoolchild dreams slowly die one by one.

And this is exactly what happens to two of the main characters in the show.  Dawn has given up on becoming an illustrator and Tim has forgotten that he was going to do something else besides sell paper.  The Office celebrates so much that is familiar about British workplaces: the cheap shirts tucked badly into a pair of itchy smart trousers, being at your desk while it’s dark outside (half the year, roughly), not knowing where the line lies between banter and offence.  But then it champions the human spirit in spite of the fate that befalls millions of us (and I recognise that there are worse fates than earning your crust in an industrial park.  You could be murdered, for example).  Over the two series and the Christmas special, the chemistry between Tim and Dawn builds with brutal realism, carving out potentially the most real-life love story I have ever seen (as I mentioned when talking about Geordie Shore).  Their final moment at the office party to the sounds of Alison Moyet’s Only You (a song associated with enduring my dad’s poor music taste while he taxied me around) is a vital moment of hope that takes place between photocopiers and computer monitors.

Let’s move on from this emotional depth with some rape jokes.  Never really appropriate, I suppose, but this reference, from the series one episode, Training, still makes me smile.  Not because it trivialises an unforgiveable crime, but because of all the circumstances that lead to it.  But this is exactly the legacy of The Office.  Get the tone wrong at work (quoting a joke from the office that uses rape as a comedic device) and you enter into gaff territory, becoming your very own David Brent.  I freely admit to Brenting out all over the show with my teams in the office.  I do this so much, I have to own the situation by irreverently claiming to be a “chilled-out entertainer” while hoping nobody notices.  I never got the goatee beard, but the topknot that lasted two years came pretty close.  Oh well.

What else can I add to all the appreciation out there already for The Office?  Not much.  But I do want to dissect the mockumentary style some more, as this really enabled the banality of the show’s subject matter to be cast in a new light.  Characters were given pieces to camera, enabling them to dig even deeper holes.  They could also make eyes and faces at the audience at any point, joining us in on the jokes all the more closely, or making us aware of the artificiality of the situation, as embodied by the handyman that just stops in his tracks at the sight of the cameras.  Best of all are the interstitial shots that chop up each episode.  We see paper sheets going through the copier feed.  We see workers staring into space at their desks.  We see a whole load of nothing happening.

But somehow, it’s this nothingness that makes The Office all the more cherishable.  Its very scarcity, at least in the UK version, is its strength, as we will always want more than we will ever be given.  The perfect volume of things happen, because office life is characterised by its monotony.  The show’s style has seen its influence spread far and wide, with shows like Parks & Recreation.  It changed the game for what a comedy expects from an intelligent audience and, sixteen years later, I’m still talking about it.

Parks & Recreation

The stages of boxset viewing are often likened to a relationship, normally an unsuccessful one.  I’ve tried to avoid that analogy throughout this blog, as it’s not really something I’ve ever experienced.  Then I watched Parks & Recreation and now I feel like a jilted lover.  But this isn’t because I let myself get into it and spent hours of my life watching it only for the quality to fall away or for the storylines to frustrate me so that I had to abandon it, never to get back the time I spent sitting through it.  This is how a lot of fans currently feel about The Walking Dead (when they should really just be hitting up Fear The Walking Dead, whose third series I’ve just binged the life out of and thoroughly fanboyed), but I guarantee that, if you are of sound mind and sound constitution, you will not feel this way about Parks & Recreation.

However, you will experience a profound emotional response as you work your way through the seven series that exist of what could be the cutest show ever to be available to stream on Amazon Prime.  The first series feels a bit like the cusp of something great, but is not great in and of itself.  In fact, I tested out the first episode a long time ago and couldn’t help feeling like someone had ripped off The Office: a mockumentary set in a workplace interspersed with pieces to camera.  I moved on with my life, convinced it wasn’t for me, and probably started watching some utter trash, such as another series of Geordie Shore.  I look back on those times with regret.  I could have been getting stuck into the shenanigans of local government employees in Pawnee, Indiana.  It was wasted time.  Geordie Shore’s cast was downgraded with the addition of Love Island rejects and I had to give it up forever (a bit like the unsuccessful relationship I was trying to make an allusion to all the way back in the introduction; you probably don’t remember it now but I’m trying to create some semblance of structure here).

But then I found myself offering it a second chance.  I needed a sub-30-minute show on the go, something to put in front of my face while I’m quickly putting food inside my face.  Too often, I was embarking on a meal with a spot of entertainment and finding myself still sat there an hour later.  The first series gave way to the second, and some cast members that weren’t really working out gave their places away to some better ones, and suddenly I was in love.

It all begins with a giant hole in the ground.  Someone falls in, their girlfriend complains to the parks and recreation department of the city council, the team spring into action to turn the hole into a park and thus ensues the storyline for the whole first series.  A whole series about a hole.  By series two, the whole hole has been wholly forgotten, to a certain extent.  Instead, each episode is at liberty to jump about poking fun at small-town America, large-town America, all forms of government and people in general.  But the poking is gentle, with no effing and jeffing (except when it’s bleeped out for hilarity) and just enough sexual innuendo to provide a bit of blue for the dads.  While a series will crescendo in an event or crisis, it’s individual (and ridiculous) occasions that mark each episode, announced in the first few seconds with someone announcing “in Pawnee, every year, we celebrate…”

The reason the plotline isn’t as crucial as it might be with other boxsets?  The characters.  Pawnee, and its department of parks and recreation, is populated by individuals who develop to be so dense and rich in their personalities, that their average working day, and all its farcical undertakings, draws you into a fascinatingly and hilariously entertaining world.  I’ll acknowledge they seem like caricatures at first, but let them mature, I say, and you will reap the rewards.  You’ll want to be their friends.  I began to miss them when several days passed without me delving into a new episode.  I began to question my career choices and started to wonder if I wanted to work with them.  I began to love them.  And when you love, you get hurt.  But more on that later.

So who are these people?  I shall tell you.  But be warned, this is just a long series of me gushing about each one, adding little to no value along the way.  Read on!

Leslie Knope

Knope is the part of you that seeps out when you have zero chill.  She adores her job, adores working for her community despite her community being full of cretins, and she adores her colleagues, who she can only view as lifelong friends.  Ask for her help and she’ll stay up all night producing a ring binder of everything she could possibly do for you, no matter the subject.  While she loves parks, she also hates libraries.  While she wants her town to be healthier, she loves waffles covered in whipped cream.  While she loves making occasions out of any obscure anniversary in any relationship in order to shower friends with deeply personal gifts, she doesn’t expect anything in return.  We should all be more Knope, though I actually like libraries.

Ron Swanson

The name says it all – an uncomplicated man.  Deeply set in his ways as a breakfast food-loving carnivore, Swanson’s journey over the series is among the most touching.  His view that the government should stay out of his life is at odds with his job in the, er, government, but it’s this conflict that lands him in so many absurd situations.  It’s his unorthodox relationship with ideological opposite Knope that proves that anyone can get along with anyone.  He also has the best and most surprising girlish giggle when things tickle him in just the right way.

Tom Haverford

Statistically, this character has caused me the most laughs out loud.  His approach to dating is straight out of a hip hop video.  He’s a grown man that whines like a child at any injury.  He is a committed consumer who places huge value in the quality of material possessions.  But he’s at his best when smiling at the camera because something has just gone his way, and that’s when I crease up at his delightful little face.

April Ludgate

Beginning her career as the department intern, Ludgate takes teen angst into adult years with a sardonic comment for every situation.  When it’s too hard to adult, Ludgate is the one that calls it out.

Andy Dwyer

Now I’m torn; I’ve also LOLled at this manchild probably just as often as I’ve chuckled my socks off at Tom Haverford.  Chris Pratt might now be a galaxy-guarding dinosaur-whisperer, but his comedic performance is on the money – timing, expressions, energy.  General face, in fact.

Jerry Gergich

Enter the office punching bag.  Jerry is actually the nicest guy around, but his accident-prone antics earn him the wrath of the others.  The play at his expense sometimes does seem to victimise him, but rest assured that later series treat him with the affection he deserves.  He also helps bring an element of fart humour into proceedings when things get too highbrow (which is actually never).  Sometimes, there is nothing funnier than watching an overweight man fall over while passing wind.  Apart from maybe Andy Dwyer.

Donna Meagle

Barely allowed to speak in early series, this character never ceases to surprise.  A throwaway comment about Ginuwine being her cousin eventually culminates in a recurring guest role for him.  This has to be commended.  She’s an enigma who doesn’t care what her colleagues think about her or what she does.  Personal favourite moment: when she bursts into a meeting room to join in with Ann Perkins trying to force April Ludgate to sing Time After Time with her.

Ann Perkins

Ann Perkins begins life as the lady who lives next to the hole, but soon Knope creates a touching best friendship out of her.  She’s often the least comedic of the characters, but her uncoolness in certain situations make her more believable, as well as her ability to bear the intensity that a Knope best friendship (obsession) entails.

Ben Wyatt

I just like it whenever Haverford bullies him for being a geek.  Also, Cones of Dunshire.

Chris Traeger

Rob Lowe as an insecure, health and fitness obsessed, incredibly energetic boss that wants everyone to like him?  Chris Traeger!

Well, that was a lot to get through and I kind of gave up by the end, but yeah, I love these guys.  I was going to make a comment about them each being a facet of my personality.  And now I just have.  They are all me.  And they are all you.  Watch them.

But wait, there’s more.  The rest of Pawnee is filled (a bit like Springfield or Quahog) with minor characters that keep coming back for more.  Swanson’s ex-wife Tammy, local douche Jean-Ralphio (who RnB sings anything contentious he has to say) and his sister Mona-Lisa, local media stars Perd Hapley and Joan Callamezzo, Lil Sebastian: just some of my favourites.  I could go into paragraphs and paragraphs explaining why they are funny and why I therefore love them.

Finally, there’s also Treat Yourself Day.  It’s a day of consumer excess when Tom and Donna hit the mall together and buy whatever they want, including fine leather goods.  Fine.  Leather.  Goods.

To recap: I have a lot of love for this show.  So why did it hurt me?  Because I finished it.  With each series I completed, I got a bit closer to the final end (the last episode went out in 2015).  Once I hit series seven, I had to ration them carefully.  Then I saw series seven was shorter and different to the others.  And then I couldn’t cope.  I had been shown what happens to the characters in the end.  There was music evoking memories from the other series (Bye Bye Lil Sebastian).  I felt I had lived through something great and that I would never have it again.  Was it worth it?  Yes.  Will I do it again?  Yes.  But that’s just how boxsets go sometimes.

Westworld

Sometimes you want a TV show to make you ponder the very essence of what it means to be a human.  And sometimes you just want something with plenty of sex and violence.  Maybe these two things aren’t that separate after all, as Westworld manages to deliver both, and all in a cheeky cowboy hat.  Let’s be honest, sex and violence are, after all, key parts of the human experience.  According to Westworld, they are definitely key parts of the cowboy experience too.

Billed, as with all big new shows, as something that would fill the Game Of Thrones hole in our lives, I let the first series of Westworld pass me by.  It was everywhere on my Sky EPG, posters followed me on my commute and trailers constantly rolled on every screen I went near.  It all made me lose interest, especially as nobody in the office seemed to be talking about it.  Could this big-budget western be a major dud?  But then, looking for a new show to start, and giving careful consideration to what should be covered on Just One More Episode, I consulted IMDB’s top rated TV shows: a list of 250 programmes that viewers have rewarded with up to ten stars.  Once I filtered out all the really old stuff and nature documentaries, Westworld (currently at #36) was the highest ranked entity I thought I could bear to watch.

My final barrier to overcome was that Westworld was also the name of a hip hop clothing shop at university and one particular friend used to dress in their attire from head to toe after watching You Got Served.  We all experiment with style when we’re young, but I should emphasise there is no age limit to enjoying a film produced as a streetdance vehicle for B2K.

From the cowboy chat so far, it should be clear that Westworld is a western, of sorts.  Not the kind of western made in the fifties that they repeat on TCM and your dad still watches during the daytime even though it’s sunny outside.  The western world of Westworld is actually a theme park.  Rather than queuing up at Thorpe Park to lose your lunch on a roller coaster though, the visitors to Westworld inhabit a near-future USA where technology has advanced enough to create artificial beings tasked with bringing history to life.  The wealthy book passage to this resurrected era, dressed for the period (a bit like those weird photo booths that actually are a part of normal theme parks), arriving by steam train at a frontier town.  Have they hired impoverished actors to flesh out the illusion?  No; these are, essentially, robots.

Right then, so it’s robots and cowboys – together at last.  Of all the historic periods you could create using animatronics, I’m still not sure I would go for cowboys.  What about all the courtly intrigue of Tudor England, or the licentious lifestyles of the Romans?  That might just be me.  Either way, the cowboy theme allows the paying visitors to shoot guns and whore about (literally) with little concern for the consequences.  Only the hosts can be killed, as they are programmed not to hurt humans.  Their purpose of existence is solely to fulfil their storylines in order to entertain.  But, such is their sophistication as pieces of tech, the ultimate tension comes from the slowly revealed truth that the hardware is starting to get emotional.  Cue a glacially paced and artfully crafted build up through series one to the inevitable pay off of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

With sinister grandpa Anthony Hopkins as the park’s founder and the hosts’ co-inventor, Dr Robert Ford, it’s all a bit Jurassic Park.  But that’s a huge part of the fun.  Let’s just say the future doesn’t look great for theme parks.  However, it does look good for A-list actors, as the cast is a roll call of household names, or at least names where you recognise the faces and can get distracted agonising over trying to remember where you saw them last.  They’re all enjoying themselves immensely, from James Marsden providing the cheekbones and jawline of the handsome cowboy hero, to Thandie Newton having the time of her life running the whorehouse as a tart with not just a heart, but a very complicated backstory.

And that’s the beauty of it.  The hosts play out storylines where they die, but then they are picked up by staff, tidied up, wiped and rebooted and sent out to play again in an endless cycle of suffering.  What if the memories start to come back?  Saying more isn’t possible without reeling off spoilers, so let’s instead focus on some questions that I always ask myself while watching.

Why do they have to be naked when they are getting serviced?

When a host is in for repair, they sit in glass rooms in the nude, while human technicians re-programme them using fancy tablets.  Not only is it unrealistic that the tech hooks up every time (the wifi never disconnects temperamentally) and nobody suggests turning it off and then turning it on again, but you’d think someone could afford the poor hosts something for their modesty.  Instead, their exposure further emphasises their abuse by the humans that run them.  Luckily, Newton’s character Maeve does finally get her own back in the second series, almost recognising the show’s surplus of wrinkly willies with one more wrinkly willy.

What’s up with the way the hosts die?

They’re robots, but they seem to have circulatory systems.  When shot with guns, blood spurts forth.  It’s not enough that they mimic humans in every way, they have this further facet of realism to provide.  Is the hardware designed so that injuries are categorised into fatal and non-fatal so the tech knows exactly when to shut down in order to maintain the storyline?  It’s kind of philosophical really.  Nevertheless, they’re back in the park the next day to do it all again.  They also never run out of battery, whereas my iPhone needs two charges a day just to keep up with Whatsapp.

Where is this place?

For the concept to be believed, we need to accept that somewhere there is a massive expanse of land that can be given over to leisure.  Our view of the outside world is, at first, limited, so we are as blinkered as the hosts to life beyond Westworld.  By the second season, characters suddenly start referring to an island, which curiously has never come up before, so I am wondering if they are now writing themselves out of a hole.

All of these niggles are just part and parcel of creating something so ambitious.  The scope of the show is as enormous as the park needs to be.  The first series takes it time letting you into Westworld and then works through twists that shatter your understanding.  Don’t get impatient, as repetition is used to show the farcical nature of the hosts’ lives.  I do admit that I have fallen asleep in almost every single episode, but don’t let that put you off.  It’s something that I have been watching late at night when I invariably start to reason that I can watch the last part with my eyes closed and then wake up to find it’s all over.  I’ve therefore had to re-watch some sequences a few times.  It’s better when you’re awake, or you won’t understand what’s going on.  The one time I didn’t fall asleep, I was ironing shirts at the same time as watching, so that kept me up luckily.

The complete first series is available on Sky Boxsets, while the second season is in the middle of premiering as I type.  This means I have gone from being able to hit up an episode each evening of series one to having to wait for my weekly instalment like some historical artefact.  Maybe this is how cowboys had to view boxsets before on-demand platforms existed.  I hope I remember what’s going on, but this enforced rationing should ensure more time to contemplate Westworld’s inner philosophical debate.  After all, what does define human consciousness?  I shall give it a good think while my eyes are glued mindlessly to the screen, trying to stay awake, watching naked people shoot each other on the telly.

Friends From College

What on earth is this?  A spin-off show from Friends?  No, it just has the name of that programme in its title.  This isn’t about six young people making their way through adult life in 90s New York City.  This is about six older people making their way through adult life in today’s New York City.

I didn’t even plan to watch it.  It all came about during that classic moment when you’re travelling through Japan with a friend (we’ve all done it, right?) and you’ve booked into a traditional hotel where you have to take your shoes off and they roll a futon out for you on the floor.  You’re in a tiny mountain town where the only thing to do is visit the thermal baths for awkward communal nudity (once you’ve hobbled between each one in wooden flip flops).  After you’ve dined exquisitely and drunk all the sake, how on earth do you entertain yourself for the evening when everything has closed down?  With Netflix of course.  Friends From College got watched as it was the only show one of us was prepared to watch again.

This is important for two reasons.  The first is that it came to me highly recommended, and here I am passing on that recommendation.  The second is that this show is best watched when you find yourself in front of the Netflix menu with a friend and you can’t agree what to select.  Maybe it’s a netflixandchill evening and you won’t be getting very far with it anyway, or maybe you’re just hanging out, but you can’t bear the thought of explaining what’s going on in series three of Bojack Horseman or you don’t want to sit through a second viewing of Stranger Things.  This show will fill that gap.  And then you can finish it off on your own in no time at all.

So that’s how to watch it, but what are you actually watching?  At the show’s heart are a group of friends who went to Harvard together.  They are now in their forties, but have remained friends, taking with them through the decades all of the emotional baggage you would expect.  In fact, episode one kicks off by contriving for two of the friends, married couple, Ethan and Lisa, to move from Chicago (where they have been living away from the friend group) back to New York.  The gang is finally getting back together!  The problem is: Ethan (played by a heroic Keegan-Michael Key) has been having a long-distance affair with Sam.  Now they’re in the same city, how will they keep their college romance secret from her husband and his wife?  Cue hilarity.

I appreciate that sounds sardonic, but the show really is a barrel of laughs.  I went into it thinking it was a comedy-drama, which means there are a few chuckles in between people crying and shouting and being serious.  But given the farcical nature of the characters’ exploits, their combination of physical comedy and things spiralling out of control, I was surprised to find myself in sitcom territory.  There is an episode where the friend group attends a wedding and I totally lost count of my laughs out loud.  In a sense, while the show is cruel in its portrayal of the well-educated professionals that form its cast, the writing’s strongest vitriol seems saved for the institution of marriage itself.  Nobody respects their vows because nobody can be honest.  It’s only Marianne, played by the incredible Jae Suh Park, who fully rejects the concept, screaming at her friends when she realises they have encouraged her lover to propose.  She’s happier with her rabbit, Anastasia.

Along with Marianne, outside of the love triangle, Nick and Max form the rest of the six-person friend group.  And it’s these characters that are most interesting, yet about whom we find out the least.  Tune in for Marianne’s amateur dramatic productions, including a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire with role-reversed casting (her rape of Blanche demands a ten out of ten for effort and conviction), but stay for further episodes where Max’s boyfriend Felix voices what we’re all thinking: this friend group is a terrible bunch of people.  With each episode at 30 minutes, it’s a bit like Girls: you always want a bit more of everyone (even though everyone is terrible).

We’ve all got a friend group like this.  We might not be forty, live in New York, or have gone to Harvard, but we all know there are people that hold us back.  Yet, we can’t get enough of them.  The fact that the characters are supposed to be intelligent (having studied at boffin box, Harvard) makes their bad choices all the funnier; they deserve what they get because they have acted so selfishly and should know better.  Miraculously, they remain likeable.  Each time they whine something about the friend group being to blame, a little bit of you wants to be in the friend group.

Sorry for saying friend group so much, but this is the term the show uses and it’s made me aware how hard it is to find a good alternative.  Gang?  Crew?  Brethren?  The English language really has let us down, so the show knowingly adopts this lame term for the social construct the characters use to organise the dregs of their adult lives.

Let’s pause for breath and conclude there is a lot to love about Friends From College.  Series two will come to us like an old friend, hopefully bringing more depth to the peripheral characters, and spending a bit more money on any special effects (as the season one finale completely undoes itself when something precious ends up in the swimming pool with graphics that look like a watercolour illustration).  Will it replace Friends in our hearts?  It doesn’t need to, and it’s unlikely it will ever form 80% of Comedy Central’s programming schedule, but it’s certainly up there as The One Where We Realise That Even People With Harvard Educations Are No Better At Adult Life Than We Are.

Empire

We need to talk about Empire.  But first, welcome to the 40^th blog post special, where we talk about Empire.  Because we need to.  It’s batshit.  It’s so crazy that I’ve actually stopped watching it, so I’m not sure how many series there are now.  No matter how many there are, it won’t be enough.  Please make more.  I’m not going to watch them though.  I can’t anymore.  If days were, on average, two hours longer, then I probably would.  Am I saying life’s too short for Empire?  Let’s read on and find out.

At the heart of Empire is the record label of Empire Records, founded by former criminal-turned-rapstar Lucious Lyon.  Played by a Terrence Howard who looks annoyed just to be there, the first series revolves around his impending death from a terminal disease and the associated conundrum of who should inherit his music empire.

There’s his wife, Cookie.  Nothing I write here can do her justice.  She’s played by the spectacular Taraji P. Henson with such abandon that you wonder the walls won’t come down in response to her undeniable sassiness.  Cookie has just emerged from 17 years in prison after taking a fall for her husband.  If that had happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to function following the institutionalisation, but she is draped in furs and tottering in heels within minutes, like the boss that she is.  She also doesn’t seem that cross with Lucious about it.  I mean, yeah, she’s livid, but only for a bit.  Two episodes later she’s trying to seduce him.

Then there are the Lyon sons.  There’s Jamal, the son that sings.  Another son raps; that’s Hakeem.  There’s surely no doubt that both only have their successful recording careers thanks to their dad, but that doesn’t really get investigated.  Instead, Hakeem tries to act the hard man while womanising to his heart’s content (which makes a scene where Cookie throws a broom at him as punishment all the more hilarious) and Jamal tries to earn his father’s respect, despite Lucious being iffy about his (mostly) homosexuality.  The latter gets a bit heavy-handed, so it’s best to focus on the silliness around Hakeem.  He also has a song called Drip Drop (lyrics: drip drop drip drippity drop), so if that doesn’t give you an idea of the show’s level, then there’s really no point carrying on.

Sadly, the eldest son, Andre, has no musical talent and instead runs the label’s accounts, which involves wearing lots of sharp suits and acting as a voice of reason, until a storyline about his mental health spirals out of control.  All of these, then, vie to inherit the Empire empire, which results in untold double-crossing within the family and beyond.  The fact there is more than one series should serve as a clue about what actually happens to the business.

Let’s be honest though, the biggest star is the music.  Thanks to Timbaland, most songs have the exact same beat, but I bloody love that beat so it doesn’t bother me.  The plot contrives to weave in multiple occasions per episode where the characters that are popstars perform to each other.  Jamal might be demoing something on the piano to Alicia Keys, and she might just join in.  Hakeem might be dropping his new joint at Leviticus, the club Lucious owns that serves as almost the only performance space.  Cookie might be overseeing a rehearsal that one of her family members needs to burst into with urgent news.  Luckily, most tracks are available on Spotify for me to relive these moments while on the 137 to Battersea Park.

Nevertheless, for the characters’ pop music careers to feel real, you’d need to hear the same songs hammered to death, just like real hits are on the radio.  But this would make the show unbearable, so each seems to be lost to posterity the moment it’s performed.  This is impressive, given they are all original songs.  These are my top three:

Never Let It Die

Jamal sings his heart out.  Things build and crescendo and then Hakeem rips in with some of his most aggressive rapping.  I am not fit to describe it so just listen here please.  It’s about the two brothers standing together against all the hardships in their lives, such as being given recording contracts by your father.

Chasing The Sky

This tear jerker shows that Empire can turn it all around and bring some real emotion to its music.  Just digging out this video has got me goose-bumping again.  It might be all hippity hop most of the time, but sometimes the cast put down the gold chains and get together as a family to harmonise about their problems.  We should all do this more.  Even Andre is allowed to nod along.

Adios

This track is sung by Tiana, one of Empire’s artists who comes and goes in the plot as suits, while the opening credits still roll.  The video (please excuse the Portuguese subtitles but we can all do with improving our lusophone abilities) shows exactly the scenario where choreography and dancers are all in place, only for the song never to be heard again.  Apart from in my earphones when I’m going round Clapham Sainsbury’s.  Another epic contribution from Tiana is Look But Don’t Touch, which features more award-winning lyrics: “Look at my body.  Look at my body.  Look at my body.  Look at my body.  Don’t I look sexy?  Don’t I look sexy?  Don’t I look sexy?  Don’t I look sexy?”  You don’t get that in The Get Down.

So, come for the music, stay for the plots.  But it’s the plots that I can’t be doing with.  I’ve mentioned the whiplash-inducing double-crossing.  All the forgiving and betraying again doesn’t really go anywhere.  My other bugbear is that each scene seems to get the most lavish set up: an excessive location, hundreds of outfits, extras etc.  But then the cast will only exchange a few lines before moving on to the next one.  I think I sometimes like to settle in and stay a while.  The jumping about creates a distance and it’s hard for any character to move beyond caricature in a fur coat.

We all know I love a trashy watch.  And why should a show be held back by pace, or story arc, or steadily building to a climax?  Why can’t it just be a hot mess of everything at once, as long as there’s some toe-tapping hip hop thrown in?  All I’m saying is that it absolutely can be.  I’m just not going to carry on watching it until I have more time on my hands.  I’ll be retired in 100 years so there’ll be loads to catch up on then.

The Man In The High Castle

I don’t want people thinking I only watch Netflix.  There’s also a password for Amazon Prime in the household, so I’ve been spreading my muck about when it comes to content streaming services.  People don’t seem to be as enamoured with Amazon.  It’s not made it into common parlance; nobody asks Tinder prospects about Amazon and chill.  Maybe we can’t move past the fact that it basically used to be an online bookshop.  Soon, it will control every aspect of our worthless lives, and, frankly, Amazon is welcome to them.  Their only content heritage lies in their acquisition and dissolving of Lovefilm, the postal DVD rental service that helped me pull together one of the most shameful film lists of all time (since my taste in cinema is as questionable as my predilections in telly).

Amazon’s big hitters, as far as my biased views are concerned, are Vikings and Mr Robot, but I’ve already done them.  So let’s do The Man In The High Castle.  I also haven’t finished anything new recently as I’ve been spending the last ten days clutching a Lonely Planet while strolling about Japan, like the middle-class cliché that I am, away from my beloved boxsets and sofa.  Now the karaoke caterwauling and onsen (thermal bath) modesty-shielding are over, I might as well use some downtime on my journey home for another one of these posts (because they’re not going to stop, by the way).  I’m speeding from Kyoto to Tokyo on a bullet train, before another train, a night in a pod, a plane, a stopover in Helsinki, another plane, three Tube lines and a bus till I am back in front of my favourite screen.  So I’ve got time to kill.

Is that enough about me?  Probably.  So, what’s The Man In The High Castle, then?  Well, there are two series and the opening credits make it seem like it’s going to be very strange.  And that’s because it is.  Based on a book by Philip K Dick, the drama unfolds in an alternative imagining of reality where World War II’s victors were the Axis countries, led by Captain Moustache himself.  That said, things are mostly set in the USA, as that’s where TV drama happens.  On the losing side, the States are split between the Japanese Empire on the west coast, and the Nazi Reich on the east, a bit like 1990s hip hop rivalry.  In between, there is a curious buffer zone which helps the plot along when people can’t be in the other two territories.  The US is basically a shit sandwich – suddenly this history doesn’t seem so alternative.

It takes a while for the storylines of a disparate bunch of folk on all sides to come together, but when they do, things get very tense.  I was about to see if I could type out a beginner’s guide, but let’s just take some examples.  There’s Obergruppenführer John Smith, played by Rufus Sewell, a classic Nazi with a heart-sy (does that work?  Probably not).  High up in NYC Nazi HQ, he has inner conflict about the regime’s view of his son, forcing him to choose whether his loyalties lie with his ideologies or his family.  Seeing his white-picket fence lifestyle harbouring and promoting racist ideology is not that much of an alternative reality from the Trumpism of today (oh right; I’ve already made this statement but just in case anyone isn’t keen on subtlety).  Over in San Francisco, there’s Robert Childan, played by Brennan Brown, an antiques dealer whose coping mechanism to the occupation is to suck up to the Japanese as much as possible.  His obsequiousness makes your skin crawl, but his severe anxiety makes him a highly identifiable character for an Asperger’s spectrum kid like myself.  Then, watching him get sucked unwillingly into the resistance movement is even more entertaining.

Ironic then that I should be writing this from Japan, the politest nation on earth.  The ticket inspector just bowed at the whole carriage in case we didn’t feel respected enough cruising along at 230km per hour in luxurious comfort (though me tapping away on the keyboard is hopefully ruining it for some people).  Tokyoites are so polite, that even when you’re a gormless tourist blocking their path while they rush around, they will go out of their way to get out of your way (and there’s a lot of getting out of ways in that place).  People in Osaka are a bit more prepared to shove but, either way, it’s hard to picture this nation ruling California under an iron thumb.  But it’s all about creative license and this has really just been another excuse to brag about my travels.

But, the question I hear you all asking is who is this man and what’s this high castle that he’s in?  Well, I can’t really work that bit out.  People in the show keep finding films that seem to show our reality (I think) of the war’s end.  Not clips of box office-gold Dunkirk featuring Harry Styles with wet-look hair, but old newsreels and that.  Suddenly, the drama is poised to take a potential shift into the paranormal – are the characters about to try and swap their reality?  I’m asking it as a question as I haven’t followed the plot as closely as I should, as the pace can be a little slow and people keep Whatsapping me.  In the background, a threat also builds from the deteriorating relationship between the world’s two superpowers, Japan and Germany, so nuclear war might arrive before anyone has a chance to get in the high castle and find this man with the films.  Keep up.

Ethically, I know questions have been asked about whether it’s right to imagine alternatives to history where the baddies won.  HBO and Amazon have both caused controversy with their reported development about shows where the American Civil War ends up with the shoe on the other foot.  It’s not a new phenomenon.  Robert Harris’s amazing book, Fatherland, uses a Nazi victory as the setting decades later for a story whose incredible narrative tension is only possible because of its framing.  There’s also SSGB by Len Deighton, a very dated spy classic, ripe with period misogyny, recently turned into a drama by the BBC where everyone mumbled their lines so much I had to give up.  With The Man In The High Castle, you’re rooting very much for the characters who represent opposition to the regimes in which they find themselves.  Even those who probably loved the evil at first are seen to be having second thoughts, so it doesn’t feel like Amazon is asking us to look at what we could have had in an attempt to cause a Nazi uprising.

Hopefully these ramblings have given some insight into the mystery and intrigue available to those who take up the challenge of watching The Man In The High Castle.  In fact, I’ve just read them back and they make hardly any sense at all, so it’s a tick in that box as far as I am concerned.  Most importantly, I’ve proved I don’t just watch Netflix.