How To Get Away With Murder

Netflix inertia (noun): To be unable to decide which boxset to start next, despite trawling through the various menus, watching all the trailers and soliciting friends’ recommendations.  Typically occurs during withdrawal from finishing a previous boxset.  Often leads to entire allocated boxset time being used up in failing to pick a new one, resulting in disappointment.

Picture the scene: I had just finished all of Teen Wolf (I know) and didn’t know what to start next.  Rather than risk the above condition, I made an impulse choice, basing it on some billboards I had seen in LA in 2014 and not much else.  I really wasn’t thinking.  Courtroom dramas have never really appealed as they just seem to be people shouting objection and judges banging gavels, all while my limited knowledge of the UK or US judicial system prevents me from really caring what’s going on.

But the premise of How To Get Away With Murder is sexier than that.  This is because the whole show is sexier than your average drama.  That doesn’t mean it’s all private parts and naughty swears.  It’s soap operatic in its approach to the (many) sex scenes: the bra always stays on, the covers are mostly up, or the camera doesn’t go below the waist (I really have checked carefully).  This isn’t Game Of Thrones with willies and boobs flapping about everywhere.  Although I could take some coarser language.  The biggest cuss you will hear is “You ungrateful little twit.”

Nevertheless, the tameness stops there.  The rest is pure wildness.  If your job is helping accused murderers avoid jail, whatever it takes, then, when you end up embroiled in a homicide yourself, you’re well placee to get off scot free.  And so we enter the world of Annalise Keating, defence attorney at large.  She’s also a college professor teaching criminal law.  She seems to have time to take clients’ cases and to teach classes, and all of this seems to happen somehow in the home she lives in, which is also a 24-hour office solution for her employees and interns.  I think I would feel weird knowing my boss sleeps upstairs.

Keating is so hard she eats her own shit, particularly in early episodes before the layers of her personality have been peeled back.  You know she eats her own shit as she permanently has an expression on her as if she’s looking for somewhere to be sick, which is an understandable consequence of such behaviour.  But this doesn’t do justice to Viola Davis’ masterful performance.  Keating is horrible, but it doesn’t take long till you’re unable to stop yourself from rooting for her.  Talking of pained faces, accompanying Keating’s sick face, we have Bonnie Longbottom, her long-suffering number two (as it were), who mopes about looking like she has just smelled a fart the whole time.  I’m glad I didn’t go into law.

These grown-ups, along with Frank the paralegal (who mostly is having an even worse time), are joined by five interns fresh from Keating’s new intake of students at Middleton University.  It’s easy to see them as a box tick in stock characters, but they really do come to life in their own right as the show progresses.  Their illustrious internships are maintained by working all hours supporting Keating with her various cases.  In this sense, How To Get Away With Murder is slightly episodic, taking on a new defendant, through to trial, with each instalment, giving the interns the chance to fight for Keating’s affections in the process.  But each series is structured around more gruesome body disposal, with our beloved lead characters caught up in their own stabby stabby slashy slashy.

These are foreshadowed with various flash forwards and flashbacks which don’t always hang together that well, but each series in itself is neatly resolved around all the big reveals.  And that is its power.  As always, first episodes get you well and truly sold in, but the mysteries pile up and up until you can’t resist one more instalment.  Before long, the various lies and secrets weave all the characters together to such an extent that nobody can trust anyone and even we as viewers lose all sight of the truth.

Everyone has something on everyone else, but somehow the interns’ friendships spring from hate, resulting in cracking crackling dialogue as they goad one another.  And back to the sex: almost everyone sleeps with everyone else.  Who’d have thought spending all hours at your professor’s house sifting through legal case files for no money would be so arousing?

Either way, there are two other things that make this show pure fantasy.  All the characters constantly answer their mobile phones.  They should learn by at least episode three that this only leads to bad things.  I stopped answering my phone at work in 2013.  Secondly, Keating’s kids are helped by policeman Nate Lahey in their legally ambiguous endeavours.  His top seems to fall off all the time and he is so chiselled that it must pain him to breathe as much as it pains me to shove too much cheese in my face while watching.  I won’t mention the plotline laziness where one character is simply able to hack things left, right and centre to help with their cases.

So it might not be perfect, but this holds the record of probably causing me the most audible gasps while watching.  Next time your thumb is hovering on the remote and you can’t quite commit to that next boxset to binge, try some US crime glamour (with bras on) and plump for this one.

Girls

Whenever a programme starts with that little HBO interstitial where three letters signifying Home Box Office slowly appear on a background of grey fuzz, you know you’re in for a touch of quality.  It’s like the royal seal on a box of Weetabix (although I wouldn’t say that was my favourite cereal).  This is the home of The Wire, True Blood and, er, Sesame Street.  Thus, Girls came with high expectations.  This was compounded by inordinate fuss during its 2012 launch.  During a couple of trips to New York that year, its four lead cast members’ faces were plastered on every bench and phone box I strode past, gormlessly imagining I was in a boxset of my own, what with all the sidewalks, yellow taxis and ironic exclamations of “I’m walkin’ here!” in my best Brooklyn accent.

The internet whinged about nudity and nepotism.  But no TV show has ever needed to please everyone.  Where did all this expectation and entitlement come from?  If anything, we were mirroring exactly the behaviour at the heart and soul of Girls: selfishness.  The four main characters are each so obsessed with themselves that their friendships crash and burn along with most other elements of their lives.  This is real life.  It’s cruel.  I’m writing this because I want people to read it.  You’re reading it in case you can spot that it isn’t any good.  So, when a show is all over the news, everyone has something to say about what’s wrong with it.  If it doesn’t tick all our boxes correctly, then we feel we have the right to be outraged.

But this is all in the past now.  Six seasons of Girls exist out there and if you haven’t watched it, you should.  Later series slipped out with far less attention and the narratives therefore had a chance to blossom and mature with less scrutiny.  After all, everything is someone’s truth (even Bromans).  So let’s talk about Lena Dunham’s truth at the time of its inception: young people coming to terms with adulthood, an unfriendly city that gives you just enough love to keep you in its palm, recalibrating your expectations of what your life will be, wanting to be loved.  Sound familiar?  The comedy and the drama, therefore, come from the characters’ journeys through these truths and the fact they are inevitably at odds with each other.

So who the fudge are these people?:

Hannah Horvath

Hannah is the main girl of Girls, around whom most other girls in the show orbit.  This isn’t due to her magnetic charisma, but because she is raw AF.  She can’t have nice things because she ruins them.  Just when you think she has achieved compassion with someone, she comes out with something that reveals it’s all about her, no matter what.  We all know a Hannah, and we all are a Hannah.  Also, her clothes fall off almost constantly and we just need to make our peace with that.

Marnie Michaels

Growing up impossibly handsome, I can identify with what it’s like to be judged first on breath-taking looks.  Note the irony.  Marnie’s self-obsession is compounded by how others treat her, from a mum who just wants to be her cool friend to men who can’t believe she’ll go near them.  It’s nice to be pretty, but it clearly just leaves you as lost as the rest of us.

Jessa

I’m not putting the surname as I never noticed it once across all 62 episodes, so I can’t be pasting it out of Wikipedia now.  I never really got the purpose of Jessa.  She seems like a lost child from The Osbournes with her transatlantic drawl.  She gives me accent whiplash.  Jessa acts as a filter for the other characters’ wilder acts, the result of lost inhibitions.  I’m torn with saying she’s either the least interesting or the most enigmatic.

Shoshanna Shapiro

By far my favourite girl.  Every line and every word that comes out of her mouth is so well observed that you never want it to end.  She’s the sensible one with actual drive, though she goes through the same challenges that force her to question everything about herself.  I can only imagine how much fun Shosh was for Zosia Mamet to play (an actress who is unrecognisable in Mad Men).  Series 5, episode 3 where we get to see Japan through Shosh’s eyes is one of the most mesmerising and magical things I have ever seen.  I’m smiling as I think about it.

Officially speaking, these four are the actual Girls the titles refers to (I’ve decided).  In addition, there’s a deep and rich supporting cast of awful relations and equally damaged male love interests.  One is now even the naughty Jedi (or something) in the new Star Wars films.  In Girls, Adam Sackler is played by Adam Driver as a fairly grumpy man-child, so it’s great to see him doing the same thing with a light sabre.  But no, I’m just jealous – he’s a very exciting actor and you feel every emotion along with him throughout his relationships with Hannah and others.

But if Shosh has the best lines of any girl in the show, it’s Elijah Krantz who has the best of any boy.  While the girls seem to delude themselves regarding the extent of their self-obsession, Elijah owns his without apology.  Yet, he and Hannah somehow make a shared STI (HPV) seem like a friendship goal.

How can a show about selfishness be gratifying viewing?  I’ve just told you, it has the HBO logo thing at the start.  Plus, it’s only thirty minutes, New York looks beautiful throughout, the soundtrack never misses, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s realistic and pure fantasy, and it doesn’t really do anything you expect it to.  That, and naked people.

The Voice UK

It’s never a good sign when a TV show’s name has to be suffixed with the name of the country it’s being shown in.  But such is the case with The Voice.  It’s our UK version, because there are literally hundreds of other ones going on all around the world, so we don’t want people getting confused and ending up watching The Wrong Voice (which sounds like an Aardman Aninmation).

Nevertheless, within a year of the Dutch format hitting airwaves in Europe, we welcomed series one to our BBC screens in 2012.  Now, series six is desperately trying to fill that Saturday night hole where X Factor used to be over on ITV.  Surely this is just the X Factor, though?  Of course not!  This is the X Factor, but with blindfolds.  Contestants cannot be seen at their first auditions as the judges’ chairs are all facing the wrong way, so they can only be assessed on their… voice.  Keeping up?  It’s a neat concept and actually the rest of the show is all downhill from this initial phase.  If one of the celebrity judges likes what they hear enough, they have a button to hit on their chair that turns them around to reveal who they’ve been listening to.  This adds great tension: will the singer totally nail it and get four chair spins, sending the crowd wild?  Or will a judge turn around and have to maintain a poker face when they see the contestant they’ve wasted a turn for is an absolute hogpig?

This whole part is best watched on fast forward, not least because its new home on ITV means there are more adverts than you could possibly use in your future purchasing decisions.  Naturally, each singer comes with their own sob story: I have a baby, I have to work in Topshop, Voldemort killed my parents.  Then, if multiple coaches turn, they have to pitch for that singer and it all descends into showing off.

The following stages don’t make much sense.  There are Battles, where two singers must duet, but then only one can actually go through.  This often becomes competitive caterwauling, adding a great dimension to love songs as the two singers give each other snake eye over romantic lyrics.  After that, the producers try and think up other ways to cull the field.  Sure enough, as a last resort, we resort to a public vote.  As we know, the British don’t have a great track record with democracy: Leon Jackson winning X Factor 2007, Tory governments, Brexit.  Therefore, The Voice UK has yet to produce a household name.  Stevie McCrorie, anyone?  What about Andrea Begley?  Thought not.

So why on earth am I watching?  Occasionally, just occasionally (and particularly in the 2013 series) there’ll be a performance that transforms a well-known song into something completely different and amazing.  Get your ears round this number here or indulge in the brilliance one of the Battles can produce here and here.  It’s even more reassuring when some old lounge singer limps through a boring old standard and all the judges fail to turn.

What of the judges?  Well, you’ve got Tom Jones looking confused.  So confused he missed a whole series while Boy George sobbed in his chair.  Otherwise, it’s been a home of the over-exposed: Jessie J, Rita Ora.  But the only interesting one is will.i.am – you just know he is looking for something bonkers.  I went to see the second series recorded with a good friend who worked on the casting and Will spent every gap in filming glued to his smartphone.  But then, there was also a lady in the front row waving her crutch about in time to the music, so there was a lot to take in.

The good news is that I was born tone deaf, so I’ll never be among the 310 (so far) winners of different versions of The Voice around the world.  But I can just imagine my VT playing out as I approach the blind audition from backstage: “I watch a lot of bad TV and then write about it in a blog.  But I want more from life!”

Celebrity Big Brother

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Borehamwood, but it’s not worth it.  I’m from a crap town myself so I can say these things.  I have, however, found myself there before, and both times it was due to Big Brother.  Can you believe that the largest commercial operation (probably) in this part of North London is the Big Brother studio?  And every January and summer it is descended upon by a raft of household names (I didn’t say ALL households), each desperately hoping to get a bit of work in showbiz by taking part in Celebrity Big Brother.

Given the show’s home has been Channel 5 since 2011, contestants’ chances of getting back on the telly after a series ends are actually higher than ever.  Hold tight for the inevitable: a heavily promoted four-episode run of Posh Former Politician And Working Class Hero Go Dog Grooming or a three-part special of Disgraced Ex-Popstar And Washed-Up Child Actor Test Lilos.

But if we go right back to 2001, we’ll find a much more tasteful approach to Celebrity Big Brother, designed to be more palatable to the broader tastes and narrower minds of middle England.  There were only six celebrities (and you had heard of them all).  It was for charity.  It was co-broadcast on Channel 4 and the BBC.  The BBC!  And it only lasted ten days.  Today’s celebrity housemates have to stick things out for up to 30 days, though lest we forget that beloved Vanessa Feltz did manage to have a breakdown in series one after only a handful of days.

Sixteen years later, it must be fair to say that it’s really only a hard core of lifelong fans still tuning in, as series 21 hits our screens on a nightly basis.  You won’t be surprised, given my love of trash TV like Bromans and Geordie Shore, that I count myself firmly among this number.  Celebrity or normal, I will take Big Brother in any guise.  With the normos, their desperation for attention drives them to be locked into the house for days on end.  But for the celebrities, it is often their desperation for attention they have had and then lost that drives them, which leads to even more compelling viewing.  It’s not even important if you’ve ever heard of them.  Whether they’re a runner up from some awful US dating show, or they were in that sitcom from the seventies that your parents remember watching, they all end up completely sucked into the highly pressured communities of tension that take shape in the house with each series.

There’s always excitement as they go in.  Who will it be?  What will they say?  Will they get booed?  Will they fall over in the rain?  Why does everyone in the crowd look a bit overweight?  I’ve taken to watching the insertion broadcast on fast forward, as it’s often incredibly awkward.  It’s the first real episode that gives you the insights on the entrances, as the overnight editing that takes place allows the important snippets to be properly sound-mixed and thus begins our journey.  Before long, you’ve forgotten all you knew and assumed about these people and it’s all about what they say and do in the house.  For me, this is perfect entertainment.  While the environment and circumstance are utterly utterly fake, the relationships and interactions become real.  It’s not a soap opera whose script has been generated by cliché bingo, it’s real people struggling to articulate themselves and control their emotions.  Drink it in!

Earlier series were won by whoever was the biggest name going in, such as Julian Clary or Ulrika Jonsson.  2014 was a particularly tough year when the two series were won by the most awful individuals: Jim Davidson and Gary Busey.  But now, with just the biggest fans still watching, it’s whoever has the most harrowing journey in the house that is rightfully rewarded.

So, let’s take a look at my favourite moments from these 21 glorious series.

Series 7 Alex Reid kick-boxes a snowman

It snowed heavily and the housemates made a snowman (see, the famous are just like us, aren’t they?).  Then Alex Reid went out and kick-boxed it into a pile of nothing, all while make weird breathing noises that proved he really knew what he was doing about martial arts.  The editing drew this out into a long segment and it took on a strangely poetic quality.  Fantastic.

Series 18 James Whale pours coffee on Stephen Bear

Bear was an absolute nightmare to live with, antagonising everyone for his own amusement.  Yet it was very gratifying to see how riled up he got right-wing slop-jock Whale.  Sinking to Bear’s level, he slowly emptied a bag of ground coffee over the lad’s head.  It escalated quickly and you could just feel the violence in the air, but Bear was somehow savvy enough to know that underreacting was his best strategy.

Series 3 Jackie Stallone enters the house

She waltzes in and is first spotted by her ex-daughter in lax, Brigitte Nielsen.  Understandably, Brigitte screams Jackie’s name in surprise, to which Jackie replies, in a broad New York accent: “Yeah, Jackie.”  Try shouting it when you next enter a room full of people and you’ll be amazed at the respect you gain.

Series 3 Kenzie is dressed as an egg

Kenzie used to be Blazin Squad, but he isn’t Marcel.  I forget the task, but Kenzie had to spend a considerable amount of time in a giant, encumbering egg costume.  He wouldn’t fit in something like that these days now he lives in a gym, but he was still a wee thing in 2005.  Lisa I’Anson was complaining about her Bo Peep costume.  Deadpan, Kenzie was heard comparing his fate, muttering under his breath about having the raw end of the deal.

Series 4 George Galloway pretends to be a cat for Rula Lenska

I don’t want to be predictable, but this cannot be beaten.  My skin still crawls at these two adults role-playing like children.  Just think about George mewing and licking himself for a moment.  Go on.  The standout moment was how he suggested it to her: “Do you want me to be… the cat?”  That pause, bookended by his Scottish brogue and the subdued volume, gave the whole scenario an air of specialist porn (that I have never seen).

Series 3 Lisa I’Anson calls John McCririck a fox

McCririck is a vile bigot, with high expectations of how women should look.  However, these expectations didn’t extend to his own body.  Undergoing a quick change in the Celebrity Big Brother bedroom, shuffling around to get some trousers on in his saggy, baggy whities, he showed the effects of his lifestyle choices.  Lisa I’Anson (who I can’t believe has come up twice in my best moments) ironically catcalled him, and, of all the words, picked “fox” in order to respond to the sight confronting her.  Cruel, but hilarious.  Sometimes, when I need cheering up, I think of this moment, and it always works.

There are many more, including Jedward, the Austin Armacost and James Hill bromance, Speidi and Kim “I wouldn't shit on you if you were on fire” Woodburn.

The current series has taken a worthier approach.  This isn’t going to be a laugh-and-point exercise at the expense of fame’s failures.  We are celebrating the year of the woman.  Such endeavours have attracted the likes of Ann Widdecombe (who refuses to have any fun) and Rachel Johnson (who I once had tea and cucumber sandwiches with at the offices of The Lady).  At first, the girls were alone, but they have since popped some men in.  So now, I am watching Ginuwine (whose song, Pony, my sister and I innocently sang along to as children) sitting on the same sofa as Ann Widdecombe.

This is the beauty of the show.  But so much for the year of the woman, this has become the year of gender: the casting has thrown together a male-identifying drag queen and a fully transitioned woman who was born a man.  Cue fascinating discourse as to whether their individual gender expressions are at odds with each other.  Hopefully nobody is surprised that men have taken over from women the conversation about women.  What is surprising however, is that this really all does happen in Borehamwood.

Black Mirror

Times are bleak.  It’s wet.  It’s cold.  There’s nothing to look forward to.  We have to go back to work.  We have to leave Europe.  Trump.  Why, then, would Netflix choose this time of year to unleash a fourth season of Black Mirror on us?  I, for one, am feeling particularly vulnerable, following a family Christmas where my thirty-two-year-old self reverted to a moody teenager under my retired parents’ roof.  Have I gained no maturity in the fourteen years since I left home?!  No.  No, I haven’t.  But maybe rock bottom is a great place from which to stare into bleak oblivion.  And that is precisely what Charlie Brooker’s suite of near-future dystopias offers us: a reason to be hopeless.

Brooker himself is a terrifying character.  His rants on the wonderful Screenwipe and Newswipe carefully detail each side of various political and social arguments before proving that both sides are stupid (a bit like a South Park episode).  His Guardian features make sparkling reading.  I rode out a notice period at my first (awful) job simply reading through the entire back catalogue of his Screen Burn column, cleverly minimised to a tiny square on my screen so the fusty old partners had no idea what I was only pretending to work.  As a child that was probably too young, I even cherished his TVGoHome book (based on the popular website from before I had internet) which was a parody of a TV guide – the comedy literally wrote itself.  Then he did Dead Set, bringing together two of my favourite things: reality TV and zombies.  Before I descend into sycophancy, let’s just say I subscribe to Brookerology.

But it is indeed a dark, dark mind that brings us Black Mirror.  The first point to commend is that each episode stands alone.  It’s that uncomfortable experience that comes with starting a new boxset: who on earth is that?  What the fudge is going on?  Am I going to enjoy it?  Well, get used to it, because that is every episode of Black Mirror.  And while your brain is working this all out, there’s also a new interpretation of our soon-to-be future to get to grips with.  To generalise brutally, most episodes take a small life-changing technological invention and show how it revolutionises our behaviour.  This could be an implant that records all your memories for future reference, such as in The Entire History Of You, or the robot guard dogs of Metalhead.  A lot of this stuff tends to revolve around applying some sort of device to your temple.  So far, so sci-fi (but not geeky, everybody).  But yes, we were commending each episode standing alone, weren’t we?  Whereas your average boxset just needs to set everything up just the once, Black Mirror has to reel you in and hold you with something new over and over.  And it manages to do this very skilfully.  You can feel immersed in a brave new society within just a couple of minutes.

The downside is that this, combined with the stark imaginings of our future, makes for relentless viewing.  Therefore, this is not a series you can binge on like so many Quality Streets.  Try and ration them out, maybe one a week.  Don’t do it on Sunday nights, though, or you won’t want to return to your mind-numbing job on Monday.  Pick a time when you feel quite resilient.

This is because things go wrong.  Whatever the episode’s premise, whatever the technological tweak to reality, things will go wrong.  And then they will go wronger and wronger and you will wonder what possessed you to subject yourself to such entertainment.  You could have been watching old Friends, but no, you wanted to chime in with the office Netflix discussion.

If there were a gun to my head making me criticise the show, then it would be that this awry-going has become slightly formulaic.  You could almost break an instalment down into 10% set up new world, 20% things go a bit wrong, 60% things go very wrong and then 10% bloody hell.  But it’s a formula that works.  As with every advancement in our standard of living, there are always consequences we never dreamed of.  I swear my thumb bone is now as brittle as chalk due to iPhone overuse.  I don’t want to use an Alexa as I can’t imagine sitting there in front of housemates and asking it how to cure a runny tummy.

Finally, the show’s progression is curiously from a British thing, into an American thing.  From a Channel 4 property in series one and two, Netflix swiped the rights for what has become the third and fourth series.  As with our beloved The Office, we feel this is a marker of something being good: “Oooh they’ve made an American version; this must be quality.”  This isn’t always accurate, but it works here.  In addition, times may be bleak here, but they’re also bleak in America, so it makes perfect sense.