Riverdale

If you’ve ever watched Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina on Netflix then it’s probable that, like me, you’ve been followed around by Riverdale when browsing for the next boxset to jump into.  There it is, in the Popular On Netflix list, in the Trending Now list, or in the Because You Watched Sabrina list.  It even came up in my Because You Watched Making A Murderer list.  Just give in to it.  I did.  There’s no point delaying the inevitable: we’re all weak.  While Sabrina’s characters, residing in nearby Greendale, refer liberally to Riverdale (joining both shows’ origins in their Archie Comics roots), it wasn’t until I journeyed there myself that I uncovered something truly entertaining.  Episode one makes every effort to hook you in with such force that you wonder how subsequent instalments will ever maintain the level: there’s mystery, there’s style and atmosphere, there are throwaway lines so witty that you can practically feel the writers air-punching as they thought of them.  Warning: some of the dialogue sparkle does die away as the drama progresses, but it’s taken over by the endless mystery and ever more stylised atmosphere of Riverdale town, until the place and its inhabitants take on an alternative universe quality, offering just the escapism you might need from your pointless life.

The trick is to immerse yourself in Riverdale and accept it for the nonsense that it is.  The first barrier is the hair dye.  Lead character, Archie, is supposed to be ginger, but apparently they couldn’t find enough male actors with red hair.  KJ Apa, naturally dark-haired, was hired for other reasons, it seems, as the poor lad’s clothes are constantly getting torn off to prove to everyone he has done all his sit ups (and to distract you from his dodgy barnet).  If this makes you wonder how much steaminess the show purveys, then I can tell you that there is romping aplenty.  All the Riverdale High Schoolers are pretty active in this department, as are some of the parents.  It’s not really a family show, but the line is drawn at the female nipple, with below the waist out of bounds.  Sex and relationships are a big part of the plots, but it seems there’s no need to be explicit.  For one thing, it would look out of place next to Riverdale’s drug culture.  This idyllic forest town eschews your standard class As and Bs for its own brands of narcotics.  Try sounding dangerous when you’re talking about jingle jangle, which basically looks like pixie sticks.  Or if you want the harder stuff, there are fizzle rocks.  We’re shown stabbings and shootings over and over, and a growing body count is paraded in front of our eyeballs, but illicit substances take on a Wonka-esque whimsy that’s just part of the Riverdale experience.

But the weird names don’t stop there.  Archie’s best friend is referred to as Jughead by the rest of the cast, all while they manage to keep straight faces.  His sister is called Jellybean.  Their dad is FP.  There’s Midge and Moose.  You just get used to it, but I have to mention that Jughead’s hat is perhaps the most displeasing thing in the whole show.  I can only tolerate its tattiness and contrived kookiness because it seems to be in homage to the original Archie Comics characters, with Wikipedia reliably informing me that they first appeared in 1941.  Americana nostalgia frames a lot of the action: the teens consume thousands of calories of milkshakes in Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe (the ur-diner of diners, but with a weird name), Riverdale High is all letterman jackets and cheerleaders, gang members are identified by their leather jackets.

The gangs!  Alongside the jingle jangle, Riverdale gang culture has also been through the PG process.  The South Side Serpents (the South Side is the bad part of town: there is litter and graffiti there) drink in a dive bar and ride motorbikes, but they also do some sterling work in the community and just want to live their trailer park lives while clad in leather no matter the weather.  That said, they’ll pack some punches whenever the Ghoulies come to town to push fizzle rocks, resulting in dialogue that feels more CBeebies than The Wire.  I’ve decided they’re the male equivalents of tarts with hearts.  One is even called Sweet Pea (see earlier snarky comment about Riverdale nomenclature).

What actually happens, then?  Each series revolves around a mystery, from Jason Blossom’s death, to the Black Hood, who lingers unwelcome into season three’s Gryphons and Gargoyles boardgame-based shenanigans (no idea why it’s not spelled griffins, but think Cones of Dunshire from the amazing Parks & Recreation, only with more death and fewer cones).  Archie and Jughead form a central quartet with Betty Cooper (ornamental collars) and Veronica Lodge (pearls), supported by a handful of other teens who tend to get the better lines whilst coming and going.  The mysteries actually feel less interesting than the day-to-day relationships between the cast, but they contrive hard to drive tension between the kids and their parents.  In a stroke of self-referencing, the parents, who are of course as photogenic as their beautiful offspring, are played by high school movie royalty.  Step into shot Luke Perry, Skeey Ulrich and Molly Ringwald.  This reference loop almost inverts itself in a throwback episode when the young actors play their parents’ characters in a The Breakfast Club-inspired exposition of the Gryphons and Gargoyles’ origins.  It doesn’t matter, as the parents’ behaviour is often much more puerile than any of their children’s, partly because the writers aren’t shy of wild u-turns to drive the plot forward.

So, take a trip with me to Riverdale.  It’s not like the real world.  I’m literally going to coin an adjective here: Riverdalian.  It’s Riverdalian not to swear or say the real names of drugs or to be called Fangs.  It’s Riverdalian almost never to be seen in class at school because you’re too busy solving mysteries.  It’s Riverdalian that the episode where the students put on a musical (of Carrie) is a musical episode itself.  It’s Riverdalian to be melodramatic, far-fetched, heavily stylised and aesthetically cast.  But then it’s also Riverdalian to indulge in this guilty pleasure and not to be sorry about it.

Miranda

Sometimes, you need to make sure you have enough silliness in your life.  I don’t mean harmful silliness, like dragging the UK out of the EU because economically inactive pensioners are scared of foreigners, or panicking about a handful of migrants crossing the Channel to be absorbed into a wealthy country of 66 million people.  I mean fun silliness, like being unable to resist the urge to gallop instead of walk down long empty corridors, or pulling rude faces at your colleagues when you spot them bored in glass meeting rooms.  You can probably tell that the silliness evident in these posts is also embraced in most areas of my life.  One environment that gets more than its fair share of my own personal brand of silliness is the office.  There’s something about such a grey, grown-up, corporate environment, all furious typing and professional profile raising, that makes me want to respond with laughter.  After a feral childhood, spending adult daytimes for the last 11 years in the UV-deficient glow of computer screens could have been crushing.  But, if enough silliness happens, the subsequent belly laughs are enough to stave off the threat of submitting to being a full worker drone.  Sadly, one of my closest partners in silliness recently fled our office home after many years of laughing till we cried.  I therefore found myself with a silliness deficit in my day-to-day existence.

But there, nestling among multimillion dollar new content on Netflix was the old BBC sitcom Miranda.  I was helpless, working through all three series in no time at all.  I hereby announce a new genre of TV: comfort telly.  In my friend’s absence, and in the face of other things in life I would describe as bad (Brexit, gluten, people who sit behind me on the bus at 6.30am after smoking so many cigarettes that I am unwillingly bathed in their tobacco-riddled breath, misplaced apostrophes throughout the media industry), watching Miranda brought cheer to some dreary January evenings.

Most importantly of all, I have to stress that my friend is nothing like Miranda.  They are polar opposites.  She has a high-powered career for which she has to wear roll necks, whereas Miranda pootles about in a joke shop she set up with some inheritance.  My friend has a top-notch husband, whereas the main joke about Miranda is her disastrous love life.  While Miranda’s idea of a good meal is to catch crumbled chocolate biscuits in her mouth while using a hair dryer to blow them off the table (biscuit blizzard), my friend has promised me one of her famous weekend roasts (not a euphemism).  I could go on.  The main point is that their only common trait is their love of silliness.

We’ll go into the exact ingredients of this silliness, but we should dwell for a moment on the polarising nature of this sitcom.  Most people’s responses to my evangelising about the joys of rewatching Miranda have been wailing indignation that I could subject myself to something so unfunny.  I’m happy to be told I’ve got bad taste, but I think Miranda’s perceived unfunniness is more complex than that.  I’ll grant you that you can see some punchlines coming a mile off, but it’s that predictable payoff, with Miranda Hart’s silly charm, that can be so reassuring and comforting.  The show came about at a time when comedy was moving away from the obvious sitcom (like The Office).  Conversely, Miranda embraced the format, adding to the presence of the live studio audience by ending each episode with the cast waving at the camera and dancing before their fans like an amateur village panto.  Two words: such fun.

Right then, here’s how Miranda is silly:

She is a show off

One of our hero’s celebrated foibles is her awkwardness in social situations, but her response to sensing a faux-pas is to behave worse and worse until the awkwardness is exacerbated beyond the human ability to cringe any further.  If a throwaway sentence stumbles into a song lyric, she’ll launch into the next verse and chorus, veering between shyness and attention seeking.

She looks at the camera

Perhaps the biggest sitcom crime of all, but the one that makes me laugh the most.  The knowing glances she shares with us when her mother, Penny, is being awful, or when she is quite pleased with how she has handled something elevate a standard joke to something much more hilarious.

She enjoys how words sound

Cusp.  Thrust.  Moist.  English has a vocabulary in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s inevitable that some of those words are more fun on the tongue than others.  Miranda will pause mid-argument to enjoy the repetition of such words, always finishing with a final flourish of saying it directly to the audience via the classic look to the camera.  Cue laughter from me which I am not sorry about.

She falls over

I laugh every time because it’s silly.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but this is my level.  I also crack a smile every time she pushes best friend, Stevie, off a stool.

She breaks wind

See previous comment about my level of humour.  It’s not so much the parp that gets me, but her surprise at having done it.

She is posh

Posh people are silly – you just have to hang around a Waitrose to realise this.  And their expectations of each other are even sillier.  Miranda might never be able to escape her boarding school days, but it makes for a pleasant stream of nonsense.

She is from Surrey

I suppose this is linked to the above, but this county really is ridiculous, and I therefore glory in any lampooning of it in popular media.  Being so close to London (making Surrey the patio of England to Kent’s garden) the million people that occupy its four-bedroom homes are often overlooked in culture, but their silliness deserves the spotlight.

But her friends are sillier

We’ve mentioned Stevie, owner of the allure, the Heather Small cut-out and very diminutive proportions.  There’s soulmate Gary, whose own stupid inability to commit to Miranda contrives to give the various series some dramatic tension, as it can’t be all about falling over and accidentally farting.  Sally Phillips gets the best lines as Tilly, the boarding school pal who peppers her passive aggression by spicing up all her words with suffix flourishes that nobody needs, declaring things tremendulant or exclaiming about major disaster and his friend, colonel cock-up, all while demanding others “bear with” when reviewing text messages or ending conversation by declaring “c’est fini.”  See, if you had someone to make eyes at now, you’d be doing it.  So much of Miranda’s silliness comes from laughing at her friends’ behaviour.

So, hello to you, Miranda Hart, and kind regards thank you caller (this is a reference to in-show dialogue, not me padding out the words).  You are a champion of the many, those of us who know our real life can’t be filtered, so we might as well embrace its silliness.  I’ve loved her ever since I saw her cameo in Nighty Night (not a euphemism again) and having her back in my life as a vegeta-pal has been just the dose of silliness I have needed.

Come Dine With Me

I’m on the cusp of being able to buy my first ever home.  This doesn’t mean I have been squatting in a crisp packet this whole time, but that I have spent the last 11 years renting and sharing (and huge apologies to all former and current flatmates; I really am dreadful).  I’m around 18 months behind on my own personal life schedule with this purchase (let’s blame Brexit) but the fact that it’s so close is half-terrifying, half-spectacular.  I even found myself looking at massive tellies in John Lewis today, even though my parents have saved me one from a dead neighbour and are keeping it under their bed for me (the telly, not the neighbour).  As a future home owner, what I plan to do, and what I have never really done in any of my rentals, is to have friends round for dinner.  I have a list of all the dear chums I need to pay back for the hospitality: all their wine I’ve drunk, all their main courses I’ve not really chewed but swallowed down like a gannet due to hunger and hanger mismanagement, all the puddings I’ve spooned in my face because excess fat and sugar don’t count if you’re in someone else’s house and have already surpassed your recommended daily allowance of alcohol units.  I’m not going to be held back by the fact I can only really make a few things and have little to no interest in how food tastes most of the time.  I just hope they all like porridge.  I do.

Anyway, this has led me to consider Come Dine With Me for this week’s self-absorbed few hundred words that I’m hoping some people will want to read.  It’s a show that’s about having people round to dinner as a competitive sport.  And please note, these aren’t friends you’re having round, these are strangers that the casting team have decided will make good telly.  Each guest scores their host, before the tables turn on the following night.  Once everyone has had a chance to arrange Parma ham on slices of melon and to slag off each other’s desserts for being too sweet, the highest-scoring contestant is revealed and richly rewarded with a wad of cash and some intensely petty envy.  TV gold, I’m sure you’ll agree.  In the UK, ITV Studios produce this show for Channel 4, which is a fun fact for your next dinner party (you’re welcome).  It’s also, the last time I checked, the most syndicated TV format in the world, currently showing in, I don’t know, a million territories or something.

But now that the serious journalism bit is out the way, let me tell you what things I like about the show the most:

The terrible characters

You need an array of personality defects to want to be on this programme.  There are the obvious ones, such as over-confidence in your cooking abilities, a strong conviction that your approach to hosting is world class and a compulsive need to be the centre of attention.  But this is where the genius of the casting comes in.  That annoying loudmouth in your office whose voice you can’t block out?  They’d be in.  The person in your family that seems to create awkwardness every Christmas?  Them too.  That schoolfriend who’s always showing off about their unorthodox lifestyle choices?  Of course.  Oh wait, I’m just describing myself now.

The irreverent voiceover

I believe strongly that irreverence is the best way to treat most things (though this does mean I have lost the ability to know if I am being sarcastic or not, which is challenging).  The narrator of Come Dine With Me takes this to another level, though, as he clearly thinks that every contestant is an absolute bellend.  It’s probably what inspired the mickey-taking of Love Island’s voiceover, and we all know what joy that brings us.  The hosting contestants often genuinely believe they are culinarily gifted food professionals, so when they talk us through their pedestrian recipes, they are ripe for ribbing.  The guest contestants behave like seasoned restaurant critics, often directly to their hosts’ faces, so it’s a gratifying shared joke for us viewers to hear the voiceover take them down a peg or two.  I can guarantee you laughing out loud here.

People’s awful homes

When you watch a cookery programme normally, things take place in some sort of deliciously artisanal kitchen with rustic herbs a-dangling and distressed work surfaces a-glistening and clutter-free.  But if you delve inside the actual average British kitchen, it’s a bad-taste buffet of mismatching cutlery, damp patches and novelty teacups hanging limply from mug-trees.  Behind closed doors, that dodgy chopping board or the limescale visible on the side of your kettle are just part of what makes it a normal home.  But on camera, it always looks like the site of a natural disaster.  You expect to hear Michael Buerk asking you to give just £5 a month so these people can afford some decent kitchenware.  But then I don’t know if the people that already have quite nice stuff are actually worse, because they seem to have no taste in the first place.  They arrange rocket salads on square plates, or use wine glasses the size of church fonts, or have blingy knives and forks.

I didn’t mean to slag it all off so much, as it does make for wonderful entertainment.  Being rooted in reality, however, does take away any aspirational edge (for most people – for me, having friends to dinner is still only an aspiration).  Therefore, watching it, despite the titters, can end up accompanied by the suspicion you could be doing something better with your time.  Episodes either last an hour and cover a group of four contestants with each dinner party in a fifteen-minute segment, or you can get strips of five episodes, where each lasts half an hour and covers a different event, with more focus on the prep.  The latter has a curious habit of drawing you in for, quite literally, just one more episode, if you ever stumble across it on More4 of a Sunday afternoon.  We’re running out of time to mention the celebrity specials, the fact that contestants also snoop around each other’s homes, or the story that some colleagues once recreated the format in real life, which involved one of them getting up repeatedly throughout the night to moisten their pulled pork, and still not winning.  My final nugget though, which I once read on a trashy website, is that each episode takes hours to film, what with all the pieces to camera, so the hosts end up serving desserts at 3am and the guests end up sloshed off their faces.  Maybe this explains some of the behaviour.

Once in a while, then, it’s ok to treat yourself (in the style of Parks & Recreation) and wallow on your sofa, scoffing at these real people, their homes, their food and their manners, safe in the knowledge they can’t see you, where you live, what you eat, or how you treat your guests.

Orange Is The New Black

Right, what’s the Netflixiest show you can possibly think of?  Chances are, whether or not you have the streaming service in your home, nagging away at you until it chains you hopelessly to the sofa, that Orange Is The New Black is near the top of that list.  Sure, there’s House Of Cards, and you’ve got Stranger Things.  You might even love the often-overlooked The Get Down (I do).  But Netflix’s most watched original series is that one with orange jumpsuits about some women in a prison or something along those lines.  I can hardly become some sort of boxset streaming guru, then, if I haven’t watched this one.  So, a few months back, I took myself down to Litchfield Penitentiary and freely surrendered my viewing liberty to the minimum-security women’s prison there.  I’m now out the other side, six series down, with a seventh and final season due in 2019.  I’ve never been in a real prison, but I loved every minute of this one.

I’ve wanged on before about certain things that make human drama that extra bit tenser – I’m calling these my trigger themes.  You know, things like having a zombie apocalypse as a backdrop as in The Walking Dead, which means your favourite characters can die at any minute.  Or setting things in a dystopian future, like the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale.  All along, I’d forgotten that prison was one of the best trigger themes ever given to a drama series.  You’ve got the artificial and unnatural environment of cells and wings, an entrenched division of characters into prisoners, guards and those left behind, and the heightened stakes that come when prisoners dream of their freedom.  Orange Is The New Black has all of this and a load more stuff you won’t be expecting.  I was hooked in from episode one and happily threw the key away until I had watched every instalment.

Everything is packaged up for your middle-class sensitivities, as we enter the world of the prison through the eyes Piper Chapman, an educated New Yorker with a wealthy background who is self-surrendering on drugs charges trawled up from a misspent youth.  She wrinkles her nose at the showers, accidentally insults the food to the main chef and expects the guards to be reasonable when it comes to listening to her many complaints.  Piper is a good in to the prison world, but in later series she ends up being one of the least interesting things about it.  Once her fiancé, best friend and parents fall away, the show no longer needs its blonde, white leading lady.  Litchfield is divided racially into prison families: Hispanic, black and white, with a splinter group shooting off the whites for the methheads, who you can identify from their bad teeth.  While racial tension shouldn’t be boiled down to a plot device for our own entertainment, Orange Is The New Black simply reflects a prison predisposition for inmates to categorise themselves in this way, like the segregation discussion in Dear White People.

What’s surprising is the limited interaction between these groups.  Some of the cast go for series only having scenes with their own prison families.  While the main white family (finally) embraces Piper under the matriarchal protection of fiery Red, you’ll want to hang out in the black family for bigger belly laughs, or in the Latina family for the wittiest bilingual dialogue.  I found myself getting excited every time a scene began for the Latina characters, especially if my favourite Litchfielder of all was there: Mendoza.  Played by Selenis Leyva (who, like all the cast, is unrecognisable in her IMDB headshot), Gloria Mendoza is capable of a wonderful combination of bad-assery, smart-mouthery, mother-hennery and unadulterated sass that my main feedback would have been to make the whole damn thing about her (and maybe Aleida).  She could push Piper down the stairs just by glaring at her (fingers crossed for season seven).  Next time you’re doing housework, imagine her shouting at you and see if you don’t get the job done in half the time.

Let’s run through how six series’ worth of content can be extracted from just one place and yet remain darkly comic and deeply dramatic (the show, that is, not what I’ve written about it; though, maybe…):

Season one

This is our Philosopher’s Stone to Litchfield’s underfunded and corrupt Hogwarts.  Piper walks stubbornly and headfirst into all sorts of unnecessary drama.  Keep an eye out for, basically, everyone, as even that incidental crazy hairy lady in the cubicle becomes a pivotal character over time.  Back on planet Piper, though, where we are forced to go, she realises the ex-lover who got her in the drugs trouble in the first place, Alex, is locked in with her.  Cue LOLs as Piper insists she is engaged to a man (Jason Biggs in various sweaters).  A dramatic arc around naughty guard Mendez supplying drugs to addicts and supplying his tool to other inmates in broom cupboards culminates in a sort-of Christmas special with surprising singing...  In all of this, you find charm and humour, but you’re first exposed to the harsh reality of the show’s treatment of its characters – they are never more than a hair’s breadth from a life of disaster.

Season two

Thinking you’ve got used to things, the first episode disorientates you horribly, as we follow a bewildered Piper around what seems like the whole federal prison system – truly grim.  Back at Litchfield, a new villain, the slimy Vee, is back behind bars, stirring up old tensions and manipulating the black family to grim effect.  We pootle through a lot of the other surrounding characters, but the finale serves up perfect justice.

Season three

Throughout this series, Litchfield is threatened with closure until a private firm buys up the operation.  Conditions deteriorate before and after and the inmates’ growing frustration is palpable.  Piper (oh god, it’s all about her) grows into a role as a bit of a hardass, taking advantage of the prison knicker-sewing industry to set up a little enterprise for herself, despite good friend Nicky Nichols (the wild Natasha Lyonne) getting carted off to max unjustly.

Season four

MCC, the new private owners of Litchfield, double inmate numbers, with bunkbeds being the only infrastructure adjustment.  This brings in a host of new characters, all while we’re still uncovering those that have been there the whole time, such as the Dominican faction and the older ladies.  Litchfield also gets its first celebrity inmate, but, overall, the new guards are too inexperienced and feckless to ensure prisoner safety.  All hell breaks loose.

Season five

This whole series revolves around a riot that bursts out in response to the guard brutality that will cost you one of your favourite characters.  While some prisoners run amok, others stay out of trouble.  Highlights include the emergence of coffee shop culture in the midst of chaos, and the unveiling of the library memorial.  Throughout, you’ll wish the cast dearest to you would behave, as you fear their future punishment and resent how they dehumanise themselves with their behaviour.  Worse still, the riot negotiations constantly dangle a satisfactory conclusion that remains frustratingly out of reach.

Season six

The action moves to maximum security and a whole host of characters never seem to return.  You really miss them, but D and C block are bursting with feisty new ladies (and guards) to help with the loss.  Every riot action, it seems, comes with its consequence, but injustice seems to be the overall response.  A kickball game promises to see a lifelong grudge between two sisters (Carol and Barb) erupt into bloodshed, but it’s the way the prisoners are forced to betray each other that will cause the most pain.

There, you’re all prepared for the journey.  A lot of folk have abandoned Orange Is The New Black midway through a series for its slower pace, but, on reflection, each season does seem to set up, ramp down, and then crescendo perfectly in its thirteen-episode arc.  It’s ruthless with removing characters, but each addition is worth their weight in orange jumpsuit.  Like Lost, each character’s pre-prison life is fleshed out with flashbacks, with one dominating each episode.  My only frustration here is that some of the best ladies never got theirs.  Methhead Angie, like many, comes from the periphery to the fore over the show’s run, but we never find out how she got such bad teeth and why she is constantly a vile mix of naivety, foolishness and sinister selfishness.  Gina, often called the squirrel lady, is another inmate whose crimes I’d love to have seen unpacked.  And finally, Maritza, a Latina whose lines are almost as good as Mendoza’s, is just crying out for more explanation.  Luckily, her story finally does get fleshed out, but I was worried for a long time that it wouldn’t.

Either way, for me, the star of the show becomes Taystee.  At first, she seems like a side-serving of comic relief, but her warmth and conflict is a magnetic force on viewers.  It’s in the riot that she really comes into her own, bringing Caputo onside in a way that proves he is a good man (beer can or not).  While Piper ultimately skips through her Litchfield journey relatively unscathed (minus some teeth chipping, a shit tattoo and some involuntary burning), Taystee is set up to shoulder an ultimate injustice that would be all the more alarming if it didn’t feel so realistic.  I said I loved every minute of Orange Is The New Black, but that can’t be true.  Taystee’s story is not one you can enjoy, but it’s one that everyone needs to see.