The Boys

Looking back, the last four weeks’ posts have all covered Netflix original productions, with the three weeks before that casting Just One More Episode side-eye on further programmes watched on that platform (including the pandemic’s breakout hit, Tiger King – another Netflix production).  So let’s balance things out with the revelation that I did actually watch something on Amazon Prime Video in recent times: The Boys.  Regular readers will know I am no real fan of superheroes: I’m yet to see a good explanation for the need to wear Lycra bodysuits, and by the inevitable climactic fisticuffs to save the world, I have totally lost interest.  But friends had raved about The Boys and it seemed only right I should give it a chance.  After all, it’s nice to be proven right.

I ended up particularly engaged with the launch marketing campaign way back whenever the show first got released, during a past age when we were allowed out of our houses to touch others at will.  My job in media meant I had been invited to watch an interview being recorded with Joel Dommett.  I’m convinced he’s my twin, even since seeing him on I’m A Celeb (though by listening to his podcast Teenage Mixtape I can see clearly that our music tastes are insurmountably divergent).  I had walked across a humid London with two grads from the office, slurped some complementary wine before enjoying Joel’s chat with Laura Whitmore (pre-Love Island, post-Survival Of The Fittest).  I was just stuffing my face afterwards with free ice cream when we were asked if we would stay for a second interview – turned out they were recording a sesh with Chace Crawford that night too.

Being young, carefree, spontaneous and loads of fun, I was happy to stay.  I jest: in reality I was itching to get back to my flat for some lean chicken, sweet potato and a bit of boxset.  But I had already fully sweated through my underpants on the walk over and self-destructed on my macro requirements with my scoops of triple chocolate.  So, there was Chace, him off Gossip Girl, metres away talking about his new show: The Boys.  Sounded decent.  Nevertheless, the evening ended in faux-pas as we made for the lifts during our exit.  One of the grads declared out loud that poor Chace “is much less good looking in real life” as our elevator arrived.  Little did he realise that Chace was standing right behind him but was too gracious to respond.  With that cringe in mind, I owed it to successful Hollywood actor Chace Crawford (who doesn’t care what media grads think about his face) to watch his new show.

Like Amazon’s other centrepiece, Mr Robot, The Boys has an epic pilot episode.  There is set up galore as we are shown a world where superheroes are a commodity as commercialised as any US sport, with merchandise and revenue streams beyond anyone’s wildest capitalist imagination.  What a fun slant to take on an overdone genre: looking at the business side of rescuing plebs from danger with x-ray vision and glowing yellow eyes.  I could gladly have just followed a fly-on-the-wall documentary on the inner workings of Vought International, the fictional corporation that has globally cornered the market in caped crusaders.  But because this is drama, we need to acknowledge that we are here to see the destruction of this proffered reality for which we have suspended our disbelief, so it’s no spoiler for me to tell you that the first season slowly edges us towards the demise of this morally corrupt business endeavour.

Sadly, so often, a great pilot can result in a huge drop off in following episodes.  Therefore, instalment two bored me and from then I was kind of done, sitting through the rest paying little attention and feeling even less.  Crawford himself is actually fairly marginal as The Deep, whose power rests in his abdominal gills.  He seemed to be there for comic relief, but without realising it.  And it wasn’t that funny, just weird.  Most of the character development had gone into his biceps.  Centre stage was, in fact, Karl Urban, as an anti-hero activist.  I don’t know what else he did as somewhere along the line the terrible decision was made for him to have a cockney accent.  Cue the worst apples-and-pears dialogue ever recorded.  Urban heads up a bunch of misfits taking on the big corp world – in fact, I think they are the titular boys, rather than the badly behaved celebrity heroes (who I kind of preferred).  If I could pinpoint the moment I turned off, it was sadly the arrival in episode two of Frenchie, a generic team member with the rebels who just left me cold with everything he did.  It’s derivative to call things derivative, but he was derivatively derivative (not the actor, the part).

Nevertheless, there’s plenty to enjoy: explosion-based action, wry wit, moral conundrums, romance, intrigue, a lens on our hero-worship of celebrity.  Just as the heroes care little for their fans and the great unwashed they rescue, I felt no real emotional investment in any of it.  I’m pretty sure it’s all based on some sort of book/comic source material.  There’s no way of knowing as I’m not prepared to google it – it’s better just to fire off an online rinsing, isn’t it really?  It’s reassuring to know I won’t need to watch a second season if there ever is one.  I’ll be too busy getting deep into Netflix’s much more user-friendly menu system, holding my breath for another season of Elite.

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.

Vikings

So that’s another series of Game Of Thrones into and out of our lives, and now we face an uncertain wait for more episodes that can feed our Westeros addiction.  Where will we get dragons from?  With all of that in mind, I’ve turned to the show that most closely resembles it and can help fill that gap.  But that’s not to say the show isn’t fantastic in its own right.  I’m talking about Vikings, which is one of Amazon’s flagship pieces of content and sometimes shown on the History Channel as well if you like that sort of thing.

While the scale of earlier series is smaller and more intimate, this closely follows the life stages of the show’s charismatic and enigmatic (basically, multi-matic) hero: Ragnar Lothbrok.  Played with such deft touches by Travis Fimmel, you are drawn into rooting for whatever it is he wants to pursue: power, fame, glory.  He’s selfish, but you want to be his best friend.  All around him, a supporting cast build up an ancient society in full, with all elements of Viking civilisation explored.  But the action doesn’t stop in Scandinavia, with scenes of action in later series happening simultaneously in Wessex, Northumbria, Paris and Spain.  For any linguistic geeks, Old English and Old French abounds, with the dialogue switching between modern English and impenetrable dead languages, depending on whose perspective we are being given.  What’s more, when any of the Viking characters are speaking, they all have charming Swedish/Norwegian accents that make everything sound playful and mystic all at once.

Each episode has enough of an underlying risk of sex and/or violence, though early battle scenes can be forgiven for being not much more than lines of men facing each other and waving swords.  It’s the intention that counts when you consider how the series and characters develop.

I do have some unanswered questions though.

What exactly do they do on their longboats when travelling around Europe?  I can barely sit still for two hours on an Easyjet flight to Seville, and that’s with snacks, a book and some headphones.  These guys just had an oar each.

Who does all their hair?  Vikings, it seems, were the first hipsters.  There are topknots, top-plaits, fresh fades and some cracking beards, not to mention the tattoos.  I freely admit to growing out some hair and shaving other bits in order to be more Viking.  I haven’t, however, tattooed the sides of my head, but you never know.

And, can Floki stop doing his annoying laugh?

From the atmospheric chanting of the title sequence, each episode is a full immersion into a culture so different to our own, it’s hard to believe that the former ever contributed to begetting the latter.  The show is not afraid to do away with core characters and to bring in brand new ones that totally change the landscape.  There may not really be anything supernatural about it, but not everything needs dragons.