Fargo

“Whatcha got there, Margie?” seems like a strange choice for the most memorable line from the 1996 film, Fargo.  A lot of crime goes on in that story, all against the backdrop of the snowy Minnesota landscape, but it’s the charming local accents and the banal interest in what people are having for their meals that has stayed with me to this day.  That said, I only saw the film during my university years in the early 2000s, during a period in which I felt the best way to round out my terrible personality was to make sure I had seen all those classic films people talk about.  Back in the days of DVDs, Fargo was easily procured from a now-defunct online rental company, viewed on a laptop intended for academic support, and sat through with an attention span that now seems alien as these were also the days that predated smartphones and their irresistible whispers of distraction when you are trying to concentrate on absolutely anything at all.

Fast forward to 2014 and, a mere 18 years after the film’s release, a TV spin off emerges.  I’ve chosen the word spin off, as it really cheapens the programme, making it clear where the quality lies in this originator-progeny relationship.  Pah, I thought to myself, I shan’t ever be watching that.  But join me, if you will, in 2021.  More advanced in age, with greater maturity and self-assurance than my student self from decades before, I was no longer pursuing self-betterment through lists of must-see movies.  Oh no, I was looking at the IMDb list of top-rated television programmes.  And this is called growth.  There, at 38 (rankings may change over time) and with a score of 8.9/10, was the previously ignored Fargo TV series.  Well, this omission needed rectifying.  What kind of wildly successful TV blog would this be if, while having sat through the vast majority of top scorers (don’t worry, they’re all covered here, guys, from Rick & Morty to Our Planet) I allowed this oversight to continue?  And lo, thanks to Netflix, three quarters of my neglect has been rectified.

From my vantage point of having seen three of Fargo’s four seasons, I shall now offload all my thoughts and opinions for you to read.  Unfortunately the fourth series emerged while I was otherwise preoccupied and I haven’t been able to track it down on a platform, so we’ll just pretend we don’t care (though I truly do as it looks like a ripping period production with casting that finally offsets Fargo’s overwhelming whiteness).  But what I can say is that those first three outings of this boxset are cracking viewing to put in front of your face – how wrong I was about not expecting much from the TV version of a film.  What’s more, the stellar cast just goes to show how far TV has come in taking on cinema as the home of the big acting name or indeed of the quality production.

Each episode of Fargo is exquisitely crafted.  From the first frame, care and attention has been taken over every detail, as if all of it is a pilot that wants you to like it.  It’s how telly should be.  This is made all the more impressive by the fact that so much of it is shot in temperatures below freezing, as I can only imagine cameramen wanting to get out of the cold and therefore not really caring a toss.  I also like to think of everyone slipping over in the ice during the outtakes.  Not because I wish them ill, but because I am the sort of person that slips in ice, so I might as well assume it’s a universal quality.  One curious feature of our storytelling is that every instalment is preceded by a statement that the events are based on a true story, but that names have been changed to protect identities.  There’s no way of checking this as I simply cannot be bothered to type it into the internet, so again, we can just sit with it, wondering if we believe it, wondering if it matters, before moving on.

It’s pertinent, though, as the plots in Fargo are delightfully far-fetched.  To me, this is proof of veracity.  Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  Right?  Each series tracks over its ten episodes a wholly different storyline.  This means you’ll need to jettison an old cast and get to know a new one.  Gradually, hints of how these worlds and timelines connect are revealed, with series two’s seventies setting engendering an aftermath that plays back into the first series, which in turn has repercussions on the third.  May I one day know how this comes to bear on the fourth.

Playing out over the real towns of Minnesota and the Dakotas, our cast is often split into three camps.  We have heroes, often nice folk with above-average yet underappreciated ability in their jobs, normally law enforcement, who have to put up with the nonsense that swirls around them.  These are our Margies, carrying a torch of affection over from our original film.  Then we have our malcontents.  Their morals are often dubious, yet we can’t resist rooting for them.  They’ve faced hardship and come out stronger, but their drive and effort often lead to their own downfalls.  And then we have some great straight-up baddies, doling out evil willy nilly, creating the murderous rampages and bloodstains in the snow that are required to propel much of the plot forward.

I’d venture to describe Fargo as gently soothing, even though it’s awash in ultraviolence.  Somehow, the gruesome gore is easy to forgive, maybe because it’s framed in a higher art form.  We have a top-notch ratio of intrigue resolution to new curiosity establishment in each episode, as well as exemplary season finale crescendoing that resulted in my own patented viewing strategy: episodes nine and ten of each series had to be back-to-backed simply because I would get so excited (what a sad little life, Jane).  I typically only ever watch one instalment of a drama at a time so it doesn’t become wallpaper, but don’t worry if you have an alternative approach – it just means I am better than you.

So come all and feast upon this ensemble masterpiece.  You’ll revel at whatshisface off that film once and whoshername that used to be in thingy.  Not everyone masters the accent as successfully as others, and all the “oh yah”s and “ok then”s are a crucial part of our charm requirements, but each player has a great time with their character.  There’s bold storytelling as far as the eye can see, and dusting everything else in snow covers a variety of other flaws that I simply didn’t notice.  So take a trip via your screen of choice to this slice of the USA and treat yourself to some of the nicest murder stories ever known.

Top Of The Lake

 

There I was, the other day, struck by the thought that I hadn’t had Elisabeth Moss’s face in front of me on a big screen in a long time.  Mad Men was ages ago, and we are a while off another season of Handmaid’s Tale, though the memory of the excellence of series three is still a tingling sensation.  With recent government curbs on demonstration and their response to violence against women, we are another step closer to Gilead anyway, so we’ll all be blessing the fruit in no time.  Under his eye, indeed.  This brought me to click on Top Of The Lake on Netflix, a Moss-fronted drama that aired on the BBC back in 2013.  It looked rainy and gritty, promising some crimes perpetrated against a backdrop of luscious scenery and I felt safe in the knowledge I would have a strong performance from such a gifted actor in the lead role.

The first series is set in New Zealand, which is something I had somehow missed.  This isn’t Yorkshire (I was imagining Happy Valley vibes) but Lake Wakatipu at the bottom of South Island.  You can imagine my surprise, then, when Moss whips out a Kiwi accent.  It sounds decent to me, but from my perspective on the other side of the world, I realise I have no credibility to judge.  Moss plays Robin Griffin, returning to her home community from Sydney (which nicely covers an irregular vowel sounds anyway).  She’s in the police, sort of coming and going in a role to do with sexual assaults.  It’s hard to be sure if she’s on a working trip or not.  Her mum is unwell, but she almost ignores her to re-tread the paths of her own traumatic youth there, making it clear that she left for a very firm reason.  In a bit of a busman’s holiday, a local girl goes missing, and there are many suspicions of foul play, so Moss is in her element as the strong female and only capable police officer, dealing with an avalanche of male incompetence and insouciance as she tries to right the wrongs in her own community.

Before long, every character is a suspect, and this is because everyone is awful.  Unlikeable characters loom as large throughout as the spectacular scenery, but we are drawn in as Moss dashes in the drizzle from riddle to riddle.  There’s even a strange women’s commune set up beside the lake in shipping containers, riling some of the local populace but mostly sitting about drinking tea.  The climax gripped me with not only its gruesomeness, but its plausibility among a group of lakeside settlements who treat the most vulnerable in their society as expendable commodities.

Come 2017, the standalone conclusion is overturned as a second season appears.  The action has moved to Sydney, so our only point of continuity is Robin Griffin herself.  Still carrying the (additional) trauma of her previous lake-based experience, she now has new vulnerable girls to protect.  There are the South East Asian young women working in the licensed sex industry, branching out into further ways of selling their bodies.  There’s also the now-teenage daughter that Robin had given up for adoption.  She’s mixed up in these brothels, it turns out, rebelling against her adoptive parents (including a Nicole Kidman with little to do but have distracting hair) by pursuing a relationship with a vile German man who specialises in looking after stray cats better than he treats his sex workers.

Being strange throughout, Game Of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie is our cop partner, clashing with Robin in various ways, while we sort of wobble through a sequence of events to our climax.  The unlikability of everyone far exceeds series one’s motley crew of characters, and this made it a bit of a slog to get through.  Everything was gross, but not quite grotesque enough to be a reason to be compelled.  I stuck with it for the sake of dear Elisabeth, covering for patchier performances.  On many an evening, clicking next episode felt like more of a duty than a treat, especially in a world of so much else to watch (bonjour, Lupin).

While this might not sound like the strongest recommendation, Top Of The Lake is still important viewing.  As a slagger-off of TV despite never having produced any, I should confess I am deep in the Introduction To Screenwriting term of a part-time Creative Writing MA I am doing.  I think we can all agree the quality of my prose needs professional help.  I also have a new-found respect for anyone who writes anything on telly.  A fellow course-member (on Teams of course – I have never met these people) pointed out to us that Top Of The Lake is a great example of a female story structure.  I think this is part of feminist literary theory, but our hero’s treatment within the show follows a different arc to what we see in the hegemonic male stories of our culture.  This is all a bit academic so let’s focus on the easy bits.  This is a strong female character, leading storylines that make us question how women are viewed and treated by our societies.  It’s not pretty, but it’s more relevant than ever.

Top Boy

In 2001, the lyrics to So Solid Crew’s breakthrough number one hit 21 Seconds taught me two lessons that I have lived by ever since.  The first was “Asher D’s never fading” and, true to his word, Ashley Walters is back on Netflix screens across the country in a new series of Top Boy, prompting immediate Just One More Episode treatment in this week’s post.  And the second: “So Solid are amazing” is just a god-damn plain fact that nobody can deny.  You might wonder what a bookish young lad from affluent Surrey could find to identify with in the brutal rhymes of an inner London garage collective, but poetry is poetry and that song has soundtracked subsequent moments in my life on many occasions.  I remember a work ski trip where 80 of us took over an après bar (which already shows how urban I am) and requested this song.  Cue unleashed office workers clad in snowboarding jackets and salopettes stood atop tables in a group recital of every single verse.  At a recent wedding, this song came on, and even the southern French heatwave (see earlier comment about being urban) couldn’t stop me taking to the dancefloor, inebriated enough to be convinced I am not only the world’s best undiscovered dancer, but also an MC so talented that surely being able to shout along with every single word couldn’t fail to impress all the other guests.  Seeing them giving me a wide berth, their expressions concerned, was the proof I needed that any of us can be a member of So Solid.

Another way for me as a Home Counties young adult to gain access to this inner circle was to follow its members’ pursuits in other artforms.  Of course, I was therefore glued to the screen when not just Harvey, but also Romeo and Lisa Maffia took part in Channel 4’s The Games between 2003 and 2005.  But it was Ashley Walters in 2004’s Bullet Boy that really showed me So Solid really are amazing.  So when Top Boy appeared on Channel 4 in 2011, my viewership was guaranteed from the first promotional trailer.  The four episodes of that first series, and the four in 2013’s season two stayed with me long afterwards, but I was convinced the whole experience was a hidden treasure only I, and maybe my sister, had found.  Drawing up a list of beloved shows to cover here when I started this self-gratifying blog, Top Boy easily made the list.  But, uncertain of its broader appeal, it had to wait its turn.  Until now.  It turns out I wasn’t alone and being a fan of Top Boy is just one of the many things I have in common with Drake.  To paraphrase inaccurately the PR coverage surrounding the third series recently brought out by Netflix and trending at number one, this celebrity fan (Drake, not me) was able to click his fingers to have his favourite show resurrected, after Channel 4 were too busy with Bake Off (although maybe they could have collaborated on The Great British Drake Off).  So let’s relive the Top Boy journey below:

Season one, 2011

Now labelled as Top Boy: Summerhouse on Netflix and positioned as a separate companion series, I would actually attest that you need to watch both previous seasons of Top Boy before starting the new stuff.  In fact, recently re-watching everything in preparation for the new instalment only made me more certain that the episodes work best all together.  We’re introduced to the Summerhouse Estate in Hackney through the eyes of Ra’Nell, a fairly reticent lad who’s coping with his mother’s mental health problems while trying to hold down school and resist the lure of easy money offered by drug-dealing gangs he has to walk past every day.  Heading up one of those gangs are Dushane (Walters) and Sully (Kane “Kano” Robinson), and while the latter actively tries to recruit Ra’Nell and his hapless bestie Gem, Dushane is our dealer with a more complex moral compass.

There is neither glitz nor glamour in this production, just grimness.  Every interior betrays neglect, every exterior is swirling in trash on concrete.  Yet here are people trying to get by, and you can stare at them as much as you like from your middle-class bubble.  Everyone is trying to get out and do better, but it’s clear their options are limited, so their misdemeanours take on undeniable plausibility.  For example, pregnant Heather converts her spare room to a cannabis farm, babyface Michael swaps primary school for dealers’ errands, Dushane and Sully resort to kidnapping.  The drama unfolds, harrowing scenes rain down, but you can’t look away.  You learn that the good guys cannot win.

Season two, 2013

The repercussions of the first series’ climactic finale are still being felt, though there’s an injection of new characters that step the narrative on into new directions as well.  An underclass in himself, Jason shows the direct results of the drugs that the rest of the characters worry so much about dealing, coming and going from his junkie mother’s squalid squat and rarely catching a break.  Dushane, meanwhile, still runs the estate, but rather than glamorising his success, the show manoeuvres to expose his unenviable position.  His new legal counsel (and love interest) points out that the only way to protect his position is through constant paranoia and violence, all while being unable to enjoy the wealth his entrepreneurial spirit brings him.

Imagine if other industries operated like drug dealing.  If someone finds a better supplier, you steal that supply.  If someone brings out a rival product, you threaten or kill them.  Dushane sells his foot soldiers an unattainable goal, one they must pursue through unfair working practices, risk and deprivation.  Yet, again, we see this is their only option.  Series two examines the Dushane-Sully dynamic while ramping up the action with more violence.  Their story starts to seem more outlandish when compared to the first season’s reliance on the threat of violence.  But we remain rooted in the banal, with Ra’Nell’s mother fighting hopelessly against gentrification, and Ra’Nell himself, played with unrivalled intensity by Malcolm Kamulete, steering his course through the misfortune.  My beloved Michaela Coel (Chewing Gum) steals scenes while falling victim to Dushane’s darkest sides, but it’s Ashley Walters’ inscrutable expressions that come across as a masterclass in understated character.  We never know what he’s thinking, but we root for him.  Even though we start to suspect we shouldn’t.

Season three, 2019

And so here we are, six years later, on Netflix, with ten whole new episodes.  Just because Drake wanted it.  Imagine what else he could achieve.  Our settings have expanded into Jamaica, Ramsgate and prison, but inner London estates are still the scenes of our crimes.  The show takes pains to lay bare how much London has changed (gentrified), perfectly lampooning pretentious coffee culture as it perplexes Dushane.  We have new characters, with a household of brothers led by Micheal Ward as Jamie, treading a similar tightrope to Dushane: doing the right thing by his family while committing crimes to support them.  However, each time a character from the old series reappears, you feel a resurgence of emotion at the reunion.  Sadly, though, it’s clear that any expectations we were ever left with of happy endings are to be dashed.  Even those still standing on the same street corners have been ravaged by age and lifestyle, with Dris, though still in possession of his ability to make the most cutting remarks, a shadow of his former self thanks to excessive nitrous oxide use.  Nevertheless, Shone Romulus’s performance demands to be seen.  Immigration law becomes one additional strand woven in with the rest in this tableau of societal injustice but, ultimately, not much has changed beyond the price of coffee.  So we stand with Dushane, Sully and Jamie as they try to get by on the cards they’ve been dealt.  They deal.  It’s an appalling reflection on Britain today that Sully says, “What else is there?”

Filling the ten episodes does start to fall into the Netflix trap of overcomplicating the plot, but the later instalments crescendo as new layers of jeopardy are thrust upon our leads.  We’re spending more time getting to know the characters, creating narratives around the rival gangs rather than casting anonymous hooded figures, which adds greater significance to their actions and their actions’ consequences.  I would simply to urge everyone to watch all of this programme.  If not for the compelling drama, then click play for the stark look at the society we live in today.  There’s no one interpretation of its message – you’ll think about different things throughout.  Any claims of glorification or fetishisation fall away.  As a Londoner, certain scenes seem familiar, but my privileged upbringing means my reality is a world away.  If anything, I’m one of the awful gentrifiers in the background (I’ve bought a flat in an area of London undergoing extensive redevelopment and my only contribution to the local economy has been some overpriced coffee and a few hipster haircuts).  I shouldn’t have made my flippant fanboy comments about So Solid Crew at the start because they risk taking away from Top Boy’s serious effect.  While our politicians fail to govern due to neighbourly preoccupations, a whole generation is being left without access to the UK’s prosperity.

Prison Break

Welcome to the blogpost on Prison Break, or Why Some Shows Should Only Have One Series Really.  It’s been a light week from a TV viewing perspective.  New home ownership has seen my evening and weekend hours spent away from my favourite screen (and I haven’t bought a telly yet), whether that be spiralling in Old Kent Road B&Q because I don’t know what drill to buy, or spiralling at home because I’ve drilled fixings into the wrong bit of wall and totally destroyed the home I’ve saved for ten years to buy, or spiralling with happiness now that I’ve finally got a blind up over the bedroom window, sparing my new neighbours (and any innocent passer-by) the daily torment of my genitalia appearing in their line of vision while I’m putting my pyjamas on.  And yes, the whole blog so far has been about me putting a blind up.  Buying a flat has made me the most boring person in the world and I know this because my friends have not been shy in confirming it to me.

But this means we are indeed trawling the archives of old stuff I watched when my life still had hope.  Why prisons?  Well, thanks for that question.  It’s nice when we’re interactive, isn’t it?  I’ve been partly inspired by the return for a seventh and final series of Orange Is The New Black.  One of the good things about my flat (cue more boring chat – let’s call it flat chat) is that I have a bath again, but I get bored in there quickly, as lying inert in scalding water waiting for Epsom salts to assuage the cramps of my Crossfit-overtrained limbs and unravel the angry knots in my back isn’t as entertaining as I would like.  I’ve therefore been taking my laptop into the bathroom with me, positioning it away from the water on an old duvet box and enjoying me a bit of on-demand premium content while my glasses steam up and my fingertips go all pruney.  This is how I got through the mind-boggling second series of Dark (even more wildly ambitious that the first outing – watch it now).  I then thought I could catch up on the latest The Handmaid’s Tale in there (this is over a number of bathing occasions – I haven’t just been in the tub for weeks in one go) but Channel 4 only have the catch-up rights to that for twenty-five minutes or so after broadcast.  So off I went to trusty old Netflix to catch up with the ladies of Litchfield.  I’d forgotten who most of them were, but I soon remembered that I loved them.

Prisons, then…  A friend first showed me Prison Break during my final year of university.  We’re no longer in touch, but that is not a result of his boxset recommendations.  When people ask where I studied, I like to retort with a bit of modesty and say Hogwarts.  I’m not actually a wizard, but people’s viewing experience of the Harry Potter films is the best way to bring to life the realities of my tertiary education.  I loved learning so much that I got myself into ye olde Oxford University, where diversity meant someone didn’t go to Eton (I didn’t) and a Scout was a local woman who smoked in your bedroom whilst wearing a tabard and changing an empty bin.  I’m only naming the place for context: my college days were spent working hard.  Not as hard as I should have, but the workload was inordinate.  The approaching final exams, then, which accounted for 100% of my degree, rendering the whole four-year faff (with year abroad) an excessive preamble, only served to ramp up the fervent book-learning.

But each night we allowed ourselves an hour of leisure before bed, and that’s where the Prison Break DVDs got whipped out.  My friend wanted me to watch the whole of season one to demonstrate its mastery of the art of suspense.  He was righter than ever.  Each instalment ended on such an earth-shattering cliff-hanger, that we were succumbing to the concept of Just One More Episode long before I realised my life would end up with me writing an unpopular blog.  If you haven’t watched it, you’ve probably guessed that the storyline revolves around people breaking out of prison.  Pow, there’s your narrative tension straightaway.  Our hero is Michael Scofield.  He is so determined to break out his unjustly incarcerated brother (though he deserved his sentence for crimes against the male plunging neckline, by having a plunging neckline) that he has elaborate escape plans tattooed over his entire body and then commits a bank robbery to place himself within the prison walls.  Wentworth Miller’s growling, earnest whispers characterise his every line, while Dominic Purcell as the wrongly accused Lincoln Burrows barely grunts in return.  At each stage of progressing their plan some sort of compromise would be contrived that forced them to link in one more escapee.  Some we rooted for, like dear old Sucre, overreacting to everything, while the sinister sexual predation of T-Bag made skin crawl, though it did prompt discussions about who would be whose prison bitch.  Apparently, you just need to turn one of your pockets inside out and whoever held onto the protruding material was yours to do bitch things with.

Their chances of success were stretched out over a phenomenal first series, with twists, turns and panic-inducing disasters.  I’ve got to be careful to give away any spoilers, but if your whole first series is about breaking out of prison, where do you go from there?  Subsequent series, which I won’t dwell on here, became echoes of this first burst in descending order of volume.  Some characters would be on the run, others would be wrongly imprisoned elsewhere, someone else would be trying to break into another prison.  Then the womenfolk were getting imprisoned as well.  And throughout, LJ (Lincoln Burrows’ awful son) was gurning at the camera and chewing the scenery in response to the implausibility of it all.  To expand on some sort of justification for the whole thing, naughty corporation The Company was suddenly invented, along with some very devoted employees (I hated Gretchen), and I began to question my viewing choices.

In conclusion, some series really should only have had one series.  It’s called the Lost effect.  A good idea works really well as a single arc, but then gets stretched out to capitalise on audience demands till it snaps.  It’s like when someone brings salted caramel M&Ms to the office and you really enjoy having just one, but then suddenly everything is a blur and you’ve eaten 75 of them.  Prison Break even came back for a fifth series in 2017, but our only focus must remain the masterpiece that is the premier season.  That is its legacy.  And also, tattooing things on your body in case you’re worried you might forget about them later.

Luther

“Luther; is he really as dirty as they say?”  Well, this was the question I had been asking myself when I finally succumbed to clicking atop Idris Elba’s brooding face on my Netflix menu.  Now an experienced viewer of gritty British crime dramas (Happy Valley, Line Of Duty), I was prepped to plumb further depths in my exploring of the nation’s obsession with murders and police officers.  Christmas 2018 had been peppered with constant conversational mentions of buses becoming worrying territory after a harrowing scene in the fifth series that the BBC broadcast as part of their festive schedule.  As someone whose average daily consumption of London buses is between three and five (I end up on the 137 most days, but most covet the rare appearance of a spiffy little P5), this warranted further investigation.  Also: Idris Elba.  I like his coats.

All I knew was that he plays a copper, but most likely one who doesn’t care much for due process, particularly after I gleaned a reference to anger issues in the blurb.  John Luther specifically works in the department of the police that looks at murders.  I’m not sure what other sort of law enforcement I thought he would be doing.  You don’t get your own series prosecuting for benefit fraud, I suppose.  Based in and around East London (which means I’m often distracted during exterior set-up shots trying to see if I can recognise various Prets I’ve grabbed overpriced gluten-free snacks in on the way to meetings in that part of town) the Victorian brickwork and city history create an environment abundant in stylistic aesthetics and stabbings most horrid.  Whereas I expected each series of a handful of episodes to revolve around a singular detailed case, the first season episodically works through a number of different killers.  With the exception of the first perp we come across (the fiery Alice Morgan who, if only to demonstrate sizzling sexual tension, turns up throughout future instalments) most of the killers Luther goes after are of the serial variety, often with specialist perversions.

Enter, then, a revolving cast of supporting actors whose odds to survive even ten minutes into the drama are not high.  If they’re not an established character, you’re really just counting down the moments until the come a cropper on the end of an axe (though this arguably also happens with established characters).  It brings to mind the Saturday evenings of growing up, when the family would gather round the box for Casualty.  In between progressing long-running storylines of the hospital staff, character actors would appear for set-up scenes.  We all knew someone was going to end up in accident and emergency, so there was a grisly thrill in eying each wobbly ladder or erratic motoring decision before we could tut at the crunching of bone and bursting forth of blood that necessitated a visit from Holby’s finest.  Similarly, with our Luther, we lay in wait as viewers, eager for the closure of each bit-part’s untimely dispatching at the hands of some sort of fantastical psychopath.  Often, Luther himself is trying to anticipate a maniac’s next move, glancing at some bits of paper pinned to a board in order to leap unfathomably to incredible conclusions that allow him to deduce the upcoming location of the culprit’s next hit.  Racing across town in his awful Volvo, Luther must have lost count of the number of times he’s been too late to save the victim.  If I’m late to a meeting at work, we just start five minutes later.  If Luther arrives delayed, folk get murdered.

I’m sure that makes for some awkward chats in his end-of-year reviews.  Later series see him under the leadership of DSU Martin Schenk (a more sort of subterranean Ted Hasting with much less lustrous hair).  Given the track record of Luther’s subordinates to end up dead themselves, we can only imagine what sort of constructive criticism is offered for his line management skills.  Getting assigned to his team can’t just therefore signify a death knell for any young detective sergeant’s career; it also drastically reduces their life expectancy.  Oh well, there’s still plenty of decent shop chat.  One police idiom for being convinced a suspect has committed a crime is expressed with the verb to fancy someone for something.  “Did you fancy him for it?” Luther will ask a seasoned colleague when the database throws up candidates for various bodily mutilations.  I think it’s meant to sound blokey, but all I can think about is the playground usage of to fancy: my head is filled with an embarrassed DCI giggling as they ask a hardened criminal if they’d like to dance at a school disco.

But Luther is such a lad that he can say and do what he wants and still he’d be our hero.  Plagued by family problems, career problems, and wedged-in problems where new hangers-on suddenly emerge to whom he seems to owe excessive favours, the jeopardy of whether Luther will solve the case before the rest of London is brutally slain is multiplied by pressure from mafia bosses and other such inconveniences.  For me, these pale in interest to the actual killings, but that’s more likely just me struggling with complex storylines.  Either way, these plot devices lead to one of my favourite scenes where Luther beats off two would-be assassins.  His weapon of choice?  A bin.  Truly legendary.

Altogether, though, Luther is a classy contribution to the insatiable canon of British crime drama, with more grit than a Highways Agency lorry on a frosty morning.  He’s made me consider investing in my own set of baggy grey work shirts, but Luther’s greatest sartorial achievement if twinning tweed overcoats with blazers, turning up the collars on both, chasing after a criminal and then not having to take everything off at the end of it due to be too sweaty.  I did mention he’s an extraordinary man, as he doesn’t seem to get as hot as I would.  Watch Luther at home alone with the lights if you’re feeling brave, then go out and ride the deserted top decks of night buses through underpopulated suburbs and see how your nerves hold out.  Luther focuses your mind back on the endless human potential for evil, filtered through the lens of work being a pain in the arse.  Whether there’s a murderer under your bed or a serial killer in your cupboard, you’ve still got to drag yourself into the office in the morning, just as Luther needs to keep solving crimes in order to afford his lavish collection of the same shirts and coats.  We can conclude, then, that he’s not as dirty as they say, as he clearly has a clean outfit for each day of the week.

Narcos: Mexico

There’s been a lot of debate around this and nobody can seem to agree.  Are we in or are we out?  Is Narcos: Mexico just another series of Narcos, or is it a different show entirely?  I didn’t even know if I was supposed to put a colon in the title between Narcos and Mexico.  However, I seem to be writing a separate one of these posts about it, so this is proof at last that’s not just a fourth series of one programme, but a fully-fledged boxset in its own right.  Sure, both exist in the same universe and both can stand alone, as you don’t need to have seen one to understand the other, but, if I’ve treated Fear The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead as independent entities, then we must be consistent here.

Truth be told I rolled straight into Narcos: Mexico after finishing Narcos – it was a logical progression and the Netflix algorithm was fairly insistent that because I watched Narcos I should watch Narcos: Mexico.  Confidently, I clicked to play was immediately devastated that the Colombian Spanish I had subconsciously learned from Narcos, however, didn’t allow much latent intelligibility with the Spanish on offer in Narcos Mexico (which, in case you can’t tell, is Mexican Spanish).  My linguistic geekiness was devastated and I was subsequently forced to pay much closer attention to the subtitles than I had been intending.  This issue was also compounded by one of the leading cast: Diego Luna.  Stepping into the Escobarian shoes of Wagner Moura as chief antagonist, Luna plays Félix Gallardo, the drugs kingpin whose rise and pursuit forms the main narrative arc of the drama. When I say play, I mean mumbles, as he violates his lines as if his mouth is full of muffin and he’s in a rush to get the words out before taking another massive bite.  Before knickers are got into twists, I should point out my longstanding fandom of Luna; coming across Y Tu Mamá También on DVD back in my student days, I vowed that his performance in this influential film would always see him endowed with my utmost respect.  I confess that Gael García Bernal has more fun in the film, and not just because he has a mullet, but the point I am making here is that everyone should see this film and that Luna is a god for being in it.

But yeah, his drugs czar lacks something.  Whereas Moura got to be all moody stares while seeming to revel in the bloodlust his career in narcotics required of him, Luna is dominated by furrowed, sweaty brows, exasperation at his staff and possessed of a mild imposter syndrome.  I’ll forgive this, though, as it’s a tough part to crack and a tougher act to follow (though the chronology actually precedes Narcos – confused emoji).  What we do have is a cracking set of US narcos hot on his trail, clearly undeterred by his poor diction (including an angrier Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men).  Our introduction to their world is delivered from the perspective of Kiki Camarena, played by the underrated Michael Peña.  Mostly wearing what appears to be one of the awful jackets from Sex Education, Camarena is quickly het up about the Guadalajara unit’s ineffectiveness in the face of the biggest marijuana farming enterprise ever seen.  But Camarena is ever resourceful and he don’t always play by the rules, brought to life thrillingly when he sneaks onto a bus transporting impoverished rural Mexicans to work at the cannabis plantation.  His disguise?  He messes his hair up, proving correct the assumption that poverty is often indicated by bad haircuts.

Providing the kind of hedonism that looks great on screen, we have Rafael Caro Quintero, Gallardo’s childhood friend and the mastermind behind the strain of weed that launches the whole operation.  A constant loose cannon of a threat to his pal’s business aims, he doubles the jeopardy at play in any illegal narcotics operation, not least with his very exciting dalliance with rich girl, Sofía.  These two revel in japes that make their eventual coming a cropper truly inevitable, providing excellent entertainment along the way.

Further complications come from Gallardo’s political entanglements, laying bare the rampant corruption that allows him to function in the first place.  With character traits as sinister as their suits are tacky, these men lurk constantly at his heels to exacerbate his stress at every turn.  Why anyone would choose such a career is beyond me.  You have loads of money, which is nice, but that only lasts until your violent murder, whereas a peaceful retirement must surely be a better, if impossible prospect.  Some of his perplexity was shared by me as a viewer though, as I unavoidably missed some of the subtitles explaining who specifically these chaps were, and ended up having to accept that men in bad suits dogging him at every turn were just par for the course.

I’ll conclude that Netflix is mostly right: if you liked Narcos, you’ll like Narcos: Mexico.  It is simply more of the same.  Heart-stopping drama is punctuated by the same standard tropes: stakeouts in period automobiles, tense cat-and-mouse near misses, cigarettes and moustaches.  The soundtrack is gunfire and Spanish swearwords.  The setting is sweaty dust and dusty sweat, though 1980s Guadalajara fails to excite the traveller in me as much as 1990s Colombia.  I couldn’t help wondering what the big idea was here: are we going to complete an encyclopaedic dramatization of every illegal substance oligarch South America has ever produced?  Either way, until Narcos: Uruguay is available for streaming, you can get your fix of that narco life with this show, but if true stories, class As, murders and Mexican sun are not crucial ingredients in your boxset viewing, then simply viewing Narcos (as in, Narcos: Original) is sufficient.

Happy Valley

Yet another season of How To Get Away With Murder has appeared on Netflix and I seem to be watching it out of a sense of duty more than anything else.  But it feels less fun than before.  I’m struggling to relate.  The characters rarely have a hair out of place, whereas someone accused me of having a perm the other day.  That, and the American gloss of each week’s new episode of Riverdale (which is equal parts cheese and artificial sweetener – a sickening combination), had left me craving something grittier.  And that’s because Brits love grit.  Our natural habitat is drizzle under grey overcast skies.  Our national pastime is wincing at Brexit.  Our approach to public transport is never to make eye contact.  Revisiting Fleabag for last week’s blog had reawakened my genetic predilection for the darker things in life.  Then I discovered Happy Valley.

Yeah, I know I’m late again.  Two seasons of this crime drama had gone out between 2014 and 2016, but my discovery of this gritty-as-gravel northern fare is timely while the internet buzzes with speculation about when 2019’s rumoured third series will air.  But, whether early adopter or bandwagon clamberer, the main thing is that my need for British grit was met in the Netflix menu by the sight of Sarah Lancashire in a fluorescent police jacket scowling into the bleak weather of some sort of Yorkshire scenery.  Where do I begin?  Let’s start with Sarah Lancashire.  It’s lame to mention an actor’s early work, but Lancashire did spend 338 episodes (and a feature-length special) of Coronation Street smoking cigarettes behind the bar of the Rovers Return and saying “Oh, Curly” on a regular basis as Raquel Watts née Wolstenhulme.  Then she branched out into the epic biopic Seeing Red (2000), where she went about adopting needy children – what a hero!

Therefore, thanks to gaps in my following of her career, my next encounter with her was the opening scene of Happy Valley, where she arrives at an unfolding crime (a drug-addled young man threatening to torch himself in a kiddies’ playground) and tries to talk down the perpetrator.  Here was the grit I had been after.  Heroin addiction in the family?  Check.  Problem relationships with her children?  Check.  An irreverent approach to the emotional upheaval involved in deciding you ought to set yourself on fire?  Check.  Wet pavements all around?  Check.  I mean, let’s hear it for wet pavements.  Happy Valley’s truest grit comes from the grim townscapes on which its characters run around chasing each other: paving slabs, concrete, tarmac.  All look naff dry.  All look even more dispiriting when glistening with that morning’s downpour.  It almost makes your eyes suffer.  I love it.

But nobody seems to suffer more than Catherine Cawood.  Before we even start series one, she has lost a daughter to suicide, is raising a practically orphaned grandson, been divorced, regressed in her career and painted her kitchen cupboards really garish colours.  As the action unfolds, the bruises accumulate, with some of the graphic violence proving hard to stomach.  But the torture is also emotional, which can lead to the feeling that Lancashire ends up crying in every scene.  However, this makes things seem too depressing.  She gets the best lines and delivers them so well that a plucky humour and no-nonsense approach permeates all scenes.  In short, it’s an incredible performance and I’m only sad that I’ve now already seen every episode currently available.

Around her, though, is gathered a cast of Halifax citizens who interconnect in all manner of disturbing ways in order to drive the plot forward.  Series one focuses on a very ill-conceived kidnapping and ransom storyline that seems to escalate from a denied salary increase to aggressive hostage-taking within a couple of conversations.  In the second season, we combine a serial murder investigation with an extramarital affair gone wrong and a very shifty teaching assistant trying to access Cawood’s grandson.  As I said, it’s a big crock of grit and it’s exactly what I was after.  For me, prominence in this Halifax cast must be given to Siobhan Finneran, who plays Catherine’s sister.  Given that her addiction problems are referenced in the opening lines of the first scene, it’s a tense inevitability that that wagon will be fallen off.  In fact, her array of impractical cardigans is a distracting yet well characterised reminder that she is somewhat of an impractical person.  If, like me, you spent your youth watching late-night films on Channel 4 that you were probably not old enough for, you’ll recognise Finneran from Rita, Sue And Bob Too.  Hopefully this film’s title gives you an indication of its bawdy subject matter, but I’m in no way ashamed to say I’ve seen it several times and even forked out for tickets to the play it’s based on.  I recommend this to all of you.  And, funnily enough, George Costigan, who plays Nevison Gallagher, played this film’s Bob to Finneran’s Rita, so I’m hoping Sue gets in on the action again for series three.

Yet again, I’m gently poking fun at Happy Valley, but it’s a boxset that everyone should see.  There’s very little wrong with it: bad characters can be identified by their constant drinking of beer cans, the same group of men spend almost all their time unloading bags of sand off a truck on one farm, the action escalates very quickly in the first series.  This is because there is so much right with it.  And the rightest thing of all is that this isn’t American gloss.  There are no shoot outs and high-speed car pursuits.  In fact, the climactic chase of the second series involves two relatively gym-averse middle-aged characters struggling not to slip on railway sleepers (wet with drizzle, obviously).  Yet this apparently plodding action is miles tenser than anything else.  Sure, nobody looks as cool as an NYPD cop in a bulky bright yellow police jacket with an extendable truncheon hanging off it, but Happy Valley gripped me like nothing else has in a long time.  Your life will be improved by the quality of Sarah Lanchashire’s performance and the relief that this isn’t your real life, as there’s no happiness in this valley.