Bridgerton

I don’t know how they do it, but Netflix always seem to know just what we need.  It’s Christmas Day 2020.  Everyone is coming to terms with substantial compromises to their celebrations, potentially stranded far from home by following the whiplashing advice from the old boys’ club running our government.  The weather is crap, the year is being wished over, and little do we know, the next one is going to be getting off to the most underwhelming of starts.  And pow, Netflix drops the most optimised dollop of delicious escapism right in front of our eyeballs.  That’s right, this week we’re doing Bridgerton.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to know that I was very late to this party.  Spirited away to my parents’ just before London was turned into an inescapable fortress, their loyalty to live TV had driven me away into my Louis Theroux documentaries.  Returning to my home and work (which have now been the same place for nearly a year – I can’t confirm if I will ever wear underpants again), everyone was talking about one thing: Bridgerton.  I resisted its call.  I didn’t need to follow the herd.  I was deep in other series (wondering if The Sopranos would ever end).  Its mania would pass.  But then, instead, it snowballed.  Every other Guardian article (I ignore all other news – no surprises there) was about its music or its fashion.  It was revealed as the most watched Netflix production.  My interest was piqued.  Then everyone chuckled at the explicit sexual content and, lo and behold, I was sold.

The eight episodes are based on the first in a series of novels that follow the fictional Bridgerton family.  Named alphabetically, they’re an A to Z (well, an Anthony to Hyacinth) of upper-class London society in 1813.  We’re with them for a social season, from the young ladies’ debuts through weeks and weeks of balls balls balls until a final climax that sees all the lords and such retire back to their country piles.  Here’s the first reason Bridgerton’s timing are spot on: all these well-attended events are spectacles we can only dream of.  Right now, a good day out is a mask-clad whiz round the supermarket.  A lavish night of dancing and drinking, dressed up to the nines, is as alien to us as most of the social conventions of nineteenth-century Britain, but it is so richly and colourfully brought to life on screen that it has the power to fill that part of our lives that is so sorely lacking.  There’s even a nod to our present day, with the string quartets treating us to classical interpretations of modern pop songs.

While we’re at it, the costumes are a second well-tuned route for vicarious living.  Most of us are now set in our leisurewear (please see earlier comment about underpants), but the lords and ladies of Bridgerton are never out of excuses to push the sartorial boat out.  Even the discomfort of very tight breeches or having your cleavage shoved up beyond your clavicle offers a welcome break to shuffling about our homes in slippers and hoodies, with the exception of the Featheringtons’ sickly colour palette.

Thirdly, the show is on the pulse of our enthusiasm for diversity, putting black Georgians front and centre.  No need to explain, no indulgence of anyone feeling threatened; it’s just a great time.  Any protest with reference to historical accuracy is farcical, and probably from the same people who wanted The Crown accompanied by trigger warnings.  Some people simply don’t deserve content this entertaining.

But lastly, it is just the story for the moment.  In a foreign world of ladies’ reputations, archaic courtship and primogeniture, there is a welcome frivolity to the various love stories.  Bosoms heave, sideburns protrude, and eyes are made across the ballroom, and we’re unable to resist caring about girls making a good match and marrying for love.  Some jeopardy is clunkily contrived, with Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey – a key player from W1A and Crashing) going from key barrier to his sister’s happiness to someone without quite enough to do, and the endless speculation regarding the real identity of Lady Whistledown (Gossip Girl gone Georgian) lacking compelling consequence.  But once the love making starts, we’re miles away from the grit and realism of something like Normal People and drinking in every romantic thrust of some good old-fashioned shagging.  You don’t get that in Downton Abbey.  Yet the shenanigans don’t feel gratuitous – they’re just another layer of fun in all the stories.  More remarkable is the sheer size of the cast, with every peripheral player committing wholeheartedly from the start, gradually coming forward as fully formed characters as the episodes progress.

Sure, the script could have done with one more proof-read to tighten the lines beyond the point of simply aping how people probably spoke in the olden days, and maybe some of the cast are guilty of doing theatre acting with their shouting and enunciating, but there’s little to fault with Bridgerton if you’re looking for a hearty romp.  I would even go as far to prescribe this as self-care at a time when reasons to be cheerful may appear to be lacking.  Switch off the 5pm briefing when we get put into surprise tier 22 and take yourself off to the world created by Julia Quinn and realised by Shonda Rhimes (How To Get Away With Murder, among many other things).  It’s a treat we all deserve, and it’s come at just the right time.

Chernobyl

The Sky man finally came a week ago.  I had planned to live without Sky in my new home, resolving not to line the Murdochs’ pockets.  But two things compounded me to sacrifice my values and change my mind.  The option of a life where I can take more control of what adverts I am forced to see was one of them, as ranted about in my post on Gogglebox.  Secondly, we’ve got the next Love Island around the corner and you can apparently only get ITV2 HD on Sky.  With all the access to boxsets my package promised me, I was buzzing to re-watch Game Of Thrones for treatment on here.  But no, that show doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.  Next on my list was something people had bleated on about in May when I was in full first-time buyer meltdown: Chernobyl.  Dealing with a meltdown of a different time, this miniseries dramatization of the 1986 disaster was held aloft as the best thing that anyone had ever seen, now ranked at number 5 in the IMDB list of Top Rated TV Shows (9.4).  With high hopes, I downloaded the first HD episode on my Sky Q.

I also drew the curtains (John Lewis, obviously) and put my phone out of reach, preparing to give the apparently untold quality of the drama my undivided attention.  Sadly, though, there were still about three minutes of adverts to wade through, but I was able to fast forward these immediately, once I finally worked out which button was which on my new remote in the darkened living room.  A week later, after limiting myself to no more than one episode per night of the five that make up this series, I have completed the boxset.  And I hereby attest to the incomparable greatness of Chernobyl – the TV programme, not the nuclear explosion.  The former made me punch the air and shout “worth it” at the inordinate expense of my OLED fifty-five incher, while the latter spread life-threatening levels of radioactivity of thousands of European square kilometres.  Let’s not confuse the two.

My attempts here to do any sort of justice to Chernobyl will fall short, but I’ll crack on with running through what makes this programme so remarkable all the same.  You’re already in the third paragraph so please don’t pretend you’ve got anything better to read.  Now, I was never that arsed by chemistry or physics at school, but you will come away from Chernobyl with quite a thorough understanding of nuclear fission.  I now know my boron rod from my graphite tip, but this isn’t down to my child-wonder levels of intelligence.  Thanks to Craig Mazin’s script (Craig a-Mazin, more like) multiple scenes contrive to see expert characters illuminate others on what’s gone wrong.  These happen in layers so that, once you’ve built a foundation of basic comprehension, you’re able to get your head around the sequence of events in greater detail.  It’s no mean feat: just as fission generates electricity as if from nothing, Chernobyl generates drama from our understanding of what should and shouldn’t happen in a nuclear reactor.  It would be worth watching for the educational benefits alone.

Linked to the above is the constant threat of radiation.  As if the explosion itself doesn’t build up enough tension, the action plays out against varying backdrops of radioactivity.  I don’t want to reveal spoilers, but one of my questions before watching was whether our main narrative was the build up to the disaster itself, or the consequences that followed its occurrence.  Through its dynamic and intelligent structure, the answer is that Chernobyl is both.  This allows a single event to be played for multiple crescendos of suspense so strong you’ll suddenly realise you’re hovering metres above your sofa rather snuggling into your scatter cushions.  Between these peaks, though, we have background radiation to prevent anyone from ever relaxing.  The erratic ticks of the Geiger counter begin to haunt you.  While this invisible threat is actually a very cost-effective form of horror when it comes to production budgets, depictions of its effects are disturbingly graphic.  This is not a relaxing watch.

But we’re not done.  Slathered over these layers of tense action is the amplifying factor of our Soviet setting.  Gilead-like in its control of every waking minute, this further threat to human survival rears its head several times, whether it’s Communist Party credibility getting in the way of the population’s best interests or the intense exchanges with head of the KGB (a spine-chilling performance from Alan Williams).  At odds with this workers’ and peasants’ utopia, which is already looking a little tired around edges and at odds with eighties fashion before the incident, is the fact that the all-powerful regime can draft in hundreds of thousands of expendable human conscripts to clear up its messes.  Chernobyl is able to relay the disaster’s impact at every level; whether a scene shows the evacuation of thousands or bristling dialogue between our heroes leading the clean-up, each detail is artfully executed and captured, from the constant smoking, the ill-fitting suits and the tacky interior designs to the suspicious glances, overuse of the word comrade and the suffocating lack of freedom under the state.

To recap, the subject matter, the writing, the setting and the production all give us top-quality drama, but the penultimate piece in our puzzle is the acting.  It’s very good (said in a British luvvie commenting at the theatre sort of voice).  Emily Watson displays why she is the sort of actor who makes any line sound like a masterpiece in her composite role as a key scientist risking her own safety to help solve Chernobyl.  Alongside her, Jared Harris (known best to me as the least sexy partner in Mad Men) commands our support as the individual who has to make the USSR realise the extent of the problem, Valery Legasov.  Each cigarette he lights is a manifestation of another realm of human exhaustion.  We’ve also got a Skarsgård (Stellan) doing his best gravelly-voiced military old man routine, completing the trinity of our three central parts.  Alongside them, a retinue of faces you’ll recognise from all sorts of places bring to life the rest of Soviet society on the Belarussian-Ukrainian border and in Moscow.

Finally, the structure.  To build on my earlier point, this is a masterclass in drawing from a singular horrific moment to drag us to the edge of our seats and beyond for five hour-long episodes.  This is TV-making at its best.  Sure, maybe it could have been rushed through as a feature film, but I’d only have fallen asleep (though I made it through Blue Story and everyone needs to see that too).  We’re able to take our time building up not just the setting, the period and the tension, but our longer format allows a depth of detail that enhances the whole drama.  An earnest review is a rare occurrence on this blog, but I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I’m in two minds about indulging in a second viewing altogether, such was the level to which Chernobyl impressed me.  Though, perhaps impressed is the wrong word.  It chilled me: a nightmarish scenario that comes into being when a nation has the wrong leaders.

Kingdom (킹덤)

Well, a lot of people filled their boots with the Shipwrecked post, didn’t they?  Learning nothing from that runaway success, this week I’m veering recklessly to the other end of the TV spectrum.  We’ve not chatted about my love for zombies since both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead (the latter a spin-off of the former) were subjected to my sardonic snarkiness months and months ago.  So, brace yourself for the flesh-eating undead.  But that’s not the only swap we’ve made.  Replace a Pacific Island with the Korean peninsula.  Switch bikini-clab British Millennials for medieval Koreans.  And sub inarticulate youths saying “you know, kind of like” for a violent onslaught from the Korean language, with subtitles straight out of the How To Speak Archaic English textbook and, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got yourself Kingdom.

But, as always, due to a grave inability to take anything seriously, I jest.  Kingdom is literally the best thing I have seen on Netflix in ages.  I’m not even sorry about writing such a weak sentence as that previous one – it doesn’t need dressing up.  I’m still in a state of excitement, and I finished all six episodes about a week ago.  I’m looking at the clock as if it’s going to tell me when series two will come into my life and provide me with equal measures of horror and entertainment.  Let’s be honest, I get both of these in my office, but very little of this comes from historical Koreans, so it’s nice to have a change, isn’t it?

The bit where I tell you what it’s all about will now follow, but again, we’re going for a certain laziness of language, as the rest is verging on highbrow (historical, foreign language) and we need to average things out to keep the majority happy.  So, there’s this prince, right?  His dad, the king, is on his deathbed, yeah, but the prince is being kept away by the new queen, his stepmother.  She’s expecting a baby by the old king, so she needs her husband to survive until the birth in order to secure succession.  She’s part of a clan who are hungry for power, so let’s just say there’s a rather Westerosi approach to this whole throne ownership business.  Her clan’s devious attempts to keep the king alive are what cause the inevitable zombie outbreak, while dismissing a physician back into the countryside is what spreads the pestilence to the peasants beyond the palace.  Meanwhile, our poor old prince also has to flee for his life on a quest to find out the truth.  He’s about to find out it’s not so easy being a prince in zombie-riddle medieval Korea.

What sets this apart, though, is bloody all of it.  But let’s distil from this two of the main TV-viewing features upon which you can feast your eyes.  The first is that every shot is exquisitely cinematic in its beauty.  From ancient palace buildings to dramatic landscapes, the visuals’ lushness is exceeded only by the ancient costumes.  You’ll wonder who ever thought those big hats were practical for soldiers, or question how warm so many layers of silk can be, but you’ll always end up impressed.  Somehow, this aesthetic doesn’t distract from the drama; instead, it becomes the perfect frame for the zombie fare, which often needs further theming to become plausible.  Having been to modern South Korea, I’m not sure the impact would have been the same among the grey buildings of Seoul, evidence of the whole place getting smashed in during the 1950s’ Korean War.

The second main setter-aparter is the incredible dramatic tension.  A zombie origin story is always fraught, as you, the viewer, sprawled on your cushions and shoving snacks in your face, know full well that doom is due while the characters all too slowly put two and two together and come up with some sort of denial of the epidemic chasing them down country lanes (yes, these zombies run, fast).  Skip this bit if you don’t want any spoiler content whatsoever, but one element of the zombie mythology in Kingdom has to be mentioned: the undead are only active in the dark.  Cue limitless possibilities of the sun setting, corpses starting to twitch, silly Korean magistrates being inefficient in their jobs and all hell being unleashed.  Conversely, you know your beloved main characters just have to survive each night before the daytime brings a bit of a breather.  A whole episode got so tense, the build and build to nightfall so domineering, that I had to press pause and pace about the room a bit to restore all sense of perspective to myself.

Alongside all of this, Kingdom finds time to make comparisons between the haves and have nots in society: a sort of socialist message to accompany the consumption of flesh, if you will.  The nobility are repeatedly shown to cock up their handling of an issue of national importance, while our royal hero, the prince, also learns that the peasant fodder bearing the brunt of the infestation don’t actually deserve to be eaten alive.  It’s funny how Brexit bleeds into everything, isn’t it?  (Or is that a bit of a reach this time?)  It seems that any dishonour towards a royal, however, does come with the alarming punishment of one’s whole family being annihilated.  What a great way to target crime.  The next time someone swipes your iPhone on a moped, you can rest assured that they won’t just be found and jailed, they won’t just be executed, but their whole family tree will be erased from the earth.

I’ll finish by saying that I don’t care if you don’t like subtitles.  You should have tried harder at school if you can’t read fast enough.  Stepping outside of the English language into Kingdom allows you to access one of the most compelling additions to the zombie canon in quite a few years.  Sure, it’s based on a comic book, like The Walking Dead etc, but it’s set apart by its uniqueness in the Western TV marketplace.  It’s also endlessly gratifying to watch the various extras really go for it in their performances and energetically give something extra of themselves, become extra extras.  Just remember, don’t come for me when you reach the cliffhanging end of series one, because it was me who opened your tiny mind to the intense tension of Kingdom.