Last Chance U: Basketball

We’ll begin this week with apologies to an unknown neighbour of mine.  The flat on the other side of the wall to which my big telly is mounted has occupants unknown to me.  They have a different entrance and we’re therefore mostly happy in our separate lives.  Sure, one of them has a very loud voice and spends most evenings playing video games while shrieking into a headset, but I just turn up my own boxset volume to drown at a grown man shouting at people to “Kill him, kill him, KILL HIM!”  But oh how the tables were turned this week as I made my way through the final episodes of Last Chance U: Basketball.  These ball games were recorded over a year ago; they’re being broadcast as part of a documentary.  Yet, the excitement of the matches, the odds at stake, the significance to the players and the closeness of some of the scores, all these things had me jumping up and down, yelling at the screen and even clapping each time points hit the scoreboard.

Such is the power of Last Chance U as a franchise.  I’ve already posted about its progenitor format, following junior college teams playing American football for their last chance (clue’s in the name) at college scholarships.  The fifth season’s appearance was a welcome lockdown drop, standing out for having a coach that actually seemed completely decent, yet sadly tailing off as the pandemic came along to ruin young lives.  Well, this is more of the same outstanding drama, but make it basketball.  I’ve covered my dalliance in this sport already, having been very pleasantly surprised by the triumphant The Last Dance a few months back.  I’m basically an NBA expert now.  And so here we are, at a college in East Los Angeles (ELAC) following their basketball team’s dreams to improve their game, come together as a unit, win state and bag scholarships to unlock futures otherwise denied to them as young African-American men.

If you’re a sporting imbecile like me, you’ll find basketball is a much easier follow than the defence-offence-special teams confusion of American football.  For those still needing help, there’s a basket at each end and you’ve got to put your ball in there to score.  It helps if you’re six foot heading on seven, as these baskets aren’t built with anyone of less-than-average stature in mind.  You also can’t just carry the ball, but you can bounce it as much as you like.  There are also sometimes fouls, but I don’t know why these happen.

At the heart of any Last Chance U is the head coach.  Step forward John Mosley, a man you’ll come away desperate to be friends with.  He gets it.  He knows the odds are stacked against his kids, so he pours everything into getting them what they need.  He’s in no way camera shy, acting out some dramatic tirades when the team aren’t following his instructions or trying hard enough.  And this man can preach, taking his fervent Christian beliefs out at the slightest provocation to deliver heartfelt sermons in the locker room that are guaranteed to have uptight Brits cringing.  His team aren’t always appreciative of how much he pushes them, yet some of the best arcs within this first season document how they come to realise his significance in their paths to progress.  And there’s affection in the tension too.  When not clapping and yelling, I was also laughing my head off during the team’s cohesion trip to the Californian countryside where one evening’s activity was competitive impressions of their exuberant coach.  Mosley took their spot-in impersonations in his stride.

Within the team itself, we are directed to focus on four key players.  Each will win your heart, from Joe Hampton’s palpable frustration at referee persecution to Deshaun Highler’s unrivalled grit and tenacity in getting where he needs to be in the face of personal tragedy.  Around this core, the rest of the team is just as engaging and you’ll find yourself wanting to know more about all of them. You’ll laugh along at team jokes like you’re a fellow player.  In fact, it’s a privilege to be able to have such a nose around in their lives and team dynamics, which leads me to the most apt term for Last Chance U’s style of observation: unflinching.  We look away from nothing.  From the captain spewing up his guts to various locker-punching tantrums, we’re with it all the way, even after we’d prefer not to be.  Signature to this series are long face-on shots of key characters, part-brooding, part-defiance, all haunting.  It breaks the otherwise sacrosanct rule of nobody looking directly down the lenses of the cameras that are thrust in their faces.  They see us, watching them.  This intensity elevates.  The only thing missing is the syncopated drumbeat of a typical Last Chance U opening sequence.

I’ve recommended Last Chance U: Basketball to anyone that will listen, and to even more people that won’t.  It will get you in its grip till you miss it when it’s over.  This series is perhaps one of the bittersweetest what with the 2019/20 season running into something just over a year ago that we’re still dealing with to this very day.  But, in time, you’ll remember the hope it has given you.  The next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, ask yourself what the players of the East Los Angeles College basketball team would do.

Kingdom

This week, we’re looking at a drama that answered a question nobody at all had been asking: why isn’t there a scripted television series about mixed martial art fighting?  Running between 2014 and 2017 and potentially never showing on a UK broadcaster (that I had access to), all three series of Kingdom appeared on Netflix at some point in the recent past.  At first, I had to overcome my confusion about whether this was a further instalment of harrowing period Korean zombie fare, Kingdom (킹덤), but then it became apparent that I have now watched so many boxsets that we’ve reached the inevitable point when the names start to repeat themselves.  Nevertheless, with every episode now under my belt, I still don’t know why this show is called Kingdom.

I don’t think it’s the setting, as this is Venice Beach, a seedy-ish Los Angeles neighbourhood that is half vegan breastfeeding and half Camden Market-on-sea.  As a viewer who loves a strong sense of place, this locale gives Kingdom a raw feel to its sex appeal, with the sweaty, toned and tattooed bodies of the various fighters belonging to an array of what can only be described as white trash.  Meet the Kulina family (who again don’t seem to have anything to do with the programme’s title).  Our leading man is Alvey Kulina, owner of the successful Navy Street gym and a former champion fighter himself.  We can see he knows fighting as, when strutting through his empire, he’s got a technique cue for every grappling extra he passes.  It’s not all protein shakes and heavy sets; Frank has plenty of demons.  Three of them are the other members of his family.  Ex-wife Christina is a victim of addiction, funding her habit through her pimp’s less-than-ideal employment arrangement.  Elder son Jay is the loosest of cannons, veering on and off the rails and, no matter his alcohol consumption, he manages to maintain a body fat percentage of 0%, something the producers never allow us to forget through his constant states of undress.  Then we have Nate, a more introverted character (pop music’s Nick Jonas – saw him on Broadway once… no big deal) who lurks mostly in the shadows with problems of his own.

Both Alvey’s sons are fighters in their own right and, according to Kingdom, this involves enduring frequent cuts to make weight ahead of whichever bout they have signed up to.  As well as crash dieting, there’s a predilection to dress in plastic and sweat out as much weight as possible, pound by pound.  Joining the Kulina boys in this is fellow brawler Ryan Wheeler.  Guess what he’s got.  That’s right, demons of his own.  He spends season one transitioning out of prison, but you’ll find yourself more interested in halfway house roommate Keith, whose mental health episodes prove a laugh a minute.  Matt Lauria, of Friday Night Lights fame, plays our Ryan, but the two shows have little in common when it comes to how they portray their respective sport.  For some reason, each fight scene fails to feel like a climax.  The stakes don’t feel as high as a high school football game in Dillon, Texas (or Last Chance U).  In fact, while there are many touching and exhilarating moments, Kingdom on the whole seems to bumble along.  This happens, and then that happens, but it never feels like part of one overall narrative that is going anywhere.  Maybe this is intentional.  Maybe I’m an idiot.  The storytelling is almost purely psychological, so expect lots of lingering shots of welling-up eyes while people deal with the unbearable nature of life.  They don’t care about their black eyes but they’re sad their fathers never really showed them love.

It’s probably down to too much expectation on my part.  I’ve been spoiled recently by super-taut boxsets where each side eye and exhalation contribute to an overall juggernaut of tense storyline propulsion (I’m looking at you, Succession, and missing you every day).  I’m craving structure, but instead Kingdom has endless gratuitous footage of cocaine being snorted or breasts being fondled or arms being injected or faces getting punched or more cocaine being snorted (leading me to suspect they borrowed the prop team from Narcos).  I always wonder if the actors are really hoovering up real powder and risking septum deviation.

Meanwhile, the characters are constantly sustaining injuries.  As an athlete, you don’t want this to happen, whether in the ring or outside of work brawling with your pals.  Somehow, though, my viewing of Kingdom coincided with my own breaking of bones.  A freak Crossfit accident smashed my fifth metacarpal, leaving me with a bulky cast for the last three weeks.  I hope everyone appreciated my painstaking typing of the last three entries with a left hand alone, though I suppose the most recent one was dictated using software that made me realise what a dick I sound as I compose each sentence.  A ruinous moment for me, it allowed me to identify with the characters on a new level.  Ryan’s hurt knee stops him training, just like my busted hand meant all of the following tasks became nigh-on impossible: cracking eggs, scrambling eggs, washing up, blowing my nose, any form of chopping, in fact all cooking, using cutlery, taking out contact lenses, putting in contact lenses and many many more.

Enough about me.  The hand is back in action and we’ll crack on, then, right up until the two hundredth post of this nonsense, even though the start next month of a part-time creative writing MA could result in less time for me to produce this drivel.  That said, that same instruction might actually improve the quality of what you’re currently reading.

So, if you like violence, there’s a certain charm to Kingdom.  You’ll become part of the fighting family, enjoying something unique, ambitiously shot and fairly decently sound-tracked.  The fact that it became a bit of background viewing for me speaks more to my own distractions than the show’s quality.  Yes, I was making a lasagne while the final episode played, but I did tear myself away from the white sauce several times to join in with the emotions playing out on screen.  I’ll miss you, Kingdom, and may I never find out why you got your name.

Soundtrack

Every minute, 6.5 boxsets are uploaded onto Netflix (probably).  As soon as you think you’re on top of your consumption, there’ll be a new season of that thing you like, or an unseen weekly instalment of that other show that person at work said you should watch.  It’s easy to feel you’re falling behind with a lifetime ambition to complete the platform as if it were a video game, sacrificing your other civic duties of staying at home and ordering stuff online.  But don’t worry, this blog is here to support you in your boxset choice fatigue.  You don’t look at the BBC schedule and despair that you’ll never get round to sitting through everything.  So it should be the same for the online streamers – you only need to watch what you want.  And, to help, I have another hidden gem that might appeal to you.

It has been freely acknowledged that previous hidden gems (un)covered here may not be to everyone’s taste.  As an unregulated, practically unedited, weekly stream of my own opinions, all that matters here is what I think, but all healthy debate is invited.  I was one of the few who thought The Get Down was pretty much a masterpiece.  I would still recommend Friends From College to anyone with a sense of humour.  Everyone should watch Dark, as the wondrous complexity of its plots is only one of its many virtues.  I could go on.  This week, after a recommendation from a dear friend, I have been uncovering Soundtrack.

The trailer ticked a lot of my boxes, mostly because the presence of singing and dancing indicated that this was probably a musical.  Finally, something to come along and meet the unreasonable expectations that I had of Glee.  But this is the first point of difference to cover with Soundtrack.  The cast don’t actually sing the songs.  They lip-synch to the soundtrack.  This is best illustrated by one of the opening scenes.  Nellie, our female lead, is getting ditched by her self-centred boyfriend in a busy restaurant.  As the emotion hits home, the opening sirens and beats of Sia’s Elastic Heart are played to us, the audience.  But it also becomes clear that these aural indications of mood and theme are perceptible to Nellie.  She mouths the words.  She dances choreography.  The background artists, masquerading as waiters, join in as if her subconscious has expanded to include those around her.  You’ll either run a mile at this point or find it to be stirring stuff.

I was hooked.  Throughout the ten episodes, the soundtrack of, lol, Soundtrack, bleeds into the characters’ actions and stories, often culminating in a quite aggressive mash up in some episodes’ climaxes.  While today’s hit parade is often the source of these tunes, later instalments raid Broadway and beyond.  Gender, race and age of recording artist are irrelevant.  It’s all about the sentiment.  Some performances play out as dream sequences, others are more naturalistic, but the whole piece has an experimental feel.  And that’s why I laud Soundtrack: it’s trying something new.  We could easily dismiss this as a gimmick, and some clanging moments (blocking!) in the earlier episodes nearly saw me switch off, but its second strength comes from its story.

Set in LA, Soundtrack at first appears to be a generic love story, documenting the relationship of Sam and Nellie.  Paul James and Callie Hernandez prove so charismatic in these roles that you’re almost disappointed that Soundtrack turns out to be an ensemble piece, with most episodes structured around two other characters and their interplay, drawing focus to Sam and Nellie’s family members, friends and social workers.  That said, the episode Gigi/Jean is carried solely by Megan Ferguson as Nellie’s best friend, though with Nellie herself almost entirely absent, and I found it one of the most compelling instalments.  Sure, this is part La La Land, so everyone is trying to make it in art or music or dance, or has made it in acting.  This is also Netflix, therefore some elements do take their time in order to fill the ten hour-long instalments, but this also somehow doesn’t feel like the kind of fluff that this characteristically flippant write-up would otherwise have you believe.  It’s more affecting, though this might be down to my own (and all of our) emotional vulnerability in lockdown.

So why not watch something that hardly anybody else is?  Soundtrack is not as derivative as it first appears.  It has devastating drama alongside banging choreography that is filmed in a way that really lets you appreciate the movement.  Some of the cast are better at lip-synching than others, but this is part of its style.  It’s a great injustice that I don’t think we’re going to be treated to any more of it, but let that reassure you that this won’t become something that burdens your to-watch list with constant additional instalments.  Soundtrack is the most hiddenest of gems, but if you believe people should burst into spontaneous song and dance in real life then let this single item in your Netflix algorithm offer some diversion from reality.

Keeping Up With The Kardashians

After last week, we’re continuing the theme of keeping up with various things.  Whereas my last post was about the very British pastime of projecting the behaviour of a superior class on one’s friends and neighbours, revealed through sitcom chaos to be as exhausting as it is hilarious (Keeping Up Appearances), this week I’ll be linking that nineties sitcom with the very LA pastime of being a Kardashian, this time projecting the behaviour of a superior class not just on one’s own friends and neighbours, but on the whole world.

Now, you may have asked yourself at various points who or what a Kardashian is.  I have to admit I don’t really recall how and when they came into my consciousness, let alone that of the planet’s.  In isolation, a Kardashian sounds like some sort of medical mishap named after an obscure gynaecologist: “Oh dear, she’s got Kardashians again.”  In fact, for those that don’t know, the Kardashians are a family that is also a series of products.  I’ve paused here to see how I can succinctly explain how they all fit together, but I’m going to have to do it in long form.  We come to know these products, sorry, family members over something like forty-two series of their reality TV show, plus an array of spin-offs.  I’m not actually a willing viewer of any of this.  Sure, it ticks a lot of my boxes.  Trashy?  Yes.  Reality TV?  Most definitely.  The real world filtered to look better than it actually is?  Absolutely.  But there’s a hollow ringing to its message that makes each minute seem like time that could be better spent doing something else: watching You’ve Been Framed, for example, or thinking fondly of childhood memories.  So, let’s meet the Kardashians we are trying to keep up with:

Kris Jenner

Our matriarch styles herself as the momager, a title that’s as apt as it is sinister.  Her shrewd skills at self-promotion have seen her many progeny foisted into the spotlight for their earning potential.  It feels a bit wrong, but she’s very good at it, so we have at least unearthed some semblance of talent behind the worldwide fame.  She’s a loose cannon who thrills at embarrassing her children – you can’t miss her fun-loving attitude, even beneath several strata of expensive make up.

Kourtney Kardashian

The eldest sister, but the second-best wit.  She wins for being first to reproduce, with her most scathing stare reserved for ex-husband Scott Disick, who enjoys himself far too much throughout the whole show.

Kim Kardashian West

The internet requires nothing further to be said about this person.

Khloé Kardashian

The wittiest sister: Khloé has the best personality and is therefore the most attractive within a family that is already inordinately appearance conscious.  Her lines alone almost make the show worth watching, but you can actually scroll through endless gifs of them in various Buzzfeed listicles instead.

Kendall and/or Kylie Jenner

There are some younger half-sisters whose names also begin with K.  I have trouble distinguishing them but it doesn’t matter as both/either are wildly more successful than I will ever be.

Rob Kardashian

Yes, there’s a brother as well, but they couldn’t think of a name beginning with K for him, so this has caused him to spiral into obesity and obscurity.

Caitlyn Jenner

Before transitioning to live as a woman, this was Kris’s husband and the father of the two youngest daughters, with the elder siblings’ father, Robert Kardashian (the lawyer off the OJ trials) having passed away.  Divorcing Kris with mixed results, Caitlyn can now hair-flick with the rest of the Kardashians, though has faced as much criticism as praise since coming out as trans.  I’ve always found this individual wooden and boring, regardless of gender, so if that doesn’t make me a trans ally, I don’t know what does.

Anyway, that’s enough slagging off of real people.  There are also various babies and hangers on.  One pal, Jonathan Cheban, only got his spot on UK Celebrity Big Brother purely through dint of being Kim’s friend.  What an achievement.  Though I suppose Kim only got famous in the first place for being a chum of Paris Hilton.  Allegedly the whole concept of the show was conceived in partnership with Ryan Seacrest, but I can’t hear that name anymore without thinking of the Bojack Horseman character of A Ryan Seacrest Type so we’ll get straight into my other reasons for finding life too short to watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

While there is humour and drama, and plenty of escapism in this guilty pleasure, it’s their self-obsession that sees me itching to switch the station.  It’s hard to identify with people so privileged who still find so much to moan about, either in their soft-focus, flatteringly lit pieces to camera, or during the constant staged conversations in various expensive kitchens where everyone stands between the units pretending to eat food while never letting their smartphones out of their clutches, probably because another family member is on speakerphone.  While watching them jetting around the world, enjoying sumptuous meals out, splurging on jewellery, clothes and skin creams, the girls harp on about their anxieties and the resentment they harbour for each other.  They complain about their lack of privacy, which is delicious when you consider the camera crew has been invited into their private life (and I won’t even dignify Kim’s sex tape with a mention.  Oh.  Whoops.)  Rarely does the outside world get a mention, or do they prioritise using their platform for greater social good.

This was perfectly encapsulated by the 2017 fallout of Kendall Jenner’s appearance in a controversial Pepsi ad that indicated a carbonated sugary beverage could solve America’s entrenched racial inequality.  The episode was filled with Kardashians sympathising with their billionaire sibling, lamenting how hard she had worked only for people to be nasty about her on social media.  The real issue of a society that seems culturally prejudiced against people of colour was not mentioned.

So what is this show’s appeal?  An old flatmate used to watch it religiously, and it was only after a few viewings that I realised this wasn’t ironic consumption: she really did love the girls.  They sell, through their show and their social platforms, a lifestyle that is aspirational.  By being voyeurs to their TV-produced storylines, that lifestyle becomes tantalisingly close to reach.  This is what drives the capitalist minion in all of us.  Skipping down the street with a takeaway blended might make you feel like some Hollywood A-lister, but you’re really just a few quid worse off, consuming calories you don’t need and generating plastic waste that will end up in Our Planet.  And you still live in Leatherhead.

As a family, the Kardashians are winning at sweating their assets and their asses to make cash.  They are swept up in their own hype, but we needn’t be.  There’s not much to keep up with besides a lot of spending, some drama and only thinking about yourself.  I don’t know why I feel so aggrieved that they don’t use their fame for more good – they’re not the only celebrities setting questionable examples.  Just look at British right-wing politicians.  I think it’s because I am so aware of their influence on a generation of girls needing more support and sustenance than unrealistic expectations and unfair comparisons.  I have a way to prevent the Kardashians ever getting a hold of me: I just think of the Big Fat Gypsy Kardashians from the Keith Lemon Sketch Show.  They’ve got the biggest caravan on the site, so they do. 

90210

This week, we are doing a show whose title is a postcode.  Only, it’s called a zipcode in American.  As always, they’ve taken a concept and given it a jazzy name that deserves the sunglasses face emoji, and we’ve made it sound ornamental and begrudgingly functional, like a National Trust tearoom.  But this isn’t just any postcode, this is 90210.  Even the sequence of numbers can conjure images of sexy beaches and palm tree-lined boulevards: yet another challenge of growing up British, where my home postcode was KT22 9PE.  What did that tell you about the place?  Not much, beyond the fact it was a forty-minute drive from Kingston-Upon-Thames, which wasn’t even a real town, but a bit of London with its own John Lewis.  But 90210 wasn’t aspirational due to its digits, but because of its association with Beverly Hills, 90210, the teen programme that ran for the whole of the nineties and from whose memory this week’s show emerged years later in 2008.  From a young age, I knew 90210 to be a thing, but I thought Beverly Hills was just a famous lady or one of my mum’s friends with an impulse perm.  Either way, at the age of 23, a version of the IP came along for me on e4 and I was hooked from the start.

Ticking my first box was the setting.  We had both the fish-out-of-water schtick, and shiny US high school.  The initial premise revolved around the Wilson family, returning to LA from down-to-earth Wichita to look after a grandmother (played by Arrested Development’s and Archer’s Jessica Walter).  Through the eyes of their kids, we entered a privileged world, adopting a trope done so many times before.  In fact, at one point, 70% of all television was about people coming to LA who were not from there and having to stay true to their hearts while existing alongside dogs in handbags.  But what about the bloody kids?  There was biological daughter Annie.  She was a dick.  Well, not really, but I remember getting more and more annoyed by her over the course of the five series.  A highlight for me was her taking part in the school production of Spring Awakening, but only because it was a play I had studied in its original German (shout out to all my Frühlings Erwachen fans yeah) at university.  She was a good kid who made bad choices so often, it became fun to watch her suffer.  On the other hand, her adopted brother, Dixon, also had the same appalling track record, but was able to laugh most things off with a little chuckle that was his response to everything.  Tristan Wilds had previously appeared in a series of The Wire, but as I watched that after 90210, I was alarmed to see this Beverly Hills jock as a child drug dealer.  But then I remembered about acting and that.

Joining Annie and Dixon at high school are a parade of beautiful people.  Memorable among them was Naomi, running the show as chief mean girl, but also dominating the script with all the best lines.  But don’t worry, she learned there was more to life than being cool when she fell for one of the school geeks and dressed up as a Na’vi from Avatar for him.  She looked really convincing.  Her best mate was bad girl Adrianna Tate-Duncan, who combined teen pregnancy with drug abuse, all while I don’t think anyone ever explained her double-barrelled surname.  Not that it needs explaining, but you rarely see these in fictional characters, so I have been obsessed with it ever since.  I enjoyed self-righteous scarf-wearer Silver, but she often veered into being nothing more than a conduit for mental health storylines.  Similarly, Teddy went from background jock to reason to have a coming out storyline.  90210 aimed well in its attempts to tackle issues, but they were always wedged into the plots like shirts you can’t fit in a wardrobe because it’s too full of hangers.

I’ll dwell briefly here to slag off Navid as well.  I enjoyed his Iranian mother getting disappointed by him, but his need to wear waistcoats over t-shirts can, I realise now, be blamed for some terrible outfit choices of my own.  And he had a weak chin, which, as we all know, should never ever be teamed with boyband hair.  Unacceptable.  But if this new generation weren’t enough to draw in the viewers, the stars from the original Beverly Hills, 90210 also cropped up in the high school corridors, providing continuity but only if you had paid attention to old storylines from around a decade beforehand.  I hadn’t, so I would lose myself in tracing the plastic surgery lines on their faces while they did their acting and failed to hide the joy behind their eyes that they were being paid to work again.

Ultimately, the descriptor for this show is unashamed.  Everything 90210 did, it did unashamedly, legitimised by its predecessor.  It was unashamedly Californian and unashamed in reflecting that aesthetic.  It was welcome as an escape from drizzly London life, particularly when I remember the terrible roles and low salaries I fulfilled and earned at the time of its broadcast.  I could ignore being dragged into adult life by looking at wealthy American teenagers.  These days, grown-up reminders slap me in the face every time I open my eyes: my friends have birthed further babies, my conveyancers want more bank statements or colleagues need actual line managing.  My postcode now has SW4 at the front, which you either associate with a chavvy festival for pill-heads or with a London suburb so preoccupied with brunching and Instagraming that someone has thoughtfully spray-painted “welcome to Wankerville” on the railway bridge as you enter Clapham.  I know where I’d sometimes rather be: in Beverly Hills (the bit in LA, not inside my mum’s friend).

The OC

Californiaaa.

Califooorniaaa.

Here we coooooome.

I think we’re all guilty of screeching these lyrics at some point during a night out.  Invariably, it’s gone midnight.  People’s standards have dropped, responding to overplayed cheese music with raucous cheers and conflating jumping up and down out of time with dancing.  On comes one of the pitchiest theme songs we’ve ever known and suddenly we’re all guilty of the delusion we can reach and sustain those big notes as sung out by Phantom Planet.  I’ve come close to asphyxiation several times, but it’s worth it for that brief sentiment that I’m some sort of Californian teenager, rather than an adult who should know better, trying to relive their university heyday, spending my Student Loan in Oxford’s The Bridge nightclub.

That’s right: this week, we’re doing The OC.  Why?  Why not!?  Also, I haven’t finished anything new in a while and you readers seem to lap up the nostalgia.  Reminding people about when they were young is some of the biggest clickbait the internet was invented for.  You’re not eighteen anymore, but let’s see if I can’t remind you just how many possibilities lay ahead of you then by taking up a thousand words or so of your time now.  But, the first thing I want to point out is our ridiculous obsession with California in the first place.  I didn’t grow up there.  My Orange County was Mole Valley; my California was Surrey.  A teen show called The MV (which we never even called our district at the time) with a theme tune that involves belting out the word Surrey repeatedly would just never had had the same global appeal.

But what was it about The OC that drove us so wild in 2003?  It wasn’t even on at a convenient time.  It appeared in the T4 schedule, thrown to by a smug Steve Jones and an even smugger Miquita Oliver (love them both), at something like 11.15am on a Sunday.  These were the days before setting the Sky Plus, so you had to make sure you knew where to be on a Sunday morning.  TVs were hard to come by in my student days (having already alluded to the TV room situation in my Desperate Housewives post) but one of us did have a teeny tiny 14 incher in their room.  Up to 20 of us would clamber onto any available service for an overpopulated group viewing, unable to make out what was happening onscreen and deafened to any of the dialogue by constant chatter and subsequent shushing as we reacted wildly to anything we did happen to follow.  Ah, such good times, then.

At the show’s heart were the Cohen family, whose wealth was matched only by their do-goodishness.  Patriarch, Sandy, summoned power from his enormous eyebrows, saying the words “pro bono” over and over until they were nothing but a euphemism.  His wife, Kirsten (which sounds abhorrent in an American accent and was therefore abbreviated to Kiki, which was just creepy instead) had different coloured highlights in her straightened hair and a wealthy dad off Neighbours.  Their awkward son, Seth, displayed his awkwardness by having his every line overwritten into banter, disguising the fact he was deeply annoying for many series.  I’m making everyone sound unlikeable, but this was over a decade ago and times were simpler.  We tolerated worse people in our Californian drama.

In the first episode, the Cohens adopt a lad from the wrong side of the tracks: enter Ryan Atwood, played by a forty-year-old (probably) but supposedly a school-age kid.  The OC didn’t care that your knowledge of LA neighbourhoods was limited: just by saying he was from Chino we had to understand that he was from bad stock.  Maybe Chino is like Croydon.  I don’t know.  Our bad boy tries to mix into wealthy society with mixed results, boosting Seth’s street cred, but also getting him into trouble.  Luckily, someone was on hand to say, “Welcome to the OC, bitch.”

Indeed, it was the bitches of The OC that became breakout stars.  We were all abuzz about the beauty and coolness of Marisa Cooper, but it was her sidekick Summer who had the best lines and an actual personality (even getting referenced in a Rizzle Kicks song years later).  Like Gossip Girl (with which the show shared some development), things ramped up around an event in each episode, typically spoiled in some way, often by Ryan’s wrong-side-of-the-tracksness.  The four seasons must have got repetitive, as I don’t remember finishing them all, but for an hour every Sunday morning, we could truly believe we were Californians.

When I finally went to California for the first time in 2014, I forced friends take me to the OC, even though my visit was already self-invited.  We sat on Laguna Beach and then had a fancy lunch.  I had a wee in the sea to mark the occasion.  Among my student pals, we all found different ways to express our obsession with the show.  One individual, editing the features section of one of our student newspapers, the Cherwell, would use Ryan Atwood as a pseudonym for the articles he wrote for his own pages.  I painstakingly downloaded the soundtracks from Kazaa, following the exact track-listing of each Mix in the series of Music From The OC, falling in love with songs like Dice by Finley Quaye & William Orbit, and Fortress by Pinback.  Maybe if I listened to the music hard enough, I would be a resident of Orange County too.

In conclusion: Californiaaa, there we went.  A show whose cast and storylines once seemed like the most important things in the world is now nothing more than a standard selection from a wedding DJ.  Relive your youth and watch it again.  Root for Seth getting a date with Summer.  Root for Ryan to overcome the prejudices suffered by a boy from Chino.  Root for yourself to find out what Chino is.  Root for Marisa’s mum’s lips to be slathered in so much lip gloss you can see your own reflection in them.  I haven’t done any of these things; I’ve just gathered some hazy recollections and then done a second-rate job of fact-checking them on Wikipedia.

So, let’s repeat to fade, now that we have run out of things to say:

Californiaaa.

Califoooorniaaa…

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.

BoJack Horseman

So far in my life, I have failed to give anyone a decent description of the concept behind BoJack Horseman; everyone claims it doesn't make any sense.  And now that the fourth series has snuck into Netflix, I will be repeating that failure in this blog.

Imagine a world where some people are animals.  Most things about this world are the same as ours.  There are humans and they have lives.  But in their lives are other people who are dogs or cats or horses.  BoJack is one of these horses.  And, because some animals behave in certain ways (fish live in water, dogs bark at vacuum cleaners, flies fly) so too do these characters.

If you're not thinking "Wait, what?!" by this point, in the appropriate southern Californian accent of course, then read on.  Our hero is a washed-up actor whose 90s sitcom projected him into the big time, only for his ego and insecurities to drive him into has-been status.  Yet we root for BoJack, as he embodies our own fragile sense of value, and laziness about most things.

The stellar voice cast alone should be an indicator of the show's quality.  Unlike adult cartoons where everything must end as it began, the characters' stories intertwine and move on.  And adult this is, with drug binges and overdoses featuring, not to mention the strange need throughout to imagine how all these different animals have sex in a world where interspecies dating is perfectly acceptable (but that might just be me).

While the animation takes a while to get used to, as it's not that pretty, and the pace of the script can seem relentless, as gags are packed in at a mile a minute, it's the subtle and not-so-subtle touches to the flashbacks that I always remember.  Sure, the 90s heyday of Horsin' Around (the cheesy sitcom where BoJack plays a horse that takes in three orphans) is lampooned.  But even 2007 is exposed for the load of old tosh it really was.  The most cunning stroke every time is the sarcastic soundtrack especially produced for each period.  Listen out for it and ask yourself if this is the first time you’ve ever noticed the lyrics to songs used in TV and that they have secretly been trolling you all along.

I've read this back, then, and it still makes no sense.  Rest assured I have done the programme no justice.  But trust me, it's worth watching.