The Night Of

You might be wondering what I’m doing talking this week about something from 2016, but over the previous 197 posts I think we’ve established well enough there is no method to my madness.  The Night Of was one of the first boxsets recommended to me at the very beginning of this project, and it’s been lodged in my brain ever since.  It even got downloaded (by me, on purpose) to my Sky box at the start of the year when I finally decided that I must get down to following up on its recommendation.  But there it stayed, cruelly ignored while I worked through Fargo and a variety of other Netflix trappings (Call My Agent!, Last Chance U: Basketball).  But then, with Oscars season upon us, its star, Riz Ahmed, was everywhere.  I needed to see what all the fuss was about and conveniently had a slot in my viewing schedule.

I’m ruing the day I didn’t dive in as soon as this show was recommended to me.  Episode one immediately got its claws into me and I tingled with smugness at the thought of finding something to watch that was not going to disappoint.  There was intrigue from the first minute, all against a backdrop of the much-missed city of New York (what with foreign travel being an impossible offence while the sniffles keeps on going round the world).  Knowing something terrible is going to happen: there’s nothing more compelling than that.  From the moment Nasir (played by Ahmed with wide-eyed conviction) gets invited to a Manhattan party from his Pakistani enclave of Queens, the show’s very title makes it clear this isn’t just a pleasant evening in the city.

I’m not going to get into too many details, as these would all be spoilers, and I know for a fact you’ll be following my pleas to see for yourself this exquisite boxset.  Needless to say, there’s a certain amount of being led astray, of trying things for the first time and of cutting loose from a conservative upbringing while potentially ill-equipped to deal with its consequences that makes this fateful night all the more significant.  The tension then takes hold, with us as the viewer violently willing Nas to slip out of the precinct while awaiting processing for his initial misdemeanour.  Cleverly, we are left in doubt regarding his innocence as far as the evidence shows, but we are desperate for him to be cleared of all charges at almost any cost.

Along the way, every character that enters the universe of The Night Of comes with such depth and richness that we almost don’t notice Nas’s long absences while they work their way into our lives.  John Turturro’s John Stone oozes New Yorker, hardened and brash, and with no shits left to give about what anyone thinks of him or any of his skin conditions (at least, so his outer shell would have us believe).  I did wonder at the size of his out-of-home advertising budget as his Subway posters are everywhere, especially if he only charges $250 a case.  Nas’s parents do a huge amount with very little, dignity burning behind their eyes, while Detective Dennis Box earns our sympathy as he retires and Helen Weiss, the district attorney, even as she works against us, carries a certain charm.  The Wire’s Michael K. Williams haunts as Freddy, showing us everything that’s wrong with the American justice system.

That said, it was the cat that I got most excited about.  It just goes to show that great writing and great character development are lost on me when there’s a purring feline rolling about on the floor.  I felt I could have cured John Stone’s allergies simply by wishing them away.  So, from New York night life, the episodes progress to a taut court case.  At points, all seems lost.  At others, the characters’ behaviour aggravates both you as the viewer and their own sorry situations.  But we’re kept guessing till the end, fed some red herrings to keep us going and distracted by artful production design and cinematography from the fact this is (apparently) a rehash of a 2008 British show.  I don’t care where it came from, this gem was a great find, and maybe the story is more universal than as specifically New York as I had thought, but it’s elevated by so much else that it’s definitely one for the boxset list.

30 Rock

For the creators of amazing telly, it must be dispiriting to have their programme described as a background show.  Yet the concept is well worn, particularly when we are stuck at home all the time.  For me, the background show is ideally shorter than half an hour in length and, typically, a comedy.  It might seem like a fall from grace for something like Friends, going from must-see TV premiers in primetime to something we can put on for a bit of chatter to drown out our thoughts while our attention is half-taken by chopping up vegetables or watering the houseplants.  But, it’s either a new way of appreciating an old favourite, as my journey reacquainting myself with South Park proved in its unfolding, or a perfectly apt way of discovering a new show, as I did with Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  It’s even more impressive if a background show can make you laugh out loud, and this week’s subject, 30 Rock, certainly did that to me.

Interestingly, to nobody but me, 30 Rock straddled both of these categories.  I remember watching the first series in some former stage of my life, enjoying the fast pace of the gags on gags, the perpetual irrelevance and the abundance of very very silliness (hello to you, Miranda).  Nobody knows why, despite the best efforts of scholars, but I never got any further.  Cue 2020/1 and I’m working from home every day, trying to make lunch breaks a thing by popping on an episode of my current background show while treating myself to one of life’s few remaining comforts: food.  There, among all the Sky boxsets, was dear old 30 Rock.  Surely I could get through all seven seasons simply because I have nothing else to do, unless you count staring in the mirror and weeping.  I’m here to report that, yes, I really did achieve my goal of watching all of it.

Scant research, by me, has revealed that the concept of 30 Rock is loosely based around the writers’ room of famous American cultural thing Saturday Night Live.  We don’t get that in the UK.  Our live thing on Saturday night is Strictly Come Dancing and that doesn’t have a writers’ room because, like a lot of British telly, there aren’t actually enough writers to go round that every show can fill its own room with them.  I suppose it depends on the room, though, as we could just be talking about the downstairs cloak.  In short, SNL (for short) is a parody sketch show of that week’s events featuring a celebrity guest host and a retinue of regular cast.  Within 30 Rock, our version of this is The Girlie Show but, as each series unfolds, we see hardly any of it.  Half the joke is that it’s bad and unfunny, cobbled together at the last minute despite the ineptitude of its writers and producers, while the rest of the humour comes from the lives of the characters trying to make it happen in the first place.

Our hero is Liz Lemon, played by creator Tina Fey.  I’m doing things arse-backwards here as I’ve already banged on about my Tina love in a previous post on her later creation Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  Both shows have a lot in common, but one key difference is that Fey hardly appears in the latter.  Lemon, however, is our window into the TV sketch show production world, the only (relatively) normal and capable NBC employee trying to wrestle everyone else along to something approaching acceptable behaviour.  You’ll come to love her as much as you’ll love seeing her abused by co-workers, friends and family, often via flashbacks to her dweeby childhood and teenage years.  She’s all of us in later decades when we can’t be bothered to go out at night anymore (something I regret terribly now we’re not allowed to go out at all).

The pilot sets up her main foil, network executive Jack Donaghy.  Alec Baldwin has the time of his life as this right-wing conservative, sending up a variety of attitudes with charming affection and building over the series with Liz Lemon an almost perfectly symbiotic relationship.  Lemon, too, is thwarted by her cast.  Donaghy forces upon her Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan.  She must effectively parent this manchild and his entourage while keeping happy her best friend, Jenna Maroney, TGS’s original star whose nose is well and truly put out of joint by the arrival of Jordan.  At all times, Jane Krakowski’s performance is my favourite thing, as Maroney’s fame-hungry desperation, delusional attitude to ageing and uncompromising need for attention mark her out as a true kindred spirit, although I can’t sing and she can’t stop blurting out tunes at the slightest provocation.  The wider cast sets up constant jokes at the expense of various strata of American society, and then this is fleshed out to great effect by a steady stream of guest stars, from Mad Men’s Jon Hamm to Bojack Horseman’s Will Arnett.  I’m reserving special mentions for Rachel Dratch in various scene-stealing roles and for the character of Leo Spaceman, the world’s worst and therefore funniest medical professional.

And that’s the main conclusion to leave you with – this stuff is funny.  Some elements haven’t aged too well from 30 Rock’s 2006 beginnings, but we’ve had many intervening years to improve our society and so any reaction to bad taste simply shows you how far we’ve come.  The characters are strong, ridiculous and don’t even come close to running out of mileage.  The action is relentless and there’s never more than ten seconds without some sort of gag.  With even just half an eye on it while you move your mouse around on your laptop so it looks like you’re actively working from home, it can still guarantee you laughs.  So this still remains amazing telly, no matter what attention you’re paying it.

The Sopranos

It’s 2021 and everyone’s glad that 2020 is over.  However, we still seem to be in lockdowns (and, worst of all, we’ve come out of the EU as if to exacerbate deliberately the economic effects of a pandemic).  If someone had said back in March that we’d be isolating and social distancing for a whole year, they’d have been told to do one.  The month-by-month slipping by of time under these circumstances is perhaps one of the worst things to look back on.  But that said, I’ve continued to embrace all things locked and down, and taken on a boxset that was definitively a big part of things way back at the start of all this.  Along with baking banana bread (didn’t do it), watching Tiger King (loved it) and clapping for carers (never did it as I would rather vote for parties that support essential workers instead of performatively applauding them in some hypocritical act of self-soothing), the government also mandated we should all re-watch The Sopranos.

Only I had never seen it.  I think, when it first emerged in 1999, I dismissed it as a programme for dads to watch.  I was a thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolboy, so I failed to see any real common ground or entertainment value in New Jersey mobsters and their mental health issues.  This means I got to spend the rest of my life telling people I had never seen it, holding out like a deluded antivaxxer.  But, in 2020, with more time forcibly on my hands and a lot of my favourite podcasters extolling the show’s virtues, I clicked download on my Sky Boxsets and settled in with high expectations.

Things, initially, appear to be quite dated.  At over twenty years old, the first season is indeed vintage.  The violence is fine, but the nineties décor of the Sopranos’ family home is quite hard to stomach.  I’m told this was the big splash that the programme made, the first in HBO’s run of revolutionising the boxset.  More blood, more boobs, more bad language.  I’m all for the constant risk of sudden nudity (see post on Industry), but the Sopranos’ contribution to this, throughout all six seasons, is a reliance on interstitial footage of the female staff of Bada Bing (still the best name ever for a mafia strip joint) jiggling their cleavage before we pan to a conversation among Tony and his brethren.  Yet, you can see the foundations for the expectations we now have of a seriously quality boxset.  And by the sixth series, it’s much easier to recognise these tropes.  In addition, with each season, the improvement in story-lining abounds.  At first, it seems to be a selection of things happening and we have none of the tight winding to a climactic final episode that the modern viewer expects.  A bit of this and a bit of that and, bada bing, the season ends.

In fact, some of the more action-based performances are slightly tentative.  Let’s be honest – this is just middle-aged men having a punch up, but I never fail to be impressed by the fisticuffs abilities of Silvio or Paulie when it comes to taking on any and all comers.  It’s often their sheer balls that outwit their opponents.  While the fight choreography doesn’t run rings around anything, the crime family do run rings around the cops.  It seems you can shoot your enemies willy nilly and the police won’t have a clue.  That said, there’s plenty of criminal-on-criminal abuse, making it clear that, as with Narcos and Top Boy, heading up an illegal organisation is a constant challenge, with a high churn rate of employees.

If anything, The Sopranos is a fairly affectionate lesson in how the mafia apparently works, with some Italian-American history thrown in.  I can’t remember if the show was accused in its day of glamorising organised crime (see earlier comments about middle-aged men fighting) but I can’t really see the appeal in how they run things.  There’s constant squabbling about who’s kicking up to whom on which dustmen routes, squeezing pals for higher percentages and then going for constant meals out at various Italian restaurants.  The death knell for me was when characters started to comment on how delicious certain gravy was.  In Britain, gravy does not go near pasta, so this was an abomination too far.

Away from the careers, it’s the adjacent families that always capture my interest more closely.  Tony Soprano himself, while an inexplicable lothario whose audible nose-breathing proves irresistible to almost any woman he comes across, is really your average put-upon breadwinner.  Outside of his day job and trials at work, dealing with his family is a source of even more compelling drama.  I love Carmela’s endless nagging, trying to hold moral high ground while constantly benefiting from dubious activities.  If not picking arguments with Tony, she’s passively aggressive or outright aggressive to daughter Summer and younger son AJ.  Both kids are brats whose impetuous parental arguments mirror their father’s own office politics back at the cosa nostra.  No wonder Tony resorts to therapy.

Indeed, it’s Tony’s time with Dr Melfi that helps to provide further exposition to his trials, but there’s a sense that nobody knows what to do with the therapist during some of the seasons.  I, for one, would have liked to see her branch out into overhauling Tony’s other health problems: smoking cigars, eating processed pork, never exercising outside of copulation, stressful occupation.  However, Dr Melfi gets to be badass in the final season, standing up for herself at long last.  In fact, the female characters add the greatest depth to proceedings overall.  From Tony’s mother, to his spoilt older sister Janice, via an array of mob wives of different shapes and sizes, the show makes it clear that they keep things ticking over.  Which brings me to Drea De Matteo’s stand-out turn as Adriana.  Having only ever seen her in Desperate Housewives, I was drawn in by her complexity as Christopher Moltisanti’s girlfriend.

If I were to analyse this, I would say Tony’s line of work is almost irrelevant, serving as just another lens on the American Dream.  Work hard enough and you can have it all, but what do you do with the all when you have it?  And how do you make sure you keep it?  What adds spice is The Sopranos’ position as an immigrants’ story.  While Tony’s associates are fiercely proud of their Italian heritage, they’re more conservative than the waspiest of Jersey’s residents, expressing outdated views about other minority groups, homosexuality, gender equality and all manner of social topics that continue to be hot buttons in 2021.  While I wasn’t always as gripped as I expected, I settled into a rhythm with my pals in the Soprano family, their whingeing accompanying many a WFH lunchbreak or the near-completion of a one thousand-piece Friends jigsaw I came back from Christmas at my folks’ with.  As the final scenes of the family meeting in the diner played out, I felt an additional tension around their prospects.  Despite it all, I wished them very well indeed.

Power

In and amongst the various quality boxsets (Watchmen) and trash series (Love Island USA) I might have on the go at any one time, there’s always a background show that I’m getting through at a more leisurely pace.  For the last one hundred years, this has been Power.  I forget when I finally relented to Netflix’s constant algorithmic suggestion that this was a show I might enjoy, but somehow I’ve got through its six series of at least ten (sometimes fifteen) one-hour episode.  Let’s be clear: I’m here to say I’m a fan of Power.  But, crikey, it’s been some tough going.  How easily and how often I’ve been distracted by shinier (Euphoria), cleverer (I May Destroy You) programming.

Firstly, let’s categorise the show.  It belongs in a group that I have previously christened: a whole lot of f*cking.  Alongside Elite and, let’s be honest, Game Of Thrones, Power viewing comes with the risk of sudden sexually explicit antics filling your screen.  Episode one barely throws out a few establishing shots before our sexy leads are not just cavorting in their marital bed, but properly having a right old go at some serious slap and tickle (I definitely heard scrotal slapping).  You don’t need to use your imagination, because nothing is left to it, but you might want to ensure your 55” telly screen isn’t overlooked by neighbours with young children and you haven’t yet sorted out curtains for your floor-to-ceiling French windows.

So, who are these people whose close-up intercourse is essential to the plot development?  Power is all about James “Jamie” St. Patrick, an NYC kid from the wrong side of the tracks who, after amassing a fortune from large-scale drug dealing, is trying to turn himself into a legitimate businessman.  Played by the exquisitely goateed Omari Hardwick, this is a character we root for no matter what terrible things he does, clothed or otherwise.  And if he happens to interpret legitimate business as opening up seedy nightclubs that are dogged by violent crime, then so be it.  What we rarely see Jamie doing is going to the gym, despite the fact he is stacked beyond all belief.  There’s some intense jogging in early seasons and he does visit a prison weights room later on (albeit briefly and bloodily), but I find it hard to believe he’s not constantly repping out some big lifts and counting his macros, in between trimming his beard, dealing drugs, shooting people, surveying his night club from a raised walkway or being an absolute sod to his long-suffering wife, Tasha, (Naturi Naughton).

Tasha St. Patrick is the heart of the show, often called upon to channel her inner boss to protect her family (with mixed success) or to ward off threats.  She and Jamie are often found in their swanky penthouse where the lift opens straight into the lounge, and it’s here they’re often visited by our third lead and Jamie’s childhood BFF, Tommy Egan.  I vowed I would never troll anyone on this blog, but Joseph Sikora is the hammiest actor I have ever seen.  It takes a real scenery-chewer to know one, so we can accept this is coming from a place of being a ham on stage myself, but you eventually develop a charmed affection for his idiosyncrasies – he is simply another layer of camp in the outrageous proceedings that almost never seem to end.

As we’ve noted before (Narcos, Narcos:Mexico) a career in drugs can be a touch stressful – I don’t think they even get to work from home during lockdown.  Drama dogs Tommy and Jamie at every step, with each season introducing a new array of dastardly dealers looking to steal their patches, take their connects and generally indulge in anti-competitive business practices.  Instead of litigation, recourse is taken rather to ultra-violence, with the body count exceeded only by the nudity count.  Whenever a fresh character is introduced, you’re hard pushed to guess whether they’ll die before they get naked or get naked before they die, or do both at the same time by dying naked.  As a homebody, the worst part about their chosen industry is the constant galivanting about town.  The endless texts and calls between the characters predominantly showcase them demanding to meet each other in person all over New York.  Once you factor in a journey time of more than 45 minutes each way then suddenly the millions of pounds earned from selling cocaine to yuppies don’t seem worth it at all, and that’s before the FBI start tailing you.

Despite being sexy and sleek, a certain bleakness with Power can take things out of you.  Sure it’s a banging soundtrack that accompanies the, er, banging, but everyone behaves like angry children and it can only really go round in circles as they cross, double-cross, triple-cross and shoot at each other.  It’s made me want to go back to New York, but I’m not currently allowed in case I bring the sniffles with me there or take it back with me afterwards.  For fans of 50 Cent, you’ve got 50 Cent, so I suppose that’s something, as he really does play an absolute shit.  Most galling for me was, being very close to the end, I inadvertently caught an advert for the spin-off series which spoiled the ending of Power completely, so all the hours of viewing became slightly redundant, resulting only in these few hundred words of poorly structured prose.  I’m about to search for GIFs to pepper in here and I’m a touch afraid about what I’ll see but, assuming you’re not pulling together an indulgent blog on your viewing experience, you can’t go wrong with a bit of Power’s sexy gangster mayhem.  And with Lockdown Two ruining lives near you soon, you’ll have plenty of time to get through it all.

Flight Of The Conchords

If you’re anything like me, you might have asked yourself on multiple occasions why can’t all TV be musical.  Following on from last week’s post on Netflix’s Soundtrack (still a masterpiece) and a previous unpopular rant from me about what Glee did wrong (it’s here and needs more reads), we’re going back in time to look at one of the few boxsets that managed to be musical and cool at the same time.  I had nearly forgotten all about Flight Of The Conchords.  But, back in January, I was lucky enough to fill a spot with friends in a French ski chalet and found myself bombing around Tignes with some very advanced practitioners of winter sports.  So adept were they at swooshing down black runs, treating their inordinate speed with nothing but nonchalance, they had earned the right to annoy less stable alpinists by carrying speakers in their rucksacks and playing music out loud.  Older gentlemen do this a lot in lockdown London, cycling through crowded parks with loud beats emanating from their bicycles.  I’m not proud to say that we were equally anti-social, especially when it came to forcing others to endure prolonged exposure to us on various ski lifts and in their various queues.  As six adults in their thirties (four doctors, one commercial airline pilot, and me, someone who tits about in media partnerships) you may find our music choices challenging.  After exhausting the soundtracks of various Disney films, from Moana to Frozen, and reliving our youths with Tenacious D, our next source of musical accompaniment was Flight Of The Conchords.

I defy anyone not to appreciate the wanky Brit-abroadness of zipping down a sheer ice face in a busy French ski resort while singing along to Foux Du Fafa.

So let’s unpack the enduring appeal of these minstrels.  Firstly, Flight Of The Conchords, as themselves, are a New Zealand comedy music duo who’ve been active since 1998.  This blogpost is about the two series of their HBO New York-based sitcom that ran from 2007 to 2009.  I’m not sure if it was ever broadcast properly in the UK and, like my friends when it comes to sorting out our first meal in a restaurant since the start of lockdown, I’m not prepared to log onto the internet to do the appropriate research that would benefit everyone.  It was one of my many Belsize Park flatmates who must have brought home the DVDs probably around 2008, drunk on the swagger of unearthing early-adopted content to show to his co-renters.  Let’s not take this accolade away from him, as he remains a dear friend, going on to have two daughters with the wife he met in that very apartment, giving my life some value by virtue of me being the one who chose his future spouse off Gumtree.  It turns out, we only had the first season, but we would watch it over and over, and then listen to the CD soundtrack, also over and over.  The second series was something I only came across in 2020 on my Sky Q box, as it seems Sky Comedy have the rights.  I therefore peppered this into my regular viewing: new Rick & Morty, a fourth season of F Is For Family, lockdown-induced reruns of old Big Brothers and, er, Cruising With Jane McDonald.

Everybody, there is so much to love about Flight Of The Conchords.  Let’s start with our heroes, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie.  Unlucky in love, they’re a kind of kiwi Peep Show pair, their strong accents only adding to the silliness as almost all of their vowel sounds get swapped around for the wrong ones.  The cheap appearance of the first season brings to life perfectly the absolute shitness of the Chinatown neighbourhood they inhabit on their shoestring budget.  Gainful employment comes in the form of a posting as the in-house band of New Zealand’s consulate, an organisation occupying the most depressing-looking office block in all of the five boroughs.  This premise sets up the perfect contrivance: as a band, they of course burst into song.

Only, they don’t really burst.  They slip.  They shimmy.  They irreverently and knowingly look down the camera lens, in on the joke that codifies their song: we’ve met a woman of average attractiveness (The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)), we’re laughing about the banality of long-term relationship sex (Business Time), we think we’re better than we are in reality at social gatherings (Prince Of Parties).  Their lyrics are often juxtaposed with reality, the whole thing packaged up with a heavily themed video, whether taking inspiration from Bowie or 90s rap.  In short, nothing takes itself seriously.  Why then, indeed, wouldn’t you have a Gallic number composed entirely of stock GCSE French expressions?  Cue titters as we all laugh about asking “Où est la piscine?” or saying “splish splosh” in a Parisian accent.  These silly songs are silliest when it comes to their catchiness.  Forgive me for only focusing on our first series here – it’s a familiar place for me, whereas the cameo-heavy second season, which seems on first watch to match its predecessor on song quality, has yet to get its claws into my short-term earworm faculties.

Alongside their failures with the ladies, Bret and Jemaine also fail to get anywhere with their music career.  This is often down to their manager, Murray (Rhys Darby), whose focus is the attendance register and agenda of band meetings at the expense of having a clue about anything else.  Nevertheless, their one and only (super) fan is on hand throughout: we have wide-eyed Mel played by Bob’s Burgers’ wonderful Kristen Schaal sporting an anorak and being, frankly, a pervert.  Fans of the anglophone world will also enjoy the long-running rivalry with their counterparts from the Australian Embassy, made all the more insulting by most Americans assuming our lads in the band are actual Australians.

For me, the only thing that has aged is the portrayal of New Zealand.  The country and its consulate are positioned as a running joke, with the Prime Minster himself acting the fool throughout his official visit and the ill-fated establishment of Newzealandtown (squashed between Chinatown and Little Italy).  In reality, New Zealand is fast earning international respect as one of the best countries.  Instead of being run by round blonde racist toddlers like the US and the UK, NZ has gone for a goddess who pursues welfare over growth, all while keeping a pandemic at bay.  Please may Jacinda Ardern take over Britain?  You may ask where I got that preposterous hypothesis.  Did Steve tell me that, perchance?  Mmmph, Steve.

Seriously, though.

Unorthodox

Netflix has fast become my most cherished companion during these weeks of lockdown.  While discouraged from leaving the house (I think) by various unclear Tory waffles (not sure why I would take any form of instruction from people who have actively pursued something as stupid as Brexit), my TV has seen unprecedented (pandemic bingo!) levels of use.  It gets switched on while I make breakfast, a weekend brunch affair that has become a daily routine of slowly scrambling eggs and brewing coffee.  If I manage to grab a lunch break between video calls, I’ll treat myself to a quick episode then.  And finally, after work, rather than a rushed Tube commute with angry Londoners, I simply have to stumble from my laptop to the living room, leaving the never-ending avalanche of emails for another day, for a few hours of inert diversion (some of which time is spent wondering what I can do about my growing belly as it protrudes over the elasticated waistband of my tracksuit bottoms).  In all of the quotidian monotony, I’ve had a very good run of Netflix not only entertaining me, but gripping me to my seat: Tiger King, Last Chance U, Cheer and Elite awakened a compulsion in me not to stop until every episode had been devoured.

As the TV powers on, I can’t switch from linear broadcast to Netflix quickly enough.  The news that always seems to be on is, quite simply, the worst.  Blurry contributors garble on from their home studies while showing off their AirPods.  Some sort of Scottish minister holds forth about how corona is affecting Scotland (specifically and endlessly) while a nice deaf lady does sign language in the corner, her face betraying a preference to be doing any else but this.  Everybody speculates about what will happen next while invoking an unhelpful comparison with World War II.  That culminated in the Holocaust, so perhaps we can do a little better in 2020.  I’ve taken to re-watching Friends for comfort (even finding an episode of series one I had never seen – I know!) just to get away from the lazy journalism.  So, I clicked on Unorthodox.

I was immediately sucked in and raced through the four episodes while practically holding my breath.  I’ll be honest that my choice was partly informed by linguistic policy.  After so much Spanish, I was hopeful for something in German to help tune me back in for FaceTimes with friends in Hamburg.  Unorthodox came up in a search for German-language content, but it’s actually half in English and half in Yiddish, with a few other languages scattered across it.  Based on a 2012 book by Deborah Feldman about her real-life departure from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, Unorthodox’s setting in a minority religious community was catnip to me as a compelling theme, so I shrugged that Yiddish was similar enough to German and cracked on.

Raised a heathen, the world of any sort of faith eludes me.  You can justify anything with faith.  I can punch you in the face and say it was faith and you can’t get mad.  I can make lifestyle choices based on spurious translations of millennia-old texts and then apply them to other people at will and they can’t get mad.  Unpacking what makes people cling to this sort of thing is fascinating.  I’ve always devoured documentaries about the Amish, while Wild Wild Country offered another view on how these things start and how communities respond.  I’d also seen the Netflix documentary One Of Us which had given me fair warning about how hard it is to leave not only your ultra-Orthodox community, but your friends, your family and your whole way of life.

Unorthodox is told in two concurrent narratives.  The first, sticking most faithfully to the book, follows our heroine, Esty Shapiro, as she prepares to leave her husband and flee the Williamsburg neighbourhood where she has lived her whole life.  The tension crackles as she secretively breaks free and you can’t help but will her to run away.  The second, which is more loosely only inspired by the book, follows her progress on arrival in Berlin – making new friends, wearing new clothes, eating ham.  Shira Haas blows my mind with her lead performance.  I’m still thinking about it now.  I am so convinced by her journey that I occasionally find myself wondering how Esty is getting on in Berlin.

As such, resisting just one more episode is impossible, as you’ll need to know if she makes it, how she makes it, why she escapes and what happens next, all at once.  This is multiplied by the privileged glimpse into a deeply religious world that is hidden from most of us; the wedding scene in particular is documentary-like in its setting out of customs for us to witness.  While voyeuristic, there isn’t a sense of condemning what we see.  We are simply able to view it, and the characters’ responses to it, in the frame of Unorthodox’s sociological storytelling.  Marriage is crucial in Esty’s community, as procreation is seen as its primary purpose, their drive to repopulate a historical hangover from the Holocaust (which I inadvertently foreshadowed in my self-pitying introduction).  Affection and sexual enjoyment are therefore fairly low down the marital agenda, far behind taking the bins out and weeing with the door open.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Esty is confronted by the fact that the aftermath of genocide, rather than leading to a life-defining duty, is more practically incorporated into daily life as a part of history and geography.  The Berlin scenes rely slightly too much on happenstance to take Esty’s journey forward, her leeching on to a multinational group of idealistic young musicians being met with enthusiastic adoption when surely most people would ask a hanger on to get lost – maybe that’s just the London in me.

In conclusion, Unorthodox offers compelling drama and an eye-opening insight into a community and their practices that you might not know much about.  I now want all my dramas to be set in devout sects, for the hats alone.  But I warn you, set aside sufficient time to get through the whole thing, as you won’t be able to stop after just one episode.  This should be fine, though, as it’s not like we can go anywhere.  Maybe lockdown is our own orthodox lifestyle that we can’t escape from.

Orange Is The New Black

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

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

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

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

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

Season one

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

Season two

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

Season three

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

Season four

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

Season five

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

Season six

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

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

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

Gossip Girl

A lot of people have been asking me recently how I choose what to write about next.  And by a lot of people, I actually mean nobody – I’m just using an Instagram trope here.  Friends tend to look away sheepishly if I ever ask them directly about reading my blog.  If I wander over to a conversation about boxsets in the office, silence suddenly descends as people fear I’ll try and promote my writing and opinions.  Sure, everyone wants to tell me what to review, so now I’ve got a list of shows I’ll never get through, but then people only read if they like the programme I’m rinsing.  But no, each one of these is a gem, so please read them all.  If you don’t like the show, there’s enough rambling about me as a person to counter that.  And this week is no different.

Currently bogged down in some big old boxsets, I’m raiding the archives again.  Two things have brought Gossip Girl to the top of the list.  One is the return of colder weather to London after the inhumanity of July’s heatwave.  As a sweaty adult, I couldn’t be happier.  Winter is coming, and everyone knows back to school is the best time of year.  You can get a new pencil case, some fresh pens, and you’re another year up in school, which increases teenage coolness no end.  However, I’m thirty-three and I work in an office.  Rather than returning from the summer hols reinvented, I’ve not been off since April (though that was for a trip to Japan, so, you know…) and we don’t have pencil cases at work due to the clear desk policy and the replacement of pen and paper by laptops.  But no, it’s colder and I love it.  And if there was ever a show for giving you winter coat inspiration, just take a look at any episode of Gossip Girl.  Every character, even those on supposedly limited incomes, has an endless supply of on-fleek winterwear.  This might give you some pointers on the quality of Gossip Girl’s drama, the fact that coats are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the show.

The second reason is that I recently passed the ten-year mark in the job I so freely berate in these posts.  In June 2008, at my final interview, I talked about Gossip Girl in answer to an important question.  In those days, the department I was entering mostly only did TV sponsorships.  My two interviewers were asking me which I had seen on telly myself.  Let’s set the scene.  I had cycled across a boiling London from my hellish old job, so I was sweaty (recurring theme) and dishevelled, with uncontrollable helmet hair.  I also had an eye infection, thanks to the effect of general London dirt on my Home Counties eyes.  So my contact lenses had been abandoned for the NHS specs I only wear behind closed doors.  On the thirteenth floor of a Holborn office block, the sun was shining directly in my face, optimising the sweat-fest conditions so much so that I had to rub the perspiration repeatedly from my clammy forehead.  Don’t worry, I totally got the job obviously, and my new colleagues later told me they got a Harry Potter vibe from me due to all the conditions of my appearance I have just described.

So what TV sponsorship should they realistically expect a twenty-three-year-old lad to talk about?  Maybe some sort of football or other ball sport?  No, I was happy to make a banging first impression by talking about Gossip Girl.  If you’re going to enjoy TV aimed at teenage girls, you might as well get that out in the open as a first step.  In those days, a combination of graduate poverty and historic media technology meant that TV could only be consumed as per the TV guide.  ITV2 seemed only to schedule Gossip Girl at 10.35pm every third Thursday as long as the moon was blue and pigs were flying.  Didn’t stop me though.  I never missed an episode, complete with Guerlain sponsorship idents for a sickly-sweet perfume aimed at teenage girls (like me) with olfactory challenges (not like me).  Cue me bossing the question with epic insights into why the brand and the programme were the perfect convergent fit.  Cue my future employers hiring me because I reminded them of Harry Potter.

After 750 words, then, I should probably tell you what the show is about.  The premise focuses on an exclusive Manhattan school for wealthy kids.  Enter via bridge or tunnel Dan Humphrey, a scholarship-endowed chap with curious side-burns, played by an actor named after a brand of tennis ball (Penn Badgley).  His crush on Serena van der Woodsen (a charmingly ingenue Blake Lively, but with a chequered past when it suited the plot) generated the tension of the first series, if I remember rightly, but luckily this was all stretched out for six series of 121 episodes.  Little bit of Mean Girls, little bit of Cruel Intentions, little bit of anything that’s ever been set in New York: this was Gossip Girl.

Well, that was the whole point: which of the main characters was actually Gossip Girl?  I never finished watching the show, so I don’t really know myself.  It doesn’t matter as I can’t be sure I ever understood what this concept was supposed to be anyway.  These were the days before smartphones and 4G.  Using the internet away from your ethernet cable was limited to noticing your ancient mobile had accidentally switched on WAP and imagining an extortionate bill on your Orange tariff.  This didn’t stop Blair Waldorf or Chuck Bass in their conniving ways, using this nebulous platform to drop dirt on friends and frenemies alike, setting us viewers up for a roller coaster of crossing, double crossing and back crossing until seeing the end credits came as a welcome release.  Each instalment would culminate in some sort of catered event: a birthday party, some welcome drinks, basically anything.  In the run up, boyfriends and girlfriends would need to betray each other in the best interests of each other (I think), resulting in a climactic unearthing of the truth on Gossip Girl, heralded by simultaneous mobile bleeping as the blast came through and the action kicked off.  I say action, but the boys were restricted to conveying emotion through smoulder only, and the girls similarly limited to pouting, so the whole thing resulted in the kind of face porn that makes you disappointed to leave the comfort of your own home and see an ugly person.  Or there might have been one in the actual house with you, which was all the more shocking due to its proximity to Nate Archibald or Vanessa Abrams.

In 2012, Gossip Girl bid us XOXO for the last time, inspiring a Beyoncé classic, but leaving a glamorous teen drama-shaped hole in all of our viewing lives.  I’m none the wiser about who ended up with whom, but the Upper East Side must be awash with genetically blessed babies by now.  A reboot wouldn’t know what to do with itself.  Gossip Girl would have to go multi-platform, with accounts on SnapChat, Tinder, Insta and probably LinkedIn.  I just hope Dorota is on more than minimum wage and that Eric van der Woodsen no longer has a centre parting.  So, to all those a lot of people who have been asking me what’s getting covered next, just chill out and keep reading yeah?  At the rate this thing is growing, you’ll be able to claim early adopter status by 2020.