Fargo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Hate Suzie

Something terrible happened towards the end of last year.  As a liberal hipster, my easily distracted thumb was pottering around on the Guardian app and I came across an article counting down the top 50 TV shows of 2020.  Like you, I did wonder for a moment why I hadn’t been asked to write it, but then realised I am not actually a professional journalist.  But, as an amateur connoisseur of boxsets, I quickly clicked it and read it, anxious to see whether I could nod in reassuring agreement or reel dramatically at their choices.  Naturally, in first place we had I May Destroy You.  Well done me; I had watched this.  But, at number two, was I Hate Suzie.  For shame, I had never found the promos of this show appealing.  I had in fact ignored a friend’s recommendation to try it, even though he was the same rascal that turned me on to my beloved Industry.  With lockdown going on forever, I made my way through its eight episodes on Sky Boxsets.

Billie Piper is as much a part of British culture as xenophobic newspaper headlines and voting in comedy prime ministers.  A massive popstar when I was in secondary school, she purveyed pop songs so cheesy and catchy that we laughed derisively about how uncool she was.  We were much cooler, being obscure, untalented children and all.  Until recently, though, my household did contain a CD single of Honey To The Bee, an underrated subsequent release of hers that almost references my surname.  It might still be around here somewhere.  But, thanks to my own perception of her as a singer, I never engaged with any of her acting up till now.  Secret Diary Of A Call Girl was a mainstay of pre-Love Island ITV2, but not of my viewing schedule.  Yet my friend, and the Guardian write-up, promised something worth investigating.  As a sufferer of FOMOIEOYCRL (fear of missing out in end-of-year cultural ranking lists), the completionist in me was prepared to embrace Billie and welcome a bit of Piper back into my life.  Because I wanted to.

Our premise is eerily similar to Piper’s own real-life trajectory.  She plays Suzie Pickles, a national sweetheart shot to fame on a reality TV singing show (hello X Factor) before transitioning into a TV actress.  She’s one of those people in the magazines and on the gossip websites and just doing this now.  Only the last thing she’s just done, putting at risk her entire career, is suffer a leak of private, explicit photos to the media.  Sadly, the shots are not a solo performance and her accompaniment comes in the form of an extramarital phallus, so there’s all that to deal with as well.  Each whirlwind instalment focuses on a single one of the eight stages in Pickles’ response to the trauma.

In the process, Piper and co-creator (and full writer) Lucy Prebble (as previously collaborated with on Secret Diary Of A Call Girl) use the unfolding disasters to provide deliciously inventive commentary on a huge number of our daily staples: the treatment of women, motherhood, fame, disability, loneliness, sexuality and so on.  From the audible diarrhoea-induing first discovery of the pics to a proliferation of meltdowns, via awkward family events (the wedding of Pickles’ sister is outrageous and universal at the same time), frustrated self-loving (for more or less a whole episode) and the ripest sending-up of celebrity culture, Piper’s performance is everything.  The camera often just gives us all that face and it becomes our anchor in the madness, trapping us with Pickles in her nightmare.

Yet more intriguing is her agent and best friend, Naomi (Leila Farzad).  The dynamics of their relationship creak under years of irreconcilable imbalance until we scream at Naomi to respect herself and prioritise her own needs.  Naomi gives one of the best ever shutdowns to casual, micro-aggressive racism I have ever seen, but her wronging by men knows no end (that train journey).  Pickles’ husband is himself human collateral in the fallout.  Daniel Ings (one of the joys from W1A) is exasperated as Cob, eagerly weaponizing their deaf son to his advantage yet less than keen to lose the perks of having a famous wife.  Even with her success, it is he, as the man, who expects to be more important in everything that happens.

I admit to lacking patience with some episodes, but I am learning to love this freewheeling style (as seen in I May Destroy You) where creativity and storytelling gang up not to care about what you’re expecting.  By the final scene of the final episode, my sympathy for Suzie Pickles was at its peak.  I had never hated her and I don’t know who did.  Having it all is simply another thing to feel lonely in spite of, only it emphasises the unjustifiability of that loneliness, so you feel even lonelier.  Does Suzie’s preoccupation with herself drive others away, or do they give up on her when she doesn’t give them what they think they need?  I still can’t work it out.

Travel Man: 48 Hours In…

While some parts of modern life are returning to a semblance of normality, particularly if you already avoided all human contact, one area of sunshine in our otherwise pointless existences has come back with an added layer of jeopardy.  What used to be called going on holiday, but is now defined as a hobby under the smugger term of “travelling”, is fraught with the risk of your foreign destination falling foul of arbitrary quarantine rules mid-sojourn.  It might have been officially safe to go there, but you could end up coming back from somewhere dangerous, required to submit to an honesty box-enforced personal lockdown of two weeks, just for burning your skin and eating full Englishes in Marbs.  Luckily, TV has many options when it comes to vicarious holiday-making.  I’ve already covered Cruising With Jane McDonald, much to the ambivalence of my loyal reader(s).  But this week I’m going to be telling you all about my recent obsession with Travel Man.

Everyone loves Richard Ayoade.  He was crucial to the charm of The IT Crowd and has gone on to make a living as a professional silly sausage, which schtick is only enabled by his conversely erudite true nature.  For those of us whose lifestyles are more than a little inspired by the teachings of Asperger, he’s a ruddy hero.  Like me, he’s guilty of the approach to travelling where, on the day you’re required to leave, you’d do anything to be able to stay at home instead.  Once away, you may well have a lovely time and forge treasurable memories, but you’re never gladder than the moment you cross the threshold back into your own abode again.  An entertaining choice, then, for a travelogue series.  Let’s run through, to borrow Ayoade’s own frequent references, the format points:

Travel Man always goes with a pal

Each episode focuses on a different predominantly European destination, to which Ayoade is accompanied by a predominantly comedic companion.  It’s a who’s who of British televisual light entertainers, though some Hollywood heavyweights do steam in, introduced to us with all their hyphenations: writers, actors and, ubiquitously, broadcasters.  But what really is a broadcaster?  Am I broadcasting now?  I don’t know.  The show has been opened with a madcap monologue where Ayoade soliloquises from multiple incongruous locations on the pitfalls of modern weekends away: what if it’s a bit rubbish?  The showbiz pal then sets us up for the second earful, demanding to know why they have been brought to Porto/Bergen/Athens etc.  Cue a street jive-inspired yet still deeply ironic beginner’s outburst to the place in question.  The guest tourists are often reduced to foils for Ayoade’s self-confessed glibness, with any showing off swiftly halted, but there is always enough chemistry for the viewer to yearn for an accompanying ticket.

Travel Man is on a budget, a massive one

Prices for sundries and excursions pop up in jaunty bubbles onscreen, with an overview of the cheapest possible trip to our destination given early on.  However, this is often run roughshod over in the very next scene when inordinate funds are spaffed on the most extravagant of hotels.  It’s wasted on Ayoade, who cares only to toss his retro luggage on the king size before dashing off.

Travel Man is tight on time

There’s a lot to be forced into 48 hours, ideally three activities either side of the break plus travel and extra filming time.  As such, Ayoade is constantly badgering his co-voyager to hurry up, resulting in a trail of unfinished drinks and food being left in their wake.  I always find this funniest when his celeb pal wants to chill in the hotel on arriving and Ayoade must insist upon them meeting him downstairs immediately in order to stick to their itinerary.  Relaxing this ain’t.

Travel Man can’t be arsed with the food or indeed any other affectation

Whether trying odd local dishes, or sitting through a 14-course Michelin-starred tasting menu, Ayoade is ever the everyman in only ever being able to assess things as “fine” or “OK” – he’ll often refuse additional bites if he deems one mouthful sufficient for analysing flavour.  Fuss and fancy are instant turn offs, often dismissed on the spot, much to the disappointment of obsequious wait staff and barkeeps.  I unknowingly channelled this approach on a media jolly to San Sebastián when I inadvertently told the maître d’ at Arzak that I didn’t like the monkfish.  Whoops.

Travel Man is nourished by facts

Our guest follows Richard on a schlepp to the city’s nearest highpoint, using a bird’s eye view to orientate themselves and discuss Ayoade’s vertigo.  Before, during and after, they are showered with openly Wikipedia-procured nuggets of varying relevance, often responding with their only viable reaction: bemusement.  On occasions, even hired tour guides seem to know less than our Richard.  It’s all deliciously awkward.  Of note is when UNESCO World Heritage Site status is pointed out, as we do realise at one point that nobody knows what this means.

Travel Man has other foibles

He makes outrageous sartorial choices.  He has a real passion for funiculars (and you will too).  He finds it outrageous when artisanal workshops do not conclude with appropriate certification.  He is vivid in his descriptions of tummy bugs.  He treats guides facetiously by asking them to stay in touch.  But most of all…

Travel Man gets travel sick

Across the nine series and counting, the producers push Ayoade into every mode of transport imaginable, from speedboats to helicopters, from camels to toboggans.  Each and every one triggers his motion sickness.  As a fellow sufferer, I identify with this more than I can convey here.  In fact, I have developed sympathy sickness which comes on whenever Ayoade looks queasy.  Which is often.

Nevertheless, this show is now a firm favourite of mine in light of its lightness and entertainment.  I feel as though I’ve been on a farewell grand tour of my beloved EU with a host of new pals.  Its irreverent tone really takes the gap yah out of someone else’s holidays, transcending the traditional tedium of online showing off by never taking anything that seriously.  Best of all, its brutal honesty really peaks at the very end when Ayoade is itching to get home and shut the doors.  Should they have come?  It doesn’t matter if you have speedy boarding.

Succession

People are always telling you what you should do.  You should stay two metres apart from each other.  You should work from home.  You should watch Succession.  Sometimes, it’s good to ignore people.  If you’re being selfish with space around the eggs in the supermarket, I’m only going to give you a matter of moments before I invade your two metres for my Burford Browns.  I don’t want to work from home anymore because the office has air conditioning and my flat is now the inside of a hair dryer only without any air movement whatsoever.  And I didn’t really want to watch Succession.  It looked like rich white people arguing while being unattractive and there was too much sexy and exciting TV to be getting on with.  Episode one only confirmed my apprehension.  There were so many characters, none of them likeable.  They talked quickly and oh-so-wittily, making references where I lacked context.  There were lots of suits, lots of greys, too many office interiors (even though this has become my dream destination).  Episode two was more of the same.  I itched with the desire to distract myself.  The crossing and double-crossing felt distant and irrelevant.  I still hadn’t picked a horse to back and, more specifically, I didn’t want to.  What should have been humorous just felt weird and in poor taste.

But everyone had been so insistent.  They had told me I really would like it.  And then, episode three happened.  I crossed a threshold.  I was hooked.  I don’t know what did it.  It was like a penny dropping.  Suddenly, Succession was the absolute treat of each evening.  I even felt like a grown up watching it.  My phone discarded out of sight, full focus on the screen, I got more and more into it, eventually unable to resist the urge to binge through the remaining episodes of the second season just because I had to know what was going to happen next.  And now I can’t bear the wait for more.  So maybe I should listen more to people telling me what I should do.  Either way, I’m now going to commend the living daylights out of Succession, but I’ve bucketed the commendations into handy themes for easier digestion, helping you, the reader, to manage your entrance into an exquisite, intelligent boxset that stretches the very limits of what you thought was possible on television.

The spot-on and terrifying exposition of a media landscape

You won’t have heard of Waystar Royco, nor the Roy family who own most of it, but both might strike you as uncannily familiar.  Succession deals with this media conglomerate (which also includes cruise lines, theme parks and a scattergun array of ill-advised ventures in other markets) and the unanswerable question about who is next in line to take on its captaincy once the paterfamilias (I’ve always wanted to use this word) steps down.  While this intrigue ensures endless tension, the interplay between the family’s right-wing news channel (ATN) and their political ambitions would be ludicrous if it didn’t mimic real life so closely.  Financing, acquisitions, cover-ups: there’s dirty trick after dirty trick, with Shakespearean levels of backstabbing and betrayals.  Yet the boardroom melodrama is so plausible you could buy this as a genuine documentary.  You just need to accept that there is nobody to root for.

The first ever portrayal of accurate adult sibling relationships

Lining up to inherit the vast fortune and power of the company, three brothers and a sister represent the future of the Roy family.  Eldest son, Connor, has dialled out of the race, but his abuse and misuse of his own (his dad’s) wealth reveals him to be a threat to the real world, if a non-contender in the Roy battles.  Kendall, our heir apparent, is having the worst go-to-work-with-dad day that anyone has ever experienced, only it’s his whole career.  Pouring all his energy into the company, at the expense of everything else, his fractious paternal relationship is the source of unending and delicious plot twists.  Jeremy Strong shifts effortlessly between conniving shark, office square as trend-missing douchebag and downtrodden underling.  Meanwhile, Kieran Culkin brings so much to what are already most of the best lines as Roman Roy, the rebellious one who can’t get taken seriously but who also doesn’t take anything seriously.  Then there’s Shiv (an outrageously good Sarah Snook), the daddy’s girl striking out on her own, trying to rise above the wheeling and dealing but always getting suckered back in.  I’ve spent too long enumerating the Roys, when the emphasis is on their relationships.  What I really buy is that these four grew up together.  Their childhood fisticuffs even persist into maturity (Shiv and Roman).  Their bickering is no longer about sharing toys, but manipulating dad, running companies (into the ground) and willing each other to look as bad as possible, all while forming occasional united fronts whenever it suits.  Needless to say, you can’t build a case to become CEO of a global megacompany when you’re blaming your brother or sister for your own mistakes.

The use of Brian Cox

Now we’ve done the kids, let’s look at the dad.  Logan Roy is our rags-to-riches self-made man.  We might be in a time when we acknowledge that plenty of screen time has already gone to white old men, but Brian Cox consistently delights in this role.  Even my pet hate of being able to tell how much he’s enjoying himself in his performance doesn’t get activated because his performance is so convincing.  It’s merely my assumption that he gets to have a great time as an actor, whether suffering the after-effects of his stroke, or reacting to his kids’ betrayals.  It would be worth working for Logan Roy just to get fired in a blaze of abuse.

The swearing

Which leads me to Logan’s potty mouth.  Never has the expression “f*ck off” sounded so satisfying.  This is how he concludes most dialogues, whether with his leadership team or his own children.  He hits the K with real back-of-throat disdain, his words literally causing the recipient to acknowledge they have no other choice but to f*ck right off.  Now that’s power.

The passive aggression

We don’t always resort to effing and jeffing though.  Plenty of the dialogue sparkles with outright cusses semi-shrouded in manners or corporate jargon.  When the wordplay moves from artful cleverness to explicitly rude insults, it’s somehow all the more delightful.

The money

Not only do the cast splash their cash, but so too does the production.  Choppers seem to be on standby, and no location seems too remote to receive a full shooting unit, whether Dundee or obscure stately homes elsewhere in Britain, or US ranches, or indeed a yacht in the Mediterranean.  I would like to work on the show just so I can try out the inflatable slide on the back of Logan’s mega vessel.

The supporting cast

The Roys have become everything to me, but every character in their orbit enriches Succession.  Hiam Abbass (Logan’s wife Marcia) revels in her scenes as the conniving stepmother, while my softest spot is reserved for the company’s general counsel, Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron) who seems to work every hour of the day, mostly while wearing ball gowns, but can be an absolute boss when required.  Special mention of course to Cousin Greg who is pure joy in his naivety, never more so than when being mistreated by Tom Wambsgans (an incredible Matthew McFadyen).  I even enjoy Willa.

But this is enough commending – there’s only so much I can say before we start running through plots and spoiling surprises.  From a sceptical viewing, pressing play under pressure from TV connoisseur friends, I’ve become obsessed with Succession.  You really should watch it.

Euphoria

Following on from I May Destroy You and Normal People (let’s forget about Final Space for now), we’re continuing this week our run of blogging ourselves silly about outstanding drama.  Fair enough, this show was on a while back, so I’m well behind the curve here (we can even call it a second wave unless people find that triggering), but, realising I wasn’t making the most of my Sky subscription, I decided to go for something available on Sky Atlantic here in the feudal state of the UK (where you can be a lord if you’re mates with the government).  I’ll admit that Chernobyl was top of my list when it came to getting more into the channel that became the British home of Game Of Thrones, but people had been telling me about Euphoria since it first broadcast.  However, what they said was kind of off-putting.  They talked about club kids.  Whatever these are, they’re not inherently interesting.  I myself am immune to FOMO and therefore haven’t been awake past midnight for many years.  However, TV shows about people who do go out at night can offer a useful vicarious route to the thrills, chills, spills and queuing up outside in the cold to pay real money for the privilege of going inside a place experienced by the kinds of people who do have social lives.  The Euphoria advocates also talked about drugs.  Again, not a part of my life, unless you count the crazy crazy highs of pre-dawn crossfit sessions, but I suppose I thoroughly enjoyed Narcos, even if I only used my post on that show to point out that, currently, buying illicit substances funds criminality.  As such, my expectations of Euphoria were that it would simply be sequences of drugged-up teenagers raving to house music under the glow of colourful lights.  Superficial, yes, but potentially just what I was after.  For some reason.

Euphoria is so much more, however, and I am now grieving for the fact I have finished all eight episodes.  Set in East Highland, presumably a generic American neighbourhood that feels a bit Californian but could be anywhere, this is a show about high school teens that elevates the trope to new (drug-fuelled) highs.  I’m sure I could research the actual location, but I’m bashing this out during a lunch break, and the one thing about working from home (slash living at work) that I’ve learnt during lockdown is that nobody is allowed a lunch break, so speed is of the essence – something by now we’ve hopefully grown used to in my weakening week-on-week prose.  At the heart of our stories, we have the main character of Rue.  She is our guide to this world and the point around which a lot of it revolves.  Rue is played by Zendaya, who is an actor who doesn’t need a second name.  I think there has been news about her, but I’ve never really seen it.  What I have seen, though, is her mesmerising and heart-wrenching performance as Rue.  Freshly back from rehab following an overdose, Rue is a victim of America’s addiction to prescription drugs.  A lot of our narrative tension comes from her palpable struggles with keeping clean.  Intersecting with these are the challenges of her budding friendship with Jules, a brightly dressed new student who forms a kindred spirithood with our Rue.

This would be compelling in itself, but I have to confess that Rue’s arcs are, to me at least, some of the least interesting in the whole of Euphoria.  They’re still more gripping than 99% of TV out there, but it’s the surrounding cast of other high school classmates that really hooked me in.  Rue, however, serves as our introduction point, often narrating the opening scenes of each episode, sparing no production expense in bringing to life scene after scene depicting various tableaux of childhood dysfunction.  Every family we look into is a hot mess and a product of visceral pain.  Whether we’re introduced to McKay’s (father’s) dreams of NFL stardom (a dramatised Last Chance U of sorts) or given a whistle-stop tour of the origins and undoings of Maddy’s incredible confidence, you can’t take your eyes off the screen until everything is divulged.  This renders the ensuing plot points all the more significant, serving as a grounding for our teens’ otherwise reckless actions.

This structure also permits Euphoria to tread tired old high school and growing up themes in a way that completely resists any definition as generic.  Instead, we are awash in originality as we consider the blossoming (ugly head rearing) of such onset-by-adulthood innocence losses, including but not limited to: gender, sexuality, body image, parental disappointment, mental health and many many more.  Seriously, all your favourites are here.

Somehow, this plays out with a high level of stylisation while retaining a contrasting grittiness.  Euphoria is at once dreamlike yet realistic.  And yes, I’ve just said the same thing twice, but with some of you I really feel a need to labour the point.  There’s nothing for me to criticise with my usual archness.  Sure, maybe I could do without so much importance being placed on eye make-up/furniture, but it’s an aesthetic that gets confidently owned.  Euphoria loves a tracking shot as much as I do; we’re either following a single character on the march, or watching a beautifully choreographed ensemble march play out in varying directions.  This adds a compelling and masterful intensity to the glorious unravelling that brings together all the characters’ narratives in the fairground episode.  No doubt the originality of the soundtrack helps glue the individual strands to each other.

Everybody, this is the show Skins wishes it had been.  I am desperate to find out more about the whole gang.  I want to be told more about the sadness behind Cassie’s eyes.  I want to know if Kat will persist in her delusion that she is using sex as a weapon on others rather than on herself.  Why do I feel such sympathy towards Fezco?  Can we get more of Lexi (whether dressed as Bob Ross or not)?  And dare I ask: how can things end between Nate and his father?  So let’s view my gushings here as a well-deserved round of applause for something that will guarantee you at least eight evenings of entertainment and thought-provoking diversion, all while looking pretty nice on your telly and leaving nobody uncertain that the televisual golden age rumbles on.

The Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison Break

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).