The Walking Dead: World Beyond

A lot of things surprised me in 2020.  The pandemic was one thing, chuckled about as some distant news story on a ski holiday with doctor pals in January and then ruining things throughout the rest of the year and beyond.  In August, I broke my hand on a barbell, which was in itself a nasty surprise, especially as I was in a cast during a number of weeks when gyms actually were open.  But also on that list of unexpected events is the appearance of a second spin-off programme from the universe of The Walking Dead.  There was me, one evening during some of lockdown, scrolling through my screening platforms and strategising to decide what to watch so I could join in with all the chatter and ensure a completed boxset each week so I can keep up with these nonsensical weekly posts.  Picking my way through Amazon Prime with low expectations, wondering if Jeff Bezos really needs any more money off me in this day and age, and there, nestled among subsequent series of Mr Robot and The Man In The High Castle that I will never sit through, was the recognisable font of The Walking Dead.  But, this wasn’t in the characteristic dark hues I normally associate with this horror series.  It was bright and neon, exciting and new.  I didn’t need to think twice before clicking play on The Walking Dead: World Beyond.

We’ve discussed the importance of the colon here before.  And no, I’m not talking about the large intestine (shout out, IBS sufferers).  I’m on about those two dots you sometimes see between words.  In TV shows, they separate an original title from its spin-off progeny.  You know, like Narcos and Narcos: Mexico.  Such a tiddly pair of punctuation points can carry a very large responsibility.  If you’re an impassioned fan of the original show, then this extra facet better be a welcome addition rather than an embarrassing dilution.  High hopes were had.  The Walking Dead, abandoned by many, remains my definitive zombie boxset.  Despite running for so many series, it always maintains its edge in finding new ways to bring to life the horrors of an ongoing undead apocalypse.  Its companion show, Fear The Walking Dead, was one of the first programmes I ever wrote about here and itself attained similar heights to its originator.  To recap, then, I had high hopes.  I have now written some paragraphs about my disappoint.

Just One More Episode was meant to be an exercise in boxset worship, but it’s developed a side hustle as the internet’s definitive home of zombie TV content blogging, so it’s only fair I speak frankly about World Beyond.  What made those hopes all the higher was the interesting angle of the concept.  With the initial outbreak of walkers now so far in the past of The Walking Dead’s universe, World Beyond would tell the stories of the first generation to come of age since the end of the world (a bit like the future youth of the UK now we’ve been dragged out the EU).  Our protagonists are enjoying their teenage years at the Campus Colony, a university-based satellite settlement of a grander network of civilisation that has sprung up.  For me, simply seeing how life is conducted there would be compelling enough, but this would clearly lack any real jeopardy.  Cue the Civic Republic, a more enigmatic political entity with whom our heroes’ community is forging a new relationship.  Hope and Iris are sisters whose father has gone to lend his academic skills to the Civic Republic but, suspecting him to be in danger, they sneak out of their safety bubble and embark on a journey across the devastated USA to rescue him.

So, we’re dealing with sheltered teens here.  Understandably, they’re not used to brain-injuring countless walkers while out and about.  In fact, they’re so pathetic, they tend to scream and lie down, allowing a zombie to get on top of them and try to bite them, only for an adult to have to come along and sort them out.  How they avoid getting bitten is beyond me, but this not only makes the walkers look like a non-threat, it makes it hard to respect our heroes.  By its very nature, the most kick-arse Walking Dead characters are the ones that can handle themselves around zombies with skill and flair.  Sure, the kids in our ragtag gang of rescuers all have the comic book-inspired looks we would expect, clutching weapons that give their character a signature or dressed individually to showcase that they’re hard as nails/troubled/a bit intellectual.  But it’s all mouth and no trousers.

Then there’s the fact they’re on a voyage.  Our setting is therefore a stream of southern scenes that don’t really ever establish a sense of place and theme.  Each season of The Walking Dead has a settlement at its heart, but in World Beyond we stumble from one tire fire to the next disaster, giving the episodes a cumulative effect of never really going anywhere.  We know Hope and Iris’s dad isn’t going to be rescued until things have been drawn right out.  This diminishes the tension and, ironically for Hope, drives in a feeling of hopelessness you can’t really escape.

The Civic Republic itself is squandered as a source of intrigue.  Too over the top to be that credible, yet too mysterious to be a true threat, they top and tail this first season of ten episodes in a way that makes you wonder if they’ve been forgotten.  There’s no real reason for them to be so sinister beyond the well-established concept that, even in a zombie apocalypse, humans will always be the biggest monsters.  We almost rush through any substantial grounding of the political and civil landscape to focus on the inner emotions of our teen stars, but watching them come to terms with smashing the head in of their first zombie of a multi-episode character arc just isn’t what bloodthirsty Walking Dead fans are looking for.  Naturally, the only way to script such psychological storytelling is with clichés, driving down the show’s originality score even further.

You have to be cruel to be kind, so let’s hope the second series finds some edge, otherwise this could be the beginning of the end for a character universe that has compelled so many viewers up till now to follow its adventures.  My hunger, quite literally, for zombies, means I will sit through this stuff, but treat yourself to something like Black Summer or Kingdom (킹덤) if you’re serious about living your life under the constant threat of the dead coming to life and eating you.  You never know what 2021 might bring.

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.

Louis Theroux

As we all know, Christmas was originally established so that shops could sell more things.  This is back when there were shops, though.  Historical times when there was an economy and EU membership.  By calling their wares presents and saying everyone had to give something to all the people they knew, once-mighty shops vacuumed up our cash (also consigned to the past, thankfully, which will make switching to the euro easier when we re-join the EU) while we skipped home with unnecessary trinkets to wrap, hide under tree branches, and then distribute to relatives before a turkey dinner and some TV, or an argument.  This traditional meaning has of course been forgotten now, partly because things were better in the olden days (especially WWII), but also because there’s a new meaning in town: the birth of baby Jesus.  Even though his mum was a virgin, this infant founded a religion that millions follow to this very day.  Some of my favourite followers are the members of the Westboro Baptist Church.  What this waffle means to say is that I always think of them at Christmas (even though they dismiss the festival as being too paganistic).  So, while holed up at my parents’, a tier 4 refugee airlifted out of London lest I miss any of the above rejoicing, I cracked out my laptop, logged onto the BBC iPlayer, and reminded myself of the documentaries Louis Theroux had made about them.

For those slow on the uptake, let me just confirm that Louis Theroux is the boxset we’ll be discussing in this week’s blog.  And those quick on the uptake will be pointing out to me that he is in fact a man rather than a boxset.  While his programmes over the years have taken such monikers as Altered States or When Louis Met, the editors and I (actually just me) have decided to treat his whole oeuvre as one boxset here.  The fact is: it’s my blog and I can make up whatever rules I want.  But, more importantly, this really is the best way to tackle a career coming up for thirty years of quality output.

We’ll start with his Weird Weekends, first broadcast when I was a wee lad of twelve and already watching things I shouldn’t have been.  Young Louis himself is a bit of a gangly smirker, embedding himself in fringe communities focused on either extreme views or extreme ways of life or some combination of both.  What unites all he comes across is their unshakeable conviction that they have found the ultimate life hack.  Whether a career making money in porn, or navigating marriage up-spicing with swinging parties, his subjects wax lyrical about the benefits of their lifestyle choices.  What helps matters is that most of his weird weekenders are Americans (from that wild land that, to British people, is where telly comes from) all too eager to show off their certainty.  Unto them, however, Louis casts no judgment.  While the whites of his eyes might betray some consternation, his questioning simply offers a length of rope by which they all ultimately unravel themselves.  Instead of jumping in once they have finished speaking, Louis pauses.  His garrulous new pals can’t help but fill the gap, eventually talking themselves almost out of their own flag-waving beliefs.  It’s glorious content you can find on Netflix and, even though it looks like it was filmed on tracing paper when compared to their modern gloss, it’s still utterly compelling.

We then move into When Louis Met territory, a small number of episodes that get under the skin of a variety of prominent Brits who can only really be described as naff.  Some are treasures like Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee or Chris Eubank, and others pose more sinister figures, like Anne Widdecombe and Max Clifford.  Most notorious of all is telly paedo Jimmy Savile and you can’t help but imagine a kiddie porn dungeon behind every unopened door in his home.  For me, though, a highlight is the haranguing of the Hamiltons, as Christine’s self-care wine servings offer great lubrication to the antics that abound.

Both the above have occasionally been reviewed as exploitative and, as a viewer, you can’t help but recoil at others embarrassing themselves.  That said, participation is clearly voluntary, and we must each earn our fifteen minutes of fame as best we can.  Look at me: writing the 180^th entry in an unpopular blog.

Between 2003 and the present day, Louis sporadically treats us to one of his BBC Two specials.  More global in subject matter (though still always best in the USA), broader themes are investigated, but still in characteristically extreme circumstances.  Law and (dis)order figure heavily, with the mind-blowing double on the Miami Mega Jail haunting my memory.  Linked to this are explorations of addictive behaviour.  The City Addicted To Crystal Meth remains truly shocking, with Theroux’s calm presence drawing out gasp-inducing frankness from addicts.  His same style in Talking To Anorexia similarly sees him hide his own discomfort in order to provide fragile girls with a platform through which to process their irreconcilable behaviour.  Tragedy looms large and Theroux will return to subjects to track their progress only to find that things haven’t turned out as planned, Twilight Of The Porn Stars being a particular example.

I would also commend our man’s bravery.  In America’s Most Dangerous Pets, he unearths a pre-Tiger King Joe Exotic and remains calm in the face of some harrowing animal encounters.  But 2007’s visit to The Most Hated Family In America stands out as the best example of Theroux’s willingness to stick his head in the lion’s mouth.  We’re back the Westboro Baptist Church of my introduction, a bible-inspired hate group who achieved notoriety by picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with offensive (and poorly illustrated) signs blaming all of America’s problems on sodomy.  Louis is hosted by the charismatic Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of the church’s founder and committed member, happy to shout down his ludicrous questions about whether she has to be so nasty to everyone.  With Theroux, we stand by while she runs her household of eleven kids with maternal tenderness, making sure they are clear about who will burn in eternal hellfire (everybody else) and who won’t (them and them alone).

In 2011, Louis returns to the Phelps in America’s Most Hated Family In Crisis, quizzing them about departed members who have come to reject the group’s ministry but also noticing that their infamy has attracted new converts.  This brings me to the highlight of this year’s festive period for me: uncovering a third documentary in this series.  Surviving America’s Most Hated Family interviews, among others, Shirley’s own estranged daughter, Megan Phelps-Roper.  In earlier documentaries, she embodies the unwavering conviction that characterises Theroux’s subjects.  To see such a sensible young lady calmly spout vitriol offers an insight into human potential that scripted drama often fails to approximate.  But, as she details in her book that I happened to be reading at the same time, Unfollow, she began to uncover inconsistencies in the doctrine the church promoted.  The arguments on Twitter that had so thrilled her started to persuade her.  Now, here she is, talking to Louis Theroux and the whole world about treating fellow humans with compassion and kindness, rather than shouting at them while they bury their dead, holding aloft illustrations of stickmen penetrating each other.

Conversely, Louis of later years does start to take exception to his subjects’ beliefs, almost speeding up the process whereby they formally unravelled themselves independently and prodding them more impatiently to agree that, yes, they’re being a bit silly and should probably stop it.  A father in his fifties, should we worry that Theroux is becoming the more conservative older gent so many of us are sadly destined to turn into?  Probably not, as he does concede where convinced, and he ultimately comes from a place of compassion and understanding.  There appears a genuine worry for the wellbeing of those involved.  In my eyes, he can do no wrong.  I’ve devoured his compelling podcast series, Grounded, and am fairly certain we will one day be the best of pals.  And with that, he enters into the folklore of Just One More Episode, alongside 179 of my most important boxsets.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

I’ve found another sitcom workplace where I think I’d really fit in.  This time, it’s within the NYPD.  Let’s be clear: I’d be no good at solving crimes.  I would also be unwilling to undertake any duties that put me at risk in any way whatsoever.  Similarly, I couldn’t work in New York as it’s either too hot or too cold (and UK citizens currently can’t go there).  But, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has now joined the ranks of charming comedy shows where I tune in to feel like one of the gang.  I’ve imagined myself really fitting in with the personalities of Parks & Recreation.  I’ve considered where my place would be among the Scranton bods of The Office US (as well as knowing full well which one’s me in The Office…).  Now I can spend time wondering how my own sense of humour would enrich the pleasant chuckling that the activities of this very special police squad create.

Naturally, I am intentionally late to this party.  Having seen countless ads on e4 for the UK broadcast of this programme, I put it in the same category as Hollyoaks: TV shows whose existence I can ignore.  This decision was compounded by my televisual aversion to the emergency services.  However, I was frequently asked if I had seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine, with most people prompted by my own excessive office-based consumption of yoghurt – a trait I share with Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews).  Well, with lockdown coming up to its one-year anniversary, we’ve all got through more TV than we ever thought possible.  I’m not sure what happens when you complete Netflix, but let’s start a rumour that you get a telegram from the Queen (The Crown’s Olivia Colman of course).  So, to offset some of the heavier drama boxsets I was wading through (The Fall, The Staircase etc), Brooklyn Nine-Nine seemed like a welcome addition to my rotations.

At first, I’ll admit to seeing nothing special.  It was about crime, but not in a serious way.  Nobody died, jeopardy was only there to serve as plot device against which comedy could play out, the characters were loud and excessive in their behaviour.  Before I got to know them inside out, the humour struck me as obvious and I began to come to terms with the fact this might well be a true background show: something that plays in the background while I cook under the extractor fan, unable really to hear or see it.  Sure, a couple of episodes would get a bit of focus during my weekly bath, but Brooklyn’s fictional 99^th precinct hadn’t yet earned a special place in my heart.  I did however unearth my favourite character early on: Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti).  There’s something about a woman who won’t let anything or anyone stop her doing exactly as she pleases that just makes for wonderful entertainment.  Her rudeness to all her colleagues is a constant source of inspiration.

Over time, though, I learned that all our main players have such strong characterisation that the humour’s beauty clearly comes from knowing them well.  Disturbingly, perhaps, there was also a bit of me in all of them.  My lifelong geek side means I see Amy Santiago as a kindred spirit.  My emotionless intellectual snobbery turns Captain Raymond Holt into a hero.  Charles Boyle is all of my insecurities wrapped up in one tiny little man.  I won’t go through them all, but they’re so much more than background artists designed to offer perspective on our central figure: Jake Peralta, played by Andy Samberg.  He is the only one I am not, but he still makes me laugh with his childishness: a great face for silliness.  As series progress, the vibe becomes less about Peralta’s tension with fish-out-of-water new boss Holt, and more about the unit’s ability to support each other through good and bad times.

If that doesn’t sound hilarious, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is also taking on a number of social issues in a matter-of-fact way.  Racism, homophobia and sexism all come under the microscope.  We tread a narrow tightrope between signalling worthiness and, in fact, reflecting the world around us.  A stereotype or stock character is a very rare occurrence throughout the show’s universe.  And it is this, coupled with the cast’s irresistibility, that saw Brooklyn Nine-Nine succeed in commanding my attention.  Somehow, it’s elevated itself well above a background show.  Each instalment of its six series on Netflix (and a seventh out there that aired this year) deserves your full attention.

Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons

Hi everyone and welcome to my insurance post.  Due to unforeseen apathy on my part, I’ve not managed to finish watching anything new in time to uncover a sexy boxset this week.  I’ve had lots of recommendations, and am halfway through a few things myself, but since riding high as an early adopter of Industry (you’re welcome) I’m having to raid my annals (not a euphemism) for something I consumed a while back and didn’t deem worthy of a post at the time.  Christmas might be on the way (or cancelled) but this week we’re swerving the single-use festivities in favour of going Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons.  Will loyal fans of the blog dismiss this as a show too obscure to warrant reading about, or will it turn out, as I suspect from this Netflix documentary’s appearance in the UK top ten when new episodes appeared earlier this year, that I’ll have a post worthy of rivalling some of my most-read musings (the top three in order: Love Island, Naked Attraction, Bo’ Selecta!)?

By now we’re familiar with my theory that prisons offer great narrative tension to any drama.  It elevated all the nonsensically earnest dialogue of Prison Break.  It created a sample population of wronged women among whom the lady fluff of Orange Is The New Black deftly metamorphosed into acerbic social commentary.  It even gave some much-needed edge to Archie Andrews in Riverdale.  But what of real-life prisons, I hear you ask.  And what about prisons abroad, I also hear you follow up with in order to help me segue effortlessly into our focus this week.  Well, Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons tells you all about them.  We’ve all seen headlines bemoaning the UK’s soft-touch criminal justice system, and of course Brexit will now allow those clamouring hardliners to enjoy sufficient sovereignty to purge individuals from society in whatever manner they see fit.  We have also heard tell of the horrors of third-world jails where many a Westerner has come a cropper for accidentally stumbling over a border after losing little packets of drugs up their bottoms.  How long must we wait to look inside them (the prisons, not the bottoms)?!

Finally, then, in 2016, Channel 5 were brave enough to send a film crew to four such hellholes, pushing ahead of them as a shield plucky journalist Paul Connolly who, under the documentary’s premise, would actually become an inmate at these institutions in order to get behind the bars and under the skin of what’s really going on.  From continent to continent, the findings are disturbingly similar: overcrowding, drug addiction, corruption, unsanitary conditions and violence.  A natural response is to swear off a life a crime, but luckily I hadn’t been planning one.  Two years later, Netflix launched a second series, bringing in the energy of Raphael Rowe for hosting duties, whizzing him round the world on a punishing sequence of gap years across a total of three further seasons.  Maybe Connolly didn’t fancy any more toughness, but it didn’t matter as Rowe outqualified him, having spent a decade imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember this bit as he’ll remind you at the start of every episode.

Bringing in real prison toughness, Rowe is all too eager to get among things.  Like his predecessor, he commits to the process of becoming a prisoner, undergoing humiliating strip searches on arrival.  As series progress, you start to twig that the guards aren’t that bothered about this and it’s in fact the production team insisting on a naked cavity search.  Rowe can’t pop his trousers off quick enough.  Once inside, we can have a proper look around.  It’s an extreme version of poverty porn.  In Paraguay, men rifle through rubbish or inject drugs in the open air.  In Belize, they trade in performative Christian faith against privileges.  In Papua New Guinea, the constant threat of violence is palpable.  But it’s not all doom and gloom, as we’re also granted access to some of the world’s least tough prisons and although this makes a lie of the show’s titles, it’s just as interesting to see how Germany focuses on therapy or Norway on preparation for normal life in order to prevent recidivism.

Whether Rowe really gets locked in overnight doesn’t really matter.  He absorbs enough exposure to draw conclusions that recognise the complexity of punishing criminal behaviour.  As a classic Brit abroad, his refusal ever to learn the native language (even a few more words of Spanish would help him in his South and Central American jaunts that dominate his schedule) poses no threat to his discussions with helpful inmates.  His questions are asked with childlike wonder, as if a slightly babyish voice and naïve frown can transcend Quechua.  Hats, and trousers, off to him though: he’s rarely fazed.  His greatest moment of worry seems to come in Lesotho where inmates suggest they might make a prison wife of him.  While it’s unlikely any wicked ways would have been had while the camera crew and production team watch on, Rowe has never moved as fast as he does when evading their friendly clutches.

Having had our nosey around, we feel safe in the knowledge we’ll never have to be confined to any of these places in real life.  It’s hard to feel optimistic about the UK as it self-destructs out of the EU, but at least there’s probably central heating in most of our prisons.  For now.  This show’s strength, therefore, comes from its ability to make our own lives seem less appalling, if only by comparison.  As we trip in and out of lockdowns, spending more time indoors than we ever thought possible, we may count our blessings that this isn’t in fact a day made up of 23 hours of isolation, but a great time to catch up on all sorts of Netflix documentaries.

The Last Dance

These days, retail is something that happens online while we’re sequestered indoors, leaving the UK’s shopping streets barren and foreboding (like our future outside the EU).  Back in retail’s nineties heyday, our greatest weekend treat was being taken to the Bentalls shopping centre in Kingston for a good old browse.  Of all the pointless branches on its many glistening floors, the enormous Warner Bros Studio Store lives on in my memory as the most extravagant of them all.  A whole shop dedicated solely to merchandise with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck on it.  Looking for a leather jacket with the Tasmanian Devil on it?  They had it in three colours of course.  Among the shiny trinkets and branded apparel, whole displays dedicated to Space Jam loomed large.  My eleven-year-old self wondered what be this mysterious film?  The animated characters I knew, but my Surrey childhood meant that Michael Jordan was an unknown entity to me.  Fast forward twenty-four years to this summer and I still hadn’t seen Space Jam, but everyone at my gym was gushing on about a new Netflix documentary on a basketball dream team with a banging soundtrack.  Not being one for team ball sports, I waited patiently until conversation turned so we could speak about something else.  Months later, I saw that The Last Dance had an IMDb rating of 9.2 and decided I had to watch it, if only to guarantee to myself that I could consume a high-quality boxset after devouring Industry.

I admit that I initially felt some regret at my decision.  Not only was this clearly all about sport, but it was about some very specific things to do with that sport.  Luckily, these were glamorous American sports from abroad, not the endlessly ubiquitous soccer that constitutes half of all “news” in the UK (the other half being articles about why immigrants have ruined your life).  Basketball was even a sport I had seen in real life during a 2012 trip to New York when a beloved pal got us tickets to see the Knicks at Madison Square Gardens.  The oversize foam finger was just one of many highlights, with the speed of play, the high scores and the party atmosphere all making for a very entertaining spot of spectating.  But The Last Dance is all about the Chicago Bulls’ mid-nineties team and their ability to win successive NBA championships.  Our main narrative plays out around the 1998 season with our Bulls going for their sixth title (and second run of hattricks), but each of the ten episodes whizzes back and forth in time to fill in the backgrounds on different players’ careers, the team’s earlier fortunes and their overall approach to the championships they had previously won.  It’s a kind of lottery of early nineties years, but there’s a helpful graphic of a timeline by which to orientate yourself.

Instead of whiplash, though, I was gradually and irresistibly drawn in until I was powerless against a characteristic compulsion to get to the end.  What bolstered the intrigue?  Firstly, the multiple first-hand accounts from key players and onlookers involved at the time, told as pieces to camera with the frankness and the perspective only twentysomething years of intervening life can give you.  Secondly, the footage from the actual time, when a camera crew had unprecedented access to the Bulls’ legendary team, offered further unique insight, as if the whole programme was planned as a follow-up almost a quarter of a century later.  What’s more, for the non-sports fan, you’re excused the commitment of sitting through seasons and seasons of matches and simply shown montage after montage of breath-taking steals, assists, scores and slam dunks.  There’s no other valid response but to be impressed.

Of course, nobody thought to capture the nineties in HD, but the skills still shine through, and there’s some very strong nostalgia at play here.  It seems news readers were always filmed in very close frame, with lead images of their stories’ subjects selected solely for the extent to which they could be deemed unflattering.  Everybody chewed a great deal of gum (though this could be carrying on till now – I have no frame of reference) chomping away on great gobfuls.  Surely there were some bitten cheeks as the players careered up and down the court.  There’s a huge internet trend for people in their thirties to comment and post endlessly about how their lives and indeed the world peaked in the nineties.  The Last Dance corroborates this as I wistfully realised I had missed out on everything at the time.

The tension builds around the epic struggle to win that sixth championship, with my ignorance keeping me genuinely in the dark about what the outcome would be.  Even more captivating, though, is the incredible charismatic personality of Michael Jordan himself, outshone only by his sporting determination, work ethic and competitive spirit.  The Last Dance covers the team effort, but everything comes back to this one-man superstar whose global influence in a world before social media must have come with pressure beyond our imagining, and that’s before you factor in traumatic personal tragedy.  As we arrive at our poignant closing episode, the sense of time passing, of lost youths and changing lives, becomes almost unbearable and you wish that everything could just stand still.  Life is terrifying highs and dizzying lows, so how must it feel if your greatest peaks are in a bygone decade?  It’s moments like this that make you glad never to have achieved anything, as at least then you can write an irreverent weekly blog about other people’s successes and the documentaries that Netflix has made about them.

Industry

Thank goodness for this boxset.  I don’t know when the BBC and HBO got together for this co-funder, nor when they filmed it as there are plenty of scenes involving people coming within fewer than two metres of each other, and I don’t even really know when it was on or who told me about it (a manager said I might like it and, as if unregistered at the time, I suddenly obeyed this recommendation at an unconnected juncture a few weeks later).  There’s no way of knowing any of these things, least of all me checking for myself, but it doesn’t matter.  The important thing is that I came across a new show that gripped me and wouldn’t let me go until I had consumed every last drop.  And now I’m telling yous lot about it: Industry.  This is a big deal: I’m putting it up there with Succession and Watchmen, even though a number of friends I’ve insisted watch it aren’t quite convinced.

Firstly, it’s set in the world of work.  And not just any old job.  We’re talking finance.  This means we get to look inside offices that are full of people.  As we end a year spent mostly working alone in underpants, seeing desks and business attire and strained professional relationships has taken on an almost pornographic quality.  We’ll come back to the porn side later, as there’s plenty of stimulation in the swish City of London office of Pierpoint already.  Some of these people have six screens (including a Bloomberg one, known affectionately as a Bloomie) and I couldn’t even count the phones: there are headsets and then funny retro ones on coils hanging directly from the desk with little switches on the back.  It’s all a feast for the eyes and this is before we even get onto the drama.

Pierpoint is a swanky fictional (sure) investment bank, long the preserve of privileged white men and a hotbed of questionable financial ethics and even more questionable employee behaviour.  Our intro into this world is a new intake of grads, hungry to earn those big money dollars straight out the gates of university.  But first, they must survive the upcoming reduction in force (RIF) day to secure permanent contracts – pow, we have tension right from the start.  Our grads’ chances are subject to numerous unfair factors, from the desk they end up on, to their line manager’s temperament, their clients’ intentions, their own backgrounds and whether they fit in with the vision of itself Pierpoint is trying to create.  It’s not life or death (well…) but nobody is safe.

You might find yourself struggling with the lack of likeability all the characters display.  Our main focus, Harper Stern, has proven challenging for many.  She’s unpredictable, makes seemingly bad choices that result in self-sabotage and can be unnecessarily unpleasant to those around her.  But she’s blazing a trail, has ambition and won’t let her past overcome her.  There’s doubt about her college credentials from the off (as stuttered by a creepy HR man) and she’s a woman of colour in a world not known for embracing diversity beyond tokenism.  In fact, fellow grad Gus Sackey (not that she is fond of him) seems endlessly amused by how little Pierpoint knows what to do with him.  More than once, his eyebrow is askance at the drones around him.

Back to Harper, though, as we invariably always must go, and her story arc sees her caught in office tension between her desk lead, Eric Tao, and her line manager, Daria.  Should she align herself with the rogue trader who is a law unto himself or the conscientious rising star, carefully plotting an ascendance that will coincide with a redressing of Pierpoint’s gender balance and subsequent treatment of women?  Over on the FX desk, meanwhile, we’ve got Yasmin, whose approach to ingratiating herself with the menfolk is to go on constant coffee/salad/smoothie runs at the expense of proving her investment chops.  From an inordinately wealthy background herself, she instead flexes female strength via humiliating and escalating power play with Robert.  Despite his cocksure manner, he too suffers from the other Pierpointers’ snobbery when it comes to his more working-class background.  His dark suit is ridiculed, but he soon finds a way in with the oldest-school Clement Cowan.

In time, the dysfunctionality of the grads only serves to emphasise the more deeply ingrained dysfunctionality of their superiors, eventually sucking everyone into a vortex of sexy skulduggery.  Claims that the drama is far-fetched don’t wash with me – if it’s someone’s real job to spend their days trading money that’s so derivative it doesn’t exist via impenetrable jargon and their nights indulging in excessive alcohol and drug consumption to entertain evil clients, then surely it’s easy enough to buy the storylines of Industry.  Having spent my first working year in financial headhunting, it confirms the whole banking sector as a glorious near miss for me.

Now, we wanted to circle back to porn, didn’t we?  Hold tight, everyone, because Industry is incredibly graphic.  If sexual misconduct is going down, then we really do see it all.  We see more or less all of our young leads too.  This adds that Game Of Thrones jeopardy of being surprised by a boob or willy at any point, lending grittiness to a London that is already smeared with dirt as it is.  Sure, we often end up seeing about twelve more thrusts that we needed to in order to establish what’s afoot, and, if like me, you get distracted whenever a line is snorted by wondering if it’s CGI or if the actor really did woof some talcum powder, but it’s all part of the fun.  Who said work had to be boring?  You just have to work in the right industry.