Super Privilege?

There's a very good chance that when I first got the computer I'm writing this on that it was some bollocks, possibly about comics. I've used this PC for 11 years and it has felt longer. It's never been anything special, but it has been a faithful old thing and I'm amazed it's been working so... well, since I condemned it last week. The next blog I write will probably be on the new machine - once I get that sorted out.

In many ways, what I've had rattling around the ideas section of my brain for the last few weeks could easily be posted in my politics blog, but only if I really wanted to make a big socio-political statement about something that was invented as a source of pleasure and if there was some hidden agendas in comics then I didn't see it probably because I wasn't taking men in tights too seriously or my keen mind breezed over the stark messages in search of the fantastic. Who can say?

The thing is, I saw a quote once about the Inhumans TV series which made me do one of those penny drop moments but not so much of the bleedin' obvious, more of a key to open a door to a path of looking at something in a different way. The quote was something like, 'how can you feel sympathy for a pampered royal family when the people against them are living in filth?'

Marvel's first generation of superheroes; the ones all in films and TV now, were pretty much all from privilege or were in an environment that was always better than the reality of the time 'origin' stories were set. Even Peter Parker had an upbringing bordering on middle class. The underbelly of society was always from the dregs of society; the other side of the tracks. The world of early Marvel comics was pretty much black and white and in full colour.

There's a list coming:
The Fantastic Four - Marvel's first family - I can't recall where their wealth came from. Or who paid for the rocket experiment that transformed them into superheroes. Flashbacks showed them at top universities; they were clever people, even if Ben Grimm was portrayed as having been from the wrong side but came good. Who paid for all those fantastic toys, research equipment. The FF were privileged.
Iron Man - Tony Stark. Billionaire; inherited a lot of his wealth, very clever. 'Billionaire Playboy'. He is so privileged someone wipes his arse for him.
Thor - a god. A member of the Asgardian royal family. Original human identity was Donald Blake - a doctor. Thor is privileged. And Loki - might be a frost giant elf thing but he's still royalty.
Captain America wasn't a creation of the 1960s; he does have a sense of being from a good family; not poor, but definitely not rich. As a modern superhero I've always wondered how he earned money. Oh and he was chosen to become a superhuman and his life was changed completely, most probably for the better.
Spider-Man. Okay, yeah he's an orphan, but his parents were clearly middle class. Aunt May lived in a house. They never went without. She was originally as old as Methuselah, I think pensions were involved. Parker had a good education; was a 'talented' photographer - at a time when good cameras were expensive. He might not have been privileged but he wasn't the product of poverty.
Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner - I'll give you a clue. It's in his name: Prince. Privileged.
Ant-Man and the Wasp - originally he was rich and she was an heiress. Privileged.
The Hulk - Bruce Banner worked on top secret government bomb experiments dealing with gamma radiation; he had his own private army; just because he chose to live like a hermit in the early comics doesn't mean he didn't have a bulging bank balance. Privileged.
Nick Fury - the comic version was head of a multi-government organisation and a war hero. Nuff said. Privileged.
Doctor Strange - he was a world renowned surgeon; that's got to come with a huge salary. Privileged.
The X-Men - original crew were all loaded. They were being sent to a private school funded by a bald guy who wasn't in the slightest bit creepy in a big mansion that didn't appear to have any staff, at all. Privileged.
The aforementioned Inhumans - a royal family in hiding wanting their throne back from a max brother who has returned it to the oppressed people doesn't sound like much more than an anti-communist, pro-elitist message to me. Privileged as fuck.
And don't get me started on Black Panther. Prince T'Challa? Heir to the throne of Wakanda, a super-advanced African country that chooses to hide itself from the rest of the world. A massive isolationist country that has ignored the famine, poverty and war that raged across their continent, preferring to fuck about in superhero costumes and travel to America. The privilege is dripping off these like they've walked out of the sea - the only positive thing is that they're black Africans, I suppose. Ultra-privileged black Africans...
Is it any wonder why Daredevil wasn't the most engaging superhero? I mean, in real terms he had a shitty upbringing. Orphaned, dumped in an orphanage, blind and with a mop of red hair... The thing is people will point at Ol' Hornhead and say, he wasn't privileged and to that I say, oh yes he was. He managed to become a lawyer, FFS!
Others that popped up in those early days had ambiguous pasts to suit their unknown natures - Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Silver Surfer all acted privileged when they hit the big time.
Even major supervillains were privileged. Your bog standard ones were easy to deal with, but your Doc Dooms (monarch of a European country) of the Marvel Universe were often as ambiguous in their wealth as the heroes. The evil geniuses often had money for their evil schemes; no one wondered who was financing them.
How come we never saw scenes where villains were out at nightclubs like what they do in James Bond films? Originally, Groot said considerably more than just 'I am Groot!' and he wanted to destroy the earth... How is that not an expression of privilege?

Marvel was based on money; despite the origins of the powers, to be a superhero usually meant a wealth of money, even in the 1960s when a Fantastic Quinjet-car could be knocked up for less than it costs for a mobile phone today.

DC wasn't exempt. Bruce Wayne - privileged beyond your wildest dreams.
Superman/Clark Kent - d'oh Superman.
They had scientists, explorers, test pilots, Martian royalty, princesses, industrialists, more billionaires - fuck me, the DC Universe is just as rich as Marvel's with original superheroes that haven't really changed, even today. Origins can be toyed with but Tony Stark has always been one of the richest men in the world; Peter Parker has never known what's it's like to go hungry because he's got no money. There might have been newer heroes, ones that came along from the wrong side of those tracks, but the building blocks that placed us here were all based on privilege, wealth and connections.

How come none of the modern day heroes are as iconic as these rich or privileged ones? I suppose, deep down, to have power is a privilege, so whenever someone, from whatever background they're from becomes powerful, they inherit privilege?

I also know that the Comics Code of Authority prohibited publishers from doing much at all that pushed the envelope, but the bottom line was the superhero of the 1960s - the most diverse of decades for popular culture - must have all been working for the man. Off shot, there were business executives doing multi-billion dollar deals with the government (or maybe even governments) to finance their 'adventures'. How else could you explain not only the mind tom come up with a portal to the Negative Zone, let alone the machinery and skill required to build one. "Reed, you need to come up with a machine that will send this alternative reality Spider-Man back to his own universe and change their history so that coffee becomes the beverage of choice." "Oh okay. It's going to cost about 8 trillion dollars and about 9 months to build. Have you checked the bank account, Sue?" It never happened, did it?

In the films, Stark Industries was, by and large, a massive corporation with directors and executives, all drawing large salaries making money selling Stark's wares to anyone but the military, because Tony was off building an army of different Iron Man costumes, robots, AI supervillains and being a renowned international playboy... Did the man never sleep? The thing is they must have been generating a tremendous profit over and above overheads and he was spaffing it on making toys with more power than small European countries, so he could defend the world from cosmic threats and wankers. What did shareholders think? "I only got a $200 bonus. Stark built a machine that can wank him off while he dreams up new ways of being wanked off..."

I remember the more sophisticated comics fan lauding the 'realism' being introduced into comics - social issues; world issues all being covered in comics and I suppose it was better than it had felt. The thing is superheroes exist in a world with superheroes - it is accepted that because super people exist in this fictional reality, everyone accepts it. The fact we don't actually have superheroes in the real world is easily explained by two things - superpowers don't exist and even in this world of celebrity culture, you'd have to be some special kind of cockwomble to dress up and fight crime.

Pop Culture is Dead to Me, Part 219½

Television and film is coming thick and fast at the moment, so much so that we're freely giving up on things as quickly as possible so not to waste what's left of our life on pointless bollocks. This is a practice that hasn't paid dividends so far... Let me explain:

Star Trek: Black Female Jesus Saves the Universe Again and Again

Or Disco Very as we (well 'I') call it. This is fucking awful. I mean I don't even feel bad about saying it's fucking awful because it's fucking awful. It has steadily gone down a wormhole that has done nothing but accentuate how idiotic and stupid the people behind this fucking awful piece of shit must have been and still are. There are a couple of mildly interesting characters - the ugly horse alien and former captain with the wiggly ear glands; the fat sweary girl who's been canned and the gay, slightly-autistic chief engineer, who has stopped being interesting - outside of that, it's just fucking awful. Gene Roddenberry's ghost should be haunting whatever fucker is responsible for this fucking awful heap of shit.

Chapelwaite

A sort of prequel to Salem's Lot and (loosely) based on the short story Jerusalem's Lot by Stephen King. It stars Adrien Brody - you know the Oscar-winning serious thesp. My personal jury is still out on this; it was relentlessly grim, full of nasty characters and was genuinely creepy until episode four when... ah but that would spoil it. So, here's a kind of metaphor: the first SK book I read was Salem's Lot. I knew nothing about it when I bought it and for the first 200 pages it creeped me out. Then the fact the book was about vampires sort of diminished it and while it was a cracking vampire novel I felt it lost something being about something tired and old. This series also starts off very creepy and weird and quickly descends into 'campire' nonsense, with laughable villains and an almost paint by numbers plot. The only genuinely odd thing about it was the ending. My advice is it's much better than Midnight Mass but that doesn't set the bar particularly high.

Midnight Mass

Everybody was raving about this overlong, wordy and ultimately fucking awful vampire series. The pandemic has meant a raft of TV shows and one can only hope that when this is all over all these people will have died so they don't ever make another TV show ever again...

The Wheel of Time

Or Boring Boring Fantasy Boring. How do people make TV series like this and keep a straight face when they're delivering their lines? Does Rosamund Pike really need the work? She's an executive producer on this and one wonders if that was to tempt her in or if she's really a fantasy geek? Either way, she should have known better. As fantasy series go, apart from being dreadfully dull it's also fucking awful.

Hawkeye

This is fucking awful...

Aha, fooled you. This is actually the best thing I've seen on TV this year* and plays out like a slightly overlong feature film. I'm looking forward to clumping them all together and watching it as a film in a few months. It feels like an Avengers movie without most of the Avengers in it and also is another link to Marvel series from the past. It isn't over yet, it concludes next week, but I do think we're going to see a cameo from Daredevil. The Steinfeld girl is both really annoying and incredibly lovely and I was very impressed with the reveal, very early on, that Clint is almost as deaf as a post. Cracking TV.

*It's not, but it might be the best Marvel series so far

Superman & Lois

Anyone who knows me knows that around 1986 I kind of discovered Superman. Don't get me wrong, he'd been around for quite some time, but I always found him to be a bit... DC. Therefore a huge thanks to a bunch of creators who changed my perception of Superman, because by the late 1990s it was one of the few comics I was still reading (despite having deteriorated in quality from a high point in the mid 1990s). As a result, I have a weird soft spot in my heart for the big blue and this TV series was nowhere near that soft spot. I have struggled with DC's TV adaptations and pretty much avoided this when it first came out mainly because Tyler Hoechlin is the least super Superman I've ever seen.

However, watching it on BBC1 - harking back to the nostalgic days of Lois & Clark - it has proved to be slightly better than I thought. I like the idea, even if Lois looks a bit like a cross between a dead Margot Kidder and the ugly horse alien from ST:BFJSTUAAA. The kids are almost believable too and did anyone notice that Dylan Walsh plays Lois's dad - he was the straight (as in not crooked) guy from Nip/Tuck.

Doom Patrol

Do you remember last time? When I was just about ready to kick this series into touch? We were about a third of the way through the third series and I couldn't understand where it was going or why it was going in the direction it was. Then it all started to fall into place. Yes, some of the characters just seemed to be flopping about, treading water and there didn't seem to be any direction any more; just a group of weird characters knocking round a big mansion and the introduction of Michelle Gomez seemed like a stupid idea rather than an act of genius; then after that seeming nadir episode where I wanted to stop watching it suddenly started to make sense and in the end it was a dazzling example of how to write a superhero story without any heroics, no real villains and keep it fresh and weird.

I have no idea where this series is going to go now that Cliff is a 50 foot tall robot, Larry has a new passenger, Vic is no longer a cyborg and Rita is a proper no-holds-barred superhero. Frankly, I have no interest in what they do to Jane because I think they fucked up her character in season two and have struggled with her ever since; we need to see more of her superpowered alter egos not less of them.

Dexter: New Blood

It's great, except... is it? Yes, it's much better than the last couple of Dexter series but I always feel the word 'contrived' applies to this character. It's good to have him back and his dark passenger, but... did I say contrived?

The Walking Dead franchise

Let's just say that Fear the Walking Dead almost became essential viewing for a couple of years; Lennie James introduction and the Mad Max feel to it made it almost light relief from the main feature. However, the last couple of years have been poor, culminating in a nuclear disaster that has you scratching your head at times. 

The World Beyond - the series looking at life 10+ years after the apocalypse and featuring New Age Nazis the Civic Republic started badly and deteriorated beyond the 'fucking awful' stage and well into the 'who the fuck gave this the green light?' If the ultimate aim of the two series was to reintroduce us to Jaden (sp) the dumpster lady who saved Rick Grimes as a wannabe Nazi storm trooper then it succeeded. It offered us a clue to Rick's fate and introduced us to a new generation of utterly shite actors. I really don't want to upset overweight people, but one of the lead characters in this spent 9 months on the road, in a world that has little in the way of provisions and she was arguably a more rotund young lady at the end than she was at the beginning. It's like Tilly in ST:BFJSTUAAA surely a thousand years in the future if you had body size issues you'd just hop into a transporter and get them to lop a few kilos off? It was a fucking awful two-series fart and the sooner they finish this entire franchise off the better.

Dr Who: Flux

Is something I rather enjoyed even if it often made little or no sense and I couldn't quite fathom the significance of many of the characters because the writer didn't bother to explain. Chibnall's run on the good DW has been woeful; Jodie Whitaker just a little too in-yer-face and the supporting cast have struggled (although Mandip Gill has been excellent and hopefully will remain for a while). There are three more specials before RTD comes back. I think any casual viewer will just hope that this means stories that make some sense and have some fun and wonder about them. It all got a bit too PC and earnest...

We finally got around to watching season one of Fargo and I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it. We're going into seasons 2-4 in the New Year. We also dipped into a number of things and quickly dipped out. Foundation being an excellent example; we gave it three episodes before we started to lose the will to live. 

Moving onto films...

Dune

Very enjoyable in a not a lot happens kind of way. It looks fantastic and I expect the next two parts will cement it into cinematic history or something...

Shang Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings

I expected more and less at the same time. It was an okay fun film but... I think we're seeing Marvel struggling with films featuring second rate heroes and also getting too clever with themselves. I always felt when Kevin Feige confirmed that the trailer did indeed have Wong fighting the Abomination that this was a red herring and so it proved to be. In fact, Trevor Slattery aside, this felt like an attempt to shoehorn in as much of the MCU past as it could. I expect I will enjoy it better in a couple of years when I watch it again, but ultimately it felt empty, pointless and a bit unnecessary. 

Free Guy

Was fucking awful, but also a bit of fun, but on the whole it was fucking awful and Jodie Comer was wasted (metaphorically, not literally... or is that the other way around?)

The Green Knight

Was The Guardian's #2 film of the year. I'll go along with the #2 bit. It was as boring a piece of shit as I can remember. It looked very nice, but it was unbelievably dull and left me thinking that people who liked this film probably also like modern art or will spend £50 on a shin of beef or mac and cheese at a Michelin starred restaurant... I like Dev Patel, but he's lost and a little wasted in this pretentious load of old wank (literally, but don't watch it just for that or like a warm bland wank you will be disappointed).

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Really? I mean REALLY? This was worse than fucking awful and seems to exist entirely for the post credit scene where Eddie and Venom are transported into the actual MCU proper as opposed to the Sony pocket universe. FFS, even the special effects are crap. This is a film that was so weak and flimsy it struggled to make it to the 90 minute mark including aeons of credits. Sony needs to look at Fox's Marvel output and decide whether they want the future ridicule...

I haven't seen Eternals yet, I expect that will be available the second week of the New Year. Like Shang Chi, I had no real investment in these Marvel characters in the 1970s either and the reviews ranging from 'Watches like a Powerpoint explainer presentation' to 'Very dull and boring' don't augur well for a fun night in. With the latest Spider-Man film hitting cinemas about now, I expect that will be a spring thing for the Hall house and I expect by the end of it the Marvel MCU will probably be missing a Spider-Man.

If there was more and forgot it then ask yourself why I forgot it and don't bother...

Hah Bumhug - Phil's Christmas Message

"Christmas is something that should be held like the Olympics. Every four years, in some other fuckers country" is probably my most creative description of my general disdain for Christmas. It's largely down to three things - age, time and no children and therefore no grandchildren. For many years Christmas represented that midwinter break where we did fuck all and felt zero guilt or remorse. When I used to lie in, it was a group of days where I could simply lounge, but in the grand scheme of things I've usually viewed the day itself as like a Sunday but very quiet, with nearly all the shops shut.

It's also a period where we have to suffer looking back over the previous year as the media and communications industry slaps itself on the back (backs?). Remembering everyone who's died. Christmas specials. Whamageddon. Fucking cheerful people. Well, bad syntax, but you know what I mean. The Festive Season brings an entire train of anything you can shoehorn into the Holiday banner. Do you know, someone said to me the other day that Elf was a Christmas Classic Film© and I've never, ever, seen it and NO. I have no intention of seeing it. It's on my not to see list along with Titanic, Moulin Rouge and any Fast & Furious film. But, A Christmas Classic? If it makes someone happy and it's not starting a war, but... you know... Elf? 

It's all part of the getting-into-the-spirit thing that apparently is infectious - a bit like COVID - and before you know it we have a pandemic of happiness all around, shining through the dark nights and making us all lovely human beings again - for one night only - before we return to our Grinch-like hovels waiting for the moment we can take it all down because you'll be finding pine needles in your knickers in August. 

The thing is, I get it. It's why there are 60 odd midwinter festivals throughout the world and its numerous cultures and religions. They all started long before we invented God; midwinter represented a turning point but also a very low point - the three weeks either side of the solstice are often the grimmest and despite the worst months of winter usually still to come, the sun gets higher in the sky and subconsciously we start to think of spring and not just the relentless dullness of existence...

The idea of festivals was around long before fairy tales and the idea of festivals was to bring a little lightness, some relief, some thanks that for the sun coming back and it won't be long before we can go back to another year of relentless grind and misery to do it all again next year. It's human existence, ennit?

I believe I marvelled at Christmas in my earliest years because it was in Canada, it was always snowy and the streets looked like hundreds of Santa's grottos one after the other. Christmas on Canadian streets in the late 1960s was ignorant of the concept of light pollution and it was magical. It's probably why I have soft spots for Charlie Brown's Christmas, Burl Ives and White Christmas because I associate them with a time when I saw it through a child's eyes. I think people who embrace Christmas in ludicrous extremes are just capable of recreating or continuously attempting to recreate a time when their lives were so much simpler. If the worst thing that happened each year was the family row at Christmas, then invite as many living family members as possible.

The thing is there are a few things that are easily excusable about not enjoying Christmas. People who have lost loved ones. Those in abusive relationships. The people who are alone and have no one to share a small part of their lives with. People of different religions and cultures. It's why the term 'Happy Holidays' is used, despite it actually being invented by a Jewish card manufacturer, who got fed up with Christmas being seen as more important that Hanukkah or any of the other festivals different people celebrate and created the term so it was seen as ALL INCLUSIVE rather than an attempt to ban Christmas. Only idiots, xenophobes and cunts think that.

The concluding week or so of December should be spent as close to the things we love as humanly possible or whatever the most appropriate alternative is because I can't believe there are people out there who wouldn't want to see every person, good or bad, black or white have a moment of joy and peace sharing with someone else? I mean, we're entering, if not in, the sixth extinction event and by the time it's finished there'll only be about 5% of humanity left and today's disgruntled present receivers will be grateful for simply finding a 30-year-old tin of prunes in 31 years time...

Pop Culture is Dead to Me, Part 217

I don't want to talk about Babylon 5, but to put the following segment into some perspective it's necessary...

Babylon 5 is one of the most excellent and rubbish TV shows ever to air. It walked a fine line between genius and AmDram. It was a product of the 1990s that would, probably, have been a massive hit if it had come out in the 1980s, except technology would have made it far too expensive to make and more than likely it would have suffered a similar fate as it did when it actually came out. It also might have worked in the 2000s, if it hadn't been made before.

To cut to the chase, B5 was originally going to be a FIVE season story. It got cancelled and reprieved so many times, so late in the production calendar, that JM Straczynski - the creator - and his team were forever reshuffling their deck until, in the end, what we ended up with was five series that could probably have been crammed into two. It ended up having a lot of quick endings for long-simmering plots, which would have benefited from guaranteed survival and budgets and illness meant everything from the cast to the stories became far more fluid (in a brown and runny way) and haphazard than it was planned.

I have a soft place in my heart for B5, but watching a bunch of 'key' episodes last year made me realise just how rubbish it looks now. It was way ahead of its time but stuck in a familiar trope. It deserved better and one day, maybe someone, will reboot it and do it some justice (or maybe they won't). 

With that aside over, I should point out that the TV series I'm about to talk about had almost as many reprieves as Babylon 5 and probably suffered just as much from having to constantly rewrite and rethink how to go forward. I am, of course, talking about Lucifer...

When it started back in 2016 it was met with a lot of controversy. A TV show about the devil, as the hero of a show. Religious geeks were up in arms; if Christians and Catholics could have held a jihad against the creators of the TV show they would but instead it was just a crap cop procedural with the devil helping an LA police detective solve some of the easiest murders ever to reach the small screen. In fact, halfway through its first series, it became obvious that what we had was a crap cop show with a large helping of ad hoc chaos thrown in; just enough to make those who were hooked think we might be onto something different. The reality was, it wasn't. It was a formula based show that reinvented the Casualty idea of guessing who was going to fall victim by transposing that into 'is the first person they interview always going to be the killer'?

The element of chaos, especially in the first couple of series, was that Tom Ellis - best known as Miranda's boyfriend in the UK sitcom - didn't seem to be working off the same script as everyone else and the comedic element crushed the concerns of the religious geeks. By the end of season two the writing appeared to be on the wall for the show which was building as big a cult following as B5 had in the '90s. Season three was going to be the last and even before its three reprieves, the writers decided to leave it dangling with a cliff hanger ending.

Then Netflix came along, picked the show up and decided to give it another series and this is where the best worst thing on TV started to fuck up...

Lucifer, in many ways, is the 21st century version of Moonlighting, a show that was phenomenal until Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd got it on, then it struggled to have the same electricity and drifted into oblivion with only Willis coming out of it with any kind of lasting cinematic longevity. While Shepherd had already been a star for a while, it was Willis who became the superstar. You could sense by the end of the third season of Lucifer that Tom Ellis is going to be a huge star - the new Hugh Jackman; an actor who can sing, dance, do drama, comedy, and is as handsome as the devil. Lauren German, his foil in Chloe Decker of the LAPD, isn't likely to have anything like Shepherd's career, but as the series dragged into later, originally unplanned, series, you could see the writers were going to have a problem with her character.

The big ending to what was the final series was Lucifer revealing his true devil-self while protecting Chloe from the mob. It was a BIG reveal - it was the moment Bruce kissed Cybil in Moonlighting - and because of that the ongoing comedy 'secret' was now no longer a secret. What followed was, in truth, painstakingly dull and awkward and as the cast grew with more celestial characters and the plot became more convoluted, while remaining largely a police procedural. Season four followed a slightly daft plot of Chloe being recruited by a covert wing of the Catholic church to kill Lucifer, while simultaneously Lucifer gets involved with Eve (of Adam fame) [again] and all the while you wondered what the actual point of it all was.

Chloe's origin became celestial and what was going to be the final season five introduced us to God and whether Lucifer would become the new God as the old one wanted to bugger off with his ex-wife into an entirely different universe. Season five wasn't helped by being filmed during the start of the pandemic, which gave it a sparse, half-assed feel and the lack of anything resembling a decent budget made this huge denouement seem a bit crap - much like the reason for originally falling for the series. The introduction of Lucifer's twin - Michael - really didn't help matters and season five finished on a kind of extra-curricular cliff hanger, because Lucifer had just won the eternal throne and was now God.

But the final reprieve had already been granted by the time they finished filming, which meant they had to go, yet again, and try and stretch out stories that probably didn't warrant it. By the time season five concluded, Lucifer had simply become a crap TV show without any of the charm that made it such a hit. There were maybe half a dozen episodes in S5 that were any good and add that the the half dozen or so from S4 and you soon realised that you'd get as much out of watching reruns of early 1970s Colombo episodes.

It was still must see TV though, mainly because you were so invested in Tom Ellis's almost continuously excellent acting [as Lucifer, not as Michael]. His adlibs, distinctly British colloquialisms and ability to make everything seem irreverent and all about him never really grew boring, as you might expect it should have, but by the time Season six came along even that was gone, because we were in completely weird and wacky territory. We went into the final 10 episodes knowing a major character was dead but still in it and that Lucifer was stalling on becoming God, apart from that...

I should mention how Chloe's character and actress German both became dowdy and uninteresting for a large chunk of the reprieves. It almost felt like she didn't enjoy the way the show was going and showed it by putting in half-hearted performances; almost dialling in her performances, as the ending drew close you sometimes wondered just what Lucifer saw in her.

[I've purposefully not talked about the comic this series is very loosely based on because the TV show treated that like a lunatic half wit cousin that no one talked about and short of that brief mention all I'll say is that while some elements of the comic were touched upon it was as relevant as a remake of Alien with Matt Lucas as the monster.] 

You would have thought that with just 10 episodes to play with there would have been more urgency to do something truly different in the final FINAL season; they could have had a lot of fun because Lucifer is now a worldwide hit and they could probably have got away with it, as it was there is something oddly low-key about it, like it was still trying to remain what it was but all the characters had moved on. It introduces a time-travel element and essentially ties up all the supporting cast's own stories, leaving Lucifer and Chloe's to the final few. There's a strangely unfulfilling element to all of it and by the time we get half way through the penultimate episode, pretty much everything is resolved. There's a logic to the finale but I, personally, had long stopped caring.

I had an idea in my head how it would all conclude and I can say, quite honestly, that I got one right and one almost right, apart from that the final 53 minute show did enough to inspire me to write this...

I've purposely avoided spoilers because people will come to this show in the future and be charmed by it and enjoy it for what it ultimately became - popcorn TV. However, the final episode might possibly be the perfect way to end a TV show, for good. Once the main story arc is resolved and we know the fates of our lead characters it does something really weird; it montages the next years of Chloe's life until we come full circle to the point where the time travel plotline actually begins; it briefly follows the lives of all the supporting cast and concludes with something that I can only describe as... brilliantly awful - a fitting ending in many ways. Except, the ending is sweet and it makes you smile and it makes you sad and it makes you realise that there will be no reprieves this time. It also has, like many times before, the strangest of choices of music for said montage - an almost perfect choice, but don't ask me why. I don't really know.

I could go into great detail about the show, but that would be pulling wings off of flies. There is an awful lot not to like about it; the superficial nature of it all, but it is ultimately a fantasy series that never really took itself seriously and really failed miserably when it did. It was always best when it was a 'will they won't they' idea and it never seemed to want to dwell on the whys and the hows and the craziness of God and angels being real. It was always paced in that unique TV way that suggests life on TV shows can be ponderous and lackadaisical about pressing issues to whatever character it was happening to, unlike real life. It really was a case of "I know who the killer is, but I'll wait until we're back in the precinct or walking to your car before making the big reveal."

But that final episode was both crap and perfect and it has stuck with me much longer than I would have expected.

***

After rambling far too long on that, let's zip through a few...

Midnight Mass is a seven-part mini-series by Mike Flanagan, who directed the Haunting of Hill House series and the Stephen King book Dr Sleep. He's quite well respected and he does make relatively good TV. I don't want to give anything away in this series because almost any spoiler will give away some nice tricks, but it was unrelentingly wordy, religious and grim. You have to take everything about it out of context because it is set on a sparsely habited island 30 miles from an undisclosed US mainland coast.

It was all right. The continuity freak in me struggled to understand how some of the island can be in autumn, some in summer and some in winter all at the same time and why the acting was either really excellent or painfully grating. Hamish Linklater deserves to go on to be the next Tom Hanks, but by the end I was glad it was over.

***

Rewind a couple of years and read me waxing lyrically about Doom Patrol. It was unique TV and while it had 'issues' it was a fun and utterly bonkers ride. They seemed to lose that edge in season 2 and it became more character and story driven without really giving anything away and when the pandemic struck it ended on a cliff-hanger that all seemed a little meh. 

The characters who made the show - Larry Trainer, Rita Farr and to some extent Cliff Steele (although Brendan Frazer's voice gets on your tits sometimes) were bizarre and crazy and unpredictable; the bizarre, mad and unpredictable one was Crazy Jane, who seemed both not that crazy or often Jane and while her character's actor is the lead the mystery behind her was far more interesting than the consequences of it. However the focus seemed to centre on elements of these characters that seemed superficial or stupid during season 2 and there was far too much navel-gazing, probably because of COVID restrictions.

Season three has tried to go in positive directions but seems to have completely lost it. Removing The Chief's daughter - an irritating character you should really all want to hate - seemed like a great idea, but introducing Michelle Gomez to fill the void is... Let's put it this way, Gomez in West Wing was brilliant. Gomez in Dr Who was essentially Gomez in Green Wing with added madness and power. Gomez in Doom Patrol is a scattier, hair-brained version of those two combined and I'm now wondering if Gomez can actually do anything else?

The Chief is dead, but you kind of know he isn't, even if all vestiges of his body have been destroyed and we're left with an increasing annoying Robotman - Cliff's story is weak; a very out of character Rita - now doing stuff in a most unRita way; Larry's journey seems to have wandered round a maze for two seasons and Jane's multi-personality 'underground' is just boring. I want to know how it was built not why there's a power struggle, yet again, with her many personalities. Oh and Cyborg... He's always been the lamest character, but now he's a whiny annoying twat. Maybe this is on purpose, but the trend is for this over the last season and a half and I think that's the route the writers are going rather than stay weird and surreal. Don't get me wrong; they're trying to be that now, but it simply isn't working.

I stopped the most recent episode with 15 minutes to go and went and did a load of stuff before watching it about three hours later. I'd forgotten I was watching it. I'm having serious doubts about my staying power with it. That's a shame, there was once an endearing cheapness about it that is now just looking cheap.

***

I'm counting down the days to the end of The Walking Dead. Part of my life I'll never get back...

However, while that flops its way out of existence, the second and concluding season of The World Beyond has just restarted and despite it really being a dreadful pile of shite, there's finally a proper villain in this post-apocalyptic world that you can get your head around. Juliet Binoche as the 'Operations manager' of a division of an independent post-apocalyptic state called the Civic Republic, who, it appears are actually worse than Nazis and have most of the US military's equipment and nutters to back them up. If you think The Commonwealth is 'dodgy' if you're watching TWD, the CRM make jokes of every independent survivor left roaming the earth. In the opening episode they literally killed off 100,000 survivors because they didn't want the competition.

***

Free Guy didn't cost me anything so I watched it and it was free. It was a film. It was called Free Guy. It had Ryan Reynolds in it. I bet he wasn't free.

***

The Green Knight was pretty to look at and pretty bloody boring.

***

I gave up on What If? after one episode. Why did it have to be so dull, pointless and ugly? [See, that was better than the 3000 word bollocks you didn't publish about it!]

***

RTD is back on DW. Well, it can't be worse than the last bloke and his bloody earnest and dull fables.

***

Invincible? Gave up on it as it wasn't very good. I read the comic, briefly, in the early 00s and this didn't resemble it in my addled memory. Why does Western animation have to look so... fake and faux anime now? I expect it's because it's cheap, but it's also really lacking in all the key areas.

***

And then I started to realise that I've seen a lot of things since the last one of these (in June) and most of it has simply washed over me, or left such an impression that even bleach couldn't remove it. Take Werewolves Within for starters. The Guardian rated it FIVE stars, calling it a 'riotous comedy' with lots of twists and turns. It was not very funny at all, I LOLed once in the 93 minutes. Every single twist and turn was as predictable as the next scene and it was fucking awful.

***

We watched Clarkson's Farm. It was going to be me watching Clarkson's Farm but the wife gave the first episode a watch and deemed to want to watch all 8 over the space of four days. It was that good. It was post-modern Dadaist Clarkson surrounded by people - professional people - who didn't suffer fools gladly and before long it turned into an interesting series on the struggles of modern farming presented by a pillock who had to learn fast. However derided Clarkson might be, this was excellent TV.

***

I forgot to mention in previous blogs that we had also watched James May's cooking programme, which was a) a waste of James May and b) actually quite erudite and charming in a strange way. And also the Top Ge... I mean, Grand Tour of Scotland was disappointing on a number of levels, but probably the strangest was 90 minutes spent in a country and they didn't speak to one single Scotsman. I also think the new team doing Top Gear are, at least, making the show fun to watch again.

***

Have I said anything about Black Widow? I must have... Did I say that since I saw it I have OT Fagbenle's name ear worming me at times?

***

We have Foundation waiting for us to watch and probably a few returning series to hit over the coming dark and gloomy months, as we huddle round a candle for warmth and fight over the last carrot...

An Actual Film Review

Black Widow

As anyone following my sporadic glimpses into the MCU will attest, my initial buzz about the Marvel Cinematic Universe started to fade after Avengers: Age of Ultron and while there have been some excellent additions to the franchise, the only two films that have arrived since Avengers: Endgame have been generally a bit meh. 

We watched the 2nd MCU Spider-Man film again not so long ago and ... Hell's teeth, did they not bother to employ either a script or film editor for it? If the story was green lit by the Sony half of the partnership then Marvel are just prostitutes, if it came from the MCU then the franchise pretty much died with the post credit scene.

The other post-Endgame arrived last week on a multitude of platforms and other than being a bit meh, it's also a fun-filled action-packed film where we know the hero won't die and feels like some kind of contractual obligation movie carved out by Johansson's agent rather than the other way around. It added absolutely NOTHING to the canon, had some dodgy casting and probably could have been dissected, added to and made into six 30-minute episodes for Disney+, it was that... meh. The epic fight scenes were great - yawn - the rest didn't even really set up anything apart from pursuing, in the epilogue, a 'Suicide Squad' route, especially if James Gunn's reboot is as good as is expected, with The Dark Avengers... 

JM Straczynski said the biggest hurdle with Babylon 5 was having the totally cosmic story in the middle; people expect things to get bigger and better not more insular and lots of people struggled with it after. The MCU will if it makes it less 'cosmic' and more 'domestic', but, then again, the MCU is going to struggle to not constantly repeat itself until it runs out of profitable films. Shang-Chi and The Eternals need to be special and neither looks it.

Black Widow is okay. It fills two hours nicely and there are a few nice touches. Ultimately, however, even after such a long wait it was always going to be an anti-climax. 

Assorted Popular Culture Round-Up

I suppose we should get the Marxists in the room out of the way first. You know, the socialist commie Marxists what play football and have been taking the knee in support for racial equality and the end to racism... I've watched the general bemusement of people trying to fathom how three similar, but different, political ideologies have anything to do with footballers showing solidarity to their non-white counterparts and racism in general. Then it dawned on me...

Marxist, Communist and especially Socialist are no longer really meant as a 'political accusation', it now means very much what the general term 'wanker' means. A wanker hasn't really been someone who masturbates constantly for donkeys' years; it essentially means 'useless idiot'. Our three political epithets now mean someone who gives a shit; someone who is concerned about the growth of hatred across all divides. It's the new sandal wearing leftie. If you're accused of being a Marxist it's because you care about other people and those who don't care about other people don't like it being rubbed in their faces when they settle down to watch an illegal stream of their team's latest match and they especially don't want England footballers displaying compassion towards a minority; it's a sign of weakness, ennit? Like foreign aid - scrap that; feed our own billionaires before anything - that's what the BLM-hating divisionist Brit is thinking. Put food on these savages tables and they'll be wanting to illegally enter the UK and steal their once secure jobs...

Who would have thought that in 2021, after a mortality affirming pandemic we'd still end up squabbling about the colour of someone's skin, their cultural or personal preferences while ignoring widespread governmental corruption and their refusal to condemn basic racism?

***

I mean, if there really was a God, surely he felt that all humans should be treated equally - a bit Marxist that God bloke - not just the ones who have more than the ones who haven't? In many ways that was the underlying theme of the second half of the penultimate season of Lucifer. (See what I did there?)

Everybody's (and it would appear to be everybody's given the ratings Netflix is crowing about) favourite crap LA cop show got another reprieve, so we're going to have to wait another 16 hours before we're finally put out of our misery...

What?

You love Lucifer?

I do. But, like a lover who thinks eroticism is shitting on your bedside rug, I've grown very tired of it, very quickly. It was clear by the 2/3rds point of this - initially final - season that it was simply about tying up loose ends, but while there were some excellent segments, on the hole it felt like these 'goodbyes' needed to be said, and then pack up the kit and get out of there. Except, Netflix in their infinite wisdom renewed it for one last time, leaving the production team with the dilemma of having to almost completely reshoot the final episode.

The problem with Lucifer is that, and I forecast this a couple of years ago, when it's just a crap procedural LA Cop show, with essentially no grounding in real police work, it's great fun. It was like someone dropped a chaotic loose cannon into a cop show and didn't tell the other cast members what he was going to say and Tom Ellis handled it perfectly. For every cringe-inducing rubbish murder or the inevitable 'first person who is interviewed is usually the killer' format, it was the crapness that made it endearing. It was too stupid and irreverent to step on the toes of the religious nuts who all campaigned for its cancellation before it started. 

Then it did a 'Moonlighting' and simultaneously saw more reprieves than Babylon 5 - from that point on we were really into 'making it up as we go along' mode and it showed. As the routine murders dried up a little, we had to suffer the agony of Tom Ellis playing his own evil twin - badly; we had to watch as the writers tried to make the celestials interesting, but ended up making the entire of concept of angels and demons as a bit less harmful than an episode of Love Thy Neighbour. As the series drew to the denouement of Lucifer possibly becoming God, because his father wanted to retire, I was wondering how it went from a 42 minute bit of fun into an hour-long load of bollocks, with less realistic settings than a Marvel film.

The weirdest thing, probably because of the filming restrictions due to the pandemic was how unimpressive the 'army' of angels was. Not only were the majority dislikeable, there wasn't that many to start with, so the battle between Lucifer's side and Michael's looked a bit like an amateur rugby match where some blokes making up the numbers. Lucifer has never really done spectacle and should really avoid trying.

There were, as I said, a couple of great bits and usually involving Dan Espanosa - Chloe Decker's ex-husband and Lucifer's 'mate' Detective Douche. His standalone episode was an absolute joy and has you totally wigged out right until the end. While Dan's encounter with God was a genuine piece of WTF in a series that really needed a lot more. Denis Haysbert, who played God, ended up being as ignorant and aloof about humans as the majority of his angels and everything about the story felt contrived.

Obviously, we'll watch the 'final' series, if only to see how much they can fuck it up further.

***

Mare of Easttown is a 7-part mini-series starring Kate Winslett about a dysfunctional Pennsylvania cop trying to solve the disappearance of two girls and the murder of another. On the surface it sounded a bit meh, but one should remember that Oscar winning Winslett doesn't tend to do much dross. It's also an odd mix of drama with human comedy thrown in for good measure - it kind of feels like a reflection of what might actually happen in circumstances like that.

I can't say much because it's all deliciously tied into itself in such a way that just saying that could be interpreted as a spoiler. If you get the chance to watch it, you should.

***

We 'treated' ourselves to a Zack Snyder weekend recently. We watched Army of the Dead on the Saturday and gave Watchmen an outing for the first time in 12 years...

AotD is toilet. Its trailer makes it seem like an intense lot of fun, but when you pack in the rest of the film around it... oh boy. It's a stinker. It might be a lot of mindless fun to some people, but it was 2½ hours of me wondering why it was even made...

Watchmen on the other hand was surprisingly better than I remembered, with the quibbles I had about it in 2009 no longer really bothering me in 2021. Those 'quibbles' were the fundamental changes to the story that could have made it obsolete, but I now think doesn't...

The Watchmen TV series is said to have spun out of the comic rather than the film and there are obvious signs, but the bottom line is both endings probably would have worked with the TV series because of Rorschach's Journal. The film doesn't feel overlong (we watched the Director's Cut) and it works on a number of levels. One thinks that maybe whatever backlash there was about the film might be down to the lack of Alan Moore's name on the credits and chunks of his dialogue lifted into the film. My take has always been Hollywood wins and the only people who suffer, albeit financially, are those who go against it. The money he could have made from projects such as this could have been ploughed into projects that soothed his wounded pride or a new jacuzzi...

***

The stand out Sci-Fi show of the year so far has been Debris, even if it feels it might be going off in a direction that the fantastic element of the series doesn't really need. It's like the X-Files meets some  twisted mutant version of Tales of the Unexpected and the main characters are not conventional in a lot of ways. It has a bit of Fringe in there, just to keep you off balance, but essentially it's about fragments of a spaceship hitting earth, each bestowed with a peculiar power or ability - from dimensional shifting to time travel to reverse terra-forming. However, the acting lets it down a little and the fact it feels like a 'lockdown TV show'.

***

[Joss Whedon's] The Nevers was a bit of a curate's egg. There was much to like about it, but a lot to worry about and feel uncomfortable about. We've only been treated to the opening 6 episodes because the creator has been fired and someone else will handle the second half of the series and any subsequent efforts - at least this was the case at time of writing. It's like an almost exclusively female version of the X-Men crossed with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children with a bit of period drama - it's set around 1899 - and some, frankly, unnecessary sex and nudity thrown in (which kind of makes you squirm a little knowing some of the reasons for Whedon's exit). It's not without its merits, but considering the length of each episode, we seemed to be no further to anything until the last part of this series section when it dumped almost far too much info into our brains.

It's about the future and a race of aliens who can essentially fix the planet for us but the armies of the God believers want the aliens killed/destroyed/obliterated so it appears it took some minds and travelled back 300+ years and 'started' again... Or at least that's how I think it is.

There's too much going on; too much mystery and not enough character development and even when that is done - which was actually redundant in the end - it feels like a sketchbook rather than a finished painting. It gets 10 out of 10 for sets and costumes, but much less for the rest. I will give the next part a go, if it's ever made.

***

Many series are falling by the wayside, either unwatched or given up on. We gave Invincible three episodes before realising that however 'adult' it might seem, it's still just a thinly-veiled anime rip-off and not very good. We tried to catch up with Manifest during the dark part of the winter, but gave up after 10 episodes because it felt like a slightly more religiously overt Lost, and even if it ends up being great; we got bored.

We aren't bothering with Lisey's Story, the latest Stephen King adaptation, based on the fact the book was a bit pants and the reviews all suggest the series is even worse. 

We watched Line of Duty and while we agreed with many on-line critiques that the series was really anti-climatic, I have no doubt that at some point towards the end of 2022 we'll see adverts for THE FINAL SERIES OF LINE OF DUTY! And apologies if I've done this bit before; I remember commenting about it but no longer can remember who I am let alone where I said things...

***

Bob Odenkirk's Nobody is 98 minutes of mindless violent fun. I really enjoyed it. I shouldn't have.

***

We finally watched Sharp Objects, the Amy Adams dark deep south mystery from 2018. It was hard watching and has a post credits scene that puts all other post credit scenes to shame...

***

And that brings us to Loki...

I'll admit to have been looking forward to this one and I'll also admit I fell asleep twice during the first episode. I think the first episode is more of a cryptic map for the coming four years of Marvel films than anything else, but because nothing really happens it just felt like it was already treading water. It felt strangely diluted. 

It's also tough to really guess what's going to happen, because pretty much every teaser of the series came from the first episode. I'd like to put it out there that Owen Wilson's Mobius M. Mobius could well be Kang the Conqueror in disguise because the premise we're given for his and Loki's involvement seems uncharacteristically 'human', not at all TVA. Also, we're being teased that the six-part series (already renewed for S2) is a 'heist movie'. 

I believe, seeing as Loki is a little bit more A list than WandaVision and TFATWS, that this series, if it hasn't already, will begin to introduce us to alternatives, paving the way for the hinted at themes of the upcoming Spider-Man and Doctor Strange films.

I'll tell you what I also firmly believe...

Avengers: Endgame was the perfect JUMPING OFF POINT. 

The World's Most Addictive Drug

The dilemma with societal problems is there rarely an easy fix; throwing money at something helps, but does nothing if there's no infrastructure. The fact there is very little investment in making the cogs that help the wheels turn means that on the surface it simply looks like another attempt at evening up that's been pissed up the wall by those people. Those people are essentially anyone who does something that tweaks your nipples; has an opinion that isn't yours; lives a way that you don't like; brings their kids up in a fashion you maybe don't understand therefore dislike it. Those people are anyone and everyone that bigoted people and normal fair-minded cast as different to them and not in a good way. 

There are always victims and like it or not, argue against it or don't, it's usually those with less that suffer the most. I've never read the Bible but I'm sure one of its key messages is love thy neighbour and be kind and charitable to those worse off than you. The fact there are exploitative capitalists who call themselves men of whatever god they worship should be mockery enough. And then you factor in the fact you now live in what is essentially an anocracy - a fake democracy akin to a feudal system - crossed with an authoritarian libertarian attitude towards its people, but also a world where there are some utter sociopaths running some of the richest organisations on the planet and you realise that everyone is either a victim or isn't.

I know, that sounds... meh, but that's how this kind of geopolitical takeover is achieved. If you look at the top 27 nations of the world, very few of them have anything you could consider as truly socialist. The Chinese worked out how to merge capitalism with their Maoist brand of communism, which essentially results in an authoritarian regime. Russia is the Soviet Union with coloured balloons and all the 'peaceful' ones are built on burgeoning economies - making money - with little or no regard to the plebs. The Scandinavian countries seem to have a better understanding of the world, but I'll bet you a penny to a pinch of shit if you spoke to the average Scandi in the street, he'd have negative opinions about something other than COVID-19. Hate has been reactivated in even the most benign people and they all have a platform to air it.

The way it has been reactivated was by ramping up the most human of emotions - envy, greed, desire, avarice and hate or simply being different. The catalyst for this was from the internet and ultimately Facebook, because of its reach. Where else can you get gaslighted on an insane variety of subjects, daily, free of charge. Facebook isn't for the people, it is the people. For over 15 years we've been fed memes from unknown groups that simply have told lie after lie until it ingrained itself into the human psyche, giving us strong opinions on subjects we never cared about. Getting us to point the finger, more readily, at someone else. While it existed before, it gave whataboutery the platform to become more important in discussion that to discuss the issue at hand. "The government are making a hash of this." "Yeah, but what about that Labour MP who did something wrong." "Ministers are giving money to their mates." "Yeah but what about that 19 year old single mum who cadges cigarettes off of people on the street, she's on benefits when she should be at work." Purveyors of whataboutery aren't interested in the relative comparisons between a very rich cabinet minister and a kid that has had little or no education into what a real life might be like should she have unprotected sex with an absent twat. 

As a brief aside: speaking to two, let's say, anti-Corbyn voters last week I was amazed that they admitted they no longer think all the bad things said about Corbyn were true; that they now know his involvement with the IRA was as a negotiator on the Good Friday agreement, or that his racism was a construct of the press; one even went as far as to say he believed the antisemitism row was all blown out of proportion  to paint him in a bad light. Too late now, isn't it? Believe it when it's happening next time and it's happening now to anyone who isn't on the same page as our present regime.

Facebook has normalised everything. I've seen people who will swear they're not racists go blue in the face at Black Lives Matter or footballers taking the knee and instead of just shouting at the dog he now shares those feelings with everyone on Facebook and I can't help thinking he might not have been like this had it not been normalised for people to share their opinions with everyone else, sometimes with bells and whistles on. How about racism on social media - that doesn't seem to carry as much weight as calling a moron stupid or, in the case of my mate Phil from Kent, using the singular term 'cabbage' in an unrelated to mental capacity conversation. He was bullying me for that and got another warning.

Timelines are life lines, and you get a constant snapshot of others and you think they all look at yours. You think you're connected to the world, but Facebook doesn't work like that and I haven't met someone who can actually explain to me why it is the way it is other than 'algorithms'. Aside from the fact that some people simply disappear from your timeline, post often but you never see is a mystery for me, but not as much as the memes floating about designed to do nothing but waste your time about how you can restore your timeline and see all your friends again.

But I suppose the thing that bugs me the most about Facebook is now it has taught us all how to be horrible to each other again; to be negative to imagine every hateful human out there is a bot, is the fact that as someone who is angered by ignorance and hate, I'm usually the one who ends up in the 'new and improved' Facebook jail, while the ignorant racist who doesn't wear a mask and won't have 'that shit' put in his arm gets to continue spreading misinformation about something that can kill you and is never challenged or stopped. I called one 'stupid' and spent 24 hours unable to do anything other than look.

The thing that made me sit up and pay attention was when Phil from Kent got a warning for some banter with me. This was swiftly followed by a 12 hour ban which he slept through most of. That was for some other bit of banter with friends. He then got another ban, this time for calling someone 'stupid'. The conditions were almost exactly the same as mine. Now, it's something my late mate Si Spencer talked about, the fact the right wing Facebookers are a tight bunch, they report posts en masse to get them removed, whereas people like him, me and Phil from Kent do not have hordes of likeminded people who will do the same to their inflammatory sic ridden diatribes. There's also the algorithm, which latches onto you once you've violated; it's like Facebook's Big Brother sitting on your shoulder telling you to leave the nasty boys alone and post fluffy cat memes. It's saying it knows you're a possible insurgent and therefore it is taking responsibility to ensure I can't spread sedition across the internet. 

It's not even isolated to me and two friends, when the latter posted about his experiences - on Facebook - about 75% of the many responses, people I know, or through association and who, mainly, I would regard as decent charitable people, had also been sanctioned and many of them for calling out a wanker. This could be the most insidious of methods to ensure the current regime stays where it is. I'm not suggesting that we should all be able to call people names, but the algorithm doesn't work like that, it looks for what it can construe as either bullying, harmful, hate speech or against their vague community standards. Someone tried to sell a load of ammunition on my Mushroom page and Facebook told me they had no problem with it. Four times, Facebook has removed content from my page without telling me until after the event at people trying to sell drugs. That's fine, drugs are illegal in many places and I would have removed them and banned the poster myself, but ammunition, such as hollow-tipped bullets are fine, especially on a mushroom page?

There are now people out there frightened to speak their mind, even in the most restrained manner for fear of having Facebook removed from them. What a fantastic drug? It keeps you calm and quiet, you get fed whatever they want you to and you're grateful for it. It carries on teaching you to be prejudiced and resentful, yet forgiving and accepting and gradually turning your belief system into something that few political parties can relate to. Let's not even go into the world of Facebook private pages, which allows you to post literally anything without fear of being sanctioned, because they are private, invite only rooms and Facebook can't even see what's happening. How dangerous is that? How come Facebook never gets mentioned when WhatsApp and Zoom and SnapChat and whatever the latest craze is are always being looked at under the microscope? You could organise a terrorist insurgence through a group named Fluffy Bunnies; literally. 

Yet, we're not allowed to tell people with dangerous and wrong beliefs that they're idiots, because, you know that's worse than selling ammunition. And, yes, I know, calling them idiots doesn't change anything, you could make them swallow the truth and they'd still throw it back up all over your new shirt, but it makes you feel superior until you're made to feel like the guilty party and sent to your room. 

Of course, you could simply report anything from these nutjobs in the hope that something sparks the ire of the algorithm. 

However, if you ever decide to leave Facebook, it will have as much effect on the rest of the world as one grain of sand from a beach going missing and because of FOMO, even if you don't have it, you dip back in until it hooks you again, you just have to play with restraint because you're being watched for being a decent person and Facebook really doesn't want decent people using it for anything other than to be fleeced by scammers, spammers, data harvesters and dodgy advertisers. Facebook doesn't even answer to governments and treats them with such an indifference it boggles the mind and if nothing else, that should tell you that Mark Zuckerberg thinks he's more important than anyone else on the planet and frankly, he's barking mad.

My Best Thing on TV?

It came without much fanfare. An alternative history of the space race based on the premise that the USSR beats the USA to having the first man on the moon and therefore not ending the space race but escalating it into territory - a world history - that didn't happen but plausibly could have if these events had happened. 

The first series of For All Mankind had cameos from actors playing Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and John Shepherd, but it was really about the next generation of astronauts; the guys waiting in the wings as a result of the momentous setback that losing the moon caused. The heroes of the real Apollo missions become side-lined and move on; being written out of history as nearly men and ushering new heroes in to replace them in a time that was considerably more fraught and tense than it really was.

Series one was about Ed Baldwin - a Korean War vet - and his pal Gordon 'Gordo' Stevens, who replaced the old guard and made the moon their home. It was also about how women's rights and their liberation was fast forwarded beyond where it is today - in the real world. The next next generation of astronauts would be women; the next big wigs at NASA would also be women and old school Ed and Gordo were needed to help the transition.

The biggest dilemma with the first series was how to make it different enough to look different. How do you turn something as scientific and cold as space travel into a soap opera about the people at the heart of the project. Joining Ed was Karen - his wife - and their troubled son. With Gordo was his twin-engine flying ace and long suffering wife Tracy, a phenomenally gorgeous woman who was always second best to her husband's infidelity and then gets the chance to become an astronaut herself; creating all-new tensions and drama. There is Margo Madison, a women - who by association - gets elevated high in the ranks of NASA. A woman whose heart beats hot and cold depending on how she felt that particular day - a wallflower but a decent, honest woman. Then there's Ellen Wilson, a fantastic astronaut and commander who happens to be gay in a world that is less tolerant of gays than it really was, who marries a gay man to hide their secrets behind each other. They're joined by Molly Cobb and Dani Poole - a no-nonsense pilot and a black career air force pilot and they are all held together by Deke Slaytor - the controller and man responsible for trying to put the USA ahead of the USSR in the new race - to mine the moon, established a base and claim the hunk of rock as American. 

There was also a subplot about a Mexican illegal immigrant who was also a bit of a physics genius and is taken under Margo's wing. Any plot watchers would have told you that season two would obviously focus on this girl. However, one thing you can't second guess is where the writers are going; Aleida plays a big part in the second series, but she's nowhere near the focus (but that might be next season).

There were other secondary characters, all playing a vital role in building a cast of believable characters, living exciting lives and yet having to deal with also trying to be normal people. Tragedy dogs season one like a bad stain and the opening ten episodes are a lesson in loss, triumph, hope and frustration, taking in unexpected deaths, needed deceit and hopeless desperation. If this world - as 'our' world - had changed very little to how those of us old enough remember it and the escalation of technology through the new-improved space race isn't much more advanced than it really was, with some exceptions, you would almost think this 'world' was our world. That's probably why it works as a drama.

By the time season one concluded, I'd pretty much added it to my list of must-see TV. You cared about these characters even if some of them were hard to like. The first season ended with every major character suffering some form of loss that they carried into the second season. It was difficult to see how jumping the story 12 years to 1983 was going to work in terms of the characters we'd grown accustomed to and much of the first few episodes of the second series were awkward in their presumption that we would eventually piece all the missing fragments together. 

Aleida - the Mexican girl - being conspicuous by her absence until she makes a resounding return as a feisty young woman nothing like the delicate young lady we last saw, struggling to work out how to stay in the USA after everything she had was taken away.

The moon is now 'shared' by the US and the Soviets. There is a growing cold war between the superpowers and the Russians have been elevated above their standing by their successes over the Yanks. The Jamestown base where Ed, Gordo and Dani lived for months is now a proper camp with 30 astronauts there, mining for lithium and doing all number of experiments in the pursuit of helping the next big phase - the race to Mars. The Soviets' own base is never seen, but their presence and threat is always felt; with tensions on Earth rocketing out of President Reagan's control, a terrible incident on the moon sees one Russian die and another, badly wounded, asking for asylum. The space race suddenly becomes a space arms race.

Behind the threat of World War 3 is the planned Apollo-Soyez docking; the balance of this being the innocent but sexually-charged, yet odd relationship between the introverted and shy Margo and her Russian counterpart, Yuri, as they struggle to find common ground between two nations that loathe each other. We wrestle with one of the main cast's act of heroism that has now put her own career and life in jeopardy and we watch how the main cast get their own shit back together. One thing we learn from season two is do not discount any inconsequential event; don't think it is treading water to give under-focused cast members something to take up their time and earn their paycheques - this is as carefully plotted a series as a grandmaster chess tournament. Every scene has a resonance and a payback of its own; it is allegorical in such a deft way that it's only afterwards that you realise you've been sucked in by skilled writers who are making utterly mesmerising Science [fact] Fiction hidden in a soap opera. It probably wouldn't work any other way.

The ultimate pay off of season two is more tragedy; in fact far more than you'd expect. This series has the feel of how early The Walking Dead episodes were; knowing that no one is safe, that star names will die just as easily as the guys wearing the metaphoric red jerseys. Not that any of this show's 'stars' were really that; some of them had major parts to play in other shows, but generally the cast was a group of people best known for being supporting cast members, but are now probably on their way to an A or B list status. Season two ups the ante and makes you realise you're watching something truly special in a landscape of excellent TV shows.

You feel, at times, like you're watching a true historical recreation of a bygone era. The early 70s were done so well you felt you were there. The 80s - using doctored actual footage - also feels like the attention to detail is all important for you to believe in what you're watching. We're heading to the 90s next; another 12 year jump and the threat of having to get used to new characters because the main group will now be in their 60s and some will have died and some might need to be recast... 

There's a new planet to explore; probably a massive diversion from real events and a chance to take this world into places only historical fantasists can imagine. I expect China will make an entrance, but also other burgeoning economic countries, plus the desire of private business to enter this story; the writers have a largely blank slate to play with and can dip in and use pivotal actual events to progress the story. In this world John Lennon is still alive and is seen on TV screens as a key political activist. The next season of FAM might not have the fall of the Berlin wall or the Soviet Union. It might not have Bill Clinton as president or a Russian Federation. This series never had a Jimmy Carter presidency (it was Edward Kennedy's as Chappaquiddick didn't happen as a result of the Soviet moon race). The FAM world isn't that much different at the moment, but I expect it to swerve into unknown directions when it returns, but always keeping its people real enough to believe in them.

For All Mankind was one of the best things I watched on TV in 2020. It became the best thing I watched on TV in 2021.

Pop Culture is Dead to Me: The First Geek in Weeks

There's a lot to talk about. If nothing else, the pandemic seems to have flooded the world with new TV and film that is designed specifically with the geek in mind. It seems to me that the world of fantasy has had to step up to the plate and deliver, even if the results are patchy at best. So ...

Let's get the elephant or kaiju in the room out of the way first. Godzilla versus Kong is a children's film for all ages. I'm constantly fooled by these films; I think they're going to be fantastic and the spectacle is going to be so good I will walk around priapic all week, but they end up being warm bland wanks... I made the mistake of going into this film expecting there to be some woeful story woven between the unending battle scenes (like there had been in the previous Godzilla film); what there was was an hour and forty five minutes of televisual super-sugar. It was like someone gave LSD to an eight-year-old and told him to write an adventure story with two massive great beasties. That makes it sound good and on one level it is, but on so many other levels it's just infantile and a waste of some recognisable acting talent. It's proving to be very popular... I don't know if that says anything about how desperate people are for some normality in their lives that they've made this extremely well made piece of shit so popular.

***

Let's throw my two-cents worth in about the big question: why are DC films so shit? As this is kind of my area of expertise, I find it ironic that DC did comics for years until Marvel came along and showed them how to do comics differently and eventually usurped them as the leading comics publisher in the Western World. There have been DC superhero film adaptations for donkeys years, most of them of independent vision - much like their comics output of the 1950s and 60s - and standalone. Even when they linked their Batman films of the 80s and 90s, it had the law of diminishing returns writ large all over them. Marvel looked like they were going to go the same way, especially when the company was essentially split up and film rights sold to all and sundry, but its gradual climb into being part of the largest entertainment industry in the world is probably down to the fact that when films finally caught up with Marvel's characters, they took the bold move of making it a shared universe from the word go.

By the time DC and Warner Brothers decided to unify and reboot their new superhero cinematic foray, Marvel was already building a universe in an oddly believable world. Iron Man was a stroke of genius in many ways, because while the character has always been a bit 'meh' in the comics, on film, with RDJ in the role of Tony Stark, you suddenly had a fantasy film that appealed to the Bond/Bourne fans and was witty and clever enough to tempt people who wouldn't dream of watching a film like that into watching it. By the time the first Avengers film came out, Marvel's cinematic universe was a guaranteed success - it was a juggernaut that wasn't going to be stopped.

DC, historically, has struggled to be ahead of the game and even when they get there they've never seemed to know how to stay there. There have been periods in the history of comics where they suddenly have a surge of popularity at the exact time Marvel hits the buffers, but they've never been able to find the right Viagra to keep themselves up.

With films their MO was basic; reboot Superman or Batman every ten years or so with a very capable director du jour and because of increased budgets and better special effects they can appease the converted with Easter Eggs of some geeky kind. The problem was as some of the producers of Marvel's X-Men and Spider-Man had discovered, that old friend the Law of Diminishing Returns is never too far away from spoiling the party, which is why the Spider-Man reboots seemed to happen so fast and why Spider-Man films work better now they've taken a new approach to them. DC's problem was it felt like Batman and Superman had already been done to death; cinematically Batman works better and like in the comics Superman suffered from essentially being too powerful making it difficult to come up with a suitable, believable, adversary.

DC, it is said, have all the best ideas, but dither about until Marvel steals them and shows how it would have worked. There is both actual and anecdotal evidence throughout the second half of the 20th century to prove this and back in 2002, long before Kevin Feige was going to create the MCU, DC had plans for an extended shared cinematic universe, but that didn't really happen until after 2013's Superman reboot The Man of Steel (a bit like with Iron Man in many ways), it then, temporarily, became the 'property' of Zack Snyder and we were treated to a number of bombastic Bruckheimer-styled slugfests in a cinematic style that just feels slightly out of kink. However, there was a anomaly - 2011's Green Lantern, a film I quite liked but bombed big time, despite having Ryan Reynolds in the lead role. Marvel kind of absorbed the second (largely standalone) Hulk film by tagging an ending on that tied it into Iron Man, despite it not being very good and not really having any connection to the Hulk as he's seen in the current MCU. In fact, the Hulk's presence in the MCU has never been dealt with, it's like it happened in that film and let's say nothing more on the matter. DC could easily have done the same with Green Lantern; it was a missed opportunity.

Man of Steel was followed by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Justice League (2017), Aquaman (2018), Shazam! (2019), Birds of Prey (2020), and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). However, you can take a few of them out as they might be part of the DCEU but their relevance - at the moment - is non-existent. The problem was none of the core films were particularly good. They were big, brash and full of mind-blowing special effects, but they are all largely soulless. Marvel invented 'family' in comics and they simply transferred that effect into the movies. Create a huge soap opera with fantastic interconnecting parts that can be read alone or as a group. DC created comic characters who did the same thing month after month after month. Clark Kent was a mild mannered journalist and Superman was a god; every month Lois Lane wondered about whether the two could be the same and every month the reset button was pressed. Not until the late 1980s did DC try and make their extended comics universe a family, by then just as they were getting the Marvel idea, their competitors had already moved on in areas DC had pondered but opted against.

I don't know if this is something ingrained into the DNA of DC, but it does feel like their film adaptations could easily just reboot again under a new 'top dog', whereas Marvel's current 20-odd film legacy will always have relevance even when film #120 comes out. 

That brings me to Justice League. DC's Avengers (more irony, the Avengers were always classed as Marvel's Justice League) was on the cards the moment Man of Steel wasn't a box office flop. If Marvel can do it, so can we, shouted DC 15 years after they first thought of it. Snyder's films to date hadn't exactly set the world on fire and when he had to quit directing Justice League two-thirds of the way through, it seemed his vision was also going to become just another unfinished subplot in the dull life of the DCEU. Joss Whedon came onboard, reshot scenes, re-edited it, changed bits and pieces and the film came out in 2017 to absolutely stunned silence. I've seen the film and I can't tell you anything about it at all; it's just dreadfully forgettable. 

It felt like that phase of the extended universe was over and subsequent DCEU films have all, by and large, been utter rubbish that feel like comics plucked from a bygone era in the way they interact with the world and each other. They all look nice, they all stink the house out as far as storytelling goes...

So, I knew nothing of Zack Snyder's Justice League until I started seeing adverts for it. I don't know the reasons behind it; it feels odd that DC would allow something like this to happen, but they did and whereas the Whedon cut has been erased from my memory, this version - at just about 4 hours - is epic. It's still soulless and devoid of any real empathy, but by the end of the film you're invested enough to give a shit, which is more than any of the other films managed. I also quite like Affleck as Bruce Wayne; I shouldn't, but his line of 'I'm rich', when asked by the Flash what his super powers were made me laugh out loud.

That said, I enjoyed ZSJL, even if it was 2 hours too long and is now effectively obsolete (especially Bruce's dreams of a dystopian future). It might be why subsequent films have been a) excrement and b) standalone. DC simply doesn't know how to play with the toys [read: ideas] that Marvel introduced them to.

ZSJL is utter rubbish but as escapism in lockdown it was better than watching Boris Johnson lie to the country.

***

Wandavision was great TV. Not enough of it, but good enough to fill a void. This is where DC fail, but Marvel has mastered the art of prick teasing. Whether Wandavision was any good is another question. It was bold and definitely unusual, but it ended up being quite an unpleasant thing that was without doubt one of the bravest things a fledgling TV company (which is what this arm of Disney is) to do.

If, like me, you realised almost before it started, that this was going to be a series about grief and escapism, then pat yourself on the back. It didn't matter what flesh was put on the bones, this was going to be about wrong footing everybody and doing something extremely clever and also... have I said brave yet? This is a brave move - on two levels: the first by making Wanda a villain, albeit through obvious mental health issues, but also by making her essentially the Phoenix - from X-Men mythos - means that whatever Marvel does with the X-Men, it might not be in any familiar way. For those who haven't got a clue what I mean, Jean Grey 'died' and was resurrected by the universal Phoenix force, unfortunately it turned her into a planet devouring monster and she had to be killed. It was highly controversial as a comic, was poorly done by Fox's X-Men and now the MCU appears to be setting Wanda up as one utterly mega-powerful entity, capable, possibly of breaking down the barriers of alternative universes and destroying worlds... It's almost like Kevin Fiege saw the abomination Fox made and now wants to do it the Marvel way.

Wandavision was essentially a bridging arc. It tied up some loose ends, did a handsome job of examining the effects of such accumulative grief on someone so powerful - especially in a world that no longer has a Cap, Iron Man or Black Widow (or Vision) she can go and seek solace with. She is alone, with no one and she's gone mad. What's not to love?

***

The Falcon & The Winter Soldier is four episodes in and was I getting the feeling it's going to end up setting up another film or TV series. At 45 minutes an episode you'd expect the first three to have moved the story along pretty quickly, but it took episode four to finally tell us what this series is really about. 

The main actors are great and they've been fleshed out to a degree that sometimes comics didn't bother with and the series feels like Wandavision in that it's dealing with issues that wouldn't work that well in films, specifically the relationship between heroes and the aftermath of the reverse of the 'blip' that wiped half the life of the universe out. 

It is also funny - funnier than Wandavision - and feels like an extension of the darker Captain America films and that also isn't a bad thing. In fact, I said to the wife, it feels like an extended Marvel film.

Oh and the new Captain America - played by Wyatt Russell (who appeared in JJ Abrams Overlord, in case you were wondering where you'd seen that ugly mug before) is an arsehole and proved it in the shocking ending of ep four.

***

Remember Fringe? What a great series that was and I don't think there's been anything that quite does 'odd' as well as it did. Well, Debris might be the exception to the rule. It is about fragments of a destroyed alien spacecraft crashing into the planet bringing quite unbelievable consequences when it does. It reminds me of Casualty at times; the start is always about what is going to happen, but instead of wondering who is going to be thrown into the thresher or fall down a drain, you wonder how the next fragment of spaceship is going to interact with the world and the people.

It's also quite clever in that it starts months after the first bits of debris hit the planet; so we're walking into a series that has been going on (in the minds of the creators) a lot longer than where we started to watch; therefore it allows us to move forwards without being bogged down by the 'set-up' and it also promises to explain the past but through the eyes of a bunch of people thrown together by fate, who no longer really trust each other.

6 episodes in and it's weird and distinctly creepy and Scroobius Pip is in it as a cockney 'villain' who can teleport using bits of alien metal. The strange thing is it's almost dealing with a similar theme to that of the MCU; whereas that is having to deal with the return of 3½ billion souls and where they belong in a world that was slowly forgetting about them; this is about something oddly similar, the argument that the debris is a gift from the universe and it belongs to all people and should not be controlled by the planet's most powerful governments.

***

I think it would be safe to say that the end of The Walking Dead cannot come soon enough. The tagged on extra six episodes of the most recent season were execrable - 6 x 45 minutes of some of the most boring excuses for an ongoing TV series as you could possibly imagine. Even the two episodes where you thought you might see some kind of progression ended up being handled in a very poor way; some could almost argue unnecessary additions to a dying series, with the Carol/Daryl second episode failing on almost every single front - if this is what to expect from the mooted series featuring these two main characters then I'll start watching Strictly.

Even Fear the Walking Dead seemed to have fallen into the 'we haven't got a clue what to do' camp, with the first 7 episodes of its 6th series not doing much at all to make you want to stay loyal, however on its return it showed how good this franchise can be with arguably the best episode of all the TWD series in years. It needs to keep this intensity up now it has learned to kill major characters off - pointlessly - again. Pointless deaths of major characters is what made it what it is today; 'no one is safe' was always the motto (apart from Rick Grimes) and that made it edgy. FTWD seems to have rediscovered 'edgy'.

***

I used to like cartoons, but as they became easier and cheaper to make they kind of lost that proper animation feel and anyone who watched anything by Hanna-Barbera in the 60s and 70s were always left wondering how Tom & Jerry could live in such a long house with really boring décor and the same picture hung every ten feet for several miles...

So, when I saw nothing but praise for Invincible - a comic series I vaguely recall being a bit of a fan of in the late 90s early 00s and created by Robert Kirkman, the guy behind The Walking Dead, I managed to persuade the wife to give it three episodes to see how it progressed.

I no longer 'get' cartoons. Everything kind of smacks of anime influences and they're so melodramatic. Invincible is no exception; it might have a host of well known people voicing it - Steven Yuen, JK Simmons, Sandra Oh, Zacchary Quinto, Seth Rogan, Clancy Brown, Mark Hamill, Mahershala Ali and John Hamm, to name but a few - but it's overwrought and kind of falls between two stools. It's too silly to be considered a proper adult cartoon and too violent to be considered a kids' one and frankly, after three 40 minute episodes I really didn't want to waste any of my time on it again... Shame. 

***

A quick return to Marvel: the new trailer for Loki dropped this week and it looks like its going to be huge fun and, I expect, this will be the main reason for the Multiverse of Madness due to appear in the next Dr Strange film. I really don't expect them to have a series with Loki and then kill him off at the end because he's a space-time anomaly (see Infinity War and then Endgame); it simply gives us him back to where he belongs and will obviously have massive repercussions throughout the MCU.

***

For All Mankind is still the best thing on TV at the moment. A fantastic mix of alternate history, soap opera with a side salad of Sci-Fi. It's by the guy who brought you Battlestar Galactica's reboot, but, seriously, don't let that put you off. It's ace.

***

Started really well and ended really disappointingly. That just about sums up my feelings about Resident Alien. The first five episodes were LOL-worthy and I did laugh out loud on a number of occasions. Alan Tudyk is great as Harry the alien who lands in Colorado, by mistake, kills then adopts the life and fizzog of a holidaying doctor and ends up being co-opted into the search for the killer of the resident town doctor. The problem with it started when it left behind it's small town charm and introduced a bigger picture; from that point it stopped being as funny and started to feel a bit... fake (a little like Harry).

The wife loved it, but I started to feel like it was a record that was good but after repeated plays starts to get on your nerves a little. There is enough 'intrigue' to make me want to watch the second season, now it's been renewed, but without spoiling anything for you, it seems very few people are really as they seem; too many of them are so one or two-dimensional that they either need fleshing out or killing off and a few of them are just annoying.

The comic was written by my friend Peter Hogan, so I hope his version didn't deteriorate as quickly as this TV show seemed to. Another real shame, but maybe renewal will renew the interest. Oh, and Asta has an unbelievably massive arse, it should be said, apropos of nowt. 

***

And in many ways all of the above are just the tip of an iceberg heading our way over the next 12 months. we're going to have new fantasy series, new Marvel films, new Sci-Fi and new weird shit that might end up being uncategorizable. There are new anthology series scheduled, including something called Them* which looked like it might be good, but I thought that about Lovecraft Country but that turned out to be a pile of dog shit (but, frankly, doesn't everything related to HP Lovecraft and the cult of Cthulhu?). Joss Whedon's back with a steampunk-looking series about a group of women with super powers in the late 19th century called The Nevers** and there are many more of which none of them have made me wish for time to fly by so I can see them...

* We watched the first episode of Them last night. It's overwrought and heavy handed with the racism, but there's also something a wee bit creepy about it and not just the neighbours; there's some other horror, far worse than bigoted racists and it seems to reside in the house now owned by the black people.

** We have the first episode of The Nevers to watch tonight.

***

And finally, the very last episode of my beloved Shameless was sad, tragic, disappointing, fulfilling, funny, hopeful, poignant and tipped its hat, bowed and honoured the source material with Frank's final monologue which was almost the same one as you used to hear at the start of every episode of the UK version. It was also the one thing it always aspired to be across nearly 12 years; it was real.

Shameless: US & Them

In January 2004, Channel 4 unveiled one of its most ambitious and controversial social commentary dramadies. Shameless - about life on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester - featured some absolute giants of British film, theatre and TV. The who's who included: David Threlfall, Anne-Marie Duff, James McAvoy, Maxine Peake, Dean Lennox-Kelly, Maggie O'Neill and Pauline McLynn (Go on, go on, go on)...

The first few series were quite unbelievable and, indeed, shameless. It portrayed the seedier side of council estate life faced with the adversity of dealing with the 'establishment', but it was also an extremely funny show, which bordered on comedy in large amounts, mainly to offset the bleak existence the Gallagher family faced. 

It had some drawbacks, as creator Paul Abbott explained in 2008, after half his cast had left to go onto bigger and arguably better things. Duff & McAvoy married and went off to become A listers, as did Peake; others became constants on British TV or just famous faces on the screen renowned for being in Shameless. By the end only Threlfall remained as the titular head of the family Frank Gallagher and by the end he had become some kind of embarrassing parody of himself; this pointless waster full of drink and drugs wandering aimlessly through life, always inebriated in some way or another. We had given up on the show long before it was cancelled. Not only had Frank become a parody, but the show had long lost its sense of family, friends and togetherness through adversary and I heard tales that the stories became even more far-fetched, the cast as far removed from the original series' as possible and it simply lost its way. Abbott claimed that losing so many talented actors meant he was constantly changing the story; that he didn't have the ability to tie actors into long contracts like they did in the USA (nor would he want to force them to stay if they had better opportunities), therefore he was constantly having to reinvent the show to suit whoever turned up every new series to work.

The UK version of Shameless finished in May 2013, almost 2½ years after Shameless (US) debuted. The similarities were obvious; it was about the Gallagher family and to a certain extent their friends and neighbours Kevin and Veronica and they lived in a run down area of Chicago (rather than Manchester) and the first series of the US version was a scene-for-scene remake of the first series of the UK version. The only real differences were changes to dialogue and locations.

The UK version's Frank Gallagher (Threlfall) was essentially a lovable arsehole with a penchant for booze, drugs and parties. He was irresponsible and a passenger in his own home, which was largely run by his eldest daughter Fiona (Duff). His wife had long disappeared and his assortment of kids ranged from Fiona in her 20s to Liam - the youngest (about 6 at the start). In between were Philip (Lip), Ian, Carl and Debbie. 

The US version's Frank Gallagher was as comical and as large as life as the UK version, but under the masterful guidance of William H. Macy (Fargo), the comedy was downplayed and the nastiness ramped up. US Frank was still a figure of ridicule and pity, but he was also a devious, uncaring, untrustworthy piece of shit, who, unlike his British counterpart, literally would have sold his own children for some drugs. Like the UK version, it was Fiona who acted as parent, sister and protector, Frank was too irresponsible to be trusted with anything.

Like the UK version, the characters had their basic traits: Lip was a borderline genius beset with drink and anger issues; Ian, a closeted gay, trying hard to keep his secret from those around him, unaware that most of then knew. Carl & Debbie were both young kids learning about the world of dole scrounging and living off the State and both were slightly sociopathic. Then there was Liam, the result of a genetic throwback in Monica Gallagher's ancestry and unlike the UK version was most definitely a black kid - the strange absurdity of having a black biological true sibling was enhanced by the fact that we were introduced to him as a baby in diapers and he still hadn't spoken a single word by the time series eight finished.

While the first season of the US version stayed true to Paul Abbott's original British series, season two on went in directions Abbott (and showrunner John Wells) could never have possibly achieved in the UK version, as all actors in the main roles were contracted for a minimum of seven seasons, if the series didn't get cancelled. Abbott said in an interview on US TV that he could finally tell some of the stories he'd been unable to tell because his UK actors all went on to bigger things leaving gaps to fill.

Unlike the UK version which seemed like a who's who of stars, only Macy was particularly well known. Joan Cusack played his love interest for the first few series, but she left and Emmy Rossum played Fiona - she was best known for a co-starring role in the indie film Beautiful Creatures and a failed music career (she also liked to get naked, an awful lot). Outside of these, all of the cast with the exception of Fiona's love interest - Justin Chatwin - were largely unknown actors or newcomers and he was only known for his role as Tom Cruise's son in the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds. The anonymity of the cast helped make the series more ... visceral.

By the time the second season ended, if your were watching Shameless US you most definitely weren't watching a rehash of the UK version and by season four, the outrageous plots and breathtakingly jaw-dropping antics of the Gallaghers' meant you sometimes wondered how the show got onto US TV screens. Barely an episode went by without you hiding behind your fingers, or wincing or thinking, 'You have got to be fucking kidding me?'

It was quite brilliant. The real point was if you could think of something really shameless, then this TV show had already beaten you to it with balls on. Its brazen ability to tackle literally any subject, however taboo, and put a black comedy twist on it was genius. It was bold, bawdy, sexy, dirty, grubby, vile, nasty, violent, distasteful and... shameless, and within four years had firmly put the UK version in its place. Macy won awards as did Rossum and the rest of the family all had stories, arcs and lives that elevated them above just cast making up the numbers.

Lip - played by Jeremy Allen White - took the UK character's brilliance and ran with it. Looking like a young modern Robert Mitchum, White bestowed so much to his character that even now, 11 years down the road, I look at his character and think 'you're the reason I stuck with this show even when it got a bit patchy, because you are a quite brilliant actor and your portrayal of this oh-so tragic Gallagher brother is unsurpassed. If you haven't fallen in total love with the character by the end of season two you have no soul. Lip is the cleverest person in the show, he's also a hopeless alcoholic, romantic and desperate for a happy ending.

Ian - played by the now rising star Cameron Monaghan (the Joker in Gotham) - is a bipolar gay man who acts like a bruiser, is married to a psychopath and has done everything from join the army, served time, been the new Messiah and worked as a pole dancer in a gay club. He is a complex and emotional character and arguably the heart of the family; he's the one who actually looks like he cares, most of the time.

Debbie - played by Emma Kenney - was eight when she was cast and is cut from a similar character cloth to that of her late mother; she's selfish, self-determined, sexually-ambivalent, a single mother at 14 and absolutely barking mad and selfish to boot; she is both utterly dislikeable and lovable. You wouldn't let this girl have a child, yet Franny - her daughter - appears to be growing up far more normal than any of her aunts and uncles.

Carl - played by Ethan Cutkosky, the only known actor among the children for his work as a child actor - is an out-and-out psychopath who ends up finding his way into the police force after stints as an army cadet, burger flipper and Rastafarian drug dealer (he's not the black one).

Liam - played in the last three series by the brilliant Christian Isaiah - is in Lip's league as far as intelligence goes, but he's a black kid from an Irish-American family and faces all the shit that a black kid in Chicago would expect to face, especially now that he's 11. He is, in many ways, the next big tragedy in the series; he simply doesn't deserve to have been born into such a family of scumbags, but he's learned from the professionals and his relationship with Frank in latter seasons is almost sweet. I mean, Frank doesn't really like his kids - that's part of the ongoing story - but he has a soft spot for Liam and vice versa.

At the end of season 9, Emmy Rossum as Fiona finally left the show to pursue other things. As the actual head of the family, her journey from lovestruck woman in season one to hardened, angry, drunken coke-head in her final season ranks alongside Lip's decline as one of the most tragic journeys in the show. Some would call her a slapper; others would call her desperate for love because she would often give it out and seemingly receive little back. It was clear from about season 7 that they either had to do something radical with the character or write her out of the series. Rossum chose to leave and has largely been absent from screens since. As I write this there are just two episodes of the show left and my hope is she comes back for the final episode (like Fiona did in the final UK episode)...

Supporting characters Kev and Vee are probably the most consistently written people in the show; played admirably by Steve Howey and Shanola Hampton, this mix-race couple are both as sharp as knives and as stupid as clotted cream; they run the local bar and are really just part of the extended Gallagher family. I believe these two will get the real happy ending.

And that's the reason I'm writing this now rather than in two weeks when the final episode is shown. I expect that a show that has flirted with tragedy as often as it has with controversy is likely to end with a finality that will prevent at least one major character from being included in a resurrected series in 15 years time, should that ever happen. I also think some of the characters will get as close to a positive end as is possible, because no one wins the lottery in Shameless, no one gets the big breaks and everyone seems to go back to square one in this seemingly ongoing game of snakes and ladders... 

I've invested 11 years in this TV show, for at least seven of those years I proudly boasted it was my favourite TV show and I think the ending might be a bit too emotional for me to sit and write anything about it. 

What started as a mid-season filler show for six years, ended up as a prime time Showtime winner (and possibly the reason why things started to be toned down, once more people were watching). It has been full of births, deaths, marriages and people being left at the altar. It's had scams, miracles, unlikely affairs, unbelievable situations, murders, suicides and really reflected just what being poor in the USA really means for millions of people. As a social commentary it was never far from being slightly far-fetched... or was it? As a Brit watching from the other side of the Atlantic, living in the USA has never looked less appealing.

I can criticise the show; for starters it has always had a habit of leaving some plot lines dangling or ending stories without any real resolution, but isn't that life? You might get invested in a storyline only for it to be forgotten about or swept under the carpet or explained away in half a throwaway sentence. Carl's life seems to have been a constant source of unfinished storylines which I now think reflects the mad nature of his character and the fact that sometimes, in life, there are no outcomes, let alone satisfactory ones. Shameless (US) does this so well it sometimes feels like a social commentary documentary rather than the blackest of comedies. 

How Frank gets so much sex with gorgeous women is also a puzzle, but it's happened consistently since season one, so you take it for granted that he'll use his wily charms to get into bed with someone far too good for him at least once a season. But Frank now has dementia and a character you will struggle to have any empathy for is slowly becoming another tragedy in the vast unfolding tragedy that has been the Gallagher family for over a decade. I don't expect we'll see another show quite like it in our lifetimes and that's a good thing, because while this version is an imitation, it's one that does it better than the source material.

If you ever fancy watching 11 seasons of classic TV you should start and end here.