TV Culture - Different Worlds

Spoiler warnings...

Goldilocks on Mars

There's been a very high bar set by the last two episodes of For All Mankind. The show that I believe has been the most consistently brilliant TV series for the best part of the last five years might have seemed to have run out of steam in the opening few parts of this fourth season, but it certainly did what it had to to re-establish itself as being pretty fucking awesome.

What may have seemed like a slight storyline for this season actually might have had the most profound effect on the entire show. The Goldilocks asteroid is worth so much money that it would have guaranteed the M7 nations riches beyond their dreams and would condemn Mars to being just a deserted outpost in an empty galaxy as the space race would effectively be over and the need for exploration and discovery would be gone. So as all the subplots somehow meshed together we saw how humanity can beat countries and corporations for the good of mankind. 

This conclusion had pretty much everything - apart from the discovery of life on Mars, in fact, Kelly Baldwin was pretty much reduced to being a supporting character probably only in it because she's Ed's adopted daughter. This was about her father's final battle, about Dani's last hurrah. This was about Dev fulfilling a dream and Aleida making up for something she didn't really do but feeling compelled to do it. And this was about a kind of redemption for Margo; maybe not the one she deserved, but equally the one she deserved and it spelled the end of the road for her wicked Soviet handler and a happy ending for everyone's favourite North Korean. In fact, the finale pretty much covered all the bases without being maudlin and without giving too much away about next season's 2012 story. One imagines that Ed and Dani will have either died or will be so old they're retired off; whether Margo will still be alive in whatever penitentiary she ends up is also up for debate, but I suspect as she was the last voice you heard she's not going to be around to see Happy Valley become one of the richest places in the galaxy. 

I have seen some quite brilliant TV over the last couple of years - The Bear, Lessons in Chemistry, the brilliant ending to Loki and the fabulous Slow Horses - it has been a couple of years of television that blew me away and I'm glad to include For All Mankind in that list - a TV show about the alternate history of the space race and a historical drama as well - it is intelligent science fiction and doesn't need fantasy fiction to make it work. I look forward to some point early in 2025 when season five arrives, any sooner than that and I will be a very happy man.

A Monstrous Mess

I really don't understand why this series existed in the way it did. why it had to have ludicrous stories with unbelievably dull (modern) characters when it could have told the same story without padding it out with bullshit and crap subplots. It could have been eight episodes of action, adventure and a simple story and it would have worked just as effectively, but instead we had dislikeable people, stupid stories, pointless back stories and sexuality, wanky organisations and some really bad acting.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters should maybe have been called Legacy of Wankers because apart from the monsters this really was a load of dreadful bollocks. We did, however, get some more Godzilla, who really mega-charged this pile of wank whenever he (or she) appeared and there was a cameo from Kong at the very end. There was a big fight with a dragon type creature and the revelation that in this 'underworld' one day is the equivalent of maybe one or two years on Earth, which, like I hinted at last time, doesn't seem to have reached the film makers of the Legendary Monsterverse just yet. This 'conclusion' - God, I hope there isn't another series - was about everyone pulling together - a sort of existential bukkake session - to get Cate, Mae, Keiko and Lee back from the other world and get someone else involved in the Monsterverse other than Monarch. Godzilla was good; Kong was fun to see, everything else, even the schmaltzy reunion just made me want to crawl into a corner and be quietly sick into a bag. this has been a really disappointing load of wank.

Italians 6 Indians 3 - Why?

We concluded the James May: Our Man in Italy series so we could move onto his latest travelogue. This wasn't as good as the Japanese road trip, but that might be down to the fact that May seemed no real stranger to Italy; he spoke the language better than you might imagine and he knew his pastas from his Ponte Vecchios.  

There was also the fact that Italy has just about been done to death over the last ten years or; if it hasn't been toured by chefs and art historians, it's been done by famous NY actors and bog standard TV pundits - Italy appears to be the go to place if you want to do a vibrant travelogue that's got a ready made audience. That said, James May is far better at this kind of thing than his detractors suggest he is and his constant banter with his film crew is far more entertaining than it should be. There was also quite a few things we learned about the place that other programmes have never touched on; such as the need for permits to film just about anything and the fact it costs an arm and a leg to film inside anything in Italy that is deemed a landmark or famous; for a show financed by Amazon it was quite telling the producers weren't going to pay the extortionate prices demanded to film inside the Coliseum or the Parthenon. There was also the fantastic place called Barga, which is essentially the Scottish capital of Italy. This archetypal Tuscany town is jampacked full of people with dual Scottish and Italian heritage and you're just as likely to find bagpipes, haggis and Tenants lager as you are pizza, pasta and Michelangelo - it's been added to my bucket list.

Next up is James May: Our Man in India which starts well with half an episode in Mumbai with James being roasted at a comedy club by local comedians and wandering around the slums discovering a peaceful and productive world despite the health and safety nightmares and filth. He's then off to somewhere I've never heard of for the Festival of Holi, which is a real highlight - something I would have loved to experience first hand. James seems to have a cracking time, even if he can't get rid of the paint and coloured powder he was covered in during a riotous amount of singing and dancing. 

I expect most of this puzzlingly 3-part series, which is May travelling across India from Mumbai to Kolkata rather than attempting to do the entire subcontinent, will be very enlightening - again, this is well trodden route for travelogues and Holi and Mumbai are both things that have been spotlighted elsewhere, but I expect there's going to be stuff that you simply would have expected, especially in India, such as meeting a man who hand paints Bollywood film posters - and bloody good he is - or entrepreneurs making a fortune out of ridding the Mumbai streets of waste plastic and turning it into recycled useful things. You also get the impression that over the last four years of making this show May has become quite good friends with director and executive producer Tom Whitter, who creeps onto the screen more often than just about everyone else apart from the host.

It so far has been the most entertaining of series, with the second episode being funny, poignant and very much full of surprises, especially Aggra and Varanasi - which, while covered before by others, was moving and makes you want to experience it - the incidental music was also really excellent. This is the best of May's travelogues so far and well worth watching, it's just a shame it's been so brief.

Hello, hello, hello, hello...

The weird thing about Echo, the new Marvel series is it doesn't feel like a Marvel series despite having the Kingpin, Hawkeye and Daredevil appearing in it. The thing is I'm not strictly sure what it falls under as it's so short and doesn't hang around with it's slight story.

Actually, there's a few weird things about it, such as Alaqua Cox's almost perfect inability to smile. It took us 68 minutes of show time before Maya cracked her first smile and I'm not sure it was a smile or if she simply let a very silent but satisfying fart out. I think it's extremely brave of anyone to do a series about a deaf Native American superhero with one leg who is possibly one of the most miserable people on the planet. She might not have much to smile about but you'd think she'd lighten up just a little bit, especially as she's back among the people who all seem to love her, but she's too wrapped up in her revenge bollocks to even notice. 

The opening twenty minutes of the first episode is basically a padded out refresher course in who Echo is and why she's the way she is; but we have added Native North American mythology bollocks thrown in to suggest she's really channelling some deity and is blessed with superpowers because of it. We also discover that Wilson Fisk didn't die at Maya's hands, she managed not to kill him with a bullet to the head from three feet and his men are gunning for the disabled hero with rage issues, or are they? There's some good fight scenes, more blood and oblique nudity than you'd imagine in a Marvel series and it has Chaske Spencer in it and we all know how good he is. Yet, there's this uncanny feeling that the recent Netflix action comedy The Family Plan used the same plot and arguably better...

However, after two very promising episodes, things start getting a bit underwhelming. The Kingpin makes a reappearance; there's lots of 'comedy' henchmen and we get a lot of Choctaw mumbo jumbo about deities and [ahem] echoes of the past. It gets very symbolic and adds yet another layer of 'gods' to an already weary MCU tapestry of confusing gods. This felt like a two and a half hour film split into sections and not a very good film at that and it actually peters out rather than builds to a thrilling climax; in fact the denouement is really poor and short - weighing in at about 30 minutes after you take out recaps, titles and end credits. The 'battle' between Echo and Fisk was pants, with Maya using her newfound powers to... do what exactly? She seemed to make Fisk a better person? Nah. It was just really lame and wasn't at all clear - perhaps you need to know the comic, which if that's the case, it's a huge cop out. 

There is a post credit scene that sets Fisk up to be the next mayor of New York, echoing [ahem] events that happened in Daredevil's comic, so that's your Born Again reference/plot and Maya reunited with her family. I'd just like to point out that the Guardian newspaper claimed this was a great, if very bloody, TV show and yet again it seems they based their review on possibly the trailers or maybe the comic because it wasn't great and the review wasn't accurate, yet again. This was poor and I can totally see why it was released in one go, was reduced in episodes and why we won't see a second season. Yet another nail in the MCU's coffin.

Beefy

Much has been said about the Netflix series Beef so we decided to watch it. This comedy about two Asian Americans who are raging about their lives has garnered much praise, yet after one episode we both felt a bit meh about it. I'm not sure if it's us, but we kind of want new TV shows to grab us and drag us in; there's not enough time or inclination to watch four or five episodes in the hope we might start liking it.

Starring Steven Yuen and Ali Wong as two people on either side of a road rage incident that spirals into a tale of revenge and survival, this probably should be great TV - eight half hour episodes of pithy dramedy - but it wasn't funny and neither of us had any sympathy for any of the seemingly entitled characters. We might be wrong; this might be brilliant TV but it pushed no buttons for either of us.

I've been told that we should watch Succession, which like Beef has won a multitude of awards recently, but I get the impression there seems to be a spate of 'watching rich or entitled people suffer' programmes on at the moment and frankly if something doesn't grab me I'm very unlikely to watch it and I know the wife is even harder to please than me. I don't want to watch rich people having constructed first world problems, mainly because I don't really want to watch things about bloody rich people at all. They're pretty much the bane of society at the best of times and like people who get pleasure from having sex with animals or children they should be kept away from our screens so not to encourage them or anger us...

Next Time...

I'm slightly lost... We don't appear to have anything new on the horizon. Something might pop up on the schedules or get released that I forgot about, but terrestrial TV is all about shite like The Traitors or the 'new' Gladiators style over substance wank. We don't do shows like this, they're as appealing as taking a bath in someone's sick and I don't care how much critics or people we know say, 'BUT YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS!!!' because critics are usually wrong or have a vested interest and history suggests my friends have questionable taste in TV.

On the Flash Drive of Doom we still have three seasons of Legion and last year's Sci-Fi series Silo. There's Mr Bates Versus the Post Office if we want to watch something everyone else seems to have watched and we still have three seasons of Fargo. I'd like to watch a 1985 series called Mr Pye that I remember with fondness and spent decades trying to track down, ended up finding a DVD and about two weeks later it became available on All4...

I'm sure something will turn up, it always does and the wife has lots of stuff bookmarked on iPlayer that I might not be able to avoid; but if this doesn't appear next week you'll know why...