A list of visual experiences
Well, stuff I watched.
Broadchurch S1 and S2
10 Years late with Starbucks
The reason for the lateness was the fact that I got accidentally spoiled for the ending of S1 and crime-shows do lose something when you know the bad guy in advance. So despite my curiosity about a highly-acclaimed show that stars both Olivia Coleman and David Tennant I didn't feel the need try it but it was on Netflix so...
And...well. I do like it when crime-shows do cases that span multiple episodes but I always have a hard time getting into one case per season stuff. I lost interest in The Fall halfway through and also in at least one Scandinoir drama because...I'm there for the case-solving. And no show spends 8 45 minutes episodes on one case. If they have that much time we get things like...how the journalists who cover the case feel about this and I thought I had never cared about anything less in my entire life until I watched season 2 and had to sit through all the lawyer drama in that.
Of course, that also gives a lot of time for how do the relatives of the victim feel and I admit Broadchuch did that better than many other shows I watched (somehow it is law that every crime show has to do one episode about a missing/dead child from the POV of the parents and it sometimes feels...condescending? As if the writers go "Ha! You're watching murder for your entertainment. Have you ever considered what murder really is?" idk but you're earning money with it so we're even) and yes, I'm there for the crime-solving but those bits were really well written and overall I liked S1 enough to watch S2 as well and...then there was the lawyer drama. And really I never thought that Marianne Jean-Baptiste playing a kickass lawyer could be that boring but it was and no amount of shirtless James D'Arcy could distract from that and even though I have been informed that there is zero lawyer drama in S3 I could not be bothered to watch it so far.
Loch Ness
Broadchurch but in Scotland
I'm not joking. It's the story of a horrible murder in a picturesque small town and mutch to the local cop's dismay a big city cop is called in to help with the investigation. Here both local cop and big city cop are women but apart from that it tries to hard to be Broadchurch and cater to an audience that knows Broadchurch
[Minor Spoiler for Loch Ness less minor spoiler for Broadchurch S1]E.g. local cop's husband is injured by (if I remember correctly) a psycho that is unrelated to the serial killer from picturesque small town and he gets all "Wife. I have to tell you something. I lied to you" and then the episode ends and in the next it turns out that his lie was...that he never actually saw the Loch Ness monster even though he always claimed he had. I wish I was joking
And in the end
[Major spoiler]The killer was the boyfriend of local cop's daughter
Deadwater Fell
A horrible murder in a picturesque small town but this time David Tennant is evil...or is he?
I started this after only read a blurb about how DT plays a GP whose wife and children die in a house fire and then some blah blah about village secrets and everyone has something to hide and expected a regular whodunit plot but it's not quite that because it's immediately obvious that there's only two possibilities:
- Murder-suicide by the wife of Tennant's character
- he killed them all and framed her because he's a psycho
And it was done well. You start off by thinking "Of course it was her, how could it have been him?" then go to "he's creepy but how could he?" to "Oh it was definitely her" and that goes on and on (and perhaps it would have worked less well if creepy GP had been played by a different actor that I didn't like as much? But I think I still would have gone back and forth a couple of times).
It does suffer a bit from the fact that a) it has a lot of flashbacks and they are in no way introduced so unless dead wife is in one of them it's hard to tell in which time the current scene is happening b) an overabundance of unremarkable middle-aged white dude characters that I could not tell apart which also made it hard to follow the plot sometime.
As far as personal preferences go, I do like my mysteries with a larger suspect pool and probably wouldn't have watched it if I had known what it really was about but also...it was only 4 (45 minutes) episodes which means there was time for the mystery to develop but not much drama that was not directly connected to the crime. (So please give me more crime dramas with 4-6 episodes. After extensive research I've come to the conclusion that this is the perfect length)
A Very English Scandal
The one where nobody is murdered but not for lack of trying
The based-on-a-genuinely-true-story drama about Jeremy Thorpe a Liberal Party MP who was having an affair with a hot young dude Norman who kept bothering him after the affair ended. And because this was the 70s and a politician could not be gay Thorpe hired a killer to get rid Norman. Only the killer was utterly incompetent and failed and then things get a bit out of hand.
Thorpe is played by Hugh Grant and Norman by Ben Whishaw which alone is a good reason for watching it but it's also...hillarious. Which is odd considering it's essentially a story about a contract killing. I did watch it with my mother and at one point she said "Nobody is really likeable but then nobody is really unlikeable either" and that's a very apt description and actually not something I usually go for but this one managed to find just the right balance.
Harrow
Ioan Gruffudd as a pathologist who solves crime but is not immortal...only Australian. And he lives on a boat.
Which is different from Forever where he plays an immortal British pathologist who solves crime. And everytime he receives an injury that would be deadly for mortals he regenerates shirtless in the nearest body of water. I definitely watched Forever for the plot.
Where was I? Right. I started Harrow over a year ago because really it's hard to keep me away from police procedurals and I have a weakness for Ioan Gruffudd. I stopped halfway through because life was busy and because there were constant allusions to A Dark Secret in his past. Namely, at the end of the first episode there was a flashback to what looked like him getting rid of a dead body. And I was kind of bored of Dark Secrets.
Now I had nothing better to do and despite everything I was curious about the Dark Secret. First some random general stuff I liked:
- He kind of is the 'he's an asshole but he's good at his job trope' but in a very very mild version. He's a major asshole to his colleague who is also a major asshole and generally keeps to people who can give it back to him (like his lab assistant with whom he has an adorable relationship)
- He has UST with hot female cop and...in episode 5 or 6 they have sex, thus resolving the U and go 'this was nice. we should repeat it' and then they do? There's no 239580170 episodes of will they or won't they. They just do and it's not a big deal
- depressingly still rare enough to be remarkable: adorable lab assistant is a gay Asian dude and...it's also not a big deal. Harrow's assholery never goes there. Not even *~*ironically*~*. He just is and gets to punch a homophobe in one episode and it's great
Now for the Dark Secret. Which I suspected the moment they figured out who the dead body was that Harrow had dumped.
[Spoiler]It was the second husband of Harrow's first wife. And Harrow had figured out that new husband had been abusing their daughter and had the glorious idea to confront him alone and in the dark. New husband attacks him, Harrow defends himself and kills him. When he tells this story to adorable lab assistant he tells him that he was worried about people not believing that it was self-defence and also about everything coming out and traumatising his family further which is...only a vaguely stupid justification I guess? And generally speaking, I'm tired of "female side characters suffer so that male main characters suffer" storylines but also...it's not that he was moping around. He really...took a more proactive approach involving sharp objects which is a nice change.
There's a second season with what looks like another Dark Secret and I guess the fact that it's still a decent not too deep police procedural about people who genuinely like each other means I'll check it out but not immediately.
(Also *glances at wikipedia* the Australia is really strong in this show. S1 had a victim who was eaten by crocodiles and S2 will have sharks and poisoned jellyfish. Beautiful <3)
Grantchester the current season so far
Murder in picturesque English villages but the vicar solves it.
I don't really have much to say atm. I think the cases have improved compared to the early episodes and the Moral Righteousness is also less strong with the newer episodes. It is sad, that the new vicar still hasn't lost his shirt but I find it delightful that all the heterosexuals in the show have relationship issues due to Anglican guilt, bipolar in-laws or British colonialism while the gay guy is so happy and content in his relationship that he has now written to his estranged father so he can have something to worry about.
The Romanovs
The Netflix doku-drama-ish-whatever.
I actually remember very little about it except for the fact that when a friend asked if I recommended it I said something like "That depends on how much you want to know about how the writers of this show imagined Rasputin's sex-life". Yes...there was a lot of fucking in this show. Which I guess is a first for a technically-it's-a-documentary.
Oh and there's also a show on Amazon that's called The Romanovs but it's about people in the present day who all claim to be descendants from the Romanovs. I only made it through episode one which had exactly zero connections to the Romanovs or just Russia and featured a character who was horribly racist But In An Amusing Way and my time is too precious for this shit.
I also watched movies namely...eh Knives Out about which everyone has already talked and so I can only repeat that it was delightful and I want a sequel in which Daniel Craig and Martha solve more crime and discover that the villain was Privilege All Along. Frozen II was entertaining but also felt weirdly disjointed and I am 95% sure at some point in the production meeting someone said "They liked the snowman the last time? Give them more of the fucking snowman!" (Not that I'm complaining much because...I liked the snowman but even for me that was...alot).
And I also watched...this:
Click to viewBecause I like An Inspector Calls and saw that a version of it was on Netflix. And then I realised that it was a subtitled version from Hong Kong and I went...why not and then I had An Experience. Possibly I consumed drugs without realising it or the movie is just That Weird. But not actually bad...just very different from what I expected. But I think they still conveyed the moral of "It was Capitalism and Privilege All Along" very well and were very colourful while doing it.