TV Show – Page 2 – In The Zeitgeist

The Tudors Then and Now

November 4, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

Inspired by our recent trip to see SIX on Broadway, we’ve been watching The Tudors, the old Showtime network series that ran in the late 2000s. Aileen already watched the show all the way through, but I only saw it previously up to Anne Boleyn’s beheading (oops – spoiler alert). Aileen has DVD box sets of all four seasons, so we didn’t even have to look for the show on streaming services.

At the same time, I have been reading Alison Weir‘s book The Six Wives of Henry VIII, also courtesy of Aileen. It is a very well written history of the King and his marriages. So much of what I’m reading in the book happens in the show, that I wonder if it wasn’t used as a writing source. But of course, there is much that was spoken and done in that time period that is recorded and appears in multiple sources, and that has since become well-known. And there are events on the show that I haven’t read about in the book, so even if this particular book was used, so must other sources have been as well.

The show calls itself The Tudors, but it really is just about Henry VIII and his wives. To me that’s a pity, because I would love to see a TV series that actually covered the entire history of the dynasty. It could start with the Battle of Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor defeating King Richard III, then progress to Henry’s reign and his consolidation of power around the Tudor name. Then it could move on to the reigns of his son, Henry VIII, and subsequently the reigns of all three of Henry VIII’s children: Edward VI and the Protestant reforms, Mary I and her attempt to reverse them, and at last the long reign of Elizabeth I. That would cover the foundation of a dynasty, England’s elevation to a true Renaissance kingdom and the origins of her Imperial destiny, the long and bloody struggle to determine her religious identity, and then finally one of the most glorious periods of her history, featuring victory over the Spanish Empire.

I guess that’s too ambitious for a TV show, so instead Showtime gave us the real juicy part – all the sex and drama in the court of Henry VIII, and surrounding the King’s six marriages. And there’s plenty of sex on this show, too, so much that sometimes it seems like we’re watching soft porn. The characters are cast younger and hotter than they really should be, which must just be the Showtime brand: giving audiences what they crave.

Don’t get me wrong; I like the guy who plays King Henry. I think he does a fine job of capturing Henry’s volatile temperament, which could swing from indignant fury to sweet sentimentality. But it’s undeniable that the actor is too young and too skinny; it would be nice to encounter the fat, balding Henry of the history books. But not on this show; no one wants to see that naked, so we get this inaccurately painted portrait of the man, instead.

The book I’ve been using to fact check “The Tudors.”

Having Weir’s book handy means I can compare all sorts of details in the television show to what really happened (I’m putting faith in Weir’s research, here). When I want to point out either a similarity or a difference, I tell Aileen, “In your book, it actually says…” and she replies, “you know, I didn’t write the book…” – it’s become a running joke between us.

There are always differences because the show does a lot of, shall we say, streamlining in its narrative, and I know this is because it wants to avoid dragging things out, and having too confusing a cast of characters. There are constraints of time and budget. So timelines of events get compressed, and some people do things which historically were done by others.

For example, Henry’s two sisters get combined into one, whose biography becomes a weird mix of the two lives it is based on. At the start of the show, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk are both prominent characters, but at some point Norfolk just disappears. Suddenly Suffolk is doing all this stuff Norfolk did. It hardly matters, since most of it is related to decisions Henry VIII has made.

Other details are just plain wrong. Did you know that Katherine of Aragon was a redhead? That Anne Boleyn wasn’t particularly pretty? That Jane Seymour was a lady-in-waiting in Katherine’s court as well as Anne’s, well before Henry ever noticed her? After watching The Tudors, you still wouldn’t know any of this.

But you would get to enjoy drama and intrigue that captures the spirit of the time, and the gist of what happened during Henry’s reign. You would also see a lot of sumptuous costumes and jewelry (honestly the highlight of the show), much of which matches descriptions I have read in the book. The scenery and interiors are lovely and authentic-seeming as well, though much of it was filmed in Ireland, and the panoramic shots of London are obviously CGI.

The production design and high caliber actors make the show, despite its many historical inaccuracies. As I already wrote, it gives the gist of the history. It’s the Tudor era through the haze of time, distilled down to the important events and the memorable moments and quotes. It’s the familiar story of a King and his six wives, done in steamy Showtime style, and by focusing on the wives, it underscores the point made by the Broadway show SIX: that we remember the man because of his women. After all, even the signature act of Henry’s reign – the break from Rome – was done for want of a wife.

As for all the sex? Well, in that era, sex and politics were inextricably entwined. How could they not be, when the fate of kingdoms and dynasties depended on marriage alliances and the production of heirs? The Queen’s bedchamber was, in a way, a branch of the government. It’s that confluence of passion and power that makes the stories of the King and his Queens such compelling stuff, and has made these historical figures the icons that they are today.

History for Everyone

October 22, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

We went to see SIX on Broadway recently (whole other story) which is about the six wives of Henry VIII. The point of the show is that the history of the King is really the herstory of the Queens, and that they are the reason why he is famous. Also, in the production, the actors cast in the roles of the six Queens are not ethnically accurate to the original wives. This is in line with the same trend as seen in Hamilton. “Color blind casting” is what some people are calling it.

Now you could argue that if the goal is to create cognitive dissonance by casting ethnic mismatches (“an African-American George Washington??!”) then the casting is not actually “color blind.” If Hamilton were truly cast “color-blind,” then there would be a white George Washington in one production and a black one in another. But that’s not how it’s being done in this new wave of theatre. A more accurate term which is also currently in use is “nontraditional casting,” to reflect a conscious choice of casting outside of ethnic expectations to make a point, or impact the overall piece.

*Bridgerton*: we’re here for the hotties, not the history.

You may have seen this kind of casting in some recent streaming TV shows like Bridgerton on Netflix or The Great on Hulu. The former is set in regency England (Jane Austen’s time period) and the latter is another version of the often told story of the rise of Catherine the Great. Both are completely fictional, and quite enjoyable and well done shows. But there’s something incongruous, absurd even, about the casting, in the sense that race relations in that time period were so much different than they are today, and therefore it makes no sense for a black guy, however suave and debonair, to be a Duke in a Russian or English court in the late 1700s.

I’ll just put it bluntly: in that time period, black people were not in high positions of power in Europe, and except for rare instances noted in history, not engaged in courtly intrigue with them, as their peers. In portraying black and white people together as equals, something which makes sense in a story set in modern times, you might say that these shows are erasing history – trying to cover up or forget the shame of the racial injustices of the past. These shows are creating a fictional version of history that ignores a glaring aspect of it.

Alternately, you might say that, since these shows are simply recreating history, then by incorporating modern values about race into the narrative they are promoting inclusivity and empowering previously marginalized people. Some of these old history stories are rousing stuff, and why shouldn’t black people get to play these amazing roles? Is it so different from a woman playing Hamlet, as happened long ago? George Washington is a towering figure of American myth – why should white people get to own him forever?

I fret about the erasure of history as I write this, but then I have to wonder: is it so bad if future generations forget about the racial discrimination of the past, so long as it never returns? Maybe it’s possible to take the old adage about forgetting history too literally.

Let’s say some young person in the future is watching Bridgerton and is completely unaware of the impossibility of black and white people all dancing together at an upper class ball in regency England, unaware that back then the races did not mix like that, or be treated as equals. It’s not like we don’t routinely botch history in our many recreations of other eras. If someone then made them aware that black people were treated poorly, as a lower class of human, in that time period, their reaction might be an incredulous, “Really??! How could people have tolerated that? That is insane!” Maybe we could achieve a future where racial discrimination seems absurd and an obscure fact that needs to be dug up in old history books.

The problem, though, is that racial discrimination is still a thing of the present. So a show which pretends that discrimination didn’t exist in the past might lure us into forgetting that it exists today. It might help us ignore a glaring aspect not of history but of our own time. It might just be a distraction on TV, posing as proof that we have finally ended racial discrimination.

We need our distractions, so maybe the best thing is to think of these shows as escapist entertainment, fun and playful. Meanwhile, we continue to seriously look at racial issues in our society. We have nontraditional casting on the one hand, and critical race theory on the other, both tools in our struggle to repair race relations. Wouldn’t it be something, if some day, a mixed race cast in a period piece was not a politically charged choice, but merely a curious anachronism.

Glee, Another “Old” TV Show to Review

August 31, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

Some time back we were watching Smallville, and I noted in my mini-review that the family might move on to the popular television show Glee next. We did binge-watch the first season some time ago, but didn’t go any further. I guess we weren’t pulled in. We watched it on Netflix. The girl and her boys had already watched the series when the boys were young; they were interested in rewatching it and in catching me up on it. I’m always way behind on my pop culture consumption.

Here is my take on the show.

Glee revolves around a high school glee club and their competition with other better-funded and more talented glee clubs in other high schools, as well as their competition for status and funding with the more prestigious cheerleader club in their own school. If you don’t know what a glee club is, it’s a musical or choir group.

In this case, the club is co-ed and performs musical numbers with a significant amount of dance choreography, which are way more sophisticated than what you would expect a high school glee club to be able to pull off. You don’t even see them rehearse much! They kind of cheated with the casting; the star student of the show, Lea Michele, was a child actress on Broadway. As is typical for these kinds of TV shows, the cast of students is a bit older than high school age. This all leads to a very unrealistic portrayal of an extra-curricular activity, but if you think of this show as basically a musical, then it’s fine for it to be unrealistic.

Glee might also be unrealistic in how it portrays the rest of the high school experience; at least, that was my impression. The show covers typical high school concerns like bullying, cliques, overbearing parenting, teenage sex – but in over the top ways. I couldn’t help but wonder, “is that really what high school is like now?” I think it’s meant to be parody to some extent, but as I haven’t been in high school since the 1980s, I guess I could be wrong. I do think it captures one Millennial generation theme well: it emphasizes diversity and inclusivity, and the students always choose what is best for the group in the end.

Meanwhile the Gen-X teachers and staff are caught up in their own drama, and struggling to find their footing in their personal and professional lives. A career in high school education isn’t exactly glamorous or fulfilling, as it is portrayed. The one Boomer on the cast (Jane Lynch was born in 1960 so I’m giving her that) portrays the domineering cheerleader coach, and she is driven to the point of insanity. Again, one wonders, “could a teacher really get away with that?” She does have her redeeming qualities, however, which we discover as the season progresses.

The show aired from 2009-2015, which puts it squarely in this Crisis Era, and means that these characters are all in the second wave of their respective generations. In other words, the characters would have been born in the 1990s, since they are teens in 2009. The actors, however, are first wave Millennials, born in the 1980s. It’s odd, but it does allow the show to explore more mature themes.

Sadly, Glee’s cast seems to be cursed; no fewer than three cast members have died in the past decade, with one of them surrounded by scandal. Is it really a curse, or just bad luck? I guess that’s the same thing. It’s not enough of a taint to stop me from wanting to watch the show, which is what happened to me with regard to the scandal around the Smallville cast.

The Millennial generation is now on the cusp of middle age, so it is not surprising that tragedies befalling their individual members have accumulated. Things do seem less sunny for them now. But I’ll try to conclude this little review on a more positive note.

With it’s thrilling musical numbers, and fun energy, Glee is enjoyable even though its characters and plot are unrealistic. It’s like a relic of a not so distant past when there was more optimism surrounding the prospects of the young generation. Just think of it as a musical when you watch it, and hope, like I do, for a happy ending.

A Noir Sitcom

August 20, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

← My partner and I recently watched the first season of this intriguing show. We were drawn to it because it stars Annie Murphy from Schitt’s Creek, which is one of the best television shows ever made (I haven’t blogged about it before, but there you have it). Her new show is called Kevin Can F**k Himself, and is available on AMC+ streaming for all you cord cutters. Why she always ends up on shows with curse words in the title, I couldn’t tell you.

Kevin Can F**k Himself is a dark comedy and a parody of sitcoms that runs with the premise that a clichéd sitcom marriage is actually highly toxic. The wife and lead role, played by Murphy (b. 1986), is trapped in a living hell she is desperate to escape. The titular husband is played by Eric Petersen; I couldn’t pinpoint his birth year but I believe he is on the Generation-X/Millennial cusp.

The show uses an unusual contrivance to contrast “sitcom life” with “real life.” It takes some getting used to but I think the creators pull it off. It has good writing and excellent performances by the leads, as well as by Mary Hollis Inboden (b. 1986) in the supporting role of next door neighbor buddy.

Traditionally, sitcom television is “comedy of errors” humor deriving from misunderstandings/poor communication. Someone overhears something, misconstrues the meaning, and hijinks ensue. By the end of the episode everything is cleared up and back to normal (status quo ante). The characters are typically two-dimensional and stereotyped, foils for one another and fodder for repeated jokes.

In Kevin Can F Himself these tropes are twisted and the consequences become tragic. Kevin’s lack of communication skills and simplistic personality are a nightmare for his wife, Allison, who somehow is unable to break out of her own responsive patterns when she is in his presence. Miscommunication isn’t a fount of humor, it’s the corrosive destroyer of a marriage.

The characters are Millennials (technically geriatric Millennials), and the show explores themes that resonate with their generation’s experience. In particular: the relative immaturity of men relative to women, the difficulty of forming satisfactory relationships, and the lack of economic opportunity for the working class. As staples of sitcoms about married, suburban life in a gentler past, these themes might have provoked light humor, suitable for a laugh track. But for Millennials in the throes of late stage capitalism, these problems of the middle class have mounted to the point of being unbearable, and the humor has become dark in turn.

Kevin Can F**k Himself thus ends up blending genres. It’s a sitcom that bleeds into a noir show more in keeping with the times. Unlike what usually happens in a sitcom, it does not return to status quo ante at the end of each episode, but has an ongoing, developing story arc. Whether the show is a tragedy or a comedy actually depends on the final outcome, which hasn’t yet been determined. Season 1 left us with a major plot twist, and I’m hoping that the show gets renewed for another season. It’s an out-of-the-box creative effort that deserves a longer run.

Some More Rambling About “The Sopranos”

June 5, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

We’re still watching “The Sopranos,” and are now into Season 3. This is the season that features the iconic “Pine Barrens” episode. It’s also the last pre-9/11 season, still containing a brief shot of the Twin Towers (in a sideview mirror of Tony’s SUV) during the opening credits. This shot was removed from the credits in the later seasons.

As we watch the episodes, it makes me feel nostalgic for old times. I can’t help but identify with these wise guys and their partying lifestyle. Their camaraderie and their gusto for life reminds me of my circles of friends back in the day, back when I was young and carefree. And a fool, no doubt, though not as dumb as some of the young men on this show who come to terrible ends. I knew the limits.

We didn’t live anything like the characters on The Sopranos, except maybe in our imaginations. I mean, we skirted the law in some ways, and we were rough around the edges. We surely used the same crass language. But some really awful stuff happens on this show; I get that this gangster lifestyle of extortion and murder is not to be celebrated. Yet somehow watching these guys evokes nostalgia for the smoke-filled dens of my wayward youth.

Maybe it’s just how well this show represents its social era, with its looser mores, and inevitably takes me back to life then, when I was younger and had different priorities. When I was a bachelor man and spent a lot of time hanging with the gang. Before mid-life hit and everyone moved on. The old groups have scattered; some of us got married and had kids and became responsible. Some of us moved to far away places to pursue new dreams. Some of us died. I sure miss them.

These episodes that we’re now watching were originally broadcast twenty years ago. Twenty freakin’ years ago! Where does the time go? All too quickly it passes by.

What I Got Out Of “The Sopranos”

April 19, 2021 Steve Comments 0 Comment

An episode of The Sopranos always begins with the opening credits scene. It pulls you in immediately with a compelling rock song – a little bit funky, a little bit hip-hop. It’s a song for the ’90s but it reminds you of the ’70s. The song goes…

You woke up this morning
Got yourself a gun
Your mama always said you'd be the chosen one

A shot from the opening credits of *The Sopranos*.

A serious looking middle aged man is driving on the highway through an industrial section of northern New Jersey, smoking a cigar. He definitely could be a 70s tough guy. The song goes…

When you woke up this morning
All that love had gone
Your papa never told you
About right and wrong

He exits the highway and proceeds through lower class sections of the city. You see buildings that will become familiar as you watch the show, which promises to be urban and gritty. The song goes…

You woke up this morning
The world turned upside down

Suddenly he’s in a much nicer neighborhood, pulling into the driveway of an upper middle class house. The grim look on his face as he exits his SUV suggests a lot of serious business on his mind. What has he had to do, and to put up with, to get to this large automobile and this beautiful house? The scene ends as he closes the car door. He’s come home.

That’s what this show is ultimately about; coming home. It’s about family, the bedrock of American life. And in the grand tradition of American fiction, it’s about aspiration, about wanting to rise in wealth and status, and maybe even become the boss.

And, of course, it’s about crime. Because Americans do love a good crime story. Via character dialogue, the show even unabashedly compares itself to The Godfather and Goodfellas, the two iconic movies which define the modern era’s obsession with Mafia-related entertainment. Some of the characters on the show aspire to achieve the celebrated fame of those movies, though others, wisely, prefer to stay in the background.

But the real point is that these characters are part of the modern era. Organized crime, like the rest of society, has had to adapt to the times. The show famously starts with mob capo Tony Soprano in a therapy session with a psychiatrist. He’s there because he’s having anxiety attacks; even a tough guy has trouble coping in this world turned upside down.

Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions are a wonderful contrivance for looking into the psychology and the moral perspective of someone who makes a living as a criminal. Through these sessions, he is humanized, and we learn that he has the same problems as any other middle-aged family man. He has to balance work and family life, maintain his marriage, and raise his children, all while overcoming the baggage from his own upbringing. In some ways, he’s just like the rest of us.

But, of course, he also has his unique work-related problems, the exact details of which he cannot reveal to his therapist. In other words, he’s not like us at all. As the story develops, we the audience get a tantalizing look into his world. This is why we come to these kinds of shows; his life is far riskier and edgier than ours, and we want the vicarious thrill of living it through his eyes. We want the excitement of transgressing moral boundaries, but not the consequences.

Which just goes to show the moral dilemma that this show raises. If we enjoy this story, and even identify with its protagonists, are we not condoning their behavior? These guys murder people, then go to their favorite restaurant for some wine and pasta, like us when we leave the office for a night out at Olive Garden. If they’re so much like us, then are we like them? Do we accept, even celebrate, a world where crime pays?

I think that question troubled the creator, David Chase, which is why he famously ended the show without resolving the chief protagonist’s story arc. But to be fair to the television audiences of the time, crime has always been a popular subject in TV and film, and has often been glamorized. What makes The Sopranos different is how it places this subject in the context of the social era at the time of its premiere in 1999.

In the 1990s, crime rates were high, the Culture Wars were heating up, and there was a pervasive sense of society coming apart. Baby Boomers were in mid-life, parenting Millennial children. David Chase (b. 1945) is a Boomer, and I think he was exploring his generations’ experience of the era – including that question of how much moral looseness a society can and should tolerate. While not all of the actors are strictly Boomers by birth year, some being just a little too old or too young, I think the mid-life characters are meant to be. Tony Soprano clearly is, based on flashback scenes of his childhood in the 1960s.

In one scene, when Tony’s teenaged daughter uses language which upsets him, she defends herself with the statement, “this is the 90s.” Tony retorts, “out there it’s the 1990s, but in here it’s 1954,” pointing first out the window, then at the floor of the house. Tony is a moral reactionary, despite his chosen profession. His Millennial daughter is what we would call “woke” today, and might even have reacted to her father with an “OK Boomer,” though that is an expression well ahead of her time.

Tony clearly wants to return to the “father knows best” social order of the good old days. You can tell that all the old gangsters do. They even complain about the breakdown of morals in their own organization. Drugs have had a corrosive influence. You can’t trust the gangsters today, who turn state’s evidence instead of doing their civic duty and serving time in prison. You just know that any of these guys who surivived to see 2016 would be sporting red MAGA caps at a Trump rally. They certainly wouldn’t survive today’s cancel culture, being too blatantly racist and sexist and homophobic.

The Sopranos stands out as an artifact of its place in history, the Bush era transition into the 21st century, with the Cold War receding in the rearview mirror, and all of these new concerns coming down the road. With its frank maturity and uncensored sex and violence, it also helped inaugurate the television noir age we enjoy today. In many ways, it did it better than any show since. It’s so well written, acted and directed, that you might even say it achieved Peak TV.

That last statement, I suspect, is controversial, but it really was the first thought I had when I recently started rewatching the show. And I have a lot of shows fresh in my memory; I’m a man who watches way too much television, a mid-lifer in a new era of staying at home with endless streaming video. In the great treasure trove of video content available online, The Sopranos is a real gem from what already seems like a fading time.

This post is the second in a 2-part series about The Sopranos, following up on an earlier post.

How I Started Watching “The Sopranos”

April 12, 2021 Steve Comments 2 comments

On June 10, 2007, I was on the road, and spent the night in a hotel. I don’t remember where I was going or why, and I only know the date because I looked it up; it’s the original air date of a certain television episode.

What happened was, that night, I decided to watch a little TV before going to bed. The hotel had HBO, which I did not have at home. At home, we had satellite TV, but my roommates paid for it and I did not ever make demands of what programming they should get. Since the hotel had a channel I did not normally have access to, naturally I chose to check it out. As it turned out, The Sopranos was about to come on. Of course, I had heard a great deal about this show, which was a cultural mainstay of the era, but I had never watched an episode. So I gave it a go.

(mild spoilers follow so if you don’t want any at all just don’t read the rest of this post)

I liked what I saw. Even though I had no back story at all, other than knowing that James Gandolfini portrayed Tony Soprano, I could follow along, kind of. The guy’s son was rebellious and annoying, and there was some kind of gang war or something happening. There was some threat to the family. They went to a diner, and this guy came in – maybe he was a bad guy? – and then suddenly the show just stopped. The screen went blank for a bit. Then the credits came on. It was some kind of glitch; probably the hotel’s fault. I didn’t think much of it, and went to sleep.

The famous last scene of *The Sopranos.*

The next day or so, I went online and checked the news feeds (I was already getting my news exclusively via the web by this time). I learned that I had watched the series finale of The Sopranos. The first episode I ever watched was the last episode of the show! And the final scene had intentionally cut abruptly to black, which was generating a big hubbub online. The creator, David Chase, had apparently mystified everyone. What I gather now is that he chose not to provide a conclusive story arc for the main character, which would have resolved the show’s fundamental moral question – can a guy who steals and kills for a living really be just an American guy, with all the same problems as the rest of us? And why did America spend nearly a decade celebrating this professional crook?

Now, it might be for the best for me that there was no resolution, because even though I watched the last episode first, it really wasn’t a spoiler. Nothing had been concluded and my appetite was simply whetted. I ended up watching the entire series a couple years later, by renting the discs on Netflix. Yes, I mean the physical DVDs, mailed to me periodically. That was how it was done in the 2000s, before streaming took off.

I enjoyed the show tremendously – it’s well deserved of the many accolades it has received. In my mind, it is the show that inaugurates the more hard-hitting, stark, and mature age of television that we live in today – though I know the trend was underway throughout the 1990s. It’s also a show that culturally defines the Bush years, along with another one which started in the same year of 1999 – The West Wing.

This blog post was inspired by the fact that the family is now rewatching (adults) / being introduced to (teens) the show. What happened was, we wanted to watch the premiere of Godzilla vs. Kong, but without going to a theater, since it’s pandemic times. So we got a subscription to HBO Max. Well, there was The Sopranos thumbnail staring at us from the screen, and since we like to have something to watch together on evenings when everyone is free, we decided to make it our new show. And personally I am enjoying it the second time around as much as I did the first time.

I have more to say about The Sopranos – a review of sorts – but I’ll publish that in a follow-up post.

Space Force: A TV Show for the Age

July 11, 2020 Steve Comments 0 Comment

The family and I really enjoyed watching the Netflix comedy series Space Force. It’s a great vehicle for Steve Carell, with his gift for playing lovable losers. Though in this show he is not so much a loser as “the man for his time and place” who “fits right in there,” to quote a mysterious stranger. In the case of Space Force, the time is now and the place is at the head of a brand new branch of the United States military. And Carell’s character, General Mark R. Naird, has the right stuff for this challenging job.

One thing I like about the show is that it is very topical. It is the only consciously Trump Era fictional television series of which I know (still waiting for a COVID-19-conscious sitcom). The President is even a character, though we only know him in the form of texts and Tweets from “POTUS.” General Naird has just the right mix of sincerity and guile to handle this unpredictable boss, as well as his peers in the other military branches, and the competitive space efforts of America’s great rival, China.

To balance against Carell’s typically understated performance, John Malkovich provides a more animated supporting character, Chief Scientist Dr. Adrian Mallory. If you are a fan of Malkovich, which we are, you will enjoy him in this role. Since this is on streaming video, there is ample opportunity for him to exploit his propensity for foul language. Just another example of how TV has changed since my childhood. The rest of the supporting cast also provides solid performances.

Space Force is completely farcical and makes no effort to be realistic in terms of the science or engineering of space exploration. There’s an irony to the depiction of the easy accomplishments of this fictional organization, in contrast to the actual state of the U.S. space program. It’s like the show is satirizing what the ignoramus-in-chief thinks the Space Force is capable of doing. Like it’s set in his imagination.

I suppose you could argue that the TV show Space Force normalizes the current administration and its feckless ways. Maybe it’s even a little sympathetic to it, so as not to alienate Trump supporters, who surely make up a substantial portion of Netflix subscribers. Arguably the show also normalizes the idea of inevitable Sino-American conflict. These are dangerous times, and perhaps we shouldn’t be making fun of these things.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that no one has announced a new comedy TV series set in the COVID-19 era. But I would welcome one. Humor is cathartic, and helps us to process the difficult realities of life.

So check out Space Force and enjoy the show. One season is available on Netflix, with no word yet of a second season.

Silent of the Week: Lesley Stahl

June 22, 2020 Steve Comments 0 Comment

Last night we watched 60 Minutes, on regular broadcast television. Yes, I mean through an antenna. We don’t have cable or satellite so it’s either that or streaming (which is my preference).

We’ve started making a habit of watching this show every Sunday evening, in part because we have a family member who likes doing things the old-fashioned way. It’s like a throwback to another era – you actually have to watch the show at the scheduled time, instead of whenever you feel like it! I’ve been getting my news off the Internet for years, and it’s refreshing to go back to this old format.

One of the segments was an interview with the Minneapolis Chief of Police, about the George Floyd killing, protests and police reform. The interviewer was Lesley Stahl (b. 1941), who has been a 60 Minutes correspondent since 1991. You could say she is the last of the old guard, certainly one of the last of her generation still prominent in journalism.

Stahl’s career took off when she covered the Watergate scandal as a young reporter. She’s been at CBS most of her life, and for most of that time with 60 minutes – the sort of career longevity that characterizes the Silent Generation, in contrast to younger ones. And she’s certainly in her element, lending gravitas to a profession that in many ways has been hollowed out in an age of sensationalism and misinformation.

You can watch the interview here: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/minneapolis-police-chief-medaria-arradondo-geroge-floyd-killing-60-minutes-2020-06-21/#x

A slow noir sci-fi show that’s perfect for bedtime

May 31, 2020 Steve Comments 0 Comment

If, like most of us in this day and age, you enjoy a good binge watch of streaming video entertainment, then I’m sure you are familiar with this pattern: you start to watch an episodic series, and you get pulled in. Each episode ends with a plot twist or cliffhanger and when it’s over your appetite is whetted, and you can’t help but watch the next episode. Before you know it, it’s after midnight and you are regretting staying up too late yet another night in a row.

If this is a problem for you, then you might be interested in checking out this show that my BFF and I recently finished. It’s called Tales From The Loop. It’s an anthology sci-fi series, and it is *so* slow paced that getting through an episode is like a slog through a swamp.

That’s not to say it’s a bad show; it has interesting stories and characters, and a really cool retro 1970s aesthetic. It’s contemplative and sad and a bit dark. The episodes make me think of Ray Bradbury short stories; they are thoughtful and personal, using sci-fi as a background to tell a story that is ultimately human. Interestingly, Bradbury had his own anthology TV show, but unfortunately it wasn’t that good.

Tales From the Loop also reminds me of an earlier sci-fi show that had a similar premise – that somewhere in America there’s a small town where all kinds of secret weird science research is going on. That other show was called Eureka, and was more of a fun adventure series with slapstick comedy. Tales From the Loop is serious and dark, which fits the current social mood and the new noir age in film and television.

What’s great about the slow pace of the show is that by the time an episode ends, you will be ready to go to sleep. That makes it perfect for watching at the end of the evening when you just want a little entertainment to wind your day down, and don’t want to get caught up in binge watching. I think it deserves its own subgenre name, to cover the fact that it is both quiet and contemplative, as well as dark and despairing. Let’s call it calme noir.

Tales from the Loop is available on Amazon Prime. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

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