The episodes are rammed with so much slapstick comedy you can’t take any of this seriously. The scenarios are frankly ridiculous and there is something desperate about it all with the weak psycho babble.
We also have to tolerate the constant silly references to gangster movies and even have to put up with Silvio Dante’s Michael Corleone quotes which his goon associates (everyone in it is a goon) appear to find rib-splittingly hilarious. It’s not funny on any level. It’s embarrassing watching these actors attempt to act amused.
You’re looking at something made in 1999; I suppose TV at the time was a lot different back then and The Sopranos was a benchmark in terms of onscreen violence and bringing a cinematic feel to the small screen, but the first season is very cartoon-like and childish by today’s standards. The later seasons are a different show altogether, intrinsically more mature and less juvenile. And about something.
More Netflix throwback viewing brought me to The Office, the early nougthies apotheosis of workplace ennui, inanities, and bury-your-head-in-your-hands moments of embarrassment. Your everyday office environment is so well portrayed that I actually know these people: the delusional ‘boss’ who’s been there for two decades and whose work defines his/her life, the go-getter who thinks they’re in the FBI or something, the joker who isn’t funny, and the roughly 50% of them who know it’s just a job so get on with it.
The most striking aspect of the show is how it highlights the existential funk of the vast majority of workplaces – what we do isn’t particularly important to anyone, and a monkey can perform most tasks if you train it correctly. One looks for meaning in the wrong places. I’ve always been dubious of folk who proudly announce, “I love my job.” They have to be either psychologically pumping themselves up to cope with the pain or are putting on a show, or have to be burdened with actual real-life mental issues.
Unless they have an interesting job. Which is a rarity.
This show took a LONG time to get going but bloody hell once it did … oaft!
It finally shrugged off the tedious, totally unnecessary and frankly plodding shite with Saul’s brother, and now Saul is firmly in the criminal underworld (rather than dipping in and out) things have been much more tasty. There is also another reason for its current awesomeness: Lalo Salamanca.
He is by far the most charismatic ‘villain’ from both Saul and Breaking Bad, and the proof that moustaches aren’t just for novelty value. The bloke needs a spin-off show from this spin-off show. It’s an obvious statement, but characters make shows. And the lack of them in their dimensions is why most of the stuff out there is garbage. Stringer Bell in The Wire, Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, Lalo is up there.
The current liberal/woke/SJW mission – they are in the tentative throes of an unofficial alliance these days – is their war on the past, their need to chop and change, to ‘fix’ that which does not conform to their present-day ‘world view’, to erase artefacts from another age which were celebrated in that age. Their fascistic ways are influential: we have it here with the latest act of cowardice by BBC-owned UKTV in their pulling of Fawlty Towers episode The Germans, an iconic staple of British TV originally aired in 1975 yet now derided by the aforementioned Axis of Intolerance. It has since been reinstated following counter-protests by what must be, and I hate to appropriate a Nixonian term, the Great Silent Majority.
Someone is offended! Phone the police! This war on … everything is the modus vivendi of hysteria culture. In the middle of a pandemic we now have folk trying to tear down statues of slave traders, these protesters (or whatever) wearing clobber made in Indonesia by slave children. The lack of self-awareness is almost funny.
I expect the following will soon appear on their proscriptions: anything Nazi-related, lauded TV series The Wire, the Crocodile Dundee movies, motion pictures featuring cross-dressing, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) because Buffalo Bill likes to put his willy between his legs, and Gone with the Wind (1939). Oh, wait a minute ….
This started off so well. For seven episodes I was gripped. It was so intricately put together and had a masterful Breaking Bad cliffhanger quality to it. Like most contemporary dramas, though, it crumbled into the nonsensical at its denouement. The last episode was so dire it ruined the preceding madness. Depression kicked in and I was then reminded of how Lost completely … lost the plot.
Stay away from this rubbish. Anyway, there’s always a good doc about Nazis to help ease the melancholy.
Mindhunter is cracking. Set within the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico when criminal psychology was in its infancy, the show’s FBI special agents interview the whole gamut of notorious serial killers in order to glean patterns of behaviour, applying this to ongoing cases. It’s got David Fincher all over it, the chap serving as executive producer and helming seven episodes.
It’s gripping stuff, as a time capsule and insight into a grisly world very few of us will thankfully ever even glimpse. Netflix addiction strikes again, though in my case generously bequeathed episodes from a questionable benefactor. I can’t help but picture the British spin-off were this to happen. In the show they remove the chains of the convicted mass murderers in order to make them feel more comfortable during questioning, to even help generate a bond for the ‘interrogation’. Imagine Scotland Yard doing that to Charles Bronson (not that he’s killed anyone).
I also have a picture in my head of Lord Longford, absolute weirdo that he was, helping Myra Hindley escape through a window during their interview, the former wielding bolt cutters or a blowtorch, zany hair flying everywhere.
Interestingly (for me), I clocked the actor who plays Bill Tench straight away. Holt McCallany wound up in two of the best movies of the late ’90s in Three Kings (1999) and Fight Club (1999). He even initiated the whole ‘His name is Robert Paulson’ recital. I hadn’t seen him in anything else until this.
Eight years of Westeros drama, 2011-2019, with a godawful two-year hiatus between the 7th and final season. To accidentally appropriate a catchy verse in a recent Justin Bieber song, it’s been a hell of a ride (driving the edge of a knife).
Thrones was two-in-one TV, shades of history with splatters of fantasy, brutal realism and realpolitik – one got the sense of the intrigue at the court of Klemens von Metternich or Bismarck editing telegrams – with magic and dragons. And all if this topped off with booze, tits, and your occasional rape. Peak Thrones has to be season 4, for the superlative writing, the intricate balancing act between the intimate and the epic, Tyrion’s ‘fuck you all’ trial, and the sheer number of what-the-fuck-just-happened moments. It was literally astonishing.
Things went a bit downhill from season 6 on. It was evident the writers, having gone beyond the Martin books, had run out of ideas and sadly resigned the show to that of ‘experience’ – spectacle, hordes of extras, battle after battle. Which is fine, but the verbal sparring and power plays such as those between Varys and Littlefinger were sorely missed, so too was any sense of remaining mystery about the familiar ensemble – all their cards were on the table. It frankly became a bit silly. Not to bother, it’s partly because the bar was set so high for so long that the later episodes in the saga felt lazy despite being the most watchable bits of drama on TV.
Summary thoughts:
What the hell was Petyr Baelish’s accent all about? It fluctuated from one region of the British Isles to the next depending on how devious he was feeling.
Tyrion got boring by the end. He forgot he had witty things to say, and it didn’t help that it was no longer a case of dwarf vs. everyone.
Ramsay Bolton was Joffrey on steroids.
Stannis Baratheon reminded me of almost every supervisor/manager I’ve had, displaying a facade of nobility, but will without compunction burn their own kin for a pay rise.
And every time I eat chicken I think of The Hound and Arya tearing around the countryside, psychos in arms. Those two were meant to be.
Remember a TV show called Lost? It was semi-gnarly for the first eight or something episodes. And then it was like … total shite, and of course meaningless. I never saw a narrative so pointlessly meandering, and I’ve sat through Fellini’s 8½ (1963).
By the second season I wish the plane that crash-landed in the pilot episode would have blown into smithereens. Utter pish. I still to this day don’t know how it ended.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 
