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Reviews
Vienna Blood (2019)
Attractive but writing tends to be formulaic
My local PBS station is featuring this show. It makes great use of old Vienna, and technically it looks good. The actors are appealing. The psychology angle is interesting.
The negative is that the story repeats the current tendency of many shows of over-explaining things that don't add to the viewer's experience and rushing into coincidences to make up the plot in the time allotted. Some of the dialogue is filler and speechifying; though I like the actors, the script is only intermittently asking them to provide a multilayered performance, and it's rarely asking that of the guest actors at all. The stories could use thinning out of a scene or two to give more room to accomplish characterization and exposition at the same time.
Related to that---maybe it's just the episodes I've seen, but I find the Jewish identity of the main character and his family to be more signboarding than well integrated into the story.
Miss Scarlet & the Duke (2020)
Could cut back on the banter
I enjoyed this show much more than several of the other new ones that have come to PBS. The setting and production values are great, and the leads are very well cast. The writing is tight and there is not a lot of obvious filler. I don't particularly care for the amount of emphasis on the serial plot thread, but the writer appears to have a full-fledged plan as opposed to the half-baked one that many current productions bring to the table.
A current trend that is not so good is the banter. After 15 minutes the positioning of the main actors very much reminded me of Fox's "Bones". They clearly are romantically suitable, and talk like it incessantly, but just as clearly that isn't going to be the direction that the show will go (or should go, given the setting).
Most Wanted (1997)
Pluses of an actor-writer
I think I've finally seen all of this movie, which one channel seems to run every week.
It's fairly ridiculous. Jon Voight has an absurd accent to which he is fully committed. Jill Hennessey plays most of her part in what appears to be a summer pajama top (and wonderfully perfect makeup). The military has whatever resources they need to advance the plot, but never enough to crush the hero. The twists are visible from miles ahead. But it remains entertaining.
I think that it is an advantage to the watchability that the hero (Keenan Ivory Wayans) is also the writer. Banter comes out more believable when the writer has to put it in his own mouth.
Major Crimes (2012)
Great characters and writing
This is a fun show. Like any series with many dozens of episodes and unpleasant subject matter, there are a few clinkers---but the holdover cast from The Closer builds very naturally on the characterizations that the preceding series sometimes forced. Flynn's and Provenza's juvenility is restrained to something more tolerable for professional adults, Tao and Buzz explore their different takes on being the Boy Scout-y tech guys, and Julio still loses it with scum that he is arresting or interrogating. There isn't the superfluous banter that has become the go-to time filler on crime series. The new regular team member Sykes is also well integrated.
Like many commenters, I could do with less centrality of Rusty. But he's really not overplayed. What was overplayed was the big bad against whom he was testifying, who was to have somehow survived stabbing dozens of people without leaving real evidence.