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Would I Lie to You?: Episode #14.3 (2021)
Poor episode. Three of four guests not selected for being funny
There is an auctioneer, someone I have never heard of, and someone from "Made in Chelsea." None of them are funny. Josh Widdicombe is OK, but you can't get the back-and-forth that makes for a good episode when three of the six are no funnier than people you would select at random from the street.
Hannibal (2013)
Absurdist nonsense posing as gritty psychodrama
1. In real life, profiling is basically worthless. It has never, ever led to the apprehension of a serial killer. (Indeed, no sort of police work has ever caught a serial killer. The only way we ever catch them, ever, is when a victim escapes.) All TV shows about successful profilers are thus shows about people with magic powers.
2. The Will Graham of this show may be the most magic of all, immediately guessing the amazingly complex (and utterly unfathomable) motives of the craziest imaginable killers. But of course it comes at price: spending so much time in the mind of crazies makes Will a very sad boy. So the lead character is mopey all the time, which gets old.
3. The FBI of this show centers its efforts to find serial killers on this seer of questionable sanity.
4. The Hannibal of this show is obviously barking mad, yet the FBI also trusts him to work cases, never questioning why he'd abandon a thriving practice to work basically full-time as an unpaid consultant. (This is nearly as absurd as the idea that the Hannibal of this show could have a thriving practice. People don't really like spending huge amounts of money to talk to creepy guys.)
5. The tabloid journalist is almost as magical as the protagonists. She can get into any building, get any bit of police information and generally investigate just as effectively as an entire police force. She repeatedly breaks the law in front of police officers but never gets into trouble.
6. Doors, walls, and all other means of keeping people at bay do not work in this show. When it's convenient for a person to magically get into a room, that person magically appears, even if the room would have been surrounded by cops.
Happy Valley (2014)
2 great episodes, 2 OK ones, 2 bad ones: All man-hating
Don't watch this if you can't ignore seething contempt for men. It's obvious and pervasive. Every single male character is vile.
At one point (inconsequential to the plot, so not a spoiler) the heroic lead character humiliates a man and hurts him by squeezing his testicles, simply because the man has annoyed her. Would any author expect an audience to cheer a male cop who terrified an annoying adolescent girl, then hit her a couple times and grabbed her genitals? Probably not. Indeed, if people made a show that portrayed women or blacks like this show portrays men, they'd probably never work again.
Still, the first two episodes are truly excellent and the second two are very good. In the first two, characters really seem to act for their own reasons and according to their own personalities, rather than behaving in whatever manner the plot necessitates at particular moments. In the second two, the needs of the overall plot begin to determine how people act. Worse, absurd coincidences begin taking place and the show begins to follow a lot of police-drama clichés it previously avoided. (Lead character only half- decent cop who makes any progress on case? Check. Lead character constantly arriving at dangerous scene first and going in alone? Check. And on. And on.)
When the fourth episode ends, stop watching. All the police stuff is done, and the show suddenly morphs into a Lifetime movie about a brave granny coping with sadness and pain. It adds nothing whatever to either the story or the characters because all that sadness was fully apparent to any remotely intelligent viewer in the first few episodes.
Kavanagh QC (1995)
Every cliché of defense law drama, including the sanctimony
Very mild spoiler alert: No specific shows are discussed, but the review does discuss tendencies in the show that might help you guess some endings.
How about a defense drama where most of the clients are guilty, most of the rest may or may not be guilty (so the defense's efforts may well set a dangerous person free) and only a tiny, tiny minority are truly exonerated by crafty court work?
How about one where the defense is not motivated by passion for justice but by the money one can make by skillfully defending the guilty while either lying to themselves about their motivations or simply embracing their own sociopathy? (How about some nice codas where the star sees a newspaper headline about the guy he freed killing someone?)
How about a show where habitual criminals found holding the murder weapon are more likely to have committed the crime than upper-class people with no apparent motive, where police sometimes arrest people based on evidence rather than the need to clear a case by railroading the innocent and where basically everyone on earth aside from our hero (and you, dear enlightened viewer) isn't a racist, sexist jerk?
If you answered a resounding "No" to all of those questions, then you might enjoy Kavanagh QC, though it's still just a poor man's Rumpole. If, on the other hand, you'd like a show about the law that plays something like life rather than every other law show in history, then pass.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (2012)
Less Dickens than Bronte filmed by David Lynch
Yes, "Mystery" does vary in tone from other works by Dickens but not nearly to this extent. The whole movie plays like a sweaty dream induced by a night of heavy eating and drinking. It utterly lacks the feeling of concrete reality that Dickens somehow evokes even as he spins ludicrous tales.
Not a single character feels like a real person with a real life beyond what appears on screen and a full range of emotions. There's never a hint that the choirmaster runs a choir, or that the lawyer has ever handled a case or that the schoolgirl has any studies.
The very talented Matthew Rhys is wasted on a role with only two notes, hatred and self pity. But it's still the deepest role in the show. None of the other characters has more than one characteristic and many of them have none at all. Oddly, despite this lack of personality (or perhaps because of it) all of the characters are unlikable. There's no one to root for in the story.
To make up for the lack of character, there is mood, lots of mood, hitting you in the face again and again with dream sequences and funny camera angles and music that is supposed to make us fearful in moments that are not scary to anyone older than 5.
The production isn't even technically competent in a way you'd expect of the BBC. Rhys, who is great with accents and can surely do an English one, frequently reverts to his native Welsh. In one scene, they say the Lord's prayer as "Our Father, Who art..." rather than "Which art," which would have been used in Victorian England. It's a miracle a car did not drive through the background in one of the scenes.
The worst adaptation of Dickens I have ever seen.
Endeavour (2012)
Endeavour "Sherlock" Morse
This series is not without its charms. Like "Inspector Lewis," it's beautifully filmed and many of the individual scenes are excellent. Many of the actors are good, though I don't share the general enthusiasm for Shaun Evans.
Still, it's going to annoy a lot more people than the other reviews let on. It suffers both from the clichés of its genre and from an utter disconnect from the Morse series.
The clichés are endless, though no worse than those of the Morse series: The killer is never someone with a clear motive from the beginning but a surprise (though often easy to spot) who only becomes a suspect in the last ten minutes. The killer is always the sort of smart and successful person who would never kill anyone in real life. (Seriously, how many Oxford professors or students have been convicted of murder in the past 50 years? 1? 2?) Morse only has to figure out what "fits" rather than prove anything because every killer immediately confesses when time constraints demand it.
All these are bothersome.
Worse still, this show, in many other ways, has nothing to do with the Morse that "follows." It's actually a bit of a Sherlock knock-off.
In the original show, Morse is a good but flawed detective, not some sort of savant. He's also a jerk. He's about 20% better than his colleagues but is convinced he's at least 50% better. He misses obvious clues, accuses the innocent with absolute certainty and often blunders into the solution more by process of elimination than excellence. Heck, Lewis regularly provides actual help in solving the cases. The young Morse is constantly perceiving things like a bicycle belonging to a vicar because of the cloth caught in the gears (not a spoiler). Also, although he gets along with no one, it's not because he's a jerk. It's because nearly everyone else on earth is, certainly everyone with power or position.
Maybe we're to believe that all that beer simply dulls his senses over the decades, but it would be easier to have simply launched this new series on its own.
Lark Rise to Candleford (2008)
Modern People in Period Garb
Period pieces are really hard.
Done right, they are incredibly powerful because they demonstrate how random our prejudices are by showing plausible people with entirely different prejudices who still manage to be entirely human. Think, for example, of how Master and Commander made it seem not only fully real that a 12-year-old could lead men into battle but also completely natural within the film's world.
But tricks like that are very hard to pull off, and nearly every period piece falls into one of two opposing traps. Either they show people who act in ways that modern people cannot fathom — without conveying why they act like that — and thus make their characters seem wooden and fake. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, the characters speak and act in entirely modern ways that seem ridiculous to anyone with even the haziest memories of history class.
Lark Rise to Candleford falls into the latter category. Only one of the show's two dozen characters expresses any Christian faith whatever and all the other characters clearly think him a fool for it. (And he clearly is both a fool and a condescending hypocrite who doesn't understand anything about Christianity.) Men and women interact with absolute equality, at least among all the remotely sympathetic characters. Entire communities are just fine with obvious infidelity and basically everything else that would seem fine to a modern BBC exec but would, in actual history, horrify a Victorian yokel.
That's not to say it's the worst show on earth. To the contrary, it's likable enough, but it's no more an actual period piece that Monty Python's Life of Brian. If that's going to bother you, don't watch.
The Fall (2013)
Other reviews may miss the point: This story may have no heroes
Don't read this unless you've watched the entire first series of The Fall, as it's less an evaluation of overall quality than an argument about how viewers should interpret events.
All the reviewers both professional and amateur have noted the parallels between the killer and DSI Gibson, but I think those parallels are meant to extend much further than most folks realize. Unless I'm really misreading things, it's wrong to view Gibson as a brilliant feminist heroine. She's as much a monster as the killer, a woman who hates men and wants to destroy them.
Take, first, the scene that made so many women cheer. "Man, subject, f***s woman, object: no problem. Woman, subject, f***s man, object..." Yes, some people hold double standards about one-night stands, but that's not why Gibson's actions and demeanor disturbed her interlocutor. No decent person in 2013 believes that a senior exec of either sex should be able to order up a one-night stand from a junior employee, which is what she did. Furthermore, no decent person doesn't feel a bit bad upon learning that a one-night-stand was married with kids. Yes, it's the married person's responsibility to be faithful but decent people still don't sleep with married people and, if they do so mistakenly, feel a bit bad about it afterward.
Not only doesn't Gibson feel bad on either front, she seems to enjoy both transgressions, the first because it demeans the man more and the second because it will help break up his marriage. Indeed, she's clearly pleased to hear that she nearly destroyed the assistant commissioner's marriage. She suppresses a little smirk when she says it would have been "unwise" for him to have left his wife for her.
Consider, also, her choice for second-in-command: not an experienced detective (because all of them seemed to be male) but a female beat cop who was only known to Gibson because she had screwed up the case.
More importantly, consider how differently she reacts to the death of women and me. She moves into the police station and devotes her life to hunting down the killer of three women she's never met but cares not one bit about the death of two cops, one of them a recent sexual partner. (And think about the moving-in bit. Others say it's supposed to show devotion but I think it's just supposed to show she's crazed in her attempt to avenge womankind. There has to be a hotel within five minutes of the station. No sane person would instead choose a cot and the resulting exhaustion?)
What's more, I'm not sure she's really supposed to be all that good a police officer. She does no good police work during the show. She only gets near the killer because her colleague miraculously knows someone who survived an early choking attempt, because the killer's daughter sees herself on TV and because the killer screws up spectacularly in his last attempted kill.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think the people behind The Fall intend her to be a monster. We'll see in the next series.