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TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Caught a new show this week, Physical. So far it's really good. The premise is that some former hippies from Berkley moved to San Diego where the husband has a job as a professor at a university there. It's now 1981 and the wife is a stay-at-home mom caring for their 5 year old daughter. The wife also has an eating disorder and we hear her inner monologue throughout her day as she drops the kid off at school, runs errands and goes to ballet class. But it's not her lucky day and her ballet studio has been closed, so she has nowhere to workout, leaving her hating herself. She's constantly (and I mean constantly) mentally negging herself about her weight (and of course she's extremely thin), and in her head putting down everyone she interacts with. Eventually she stumbles upon an aerobics studio and finds her calling. We get a glimpse of where this is going to end up, and it's not pretty. It's fascinating hearing her inner thoughts (but not for the faint of heart — some of it is really hard to listen to). They flash forward in the first minute of the show to the horrible person she becomes, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to stick with it until it's finale, as I don't generally like watching people become even worse people than they already are. But I'm interested enough in her inner monologue that I'm willing to give it a try and see how she gets there.
Oh, I forgot that we also watched the first episode of Crime Scene Kitchen. I really really love the premise and really really hate the format. The premise is that there's a kitchen where a dessert was made. Whoever made it left after making a weak attempt at cleaning up. Groups of 2 chefs at a time enter the "crime scene kitchen", look at the clues, and determine what dessert was made. Each group then has to make that dessert in under 2 hours.
It's a really fun premise, but the format is "reality" (i.e. game) show. It's full of manufactured tension ("and the winner is ..." wait 3 minutes while they pan back and forth between contestants and everyone pretends to grit their teeth, etc.), places where commercial breaks would be if we were watching it on live TV (but we're not so it's just weird), and very stupid jokes. It's a shame because I think it's a clever idea, but the delivery is so boring and uncreative I can't be bothered. There's a ton of baking shows, and this one could have stood out if they'd done something more interesting with the format. Oh well.
I just started watching Time (2021)
Three episodes of well-paces, beautifully shot drama with excellent performances across the board.
edit: I finished --- it feels like a movie split into three acts. The timing and pace of it is perfect. Nothing drags on too long, but they also don't sacrifice anything. Really nice.
I watched the first season of Bosch, the crime drama by Amazon. I wouldn't call it memorable but it is really good, especially for fans of film noir. The show is unapologetically referential and really goes for the core of the genre, revigorating its tropes with clever variations. The cast is excellent overall, but Titus Welliver shines above. His Bosch is strong yet sensitive, hardened yet warm. A delightful character full of nuance.
I really want to write at length about film noir someday. Watching this gives me extra motivation... as long as there's decadence and corruption in the world, noir will remain relevant.
Plus: no melodrama! Adult characters that behave like adults. No artificial drama that real people would solve with a 5 minutes conversation. So refreshing!
Have you read any of the books by Michael Connelly? If you haven't and decide to, start from the beginning but be sure to skip Void Moon (Cassie Black) --- awful book.
With the series and also the movies, the outcome and details are always different than the books, so one won't spoil the other. There are about six characters that the book series follows:
Chasing the Dime (Henry Pierce) doesn't seem related to the series, but it loosely ties in. You could also skip this, but I enjoyed it.
I think he's one of the best crime writers going. He also wrote The Lincoln Lawyer / Mickey Haller, who Matthew McConaughey portrayed in the movie of the same title. There's a series for that coming out in the near future, too.
But yeah, you nailed it with the overall tone and approach. I really enjoyed the series as a once-a-year 6 - 10 hour binge. There's a spin-off that is really just a continuation that will be airing through IMDB somehow.
I haven't read any of the books. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll put them on my list. But to be frank, I'd probably only read contemporary noir after closing my gaps on noir classics like Raymond Chandler and stuff. I love film noir but I'm very ignorant regarding its literature.
The old stuff is fun. Most of the films don't do them justice, which is a shame.
There's a lot of great contemporary stuff, though. Series like Bosch (etc) are good, but Matthew Scudder (Lawrence Block), Kenzie / Gennarro (Dennis Lehane), Carter Ross (Brad Parks) are all proving to be good series. I've been rotating through them and have been pleasantly surprised with each.
The Carter Ross series is a lot like the Jack McEvoy books from Connelly.
If you want really pulpy stuff, check out the Quarry series from Max Allan Collins. Don't read too many in a row, though. Like the Bond books, they stick to a format, even though they're fun reads.
Slightly off topic but I keep asking myself if a true noir is possible in a third world setting. One major characteristic of noir is the juxtaposition between a seemingly harmonious facade of beauty and respectability that slowly reveals its rotten core. That's the whole deal of the Los Angeles settings. But places like my own country Brazil don't even have the facade, the hypocrisy and corruption are transparent to everyone. Our institutions evoke no respect, there is no onion to be peeled, we already expect reality to confirm our worst suspicions every step of the way. So we have works that try to reproduce the atmosphere and visual cliches of film noir, but they fail to achieve that tension. They're charicatures.
that's an interesting thought, actually. It does feel like noir is completely isolated to LA and anything else that is considered noir (Stray Dogs, High and Low, The Third Man, Rififi, etc) are simply influenced by LA-based noir. The settings don't seem to have the same pulpy darkness... like you said, caricatures.
This is great thesis material.
Yep, I'll file this under "Master thesis I will never write" :P
But it might be a cool blog article.
ha. it really would be. It'd be neat to pull in the stories from the pulp magazines like Black Mask that Chandler, Hammett and others wrote for and how it formed the backdrop for Noir as a genre.
I'm filing this under 'blog articles I will read if you ever write them' :)