Summer telly

Here are my notes from the telly I have been watching recently while hiding from the rain or heat.  I have already talked about Heartstopper elsewhere but there’s been a lot of other good stuff too.  I am still gripped by Ruth Wilson in The Woman in the Wall, but as it is being drip fed weekly the old fashioned way, I will have to be patient!

Wolf

This was a disorienting experience but well worth hanging on with fingernails if necessary, or possibly hiding behind a cushion if gory violence isn’t your thing.  There are three stories smashed together to make not necessarily a coherent whole, but certainly something worth watching! We have a classic noir type thriller where a detective is still trying to solve the disappearance of his brother when they were children.  Then there are the ‘Donkey Pitch’ murders of two teenagers years before - is the right man behind bars or still at large?  The third strand is a family (including Juliet Stevenson and Owen Teale) who are clearly struggling with some kind of trauma coming back to their house without phone signal and with scary entrails left dangling about the garden presumably to scare them away.  Into this come two policemen knocking on the door.  It’s a mix of broad and silly black comedy, excruciating violence and family drama mixed together.  It's wild, and I don’t know why or how it works but it does.  

The following events are based on a pack of lies 

Well this was an entertaining and slightly nailbiting few hours which is about a conman and one woman's attempts to take him down.  Alice unexpectedly spots her long estranged husband Robbie.  He popped out for a chow mein taking her family’s savings and investments with him years ago and never came back.  Only now he is posing as a climate scientist.  Over the series we get to see the conman’s schemes, and some striking breaking of the fourth wall, with the attempts by his estranged wife to get justice.  An entertaining and fast moving black comedy, it also takes some time to explore the impacts of gaslighting as well as some sobering thoughts about the slim chances of justice prevailing.  Funny but tense, with some heisty vibes, I had a great time with this! 

Starstruck series 3 

I chose Starstruck as my romcom for 2022, and I was a bit nervous that maybe they were being a bit over-optimistic doing a third run at a will-they-won't-they, but, without giving away any spoilers, this series was a brilliant anti-romcom.  Rose Matafeo continues to produce great characters with her writing and I enjoyed the way she undercut the 'secrets' tropes that so often crop up in romcoms as well as taking a different angle on the romance.  It also remains pretty funny.  An entertaining few hours with a satisfying ending. 

Henpocalypse 

I really wanted to like this - a women led apocalypse comedy, and I did like it in lots of ways.  It is actually great in terms of concept, the jokes are smart with a layer of raucousness to sometimes hide how smart they are.  The actors do a fab job and I love the whole Danny Dyer running joke. So what’s the issue?  Well I think this would have made a great two hour movie but taking it over a series a lot of the jokes were being repeated in a slightly different context which made it feel a bit too one note in the end.  The payoff was set up through loads of flashbacks and it felt too much of a painful device to me which dragged out the story a bit too much.  As a result I found myself browsing on my phone in places, never a good sign.  There’s enough of a cliff hanger at the end that they are clearly hoping for a second series, and as they haven’t actually explored much of the post apocalyptic world yet, there is scope and the characters have a lot of potential so I would sign up to watch it.  But fingers crossed they sharpen up the narrative a bit.

The Bear series 1 

I also watched series one of this drama about a successful chef coming back home after his brother’s suicide to run his sandwich shop in Chicago.  It's a bit bleak in places, about trauma and grief but also about the restaurant industry, burnout, snobbishness, crime, toxic masculinity and cake.  Then there is the warm humour which does give a sense of a real family trying to muddle their way through, sometimes cut through with a really sharp joke that made me laugh out loud.  There are some great single shot scenes in the kitchen during service that go on forever which really give a sense of a place and people in crisis.  Season one had a good definitive ending and season 2 is sitting waiting for me to hit 'play' so it will be interesting to see what comes next.