56 Days: Wild, Sometimes Winsome, Sometimes Weird, Thrilling Little Series

My wife and I just binged 56 Days on Amazon Prime.  Aside from the title, I thought that this was one wild, sometimes winsome, sometimes weird, multifaceted gem of a thrilling whodunnit series, with two separate complex intersecting stories that jump back and forth from the present to the past.

One story is about the couple who have some kind of a close proximity to a body found in their apartment, no doubt murdered and turned into a chemical soup in a bathtub.   The initial question is who in this couple murdered whom.  

[And there will be some spoilers ahead ... ]

I began to think pretty soon that the soup could be of both of their bodies, or a third person's body altogether (which turned out to be what it was).

The other story was of the two detectives investigating the crime, an older, somewhat disillusioned guy and his younger woman partner.  She's having an uncomfortable affair with a suspect (in another case), who doesn't take kindly to her efforts to end that relationship.

Romantic love in surprising places and its power to overcome all kinds of obstacles is one of the central underlying themes of 56 Days.  This animates the couple associated with the human soup in all sorts of surprising ways.   And a story of love rearing its head and holding its own in all kinds of unlikely situations is one of the most attractive parts of this series.

Kudos to creators Karyn Usher and Lisa Zwerling, and Avan Joglia and Dove Cameron as the couple in the apartment, and Karla Souza and Dorian Missick as the detective partners.  All four gave memorable performances.

I said earlier that I didn't care for the title, and it was indeed the unexpected emotional power of the narrative that I thought deserved a more evocative title than just a number of days.  The action flipping back and forth from the present to x number of days in the past is of course what generated the 56 Days title, but that narrative form would have worked just as well with any title.  I know that the series is based on a 2021 novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Howard (which I haven't read), but a streaming series that bears some resemblance to You and the movie Body Heat deserves a name at least as good as those.

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Cross 2.1-2.3: To the Rescue

My wife and I saw Season 1 of Cross (starring Aldis Hodge) a few years ago and really enjoyed it.  I didn't have time to review it then, but I thought it was fast-paced, full of twists and turns, and emotionally powerful.  I liked it just as much as, if not more than, the Morgan Freeman movies in the 1990s.

We saw the first three episodes of the second season last night.  It's starting as engaging and powerful as the first season, with a crucial additional ingredient:  it speaks to the political turmoil currently pulling our country apart, and comes in on the ethical, democratic side on two related, front-page issues.

Those would be the Epstein files and the ICE attacks on anyone they see as not belonging in this country.  

[Spoilers ahead .... ]

The new season opens with a pair of assassins killing a man disturbingly similar to Epstein on an island with middle-aged men and young female victims.  It was an opening gambit that posed a vexing moral question: Are Cross and company right to hunt such assassins? And, are this serial killer couple second cousins of Dexter Morgan?

Next, we have an immigrant who kills a vicious ICE officer (or whatever racist US police force), who had recently killed someone that Cross was about to subdue without violence.  It will be instructive to see how Cross investigates, but the series deserves credit for correctly depicting what ICE and the Border Patrol have been doing not just near our borders, but in Minneapolis, Chicago, and cities across our country.

As was the case in the first season, there's lots of hot romance in the story, and more than one crime and criminal that Cross and his associates must bring to justice.  Based on the first season, I'd say that no one (other than Cross) is safe in this narrative, and I'm looking very much forward to seeing how it all unfolds.

Ten-Minute Podcast Take on Current Beatles Books and Documentaries

 from Rock Talk Studio ...

A Conversation with Sarah Clarke Stuart about Song of the Unsung Mushroom

Welcome to Light On Light Through episode 417, in which Sarah Clarke Stuart and her husband Jonathan Oakes join me and my wife Tina Vozick in a conversation about Sarah's debut novel, Song of the Unsung Mushroom, published January 15, 2026 by Connected Editions (a boutique publisher that I and Tina created and operate). 

At times joining our conversation are Alexis Stuart (who created the cover for Sarah's novel), Susan Clarke, Molly Vozick-Levinson, Elizabeth Clarke, Chryssi Steven, Meghan Vickers, Bud Gundy, and Edwin Stepp (thanks to the last three for providing blurbs for the novel).

Relevant links:

• Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook (read by Sarah for Listen and Live Audio) of the novel here
• More about Connected Editions here

 

Check out this episode!

Hijack 2.3: On Counting on Actors Who Play Good Guys Not to Play Bad Guys

We find out lots of essential things in Hijack 2.3. 

[And there will be spoilers ahead .... ]

First and foremost: Of course Sam Nelson was not going to sacrifice any innocent person's life for anything he had planned for the train he had hijacked.   His threatening to sacrifice that man was just a ploy to get the people running the trains in Berlin to do what he needed them to do.

This raises, at least to me, the interesting question of can you predict what a character will do in a TV series or movie based on who the actor was, or more specifically, what characters the actor has previously played.  Even in The Wire, in which Idris Elba played someone high up in a drug cartel in Baltimore, he displayed a conscience and a heart.  That in itself was why I was sure that Sam, who was an honest man with a big heart in the first season of Hijack, wouldn't trade in an unthreatening person's life in the second season.

Of course, actors occasionally do switch from playing heroes to villains. Elba has indeed done that a few times.  Ronald Reagan played a bad guy for the first and last time in his acting career in The Killers.  He would go into politics after that, and become Governor of California and then President for two terms.  Not the greatest President, in my humble opinion, though almost any predecessor looks good in comparison to the current occupant.  I was surprised to see Eddie Redmayne play a villain in the brilliant  Day of the Jackal -- after his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything -- but he was charismatic in Jackal, and I saw, after a bit of research, that he's played lots of villains in his career.

Back to Sam, we also in the third episode of this second season find out that the reason he hijacked the train was to save his former wife from the brutal people who hijacked the plane in the first season, and in between the two seasons killed his son.  Lots of tension building up, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

See also Hijack 1: Don't Miss It! ... Hijack 2.1: A Tale of Two Vehicles ... 2.2: What Is Sam Nelson Really Up To?