reviewing Black Doves; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Detective Hole; Dexter: Resurrection; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star City; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics
George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.
Chuck Todd interviews me about alternate histories
My wife and I saw all six episodes of Top of the Lake: China Girl on Sundance last night. It was that good. The first season a few years back took a little longer, and not just because it had seven episodes. It was compelling and memorable, but meandered down side stories a little too often. In contrast, China Girl was even more compelling, and tight as a drum in its complex, multi-tiered plot.
Elisabeth Moss is back as Robin Griffin, a detective with a palette of smarts, passions, and vulnerabilities like none you've ever seen on television (I guess Gillian Anderson as Stella Gibson in The Fall would be about the closest, but even she is figuratively as well as literally continents apart from Robin). Robin's back in Sydney from her visit in season 1 to New Zealand, this time to investigate the death of a prostitute who turns out to have been part of a surrogate mother ring. Robin's personal life is woven in perfectly - which is to say sometimes harrowingly, sometimes lovingly - into the plot, including her 17-year old daughter last seen by Robin shortly after she was born. Moss's performance is incandescent.
Her police partner is a nice surprise - Miranda Hilmarson played by Gwendoline Christie from Game of Thrones, with Christie showing a much greater gamut of acting talent than she did on Thrones. Robin and Miranda are a complicated, ultimately powerful team, alternately screaming at and consoling each other, and one of the best scenes in this series is the two of them sitting on a dock, coming to terms.
There are paucity of really worthwhile men in this story - I'd say maybe one and a half - with the majority being liars, psychos, sleazes, and killers. But that's the story, the scoundrels are very well acted, and some of the women are close to despicable and well acted, too, including Nicole Kidman (with grey hair) as the adoptive mother of Robin's daughter.
The plot contains all kinds of twists, some sudden, some long and dangling, and I'd rate these six hours as among the best ever on television. Kudos to Jane Campion who wrote and created this.
Well, I really liked the double ending of the concluding episode - #13 - of Mad Men on AMC tonight: first, what Don would have wanted, coming home and telling Betty and the kids that he'll be going with them to spend Thanksgiving with her family ... cut to ... Don walks through that same door to find Betty and the kids already gone (he had previously told her he wouldn't be joining them). Sure, Don might have called Betty and told her he was coming home ... But the double scene worked so well I can accept Don's lack of phone call as a necessary set-up.
I also loved Harry (Isaac Asimov ringer, played by Rich Sommer) invoking the prehistorical cave paintings in Lascaux. They may indeed be one of the earliest known forms of writing. Siegfried Giedion has suggested that, if seen in flickering candle light, the images may move, and may be a primitive motion picture. (My colleague Ed Wachtel at Fordham University dubbed this the "first picture show," and I worked it into my science fiction novel, The Silk Code. The original Isaac Asimov found these cave paintings fascinating, too.) So why not look at Lascaux as the first advertising on public walls? Harry's mention of Lascaux is emblematic of the literacy and respect for history in the series, and one of its most winning qualities.
Don's promotion of Peggy to copy writer was also gratifying - did Don do this in part to stick it to Pete? - probably. But I also had some big problems with Peggy Olson on tonight's show.
First, she seemed unnecessarily critical about Annie speaking the commercial - or maybe the problem was that Annie sounded ok to me. I mean, hey, what do I know, but I found her convincing enough...
Far more serious is Peggy's pregnancy, which my wife called as soon as Peggy started gaining weight. But wouldn't have Peggy realized she was pregnant before this? Her baby didn't look premature, which means she would have been pregnant for a good many months. Even in 1960, how could she not know this?
Elisabeth Moss did a great job of portraying Peggy, as she has done throughout the series, but this part of the plot just didn't add up.
I also found the scene with Betty and the neighbor's boy a little confusing. Betty wants to talk to him because ... she wants the ear of someone who idolizes her ... ok ... but this could have been made a little more clear.
The scene with Pete and his wife was a little more clear: She at first is operating on the premise that they are not trying to have kids, but, Pete, under pressure from his father-in-law, thinks maybe they should, even though he is still concerned about his income, which his wife assures him is no problem. Ok, you can get that, if you work at it.
So, all in all, I thought the next-to-last episode was better than the final episode of Mad Men. But, that's ok, I thought the same thing about the last two episodes of The Sopranos (with the exception of that brilliantly ambiguous last scene).
Mad Men has established itself as a wonderful time machine - which Don appropriately mentioned in his great soliloquy narration of Kodak's "Carousel," another superb sequence (a real Kodak moment) in this concluding first season episode. The acting - beginning with Jon Hamm's tour-de-force Don Draper, to everyone on the show - is superb, and I hope Matthew Weiner keeps up his fine work on the series for many many years. We are, after all, still a long way from the present - though, as Mad Men also shows with a wink and nuance in every show, maybe not that far away, after all...
My wife and I saw all six episodes of Top of the Lake: China Girl on Sundance last night. It was that good. The first season a few years back took a little longer, and not just because it had seven episodes. It was compelling and memorable, but meandered down side stories a little too often. In contrast, China Girl was even more compelling, and tight as a drum in its complex, multi-tiered plot.
