The first season of The Crown is not bad.
The second season starts off so pompously predictable and postmodernly “boldly self-depreciating” that I had to turn it off after the third or fourth line.
This is how I judge books, as well - if the writer doesn’t clarify to me in a few sentences that s/he is exceedingly intelligent (I dont mean the academic intelligence, rather the dirty psychological, “real life” kind) and willing to put it all out there, I wont bother. Usually.
Shows I didnt like:
Prisonbreak couldnt draw me in.
Sons of Anarchy is too nerdy to really be a biker thing
Fargo is good, but, season 3 gets very difficult to get through with the increasingly fetishistic irony about shitty humans
Peaky Blinders bores my socks off
Lucifer, Suits - interchangeable shows about metrosexuals
“Your Honor”… Almost like “Breaking Bad” set in New Orleans to the extent that Bryan Cranston is the same adrenaline-fueled engine holding our attention as the drama around him unfolds. It’s like the perfect follow up role everyone has been waiting for from Cranston after “Breaking Bad.” Cranston also fulfills a similar father-saving role to his son.
_ The Da Vinci Code - The Greatest Story Ever Sold:
How the Da Vinci Code forced a counter-attack from the church and the art world.
After Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code was cleared of plagiarism charges, this documentary explores the climate which has permitted a fictional story to make such an effective challenge to conventional history that it has forced a counter-attack from the Church, the art world and academics. Has Brown cracked the most difficult code of all our 21st-century cultural DNA?
Contributors include Richard Leigh, author of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, art critic Brian Sewell, novelist Sarah Dunant, columnist David Aaronovitch and Opus Dei director Jack Valero.
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Dan Brown asserted much as fact… says one documentary commentator.
So I’m on the 8th episode of “Your Honor,” continuing to enjoy what has been a pretty damn good show…and then it appears, in all its morbid glory… the ominous, blue face-diaper of death!.. up until this episode you just assumed the show was taking place in a universe free of covid-1984… But for whatever reason, they decided to diaper up one of the cast… just the sight of that thing completely killed the feelings of immersion I had going, thrusting me back into the very lame drama of covid-1984, and ruining what was a very enjoyable show… Apparently, there’s no low to which they won’t stoop…
The original Twin Peaks.
For its numerous moments of genuine soap, it has as many moments of the gravest, most profound art.
And then those moments where the two combine, which are truly transcendental.
Also, the concept of honor. By the 2000’s, it had become possible to convey the idea of honor only in reference to crime. Our culture had fallen by then.
Twin Peaks was made at the peak of the Empire.
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The Hatton Garden robbery series… airing is up to the point where the detectives have tracked down the white BMW that was constantly around and caught on nearby CCTV, prior and running up to the day of the robbery.
I never knew it went down like that… the dos and donts of after-robbery clean-ups.
