Three Shows Down

That post I wrote about the Kindle Fire? It didn't entirely come out of left field. You know how when you're driving on ice and the car goes into a skid and you're meant to steer into it - well, it happened like that.

It was supposed to be about what I've been watching on TV recently, which is why it opens with the paragraph about my viewing routine but let's not start all that again. The point is what I watched, not how or where I watched it.

It's been a while since I last wrote one of these. April, to be precise. Longer than I thought. Since then I've started some shows, finished some more, and I'm still in the midldle of watching the rest. As I said back then, there's a problem in writing about watching TV, which is that it takes weeks, even months to finish a series. They run across each other and there's seldom a neat, tidy moment to stop and assess.

So I'm just going to get on with it. It'll be messy but hey. I can at least begin with the shows I've watched all the way through. They all happen to be on Prime. I don't know if that means anything.

The Legend of Vox Machina

I was wary of this. It looked a bit shoddy. I was short an animation at the time, though, several others having non-started on me, so I gave it a go.

The tone was hard to define at first. It seemed like comedy-fantasy, always a risk, but I could sense there were undertones I wasn't getting, a rumble of subtext. I quite liked the characters, though, and the jokes didn't make me ill so I stuck with it and gradually it occurred to me it might be an adaptation of something I'd read other people talking about a good while ago. 

And it was. According to Wikipedia the show is "based on the first campaign of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role." I imagine everyone already knew that. 

Finding out the origin neither increased nor diminished my enjoyment. It was an interesting piece of background but no more. By then I was moderately invested in the storyline and more interested in where the show was going than where it had come from.

I finished watching it a few weeks ago and already I can't remember all that much about it. That's the danger of leaving these things too long. I can remember the characters, though, and enjoying myself, so I'm pleased to see a third season was commisioned late last year although it seems like it won't surface on Prime until early 2024 at the earliest.

Having enjoyed the animation, you'd have thought I might have felt more like giving the live role-playing show a look, something I've always resisted, no matter how people have talked it up. Somehow, I don't. 

Swedish Dicks

I watched this around the same time but I remember it a lot more clearly. If you want to talk about a show with an odd tone...

The Swedish Dicks are literally that: two Swedes who live in Los Angeles and work as private detectives. At the beginning there's just one Swedish Dick and the agency is called The Swedish Dick. Then another Swede turns up and joins so they add an "s" to the end of the name. The writers seem so pleased with that joke they focus it a couple of times, which should give you some idea.

When I was about eight or nine and no doubt an embarrassingly preocious trial to all who met me, I once had an argument with my Aunt over the word "dick". I insisted it was a legitimate nickname for a detective. She was equally sure it wasn't and that I oughtn't to be saying it at all. She's still alive but she's in her late 'eighties now. Probably a bit late to call her up and tell her I was right. (I knew I was right then, of course. I wasn't bloody guessing, was I?)

I liked this show quite a lot. It's funny enough to carry the elevator pitch premise. It also has the weirdest casting. The two leads are Swedish-born character actor Peter Stormare, a familiar face, if not name, from umpteen Hollywood movies and Johan Glans, a Swedish stand-up comedian. So far, so logical.

Among the recurring cast are Traci Lords, a name even I can recognize as synonymous with the porn industry and... Keanu Reeves. The Wikipedia entry for the show goes into some detail about how Lords got the part but how they landed Keanu remains a mystery. He's very... Keanu in it.

My favorite characters were none of the above. I liked Vivian Bang as Sun, the enigmatically terrifying Vietnamese woman who has a business in the same office block as the Dicks and becomes increasingly entwined with their bizarre cases and Felisha Cooper, playing Sarah, kick-ass lawyer and unlikely daughter of original dick Ingmar, who... ditto.

The show ran two seasons, two more than it had any right to run. It didn't go down well with the critics but I liked it. It's ramshackle and most of it makes no sense but it hangs together, somehow. Much like the rest of Keanu's career, now I come to think of it...

Deadloch

Oh boy. Everything Swedish Dicks probably wishes it was, Deadloch is by orders of magnitude. Hysterically funny, jaw-droppingly weird, mostly uncategorizeable, barely describable. An absolute one-off.

It's Australian, set in a no-mark country town in the backwoods of Tasmania. The two central characters are senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), the town's senior police officer, and senior investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), a detective flown in from Darwin to take over a murder investigation. 

The police contingent is rounded out by the excellent Sven (Tom Ballard) and Abby (Nina Oyama) and there's a huge ensemble cast of townspeople, almost all of whom are confoundingly peculiar. A few are even likeable.

The first three episodes are the broadest of broad farce and also, without any possible challenge, the sweariest thing I have ever seen on the small screen. Seriously, the swearing just never stops. And it's hard swears, too! I love truly creative swearing and this is outstanding. I'd quote some of the best bits but I'd be too embarrassed to type them out. 

Sadly, almost none of the strengths of the show are evident in the bland trailer but it's all we've got, so use your imagination.

The opening episodes are extremely funny and I was expecting the whole season to continue that way but it does a slow pivot in the middle to become much more of a police procedural. It's still funny but the humor starts to disappear under the encroaching shadow as the scale of the threat becomes clear.

As well as mounting an attempt on the Guinness Televised Swearing record (Not a real record, sadly.) Deadloch also seems to be trying to dismantle the entire concept of the Australian national character. I'm guessing there must be a whole strata of subcultural satire going on that non-Australians are going to miss but even judging by the part that juts above the surface, this is brutal stuff.

The show also evidences an almost mythical socio-cultural ambition, denaturing expectations left and right and leaving them bleeding in the Tasmanian mud. I spent some time trying to work out if the writers were trying to favor any particular ethnic, gender, class or orientational grouping over the rest but in the end I came to the conclusion they found every one of them worth poking hard. 

The First Nation characters come out of it best but certainly not unscathed. Straight, white men get it the worst. I'm not sure there's a single, heterosexual caucasian cis-male that isn't proven loathesome by the end. Everyone else gets pummelled repeatedly but somehow makes it through with at least a tatter of some kind of dignity or credibility.

The show ends with a very definite and satisfying resolution, albeit one that gave me unplasant flashbacks for about a week, which makes it entirely comfortable to recommend as a mini-series in terms of narrative conclusion but only providing you can cope with everything else it's going to throw at you. 

The coda, however, is a blatant set-up for Season 2 which, if it ever happens, looks like will shift the action to Eddie's home town of Darwin in the Australian far north. I hope they make it - Dulcie and Eddie and the showrunners both.

And that's what I've finished watching. Next time we'll take a look at what I still am, although of course there's a chance I might have finished at least one more show by then. 

I said this was going to be tricky.