Endings And Beginnings

Having cleared out the tunes locker it's time to do the same for shows. I haven't been watching as much TV of late, for which you can thank a combination of Beryl, Blaugust and something that doesn't begin with B, namely Solasta, into which I have now put more than fifty hours, most of it in the last month.

Even so, I have managed to see my way through to the end of a couple of shows since I posted about the final season of Umbrella Academy. I didn't mention it then because until it was all over, I had no idea, but the creator of  the comic the show was based on is the guy out of My Chemical Romance, a third-wave emo band considered quite controversial in their day (At least by the Daily Mail, but then who or what isn't?) I'm not sure how that knowledge would have colored my view of the show, had I known it earlier.

I think everything I've watched for the last three or four months has been on Netflix. There's a simple reason for that. Well, two simple reasons. And one of them's not all that simple, now I come to write it down...

The easy reason is that I haven't found much I want to watch on the other service I'm paying for, Amazon Prime. If it was down to just the media on offer I'd have unsubbed Prime long ago but of course the primary reason I pay for it is the free and/or expedited shipping and the secondary reason is the free games so anything I watch there is pretty much a bonus anyway.

The more complicated reason I'm not even checking to see if there's anything new on Prime is laziness technical. I mostly watch TV on my laptop, in bed, and my laptop is both ancient and falling apart. Half the keyboard doesn't work any more so I have to use a wifi keyboard alongside it, which is awkward in the dark because it's not illuminated and I can't see the keys. It's also running Windows 8.1 (I think it was Windows 7 when I got it.). 

I've been using a VPN for a while now, partly for the enhanced security but mostly to get access to some shows that aren't otherwise available in the UK. The VPN I use, Mullvad, doesn't support anything that old but it does have some kind of reciprocal agreement with another VPN that does, so I had to link the two of them to get it to work, a mildly complicated procedure which works perfectly but also means I can't just flip the connection around the map at the touch of a mouse like I can if I'm using Mullvad directly. 

Amazon Prime flashes up a panicky "Not in this house!" kind of warning if it senses a VPN so I'd have to take it off every time I wanted to watch something on Prime, then put it back on when I wanted to do anything else. The extra step is enough to make me not want to bother so I don't.

Well, that was a long, boring explanation of something no-one needs to know. Yay me! Anyway, the point is I've been stuck to Netflix like it was the 1950s and there was only one TV channel, so Go Progress! I guess...

Luckily, I'm having no trouble at all finding plenty to watch there. More than I can handle, in fact, which I think is just how it ought to be.

The Conners - Seasons 2 to 5

Attentive readers (Are there any?) may recall I originally took the VPN option to watch three specific shows and seasons: Housebroken (Season 2), The Conners (Seasons 1-5) and Roswell: New Mexico (Seasons 3 & 4).
I already gave my thoughts on Housebroken and the first season of The Conners. The subsequent seasons of the Roseanne sequel were somewhat mixed. I enjoyed the whole thing but some of it was shot during the pandemic and the way that distorted both the narrative and the production was bizarre. 

I actually think it would have made more narrative sense for the writers to have ignored the real-world situation entirely rather than incorporate it into an ongoing storyline although clearly the supposed rootsy, quasi-realistic, highly contemporary tone of the show would have made that more difficult than it would be for most sitcoms. I am wondering now how many shows did do Covid storylines and how that worked out for them. It's going to look really weird in reruns in a few years.

Other than that, the writing was a bit up and down and so was the acting. Laurie Metcalfe, in particular, looked like how she played a scene depended on whether she'd taken her meds or not. As for passive-aggressive, gaslighting Ben, with his bottomless well of self-pity and his unconscionable double standards, I took against him and his hideous beard from the moment the pair of them walked into shot.

For a brief moment, when he appeared unexpectedly clean-shaven, he actually looked almost like a person for a while instead of some kind of cartoon bear. If he'd kept it up I might conceivably have begun to pay attention to him as a character rather than wishing he'd just fuck off back to Jellystone but sadly his filthy face fur grew back all too fast and any interest I had in him died before it could properly say it had been born.

I don't really believe it's a co-incidence that Ben so much reminds me of a bear. Bears are about my least favorite large mammal for their habit of gutting their prey and leaving it to linger on, alive but in agony, just so they can go back and snack on bits of it whenever they fancy. That's barely even a metaphor for what Ben does to Darlene, albeit emotionally not with actual teeth and claws. 

 

Typing the word fuck reminds me I'm going to talk about Kevin Can F*ck Himself in a bit and while I know it was inspired specifically by Kevin Can Wait I do think it could just as easily refer to Ben's manipulation of Darlene. I pretty much worshiped Sara Gilbert for years, mostly for her portrail of that specific character, who I always took to be in complete control of her own, real, true  self and an aspirational role model.

Apparently that was a misreading on my part because Sara Gilbert is largely in charge of the direction of the reboot as far as I can tell and she plays the adult Darlene with no such respect for her past. Instead both she and the writers clearly remember nothing much more than a depressed adolescent with no self-knowledge at all, who made serial bad choices mostly through fear and stubbornness and now has to live with the consequences.

Gilbert is still brilliant in the role but much though the script tries to portray the adult Darlene as making rational, reasonable decisions for the first time in her life, I couldn't see most of them as anything more than finally giving up. She's portrayed as having spent thirty years trying to be a writer and when she finally abandons those dreams to settle for being a middle manager in the factory where her mother used to work, we're supposed to cheer? And then she gives even that up to become a lunch lady at a state college so her precocious son can afford to go there. Geez...

Similar fates befall just about everyone in the show, which could easily be seen as very depressing indeed if all of them weren't so sharp and witty and slick with a one-liner. For a supposed sitcom the whole thing has a real soap operatic, doomscrolling feel to it. 

And yet I still really enjoyed it, partly because it is frequently very funny but mostly because I feel quite connected to most of the characters, having lived with them one way or another for more than half my life. And at least some of them grew and changed in ways I liked. 

I was very surprised by how much I came to like Becky, for example, a character I barely noticed most of the time in Roseanne. She also has her ups and downs in the series but she's possibly the only one of the original cast who always seems to be moving forwards despite all that. She's played with enormous warmth and verve by Lecy Goransen, who I would really like to see in something else now.

The new characters, with the exception of Beastly Ben, are all very fine, especially Darlene and David's kids. John Goodman is as good as he always is and the whole extended cast is generally excellent but no matter how funny everyone is and how strong the performances, it was still a bit of a tough watch at times. All of that may change in the final season, of course, but most annoyingly, Season 6 is currently not on Netflix and I haven't figured out how to watch it for free. I might actually have to buy it!

Kevin Can F*ck Himself - Season 2

Since I mentioned Kevin Can F*ck Himself just now, I'll do that next. I just finished watching the second and final season last night and I absolutely loved it. I thought it was significantly stronger than Season One, which itself was really good.

Given that I enjoyed it so much, it might be surprising to hear that I was also delighted to learn there won't be any more of it. When the final episode ended I actually said to myself "I hope there's not going to be a third season" and the first thing  I did after the credits ended was google to check. I was very happy to find there was no prospect of any more episodes to undo the great work done by the finale.

It seems a definitive statement was made even before filming began on Season 2 that it would all end there. It wasn't originally planned to be a two-season series but that's how it ended up and I couldn't be happier. 

I can't exactly say why without giving away a major spoiler, something I'd rather not do because I really hope someone reading this might decide to go watch the show as a result of my recommendation. What I will say is that anyone who's familiar with almost any strand of popular culture will get to the end of the final show and think the same as I did, namely "Well, I know where that's going...". And I guess it might have, had there been a Season 3. Except there isn't and now it won't, thank god. 

Instead we get an ending. A good ending. A positive, hopeful but very believable ending. We don't get many of those. It'd be a shame to lose even one.

In one way it's surprising there'll be no more. The show as a whole has been well-received, critically, and very deservedly so. I thought the sitcom/drama conceit (Referred to in most reviews as multi-cam/single-cam, which seems a bit insidery to me.) was more effective in the second season, partly because it was more familiar and therefore less distracting but also because the border between the two wasn't quite as clearly delineated. There was a lot more bleed-through, albeit very subtle. 

Especially in the later episodes, I noticed characters in the sitcom scenes saying the kind of negative, critical things to and about Kevin that I don't remember them saying in Season 1. Conversely, there was a moment when Allison seemed almost to gain some understanding of who Kevin was and how he saw the world that wasn't wholly negative. The entire thing, which was already highly nuanced in the first season, took on even more of a grayscale quality, with nothing being quite as black and white as before. 

Creator and writer Valerie Armstrong has done a lot of interviews about the show. I'm always very conscious of the intentional fallacy so I don't necessarily take what creators believe about their creations as anything much more than one possible meaning among many. All the same, it's always helpful to know and in this case I didn't find myself much at odds with most of it. It looks very much as though what's on screen is what she hoped to put there, only I'd say there's a fair amount more besides, as there should be in a collaborative medium like television.

Once again, this was a show with an exemplary ensemble cast. I find it interesting that the first season was promoted as a starring vehicle for Annie Murphy, ex of Schitt's Creek, but the second was described in some places as a two-hander, co-starring Mary Hollis Inboden. It's certainly the case that Allison and Patty make up a classic double act. The chemistry between them really drives Season 2 and it's at the heart of what makes the ending work so well. 

Everyone is good in the show but apart from the two leads I'd single out Alex Bonifer as Patty's brother Neal. In the first season he's basically an idiot but Season 2 shows that absolutely is not the case. He's no more the dimwitted sidekick Kevin turns him into than Allison is the ditzy, air-headed wife. 

That, however, does not make him a nice person. He's a user: unpredictable, self-centered and dangerous. Unlike Kevin, though, he may have the capacity to change. That aside, almost the most impressive part of the whole of his character arc is the way he utterly fails to come to terms with having been knocked unconscious, twice, at the end of Season 1. 

It's incredibly unusual to see any show - sitcom or drama - deal with the long-term effects of an assault of this kind. In very nearly every genre I can think of, hitting someone on the head is mostly just seen as a convenient way to remove them from the action temporarily. At the most it might lead to a bump or a bruise or someone might turn up with a plaster or a bandage in a later scene. I can't recall ever seeing a character spend time in hospital afterwards with a vicious head-wound that requires their hair being shaved off , much less suffer from persistent and disturbing PTSD for the rest of the season.

Neal not only has to deal with all that, he has to deal with the fact that one of the assaults was by his sister and the other by the wife of his best friend, both of whom he still has to see every day. He knows he deserved at least one of the blows. Patty only hit him with a bottle because he was trying to strangle Allison at the time. I'm not quite so sure it was strictly necessary for Allison to hit him with the kettle but at the very least it counts as payback so in the end he has no-one to blame but himself.

I found the whole context of the sprawling, complex, messy, ugly situation far harder to parse than appears to have been the creators' intention and I put a great deal of that down to the subtlety of the playing. It's hard to see characters as representations of  behaviors when they make the motivations and understanding of the characters feel so human. Valerie Armstrong seems very clear on who the good guys and the bad guys are and I don't think many viewers will disagree but some of the playing is just so strong it's not always quite as certain as perhaps it was intended to be.

So, anyway, obviously I enjoyed that one a lot, even though I had to take a break between episodes not once but twice because watching the show made me feel too wound up to sleep for worrying what might happen next. I imagine knowing that would make the cast and writers quite happy.

Roswell: New Mexico - Seasons 3 & 4

Anxiety on behalf of the characters is something I never had to worry about while watching the third and fourth seasons of Roswell: New Mexico. Sure, bad things happened to people all the time, everyday things like being sucked into a pit of quicksand and coming out in a pocket dimension or having your arm cut off and having to replace it with a mechanical hand or waking up after spending fifty years in a pod but even when people died you knew they were probably going to get better. Except when they didn't, which is a plot point and probably a spoiler.

None of it ever really mattered all that much, though. That's the difference. As I said last time I wrote about the show, everything seems to happen at some kind of meta telenovella level, where even the characters know how ridiculous their lives are but go on living them as though they weren't. 

I loved this show. Not quite as much as the original Roswell, which I absolutely have to watch again now, but in its own right as a roller-coaster thrill ride through a theme park full of craziness.

Like Kevin Can F*ck Himself, the final episode leaves so much open it makes you sure there has to be another series on the way, which indeed there should have been. Once again, both the tied and untied knots of the plot are down to a cancellation notice that came in time for the writers to react. There was indeed going to be a fifth season, which would have been the final one in which all plotlines would have been resolved and all relationships finalized. 

I'd still like to see that season, should it get made someday, a possibility which certainly can't be discounted, but ending the show with a wedding and a series of heartfelt farewells as the characters dispersed to their various destinies and futures is certainly a much more satisfying way to conclude than most shows ever get. What happens after that, who knows? Just like life, then.

These days, as I get older I often find myself complaining not that I don't have enough to keep me busy in my increased leisure time but that there's so much I somehow find it harder than ever to fit it all in. I often wonder, on finishing a show or a novel or a game, whether I'll ever find the time to revisit it. 

I just said I want to re-watch the original Roswell, which I own on DVD. I also feel I need as much as want to re-watch all of Buffy and Bojack Horseman and Veronica Mars because one viewing cannot be sufficient to calibrate works as significant as those. I also already feel like I want to watch Schitt's Creek again, even though it seems like hardly any time since I saw it the first time. If I can rewatch the entirety of Friends and Big Bang Theory, surely I can manage six seasons of Schitt's.

There are plenty more like those but to go through any show, end to end, takes days of a life. Weeks, even. I used to think I'd have time for all that when I retired but I'm all but retired now and it turns out I don't. I talked to a few people at work, five to ten years younger than me, coming up to the point where they're starting to think about these kinds of things too and everyone agrees. Those extra kick-back hours you imagined you'd get later, when you were young? They don't come.

I doubt I'll rewatch Roswell: New Mexico. It was a ride but it's over now. I loved it while it lasted but it's gone. I might watch a few scenes now and then if only for that breathtaking scenery and Liz's inimitable pout. The ludicrous plot, though, I don't believe will give me anything more second time around. I'll let it lie.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Season 2

I almost forgot this one. Not because I didn't enjoy it, which I did. Just because it seems like a very long time ago now that I saw it.

I don't have an awful lot to add to what I wrote in a comment in reply to Tyler Edwards' post on it at Superior Realities, so I'll just re-direct to that. I will say I enjoyed the season overall, The middle got a bit baggy but the very strong final four or five episodes really made up for any lack of direction earlier. 

There's no official word about a third season but the final episode of Season 2 is pretty much nothing but a (Very well thought-out and presented.) set-up for one. This is definitely one case where it would be a shame if all the only further adventures of this crew were ones we made up for ourselves.

The Future

And so to what next? I was going to move on to Dead Boy Detectives but the wind got taken out of those sails with the news that it's already been cancelled. It's more than a tad irksome to think that Lockwood & Co. most likely got shelved to make way for DBD and now that's going dark too. Two with one stroke of the red pen.

I probably ought to watch that Fallout series but I was really never feeling it and, now it's slipping into the past, even less so. I still haven't picked the Flash back up after taking a break at the end of Season 3. Just the thought that there are more episodes left than I've seen already makes me twitch. With that one out of the picture, my inclination to try Legends or any of the other Arrowverse shows is at a low ebb, too.

I did watch the first episode of the final season of Supergirl but it felt a lot like more of the same and I haven't carried on. I will, but not just now. I have a lot of possibles on the list, shows like Arcane that I passed over at the time but about which I have since heard good things; shows I know from the source material and am curious about, like A Good Girl's Guide To Murder; shows I meant to watch but just never got around to, like the second and third seasons of Sweet Tooth. 

What I actually will watch is most likely far more random. I seem to pick things up without quite knowing how. I'm currently in the second season of an anime called Overlord, which is getting odder by the episode. I can no longer even remember why I began watching it in the first place but I'm not about to stop. 

I imagine I'll settle down to something more substantial soon enough. Nights are getting longer, the weather's getting colder, we're entering the season for staring at screens. And whatever I watch, I'm sure I'll end up talking about it here because what's the point of watching television if you don't talk about it afterwards?

Why, none whatsoever.