Drug Of The Nation? I Wish...

I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the party...

Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was reported to  be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies, tried to get to me watch it ages ago. 

It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one, too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had done the theme song.

Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.

Having watched Edgerunners I judged it "very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a lot more complimentary for Arcane. 

Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find out what they've been missing. It's a lot.

The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to reveal a world.

The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even the minor characters have substance.

The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to keep all of them balanced throughout. 

Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears, by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability, presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.

Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it carries.

Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.

I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe. 

One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let alone something good.

I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one episode a night to two.

I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.

I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still the impression I'd somehow acquired.

As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.

Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy, the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?

Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.

And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.

The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription, wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in talking early about Angel.

Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at? 

I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to be some pattern to it?

There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later, between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying. Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned  the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was infuriating.

Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.

The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all. None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.

Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers, none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control? Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular episodes?

It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode. That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or not at all.

I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none of the ads would interest me. Who knows?

I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic, unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?