There Are Different Standards For Cute People

I've been sitting on a post for a while now (Don't. Just... don't.) about TV shows I've been watching but the problem with posts like that is it takes a good while to finish a whole series and viewings tend to overlap. Or at least they do the way I watch TV. If I wait until a nice neat wrap-up moment, when I've finished everything and haven't started anything new, well, we'll be waiting for a long, long time, so I think I'm just going to get to it.

The shows I wanted to cover are:

• Daisy Jones and the Six
• Eden
• Supernatural Academy
• Locke & Key
• Daria
• Camp Camp

I might also cover a couple more if I have time but that looks like plenty for one post. 

Before we begin, I'd also like to mention (Complain about...) how awkward it is to find the history of what you've watched on both Netflix and Prime. They each have sections on the front page for your Watchlist and Currently Watching but to find the full history of everything you've seen you have to come out of the front end altogether and dig deep into the Account settings. 

I had to google how to find the history for both services before I could go back and check what I'd seen recently. Of course, that I couldn't just remember some of the shows without a prompt tells its own story...

Looking at the six shows above, the first thing to note is that four of them are animations. As I've said before, I seem to be watching more and more animated shows these days. There are a lot of them on both services and the quality is high. 

Every time this comes up, someone pops into the comments to recommend various anime shows I ought to be watching and I'm very grateful for that. The thing I'm increasingly finding, though, is that I don't really notice if what I'm watching is anime or just plain animation. I'm a lifelong animation fan but in a much more untutored way than I'm a comics fan or a science fiction fan or an mmorpg fan. I'm not sure the exact definitions or provenance matter all that much to me although I'm always up for an academic discussion on the differences.

I suspect this is going to run long so rather than ramble any more I'm just going to get on with it. I'm also not going to attempt any thematic linkage or overarching structure. I typed the list in the order the shows came up when I checked and I'm just going to go with that.

 Daisy Jones and the Six

If  we're talking about the fallibility of memory - and on this blog we always are - then this is a Grade A example. I read the book this series is based on back when it first came out in the UK a few years ago. At the time the author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, was unknown in this country. Now she has a string of best-sellers to her name.

My memory is very retentive when it comes to novels but it almost always needs a jump start. If you name a book I've read and ask me what it's about I probably won't be able to tell you, even if I only read it last week. If I pick up a copy, though, and glance at the cover and maybe the blurb on the back, a huge amount of detail will immediately flow back into my mind. It's a pattern that established itself back when I was studying literature, I think, based around having to write essays from specific prompts, and it's never really left me.

The same process usually kicks in when I watch TV or movie adaptations of books I've read. I may remember almost nothing going in but as soon as the characters appear and the narrative unfolds, everything comes rushing back. 

Not this time, it didn't.

I watched the whole show, originally framed as a complete-in-itself mini-series but now apparently the tentative first season of a maybe-continuing franchise, and I recognized literally nothing about it. Not the plot, not the characters, not the setting; nothing. That in itself was so odd it kept distracting me from the show itself, which was a shame because it's a pretty good one.

I'm going to have to read the book again to find out if it's an accurate translation of page to screen. I'm certainly not going to claim it's any kind of accurate description of the 1970s music scene or 1970s America or the alternative history of Fleetwood Mac or any of those things. I'm pretty sure it's not. What it most certainly is is a funny, camp, occasionally poignant romp that feels weirdly convincing in its earnest evocation of seventies and eighties TV mini-series. It's not so much a parody of the form as an homage.

The performances are pretty good. I found Daisy herself to be slightly - occasionally intensely - irritating, which is a compliment to the actor, Riley Keogh. I don't think you're supposed to like Daisy Jones. Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne was good when he was being gruff, not quite so good when he wasn't. 

The whole premise relies on the chemistry between the two of them, which was almost there but maybe not quite. I liked most of the supporting cast, especially Suki Waterhouse as the inexplicably English keyboardist. There were times when it felt like Spinal Tap lite and those were good times.

By far the weakest aspect of the show was the music, which is a fairly major problem for a show about a rock band who are #1 in the Billboard Hot 100 and headlining stadiums. There is an actual album of the music from the show. Pitchfork gave it a 6.6 which is at least a point more than I'd give it. It's not bad, just bland, but then, back in the late '70s, I'd have told you Fleetwood Mac were bland, too. I'd be wrong now, but I was right then.

For a supposed mini-series the ending was weird. It just seemed to stop. Overall, though, it was a fun road trip and I hope they do expand it into an ongoing series. I'd watch more.

 Eden

Another mini-series. I watched this specifically because it was complete in itself and only four episodes long.  It's a post-collapse show about a human girl waking up in a world filled by robots. The animation is solid, the characters endearing, the plot rolls along, there's action, adventure, humor and pathos. It's cute. I liked it.

It's also quite incoherent at times. A lot of details make no sense. Why would robots farm apples and how could a human baby grow up into a healthy adult on a diet of nothing else? If the world is filled with nothing but robots with no apparent internal or external threats for the past thousand years, why is there a sinister security force and a surveillance culture that would do a police state proud? And if there is such a force, why is it so radically ineffectual? Seriously, Imperial Stormtroopers could do a better job than this lot.

It doesn't pay to pick holes in these things. If the execution is entertaining then give the premise a pass. My only real problem was with the ending, which I won't spoil. Suffice to say, be careful what you wish for. That's my takeaway.

Recommended for a quick watch. It's neat, complete and satisfying, provided you don't think too hard.

 

Supernatural Academy

This is the only show on the list I haven't finished watching but I'm throwing it in anyway. I really shouldn't because I only have two episodes left and it's always a risk trying to sum up a story before you know the ending but if I leave it for the next TV post I'll probably have forgotten all about it.

That's not to say Supernatural Academy is forgettable; more an observation on how quickly one show replaces another on the never-ending conveyor belt of content. It's actually fairly memorable for a Saturday Morning kind of show. 

It does feel a bit like a throwback in that respect, with its ensemble cast of sassy teens, each with their own signature power, but I don't recall many shows of that era having such strong, coherent narratives. It's very much a plot-driven affair, with a single throughline and very little in the way of side stories. It's not episodic at all, even though it employs an odd A/B structure, pairing episodes as though each set were some kind of chapter.  

I'm really enjoying it. The characters are all quite distinct, even if most are types or tropes. The script is strong and the voice acting is good, both carrying a little more than their share of the weight, since the visual detail is relatively light and the animation can be slightly stiff. It's particularly noticeable in some of the running scenes, which can feel a little jerky. 

None of that detracts from the pleasure I've had watching Mischa, Jessa and the Pack negotiate high school high jinks and world-threatening dramas. If anything, not being quite as slick as some digital animation can be adds to its charm. 

The show originally aired on Peacock and is currently on Netflix in the UK. It's based on a series of books by Jaymin Eve, which look a lot more racy than the adaptation. No second season has been confirmed as yet so I hope that ending I haven't seen doesn't turn out to be a cliffhanger. I'd definitely watch another season if someone wants to make one.

Locke & Key

On the matter of endings, a very controversial and troublesome topic these days, I hope it's not a spoiler to say that Locke & Key has a proper finish. There are three seasons, all of which I've seen, and the third ends with a wrap-up conclusive enough for a movie. They obviously either knew they weren't getting renewed or a three season arc was always the plan.

I went into this one somewhat grudgingly. In my mind it was a magical detective show with teen protagonists and a somewhat silly premise. I had it backed up on my watchlist with no real enthusiasm as a fall-back should I run out of better things to watch. Then I did.

Locke & Key is almost nothing like I thought it would be. About the only point of contact between my imagining and the actual show is the part about teen protagonists, but even there it's more along the lines of Stranger Things than Supernatural Academy. There are plenty of adult characters but, more importantly, the story doesn't really differentiate all that much between them; everyone's caught up in the same nightmare and age doesn't signify.

Indeed, one of the central characters, Bode Locke, is barely a teenager at all. I think he's thirteen but he looks younger. Played very well by Connor Jessup, like all the central cast he's very convincing, especially considering what he's tasked with playing in Season Three.

It's a well-acted show for the most part, although a few of the supporting characters seem a bit unconvincing. It does have a very large dramatis personae, with Wikipedia listing almost thirty "Main" and "Recurring" characters. Not all of them get the space to grow or the opportunity to make much of an impact.

Tonally, Locke & Key is a horror show. This took me by surprise, although it wouldn't have if I'd read the credits in advance. I knew it was based on a comic-book but I didn't know that comic was written by Joe Hill, aka Stephen King's son and a noted horror author in his own right. 

The show works off a very odd and largely incoherent premise involving other dimensions, demonic possession and extremely ill-defined magical powers. To call  the set-up quirky would be doing a disservice to quirks. The whole thing seems to have been precariously built around the pun in the title, a foundation most ill-prepared to support the weight of three seasons and twenty-eight episodes.

Strangely, all of that works very much in its favor. The highest of high concept frameworks allows the plot to proceed without any impediment of explanation. Characters and powers appear and disappear as the plot requires and everyone reacts to even the most impossible revelations with admirable sang-froid, which is just as well. I'm pretty sure if as many people in real life discovered that magic was real as happens here, it would be the top global news story and the small New England seaside town where the show is set would be either locked down or filled with crazies, rubberneckers and journalists within hours.

If you park your disbelief at the door, however, Locke & Key is a highly entertaining thrill ride alongside a bunch of mostly likeable characters, involving a good deal of unusual imagery and a take on magic you probably won't have seen before. It was much better than I was expecting and although I appreciated the tidy and formal ending, I'd rather have had another season.

Daria

Daria is an old show. A quintessentially millennial show. A classic show. Another animated show. It's long been a show I thought of with both fondness and respect but until this year I hadn't actually seen much of it.

It was originally made for and shown on MTV, back when MTV did stuff like this. In the UK I believe it aired on Channel 4. I only caught a few episodes back then but it made an impression. The main reason I remember it so fondly, however, is that - as I've mentioned a few times - I played through the whole of Baldur's Gate using a voice-pack that replaced everything my character said with a sample taken from the show.

For that reason, I tended to think of Daria as a series of one-liners, which isn't wholly unfair but which undersells its power and reach. It begins as a dust-dry sardonic comedy filled with snark, sarcasm and wit, as befits a project borne out of the meta-irony of Mike Judge's oft-misunderstood Beavis and Butthead, where the character of Daria first appeared, but over the course of five seasons and sixty-five episodes it develops into something much more nuanced and bittersweet.

The five season arc, if it can be described that way, shows some characters sticking with the same one-note tropes from beginning to end while others show novelistic character growth. Daria, her best friend, Jane Lane and Daria's younger sister, Quinn, all develop adolescent self-knowledge in a most convincing way, while others - Stacy and Sandi of the Fashion Club or Jodie Landon, class president and reluctant African-American role model, for example - offer less overt but still poignant glimpses into their inner lives.

The writing is always sharp and the show is very funny at times but as the seasons pass, the humor becomes bleaker, the situations more awkward. High school may not be the best time of your life but who's to say college or adulthood will be any better? There are moments when the whole thing risks veering off an existential cliff, particularly in some of the scenes between Daria, Jane and Tom, the boy they both - unfortunately - share feelings for, but somehow the writers and cast always just about manage to pull things back from the brink of despair.

It's not quite Bojack Horseman - The High School Years but it pushes some of the same buttons, albeit not as hard and not for as long. There was supposed to be a spin-off series in development a couple of years back, called Daria and Jodie but it's been re-titled: now it's just called Jodie. Also, it's not a series any more, it's a movie.

Written out of her own story. It's no more than Daria would expect.

Camp Camp

And finally, Camp Camp. I don't have all that much to say about this one, other than I enjoyed it, I'm glad I found it but I have no idea why I started watching it. I think I saw it was short and I had a quarter of an hour to fill. Once I was in, though, I was, as they say, hooked.

It was a hard show to watch, not because of anything about the subject matter but because it originally aired on the web channel Rooster Teeth and doesn't follow a typical TV pattern. Amazon have tried to package it in a more traditional format for Prime but haven't made a very good job of doing it. I watched every episode there in the order they were listed, only to discover later it was neither all of them nor in the correct sequence.

I tracked the rest down on YouTube and I've now seen the lot, albeit not necessarily in the order they were intended to be viewed. It doesn't matter all that much because, while there is a storyline of a sort, there's no strong, central narrative. On the other hand, it doesn't not matter at all because most of the main characters do exhibit a kind of growth, eventually and incrementally, and it is possible, over time, to become quite attached to them, which would be a lot harder if you saw the episodes out of order.

That's something I certainly wouldn't have expected at the start. Camp Camp crashes in as a brash, loud, chaotic comedy with one-note characterization and an aggressive sense of humor. Like most sitcoms that stick around a while, though, the characters slowly establish a presence that outweighs the situation in which they find themselves and in doing so turn into real people.

Even if they're cartoons. Screw animation - Camp Camp is definitely a cartoon. It's like a Viz strip come to life, if Viz was an American comic. The Viz comparison comes to mind not least because there's a lot of swearing, although weirdly there's also a lot of euphemism, too. 

After a while I figured out that someone must be counting the actual cuss words so as to stay below some arbitrary certification quota. It means in any given episode, Gwen might say "Fuck" once and "Freakin'" five times. Which, okay, is a thing someone might do, only not quite the way it's done here.

It doesn't matter because Camp Camp is in no way a realistic show. There are ghosts in it for a start. And a platypus. What it is is funny. And smart. Go watch it. If you can find it. It's already not on Prime any more.

And that's more than enough for today. Anything else I was going to include will just have to go unrecorded. I'll be back with another of these just as soon as I've watched something new. It might be on DVD next time, though. Unlikely as it might seem, I seem to be running out of new things to watch on my streaming services and I'm freaked if I'm going to subscribe to any more!

Daisy Jones & Co.

Believe it or not, I have actually been taking notes in anticipation of a catch-all Friday post for this week. I know, right? Pod person alert!

Of course, when I say "taking notes", what I really mean is I've been bookmarking pieces that sparked an interest or making brief mental notes on things I've heard or seen. It's not like I've worked up an essay plan or anything. I still have to sit here and somehow spin this base metal into gold. Gold thread. Whatever.

It's a useful step in the process, anyway; the mere act of recording an idea. It tends to lead to musing, not to say brooding. It's a bit like prepping vegetables. You don't want to start too soon or they'll lose their freshness but getting some of the work done ahead of time does make things a whole lot easier when it comes to the actual cooking. 

Okay. I'll stop with the analogies. They're not helping. When did they ever?

Let's see what we've got. Here are the topics I bookmarked, literally or figuratively, this week:

1. The Daisy Jones and the Six adaptation and soundtrack album.
2. Velma becomes the worst rated show on IMDB ever.
3. Lockwood & Co.
4. Syberia

Not a lot, is it? Still, these things tend to balloon. I'm sure it'll be enough. If not, we can always pad things out with a song or two.  

Let's start with #s 1 and 3 because they fit together in an unexpected way.

For anyone who hasn't stepped into a bookstore in the last couple of years, Daisy Jones and the Six is a novel by Taylor Jenkins Read. Read is the 39-year old author of eight novels, the last four of which are set in the same universe, as we're now, almost unselfconsciously, training ourselves to think of these things. 

As far as I can tell, no-one paid much attention to the first four. Until I did some research for this post, I hadn't even heard of them, which is kind of surprising, seeing what a huge deal the rest of them have been and what I do for a living. 

This, though, is how publishing works. I can't count the number of "new authors" I've watched being "discovered", only to find they have a back catalog going back years. It applies to several of my favorite writers of recent times- Rainbow Rowell, Emily St. John Mandell, Frances Hardinge - and now, thanks to TikTok, which is in the process of rewriting the rules for both publishers and booksellers, it's happening to dozens of authors all at once.

Taylor Jenkins Read isn't, so far as I know, a TikTok phenomenon. I'm not really sure what caused her sixth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, to catch the reading public's attention but by the time it happened I, for once, already knew who she was.

I'd read Daisy Jones and the Six a couple of years before, in proof. It had a catchy cover, an engaging title and it was about a rock band in the 1970s. Predictably, I gave it a try; less predictably, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I have something of a history with novels about rock groups. When I was a teenager there hardly were any. Rock music wan't seen as something adults wanted to read about, I guess, and in the days before the Young Adult genre existed, adolescents were barely even thought of as a market, other than for exploitation and media spin-offs.

Still, there were a few. All Night Stand by Thom Keyes was one that often got mentioned although, as I found out when I finally tracked down a copy, it's not very good. I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo by Nik Cohn was another. I was lucky enough to grab a copy of one of the best ever written, Mick Farren's The Tale of Willy's Rats, when it was published in 1974. It's been out of print pretty much ever since.

Nowadays, every kind of musical act from a struggling indie band to a bunch of global megastars is as likely to turn up in prose fiction as any artist, actor or creative profession - other than writer, of course. Writers just frickin' love writing about writers. Even so, books that focus on the process of being in a band still aren't that common.

What's even more unusual are fictional bands that make the transition from the page to the recording studio. I'm not talking about the kind of projects I addressed recently, where a band made up of actors features in a movie or a a TV show, then takes the whole performance on the road. That happens more often than the reverse, where musicians are hired to recreate the sound of a band that already exists (And has usually already split up.) in the pages of a novel.

Until it was announced that a scad of professional songwriters, among them Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers and Jackson Browne, would be coming up with an album's-worth of songs by Daisy Jones and the The Six, to be recorded by "instrumentalists who’ve played with Rilo Kiley, the Who, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, Elton John, Jeff Beck, the Wallflowers, and more", the only example I could think of off the top of my head was the radio adaptation of Iain Banks 1980s novel Espedair Street. 

Banks himself wrote the words and music for the imaginary band, Frozen Gold, in collaboration with Nigel Clark. It was performed for the show by a band put together for the purpose, aired twice, then was never heard again. It remains my go-to for proof you can't just find everything you want on the internet.

I read a lot of books and I rarely remember much about them afterwards, other than a fairly clear impression of whether I liked them or not and whether I thought they were any good, not necessarily in any way the same thing. I liked Daisy Jones and The Six and I thought it was good. I went on to read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which was even better.

Read is both marketed and widely thought of as a light, romantic, middlebrow writer, whose books are aimed at and appeal mostly to young women. In common with plenty of other writers caught up in that commercial bracket, she has plenty to offer readers of a much wider demographic but don't get me started on the horrors of genre marketing. With luck, the adaptation, due to appear on Amazon Prime next month as a ten episode mini-series, will introduce her work to a whole new audience. If it's any good, that is.

Adaptations of novels are tricky things even when there isn't an entire discography to spin up out of nowhere. I mentioned The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, a version of Sally Green's Half Bad that was shown on Netflix last year. I watched the whole thing with considerable enjoyment. It was a dark, grimy, glamorous, disturbing vision of a contemporary world where magic was real. It was critically well-received and sat in Netflix UK's Top Ten for a while but I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to know it's already been cancelled.

At least, as an adaptation of an extant series of novels, there's no need to guess what would have happened next; you can just go read the book. That's something I may well do, both for Half Bad and for the Netflix show I started watching a couple of days ago - Lockwood & Co.

Lockwood & Co. is based on a series of YA novels by Jonathan Stroud and for once I haven't read any of them, neither before or after publication. I thought I had. I mistakenly believed - unti l I fact-checked it - that Stroud was also the author of the long-running "Spook" series, which I did read the first of in proof a long time ago and which Mrs Bhagpuss liked enough to buy the first half-dozen or so, when she spotted them in a charity shop, although I'm not sure if she ever got around to reading any of them.

In fact, it was Joseph Delaney who wrote the Spook books, whose ghost-hunting premise and teenage protagonists appear to be all the two series have in common. Still, the imagined link to something I knew and liked was enough to catch my eye - that and the uncanny similarity between Lockwood & Co. as an organization and DC Comics' Dead Boy Detectives, originally created by Neil Gaiman and who I first encountered in the TV version of Doom Patrol.

Each team consists of two boys and a girl, all in their late teens. Both outfits act without adult supervision to investigate supernatural phenomena and solve mysteries. The main point of departure would seem to be that both Dead Boy Detectives are, as the name suggests, dead, while Lockwood and his pal are most decidedly still alive.

As I write, Lockwood & Co. is #1 in Netflix UK's Top Ten. I've seen the first two episodes and they are fast, fun and already a good deal less frothy than I was expecting. The set-up, a roughly contemporary Britain in which angry, incoherant ghosts have been ruling the night and killing millions for over half a century, certainly gets points for originality from me. If it's been done quite this way before, I haven't seen it.

As well as what look like solid viewing figures, the show also has both audience and critical acclaim. As Forbes fumes, though, this means nothing when it comes to whether we'll ever get to see a second season. In that article, Paul Tassi makes the same point that's been raised here several times - writers of these shows are just going to have to learn to deal with the massive uncertainty over whether they'll get to continue their stories and stop ending every season with a cliffhanger, whose resolution, more likely than not, will never come.

As I've said, though, fear of an unresolved narrative is not going to put me off  trying new shows. And, once again, in this case there's a safety net. If the show doesn't get picked up for a second (Or third, or fourth...) season, I'll just have to read the books.

Always assuming, of course, that the adaptation stays faithful enough to the original make that a rational option. It's not always the case as, by absolutely all accounts I've seen, the newest take on the Scooby Gang demonstrates.

But I've gone on long enough. Velma will have to wait, along with Syberia. Probably just as well.