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!

Friday In My Mind

Friday again? Didn't we have one last week? Oh well, here goes...

Twitter Goes Boom! Again.

Thanks to Firefox Monitor, I bring you news of yet another in a never-ending stream of data breaches. Seriously, these will literally never end. Even though it's really tempting just to ignore the notifications, I always feel I ought to do something...

It does get particularly irritating when the source is 

a) Something I signed up to a decade ago

and

b) Have pretty much never logged into since

not to mention

c) Have no intention of ever logging into again.

So, this morning I dug out all my Twitter details, which, yes, I still have, thank-you, and changed all of them. Should I ever want to use Twitter, which will never happen, I now have a specific email address just for that. It will not be used for anything else, which means it will never be used at all. 

Now no-one will be able to steal my unused Twitter account with no followers and no posting history and pretend to be me, someone no-one has ever heard of. Phew!

So Long, Tracy Hyde

Here's the timeline:

Ten years ago: For Tracy Hyde form in Japan "as a solo project for Natsubot".

One week ago: I "discover" For Tracy Hyde, while searching for something entirely unconnected on YouTube.

Three days ago: I share my discovery with the world - or at least the infinitesimal part of it that reads music posts here. I'm less than effusive, observing "It may be shameful to admit it but this is exactly the kind of song I'd probably skip over if it was by an English or American band."

One day ago, morning: Pitchfork reviews For Tracy Hyde's latest album, Hotel Insomnia, giving it a big 7.6 thumbs up under the headline "The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest."

One day ago, afternoon: Pitchfork reports "For Tracy Hyde, Japanese Shoegaze Band, Break Up".

I  hope it wasn't anything I said...

I Like Cartoons

No-one calls them "cartoons" any more, do they? If it was good enough for Top Cat...

Once again, it seems I'm watching a lot of animated television. I swear it's not intentional. It just keeps happening.

I mentioned how frustrating I found it, not to be able to footnote my entries in last year's musical Advent Calendar. Case in point, Day Nine, which featured Woofin' and Meowin' by Inventory Full favorites Superorganism.

This tune was written specifically as the theme for the Christmas Special of a show called Housebroken, a Fox animated comedy featuring Lisa Kudrow as "A dog named Honey who runs group therapy sessions to help neighborhood animals manage the neuroses brought on by their owners and each other." I had never heard of the show before the song popped up on one of the music feeds I follow but pretty soon I'd seen every episode.

Luckily for me, since the show has no distribution in the UK, some kind-but-arguably-irresponsible person has posted them all on YouTube. Even more luckily, as yet no-one has put a stop to it. 

I wasn't expecting great things, as I'm sure you won't be if you just watched the awkward, official Fox trailer at the head of this section, but I was substantively impressed. The show's way better than I imagined it would be. 

Housebroken is a smart, funny. well-written show that frequently goes in directions I didn't anticipate. The characterisations are solid, the situations believable-for-sitcom and there's a delirious sense of surrealism hanging around the whole thing. Highly recommended, especially for anyone with pets.

Sadly, I've consumed all the Housebroken content that's available right now but I have two other much longer-running animated shows on the go, both on Amazon Prime. One's a very old favorite that I belatedly realised I'd never really seen that much of; the other's a show I'd never heard of until a couple of weeks ago, almost certainly because it's Canadian. 

It took a combination of the worldwide web and the growth of streaming services to reveal the depth and breadth of Canadian popular culture to the world. Now the curtain's been lifted, it's catch-up time. This particular revelation is the animated spin-off of a live-action show I really want to track down as well. 

They're both called Corner Gas. I imagine some people in the US may know the show but as far as I can tell it never had distribution in most of Europe (Finland and Cyprus being the exceptions). Instead, for some arcane marketing reason, it showed mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The animated version reminds me very strongly of King of the Hill, a show I watched in the '90s. It also has some similarities to recent Canadian sitcom hit Kim's Convenience and US classic Newhart, although in none of those shows was the main character a comic-book fan, something that automatically puts Corner Gas ahead on points.

The other show will, I'm sure, be familiar to most people reading this. It's Daria.  

I watched a few episodes of Daria on Channel 4 in the '90s but they were mostly out of sequence and I remember little about them. What I mostly remember Daria for is the voice-pack for Baldur's Gate I downloaded and installed that made my character speak only in phrases sampled from Tracy Grandstaff's performance as the title character, Daria Morgendorffer.

As you might imagine, that gave my first play-through of the game a certain edge it otherwise wouldn't have had. I lost that voice-pack when I changed computers and my second run at the game was nowhere near as compelling without it. 

It's been a revelation to watch the show from the beginning, learning who all the characters are and how they interact. I'd remembered it as something close to a monologue but it's really more of an ensenble show, as are most really good sitcoms. The animation is incredibly minimal, as was the unfortunate norm of the time, but the script and voice acting more than makes up for the lack of visual finesse.

Renewal Patrol

While we're on the subject of TV shows, I just finished the third season of Doom Patrol. As is my practice, I immediately tabbed over to Google to find out if there was going to be a fourth. Question expecting the answer "No".

To my amazement, not only was a fourth season commissioned, it's already showing on HBO Max. Given the frequent reports of cancellations to various DC projects following the appointment of James Gunn as Studio CEO, it seemed to me, having watched with increasing amusement the extent to which the showrunners of Doom Patrol were willing to subvert the entire concept of superheroics, there would be little chance of a slot in the supposedly more commercially-focused New DCU.

Then again, given the timeframes, I guess Season Four is already legacy product. Season Five has to be the one that's in doubt. I have yet to watch any of the current, fourth, season, which has no UK distribution at present, but it would be deliciously ironic should it turn out to be the final exposure. 

Doom Patrol holds the record, as far as I'm aware, for longest set-up for a superhero team. I thought two seasons from Cloak and Dagger was pushing it but we've watched these characters bicker and equivocate for three full seasons over whether they are - or even want to be - any kind of team. They don't even get a collective name until the final episode of Season Three, when Cliff "Robotman" Steele comes up with... Doom Force. 

Personally, I'd like to see a spin-off show featuring Dorothy and the Dead Boy Detectives, the team of paranormal investigators (Two ghosts and a medium.) with whom she leaves the show in Episode Three of the third season. Maybe they'll be back in Season Four. I hope so.

And that's about all I have for today. Another Friday afternoon ground down to dust.

Onwards!

Did I Say That Out Loud?

I was flicking through my Feedly this evening when I came across a piece on Pitchfork that for once seemed to be about someone I'd already heard of. Naturally, it wasn't a musician.You could say it wasn't even a real person, although we all know reality is a lie.

Back in the mid-90s, just before I discovered MMOs and thereby lost my fingernail grip on popular culture, at least for a while, I used to watch a quirky animated t.v, show called Daria. You may have heard of it. Apparently it was kind of a big deal. Not that we knew.

As I recall it was on Channel Four, possibly on a Sunday afternoon. I didn't watch it a whole lot but I liked it well enough. I particularly enjoyed the flat, deadpan delivery of the lead character, Daria Morgendoffer.

Around the same time the show was running, I was beginning to get back into video gaming after a few years' break. In 1997, I think it must have been, I'd bought a PC with my redundancy money, ostensibly with the intention of writing a novel. That never really panned out but inevitably some games got bought and among them was the original Baldur's Gate.

I'd scarcely begun playing before I discovered it was possible to swap both the character portraits and the characters' voices for custom versions. After a few experiments with making my own I took a look at some of the many versions floating about online and there I came across one that replaced the player character's entire repertoire of sayings and exclamations with lines from Daria. That's how I came to play through the whole of  Baldur's Gate as "a smart, snarky, sensitive teenage girl", to quote the Daria wiki.

This is also, surely, one of the primary reasons the first Baldur's Gate remains the only BioWare RPG I have ever - unequivocally - loved. The sardonic tone of these short clips (voice-acted by Tracy Grandstaff with admirable lack of affect) brought an astringency to the fantasy setting that undercut the sometimes ponderous self-importance of the narrative. Plus it made me laugh. Every time.

They say that once something's on the internet it'll be there until the heat death of the universe but if the original soundset I downloaded is still around then my google-fu isn't good enough to find it. I believe this clip features one of the soundbites it used. I'm sure I remember hearing my bard saying "I'm the Misery Chick" about ten thousand times over the course of the campaign.

All of which brings me to my point (and yes, I do have one, thanks). Earlier in the day I made a new Square Enix account and patched up FFXIV to take advantage of the new, improved endless free trial. No doubt I'll get around to posting about that in due course but for now I just want to mention the character voice samples.

In common with almost all Eastern MMOs, FFXIV offers you a choice of voices for your characters. You can have all kinds of squealing, grunting, yelping, groaning or giggling. The range runs the usual gamut from hysteria to...well, more hysteria. If you want anything more nuanced, though, well you're kinda outta luck as Lana Del Rey might say (Now there's an idea...Lana as the voice of your Miqo'te. That's a cash shop killer if ever I heard of one. I'll give you that one for free, Square, just make it happen).

Actually, it's not even fair to pick on Eastern MMOs. I've been playing a lot of LotRO of late and my Dwarf there can't go two seconds in a fight without growling or yelling "yaaarghh!" like a drunken pirate. It's really quite distracting.

GW2 has a seldom-mentioned function that allows you to replace any or all of the in-game music files with your own selections culled from your no doubt extensive and eclectic library of math rock and hair metal. If that can be a thing then why not voices?

I'm guessing that just about all MMO sound files are client-based, even when the character spouting the nonsense isn't my own. When I hear some passing mesmer boasting how she can run faster than a centaur, presumably that's the game triggering a sample that's already installed on my PC, so why couldn't it trigger a sample of my choice instead?

There doesn't seem to me to be any technical reason this couldn't be a standard add-on for games that allow such things. Maybe it is and I just haven't noticed. Oh boy, I hope so!

If not then someone better get right on it. I don't even mind if I have to cull and compile my own samples. I'm hearing voices already...