Upload/Undone

Seasons of original shows on Amazon Prime seem to run eight or ten episodes. It's a curious length. I grew up with U.K. television series lasting about that long but I'm used to American seasons stretching out for twenty weeks or more to fit the way Network schedules used to align with the calendar. There's a reason they call them "Seasons", after all.

Freed from those constraints I guess it makes sense to take smaller bites, especially when you take into account the tendency to let the whole thing go at once. Eight episodes makes for a handy weekend mini-binge.

I try not to do that. For series that come in single figures I try to ration myself to one a day. Or one a night, since that's when I watch. I've come semi-circle (not full) from TV advocacy in the eighties/nineties through abstinence in the oughts to what I like to feel is a balanced stance today.

After Tales from the Loop, which turned out to be every bit as good as I'd hoped, I moved on to another science fiction-inflected original, Upload, a brand-new show debuting this month. As the trailer says, it's from "The guy that brought you The Office and Parks and Recreation" only I didn't watch the trailer until later so I didn't know that. Also I've never seen The Office, either version.

I have seen Parks and Receation, though. It's superb. That might have swayed me, had I known. The trailer certainly wouldn't. It's a terrible advertisement for the show. Yes, it is partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top but it's more a murder mystery and a lot better than the trailer would suggest.

I'd definitely reccommend Upload. It's smart and funny and has an involving if highly unoriginal plot. Its big strength is some very strong, nuanced characters. Andi Allo, once a singer and guitarist in Prince's New Power Generation, has been drawing all the attention for her turn as Nora and she is a warm and inviting presence but for my money the most interesting performance comes from Allegra Edwards in the far less likeable but unsettlingly nuanced role of Ingrid.

With only ten episodes, I was through Upload in not much over a week. I sped up a bit towards the end. Watched a couple of episodes back to back. Hard to resist doing that.

Amazon, naturally, uses algorithms to suggest things you might want to watch next. One of the shows it put in front of me after Upload finished was the very similarly-named Undone. Makes you wonder whether they're sorting these things by subject and theme or just going with the closest character match.

Luckily, Undone is another top choice. Better than Upload?  Maybe, although I'm not sure it makes much sense to compare the two. They have some similarities, sure, particularly in the female leads and the murder mystery backdrop and the "from the guys that brought you" pitch (in this case, those would be the guys that brought you Bojack Horseman, a show I really want to see...) but they're more different than they are alike. At least the trailer's better, we can all agree on that.

Undone came out last September but I didn't notice it back then. It's  Amazon's first original animated series, although I sometimes balk at including rotoscoped motion capture in "animation". Where Upload's reviews are somewhat mixed (people seem either to absolutely love it or think it's very weak), Undone has had almost universal critical approval and I can see why.

It's a very adult show, something I also felt keenly with Tales from the Loop. Very much television for grown-ups. That's definitely down to the outstanding writing, but I also believe it has much to do with process. Animation always drags a huge weight of history along, pegging anything that smacks of cartooning as for kids, but I have a strong suspicion rotoscope imparts a gravitas that's not always fairly earned. It's a paradox.

Something about the cleanliness of the surfaces, the ability to include only what's wanted, combined with the eerie sense of watching real people (which we are) conspires to elevate the experience somehow, make it feel more important, give it depth. A heightened reality. That's certainly the case here, where the acting is exemplary, the illustration overwhelming.

Undone triggers me. It might be argued I see Philip K Dick in everything but he's here for sure, not just in the fracturing of reality but in the stylistic hat-tip to the stone-age mo-cap of A Scanner Darkly. I was minded also, at all times, of the Hernandez brothers' classic work on Love and Rockets. It's a more dangerous comparison. Lazy, maybe. Latinx characters, ligne claire by way of Riverdale High... an easy conclusion to jump but I'll stand by it.

It's more than surface. Alma's spiky, punk attitude, the relationship between her and sister Becca, their physicality - Alma gamine, Becca womanly - all vibe Hopey and Maggie. And I speak as someone who once had photocopies of the two of them all over my walls.

Love and Rockets also operated in the liminal space between the quotidian and the fantastic and so does Undone, albeit much more quietly. There are no rockets, for a start.

There is quantum entanglement, though, and timeshifting. And pre-Columbian mysticism. Or maybe it's all just in Alma's scattered mind. A car crash, PTSD and a family history of schizophrenia might lead you to see things that way.

Upload and Undone have both been picked up for second series, just as well since they both end, if not on cliffhangers, then on open questions. This is the part of watching new stuff I don't much relish. The waiting. Then again, with things as they are these days, who can afford to leave it for the box set?

In The Loop

I was flipping through a folder of old Guild Wars 2 screenshots (I have nearly thirteen thousand of them now), looking for illustrations for yesterday's post on NPCs when I happened upon the picture above. Just for a second I was back in the Loop.

The tall-trunked pines, the blue and gold automaton, self-dismantling architecture streaming up into the sky. The resonance felt uncanny.

I've been watching Amazon's latest high-profile project, Tales from the Loop.  So far I've only seen two of the eight episodes, all of which were released simultaneously in early April.

It's been described variously as "Thoughtful television for the slow days of lockdown" (The Independent) "Artfully slow-moving sci-fi" (The Guardian) and "Another dystopian drama for your lockdown watch list" (NME). Digital Spy believes the show is "more than just Amazon's Stranger Things" despite both being set in the 1980s. Well, a 1980s, although after the two episodes I've watched I'm not sure how you'd know. It looks as much like the 1950s as the 1980s to me.

The two things everyone seems to agree on, whether they like the show or not, is that Tales from the Loop" is very beautiful and very, very slow. That's what drove Joel Gilby of The Guardian to distraction: "Loop is very beautiful, but that’s where the praise ends. Fundamentally, I consider it rude to take an hour of someone’s life and only tell seven to nine minutes of story across it", he says of the first episode, one of the most thought-provoking and emotionally disturbing hours of television I've watched in years. I guess you either get it or you very much don't.

The pace is astonishing. I can entirely understand how some viewers might - will - find it frustrating. Shots don't just linger, they glaciate. There's a scene in the second episode where you can literally watch paint dry. Almost everyone speaks slowly, often quietly, often with little inflection. Conversations barely start, rarely continue, often drift. Half of every episode seems to be people walking through woodland.

I find the whole thing mesmerizing. I absolutely love it. Time seems almost to stand still while I watch. If you think nothing's happening, you're wrong. Everything is happening. If I was going to say anything negative, which I'm not,  it would be that an hour isn't nearly long enough.

Unusually (uniquely?) the series is based not on a novel or a comic but on paintings by Swedish Artist Simon Stålenhag. The soundtrack is by Philip Glass. One of the eight episodes is directed by Jodie Foster. This is a project that takes itself seriously and with ideas on this scale it needs to.

I need to re-iterate that I've only seen two episodes so this is not a review. In gaming terms it's a first impressions piece. What I would say is that, contrary to the numerous claims I've read suggesting Tales from the Loop as warm, cosy, nostalgic comfort viewing for lock-ins, I found it disturbing, unsettling, unsafe. If I had to slot the series into a genre, based on what I've seen so far, that genre would be existential horror.

The themes of loss, dissociation and identity put me in mind not just of Philip K Dick but of Kafka. The setting, a small town deep in pinewoods, inevitably invites comparisons with Twin Peaks. There's more than a touch of Lovecraft lurking in those woods, too.

To put it mildly, this is not an easy watch. It's bleak, dark, almost nihilistic. It's compelling. I really hope the next six episodes live up to the promise of the two I've watched. It would be one hell of a standard to keep up.

I could go on at length but I'll wait until I've seen the rest.

I wish I could remember what that golem in GW2 was doing, too.