Arcane Vs The Mighty Nein

Before Christmas, I watched two animated fantasy TV series. I've been meaning to write something about them both ever since but somehow the post kept getting pushed down the list. Now, when I've found a slot for it, I discover I can't remember enough about either of them to make the kind of detailed analysis I would have liked. 

Lucky break! 

I guess I'll just have to go with whatever impressions have stuck, which is probably a more reliable and useful way of appraising the long-term value of any experience. Some things are very much meant to be "in the moment" but that's often more to do with sensation than any kind of cultural or academic appreciation.

The two shows were Arcane and The Mighty Nein. Both were first seasons, although there's also a Season Two of Arcane. I just haven't watched it yet. 

Both are also spin-offs, Arcane from League of Legends and The Mighty Nein from The Legend of Vox Machina, which itself is a spin-off from Critical Role. I have never played LoL and never watched Critical Role, although I did watch Vox Machina. 

The LoL connection actively put me off watching Arcane, which is why it's taken me so long to get around to giving it a try. Conversely, since I liked Vox Machina, I was keen to start The Mighty Nein as soon as it turned up on Prime Video.

And I was very happy with it, too. At least until I started watching Arcana, half way through the run.

It's Prime's own fault for staggering the release of TM9 in such an irritating fashion. If they'd let me watch the whole season in one go, I'd never have been in a position to make unfavorable comparisons. Three episodes dropped at the start and then it was a drip-feed of one a week. It was while I was tired of waiting for the next one that I started looking for something to fill the gap. In came Arcane.

I knew Arcane had been very well received and reviewed. My friend had raved about it at the time, too, so I even had a personal recommendation. She also assured me it was entirely independent of the video game, which she'd never played either. And still I wasn't keen.

Well, that was my mistake. Arcane is one of the best animated shows I've ever seen. It's been out for far too long for it to be worth my reviewing it properly, so I'll just say if for any reason you've been avoiding watching it you should do yourself a favor and start. Today, preferably.

Even if you aren't interested in the magitech world-building and fantasy plotline, something that seems exceedingly unlikely given what I know about the readership of this blog, it's worth seeing just for the visuals. If I've ever seen a better-animated show I can't immediately bring it to mind. 

The whole thing looks extremely expensive, as if a very great deal of money has been spent on producing animation far, far more lush and rich than any television show should have. It would be impressive for a movie, let alone a TV series. You could freeze-frame it and explore the individual images for hours although that would lose the enthralling, mesmerizing camera-work that makes the whole thing so astonishingly and thrillingly kinetic.

All of which stands in stark contrast to The Mighty Nein. Even before I had Arcane for comparison I was surprised by how flat and static the newer show looked. The first episode made me wonder if they were intentionally aiming for the look and feel of an 'eighties Sarturday Morning Cartoon. 

After a couple episodes I attuned to the look of TM9 and began to appreciate the way the show was doing more with less but then I started watching Arcane and TM9 went back to looking stiff and unfinished. It didn't put me off carrying on watching it but it was hard not to notice how perfunctory a lot of the imagery appeared in comparison.

Looks aren't everything, of course. Substance over style can be a mantra that works. Except that in this case Arcane has orders of magnitude more substance as well. 

I wouldn't attempt to precis the plot of either show. They're both quite twisty. Arcane, though, is truly complex while TM9 is mostly just complicated. One's a pantomime romp, the other's a greek tragedy. 

Each show relies on a good deal of character work as part of the narrative, with multiple characters appearing to be one thing and then turning out to be something else instead. In Arcane that feels like genuine character development. In TM9 it can have a whiff of Plot Logic.

I found Arcane to be quite an emotional experience. The characters are introduced and presented in a way that makes them feel like people you know. When things happen to them, there's a resonance. In TM9 they're more like performers you watch. When things happen to them, you're entertained.

The two approaches both work. I enjoyed both shows. The difference is in how much it feels like anything I saw mattered. Arcane operates much more on the lines of classical drama, working towards a catharsis. TM9 is more like a blockbuster movie, albeit one that's been put together on a very limited budget.

Characterization is strong in both but again in very different ways. TM9 relies very heavily on the well-rehearsed talents of a troupe of actors very much used to working together. There can be a sense of people "doing their turn", sometimes. The voice acting in Arcane feels much more individual, with a uniformly high level of skill but an absence of too-easy familiarity.

Of the two, there's no doubt which I preferred or which I thought was better-realized. Arcane not only aims much, much higher, it also hits the target bang in the middle. TM9 rolls along very cheerily but there were multiple occasions when things didn't quite seem to fit together or follow through and the whole affair had a very slightly ramshackle feel to it, now and again.

 

But it was very entertaining. The Mighty Nein is frequently funny, occasionally exciting and almost always fun to watch. I enjoyed it a good deal and will be very happy to watch the second season, currently in production.

Arcane, on the other hand, was a lot. I was exhausted by the end. Without giving anything away, it has a fantastic ending that I actually couldn't believe was the ending. I had to google it to make sure there wasn't another episode to come.

I found it completely satisfying and absolutely enthralling. But I finished it almost a month ago and I haven't started the second season yet. 

This is the thing: the two shows are ostensibly working the same end of the market but they're serving very different purposes. You need to be aware of the commitment levels each requires, which are radically different.

I mostly watch TV shows late in the evening. Usually, I'm looking for something relaxing that will see me asleep almost as soon as it ends. I'm not really in the market for thought-provoking art that's going to keep me awake for another hour, pondering the implications.

When I start the second season of Arcane, I'll be sure to have something lighter ready to follow it each evening. A kind of decompression show that'll clear my mind for sleep. So far, I haven't come up with one but I'm sure there's something out there. 

I very much doubt it's going to be that other show I know I ought to be watching. That other video-game spin-off that also had stellar reviews when it came out and that I've also been avoiding ever since. The one that just started a new season. The one that's currently #1 on Prime in the UK. The one you're watching. Yes, that one.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I did finally get around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. And I loved it. Now, that would be an ideal show to wind down at the end of an evening. 

Unfortunately, it's not a show. It's a short movie. And the sequel, which will also be a short movie, won't be here until 2029.

Any suggestions what I could watch until then?  

Three Shows Down

That post I wrote about the Kindle Fire? It didn't entirely come out of left field. You know how when you're driving on ice and the car goes into a skid and you're meant to steer into it - well, it happened like that.

It was supposed to be about what I've been watching on TV recently, which is why it opens with the paragraph about my viewing routine but let's not start all that again. The point is what I watched, not how or where I watched it.

It's been a while since I last wrote one of these. April, to be precise. Longer than I thought. Since then I've started some shows, finished some more, and I'm still in the midldle of watching the rest. As I said back then, there's a problem in writing about watching TV, which is that it takes weeks, even months to finish a series. They run across each other and there's seldom a neat, tidy moment to stop and assess.

So I'm just going to get on with it. It'll be messy but hey. I can at least begin with the shows I've watched all the way through. They all happen to be on Prime. I don't know if that means anything.

The Legend of Vox Machina

I was wary of this. It looked a bit shoddy. I was short an animation at the time, though, several others having non-started on me, so I gave it a go.

The tone was hard to define at first. It seemed like comedy-fantasy, always a risk, but I could sense there were undertones I wasn't getting, a rumble of subtext. I quite liked the characters, though, and the jokes didn't make me ill so I stuck with it and gradually it occurred to me it might be an adaptation of something I'd read other people talking about a good while ago. 

And it was. According to Wikipedia the show is "based on the first campaign of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role." I imagine everyone already knew that. 

Finding out the origin neither increased nor diminished my enjoyment. It was an interesting piece of background but no more. By then I was moderately invested in the storyline and more interested in where the show was going than where it had come from.

I finished watching it a few weeks ago and already I can't remember all that much about it. That's the danger of leaving these things too long. I can remember the characters, though, and enjoying myself, so I'm pleased to see a third season was commisioned late last year although it seems like it won't surface on Prime until early 2024 at the earliest.

Having enjoyed the animation, you'd have thought I might have felt more like giving the live role-playing show a look, something I've always resisted, no matter how people have talked it up. Somehow, I don't. 

Swedish Dicks

I watched this around the same time but I remember it a lot more clearly. If you want to talk about a show with an odd tone...

The Swedish Dicks are literally that: two Swedes who live in Los Angeles and work as private detectives. At the beginning there's just one Swedish Dick and the agency is called The Swedish Dick. Then another Swede turns up and joins so they add an "s" to the end of the name. The writers seem so pleased with that joke they focus it a couple of times, which should give you some idea.

When I was about eight or nine and no doubt an embarrassingly preocious trial to all who met me, I once had an argument with my Aunt over the word "dick". I insisted it was a legitimate nickname for a detective. She was equally sure it wasn't and that I oughtn't to be saying it at all. She's still alive but she's in her late 'eighties now. Probably a bit late to call her up and tell her I was right. (I knew I was right then, of course. I wasn't bloody guessing, was I?)

I liked this show quite a lot. It's funny enough to carry the elevator pitch premise. It also has the weirdest casting. The two leads are Swedish-born character actor Peter Stormare, a familiar face, if not name, from umpteen Hollywood movies and Johan Glans, a Swedish stand-up comedian. So far, so logical.

Among the recurring cast are Traci Lords, a name even I can recognize as synonymous with the porn industry and... Keanu Reeves. The Wikipedia entry for the show goes into some detail about how Lords got the part but how they landed Keanu remains a mystery. He's very... Keanu in it.

My favorite characters were none of the above. I liked Vivian Bang as Sun, the enigmatically terrifying Vietnamese woman who has a business in the same office block as the Dicks and becomes increasingly entwined with their bizarre cases and Felisha Cooper, playing Sarah, kick-ass lawyer and unlikely daughter of original dick Ingmar, who... ditto.

The show ran two seasons, two more than it had any right to run. It didn't go down well with the critics but I liked it. It's ramshackle and most of it makes no sense but it hangs together, somehow. Much like the rest of Keanu's career, now I come to think of it...

Deadloch

Oh boy. Everything Swedish Dicks probably wishes it was, Deadloch is by orders of magnitude. Hysterically funny, jaw-droppingly weird, mostly uncategorizeable, barely describable. An absolute one-off.

It's Australian, set in a no-mark country town in the backwoods of Tasmania. The two central characters are senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), the town's senior police officer, and senior investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), a detective flown in from Darwin to take over a murder investigation. 

The police contingent is rounded out by the excellent Sven (Tom Ballard) and Abby (Nina Oyama) and there's a huge ensemble cast of townspeople, almost all of whom are confoundingly peculiar. A few are even likeable.

The first three episodes are the broadest of broad farce and also, without any possible challenge, the sweariest thing I have ever seen on the small screen. Seriously, the swearing just never stops. And it's hard swears, too! I love truly creative swearing and this is outstanding. I'd quote some of the best bits but I'd be too embarrassed to type them out. 

Sadly, almost none of the strengths of the show are evident in the bland trailer but it's all we've got, so use your imagination.

The opening episodes are extremely funny and I was expecting the whole season to continue that way but it does a slow pivot in the middle to become much more of a police procedural. It's still funny but the humor starts to disappear under the encroaching shadow as the scale of the threat becomes clear.

As well as mounting an attempt on the Guinness Televised Swearing record (Not a real record, sadly.) Deadloch also seems to be trying to dismantle the entire concept of the Australian national character. I'm guessing there must be a whole strata of subcultural satire going on that non-Australians are going to miss but even judging by the part that juts above the surface, this is brutal stuff.

The show also evidences an almost mythical socio-cultural ambition, denaturing expectations left and right and leaving them bleeding in the Tasmanian mud. I spent some time trying to work out if the writers were trying to favor any particular ethnic, gender, class or orientational grouping over the rest but in the end I came to the conclusion they found every one of them worth poking hard. 

The First Nation characters come out of it best but certainly not unscathed. Straight, white men get it the worst. I'm not sure there's a single, heterosexual caucasian cis-male that isn't proven loathesome by the end. Everyone else gets pummelled repeatedly but somehow makes it through with at least a tatter of some kind of dignity or credibility.

The show ends with a very definite and satisfying resolution, albeit one that gave me unplasant flashbacks for about a week, which makes it entirely comfortable to recommend as a mini-series in terms of narrative conclusion but only providing you can cope with everything else it's going to throw at you. 

The coda, however, is a blatant set-up for Season 2 which, if it ever happens, looks like will shift the action to Eddie's home town of Darwin in the Australian far north. I hope they make it - Dulcie and Eddie and the showrunners both.

And that's what I've finished watching. Next time we'll take a look at what I still am, although of course there's a chance I might have finished at least one more show by then. 

I said this was going to be tricky.