Love and bingeing through the lockdown

Lockdown, I’ve discovered, is a good time for a Love binge.

No, no, not that kind. I’m talking about bingeing on TV series about Love. And there are three we’ve been enjoying recently on that theme. One of them goes so far as to take the remarkably original title, Love.

Only one of them is new, so you may know them anyway. But just in case, here are my recommendations.

Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas in Lovesick
Having fun (left) and not so much (right)

Let’s start with Lovesick, a British series, jointly produced by Channel 4 and Netflix. It’s based in Glasgow (though you have to work that out for yourselves, and the accents are almost all English). It’s still available on Netflix.

The premise amused me: a young man (Johnny Fynn) diagnosed with chlamydia has to contact all his sexual partners of the last several years, of whom despite his obvious emotional clumsiness and ineptitude in relationship-building, it turns out there are a large number.

He’s surrounded by a diverse crew of friends, including the would-be gigolo (Daniel Ings) who’d rather not be (OK, you have to watch the series to get that), the friend (Joshua McGuire) for whom every relationship is long-term until it blows up in his face, and the young woman (Antonia Thomas) whose attraction for one particular young man (no, no spoilers here) is veiled by a series of attachments that could never prove as satisfactory.

Around them is a string of secondary characters with their idiosyncrasies and their peculiar stories which keep the series moving nicely through its 22 episodes in three seasons (originally released between 2014 and 2018). Cleverly, all the characters occasionally do things that are off-putting, but then win their way back into our affections in other, more attractive ways. 

Overall, there wasn’t a character I didn’t feel I liked, at least most of the time. Which is a great relief, since I’ve seen – and abandoned – plenty of series where I feel that no one appeals to me.

Mae Martin and Lisa Kudrow in Feel Good
Charlotte Ritchie is behind them

The second series is new (released in 2020), with only one six-episode season so far. Feel Good is also British, and made jointly by Channel 4 and Netflix. There’s no confirmation of a second season yet, though it would surprise me if there weren’t one (though perhaps delayed by coronavirus).

It’s a semi-autobiographical look at the life of the acting lead and co-writer (with Joe Hampson) of the show, Mae Martin. She’s a Canadian-born stand-up comic, based in Britain since 2011.

Martin’s a good standup and we got some amusing comedy scenes (not quite as many or as extended as in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, but nonetheless of the same general kind). She’s also an attractively complex individual, who resists being categorised as either bisexual or lesbian, and identifies as either non-binary or a woman, using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘they’. No problem there, as I’ll use whatever pronoun about them that she wants.

From the first episode, Mae gets into a new relationship with a straight woman (Charlotte Ritchie), ironically called George, and the rest of the season takes us on a roller coaster ride of their relationship, mixed in with the problems of coping with addiction (or with an addicted friend) and of handling the stereotypically awful British family of George’s friends.

Everything’s treated with a deft and light touch, making the even some difficult scenes beautifully comic. There’s also a wonderful performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother (she says her own parents are nothing like the depiction in the series, and I can only say, just as well). An unusual, quirky and beautifully funny series.

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love
Their roller coaster has troughs as well as peaks

Finally, there’s that series with the startlingly distinctive title, Love. That name’s so distinctive that, for the first time ever, I couldn’t use the title to track the entry down on IMDB.

You don’t know IMDB? It’s the best, most comprehensive internet movie database there is. Funnily enough, that’s what IMDB stands for, by the way.

The only way to search for it, I found, was to look for the name of Paul Rust, and then pick the series title from the list of his filmography. That’s quite appropriate, as it happens, since Rust is a highly talented individual, who’s both an accomplished scriptwriter and a fine actor. He’s the co-creator, one of the producers and a star of the show.

His co-star is Gillian Jacobs as the wacky non-conformist with the addicted personality (yep, we get some addiction in this series too), who has a bit of a rocky ride with Rust’s character. Like Lovesick, there’s a large collection of secondary characters, each funny in his/her/their way (see? I’m learning about personal pronouns). And, again like Lovesick, the behaviour of the main characters makes them absolutely unbearable at some moments, though at others they redeem themselves, so you can’t help sympathising with them generally.

I have to confess that we’ve only watched season 1 so far, but we’ve enjoyed it enormously. It’s a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018, with 34 episodes over three series. My suspicion is that when we get to the end, I shall feel as many others have, that it was cancelled too soon.

Still, it has all the qualities one needs to get through some more of the Lockdown with sanity undisturbed…

Unbelievable’s unbelievably good. Believe me.

Imagine an eighteen-year old woman, in foster care since she was three, at last able to move into a half-way house, semi-independent but with staff on-site to protect and support her. And then she’s raped. In her room. By a masked intruder, who comes in through the window from the balcony, binds her, assaults her, takes pictures and goes a few minutes after first appearing.

Kaitlyn Dever as Marie Adler

An appalling, devastating experience. But it gets far worse. After showering sympathy on the victim, Marie Sadler, played with great empathy by Kaitlyn Dever, individuals start to doubt her story. Worse still, the doubts eventually reach the (male) detectives investigating the case. Ultimately, far from having the police on her side, hunting down a criminal, she finds herself facing charges herself, of having made a false report.

It’s a powerful and immediately gripping start to a remarkable Netflix original mini-series, of just eight episodes, called Unbelievable.

All the better for being based on a real case.

Or rather, real cases. Because in episode 2, we’re taken forward three years to 2011, and from the state of Washington into Colorado. There Karen Duvall, a detective excellently portrayed by Merritt Wever, has been called in to investigate an appalling rape. The masked rapist came in through a window, bound and assaulted his victim, took photos and left. There are some key differences: he took four hours with this victim, and he made her shower for twenty minutes, to wash away all trace of DNA. But these are enhancements in his technique. The basic crime is the same.

A stroke of luck reveals to the detective that a similar offence took place in another nearby police district. In fact, when she contacts the detective investigating that case, Grace Rasmussen, played in another fine performance by Toni Colette, the two women quickly realise that this rapist knows something of police procedure, and never commits a crime in the same district twice, relying on lack of communication between separate stations.

Merritt Wever as Karen Duvall and Toni Colette as Grace Rasmussen

So they combine their investigations and discover that there are several other crimes to add to the two they already know about. These were, in reality, what came to be known as the Washington and Colorado serial rape cases.

From this point on, the series is following two stories: that of Marie Sadler in Washington, and that of the two detectives in Colorado. Both story lines are gripping from the outset, intense in their impact on the viewer, powerful in their suspense. We suspect that the lines must eventually intersect, but we can’t be sure and we don’t know how or when. The best kind of crime TV.

The basis in fact gives the series poignancy and impact. The writers have changed names and naturally to some extent fictionalised the account, but the key events are as they were in history. Add to that excellent writing and superlative performances, above all by the three main actors, and you have in Unbelievable an outstanding series it would be a pity to miss.

Call my Agent. And enjoy

France has been slow in building itself an international reputation for producing TV series. In fact, it wasn’t until … that it released the first series to win a major following outside France, was Engrenages, translated into English as Spiral, a gripping and entertaining thriller series, though one that sometimes pushed credibility rather beyond the limits of plausibility.

Since then, they’ve made several, including under the Netflix name, of greater or lesser quality. None, however, had come close to rivalling Spiral until Call my Agent or, to give its original title, Dix pour cent, from the Netflix stable. The French title is for the fee a theatrical agent will charge a client for finding him or her roles in theatre or films.

The agency is a great setting for all the tensions and poisonous relationships that we’ve come to expect from office-based soaps. This series, though, handles them particularly well: the clever plots and manipulations often blow up in their perpetrators’ faces, and the games that the powerful play sometimes succeed but sometimes fail against a smart counter-move – or simply bad luck.

The cast of Call My Agent: ready to entertain us a lot.
And even surprise us a little
l to r: Liliane Rovère, Stéfi Celma, Grégory Montel, Camille Cottin,
Nicolas Maury, Laure Calamy, Thibault de Montalembert,
Fanny Sidney,  Assaad Bouab

That, indeed, is the great charm of the series: every single episode has an obvious ending that one can predict from the beginning, and hardly any actually ends that way. That makes even the ones that do end the way you’d expect surprising, since it’s so unusual for any of them to do so.

The acting, too, is superb, to the highest level of comedy. We have the female assistant (Laure Calamy) who will occasionally fly into a rage or a panic attack with superb contortions of her body – almost clinical seizures – or the gay male assistant (Nicolas Maury) who makes no secret of his wounded and hurtful feelings, while also proving frequently the smartest person present, with clever suggestions expressed in a gloriously camp voice.

We have the adulterous agent (Thibault de Montalembert), we have the agent who can’t keep a girlfriend (Grégory Montel), we have the old agent who had her glory years decades ago, out of which at least one old flame will appear for our amusement (Liliane Rovère), we have the driven Lesbian who falls in love but can’t help straying, not always with a woman (Camille Cottin), and we have the young ingénue who gives us our protagonist and our benchmark of normality while remaining charming and likeable (Fanny Sidney). And even she has a secret that will dog her for many episodes…

All this is excellent enough but then there’s the structure adopted by the series. These agents have clients and those clients are actors. Some, indeed, are stars, and the producers decided not to use ordinary actors playing stars, but real stars playing ‘themselves’. The quotation marks around ‘themselves’ are there because these are fictional versions of themselves – I don’t think, for instance, that Monica Bellucci would have to spend long in an enforced singleton existence in Paris, unless she truly wanted to.

Juliette Binoche getting ready to open the Cannes Festival

Bellucci is far from the only star we meet. There’s at least one in every episode, and many of them are of the same calibre: Isabelle Adjani, Fabrice Lucchini, Guy Marchand, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few of the major figures of the last few decades of French cinema who appear in the series.

For the moment, there are just three seasons of six 45-minute episodes each. Perfect binge watching. And much to be enjoyed…

A TV of strong female leads. At last

It felt like a long overdue change might be taking place, as we watched episodes from three TV series this weekend, all with powerful female characters.

Amazon released a couple of episodes of The Man in the High Castle some time back, but the full series came out at the end of last week. It’s set in a parallel present (well, parallel past now, since the book appeared in 1962). World War 2 was won by Germany and Japan. What had been the United States is now split into a huge zone covering the middle and eastern states, under the dominion of the Greater Nazi Reich, a smaller coastal area in the west administered by imperial Japan, and between them a neutral zone based around the Rocky Mountains.

An alternative reality for the United States

The key figure is Juliana Crain, well played by Alexa Davalos as conflicted, troubled and dangerous to all who come into contact with her. Around her are some powerful characters, mostly male – including an utterly vicious bounty hunter played with deeply sinister and blood-chilling panache by Burn Gorman – and together they make for great viewing. But don’t make my mistake and read the book before watching the series: I find myself constantly regretting the series’ divergence from Philip K. Dick’s novel. It presents the Japanese as significantly less heavy handed in their oppression than the Nazis; indeed, much of the narration focuses on a Japanese character whose torment is central to the action. In addition, the book is much more about the nature of fiction and reality, far less about the top-level story. Most of that seems to be gone from the series, at least in the first four episodes we’ve watched so far. Instead, it’s more concerned to tell a tale around the theme of occupation and resistance.

It’s still gripping, though, and Juliana’s character is complex and believable.

Meanwhile, the BBC has released the latest season of The Bridge, the Swedish-Danish police series centred around the character of Saga Norén, socially awkward to the point of autism, but a thorough and gifted detective with the Swedish police in Malmo. We were a little concerned about how the story would keep going having lost Saga’s opposite number from Copenhagen, Martin Rohde, denounced by her at the end of season 2 and now in gaol. But the series keeps going just fine, with the same bewildering cast of characters, the same highly-stylised and vicious killings, and Saga driving same Porsche with its weird shade of green.

Saga Norén and her weird-coloured Porsche 911

A sub-plot’s already been announced, in which Saga’s going to have to address her own complex past, above all in relation to her parents and the death, for which she blames them, of her sister. Chickens, one feels, are going to come to roost. Meanwhile, her new Danish partner has secrets of his own, including drugs and apparently a rather unusual view of sex. Plenty of promise there, then, for more Nordic noir at its most intense.

The other series has just been released on Netflix. Even the Guardian talked about Jessica Jones as unusual for being yet another Marvel comics spinoff, but unusually with a strong female lead. The eponymous protagonist is played by Krysten Ritter, and she has real complexity. Still shaken by PTSD, she seeks solace in two activities which don’t play much of a role in most comics: heavy drinking and (occasionally) casual sex. She’s a compelling character, but not necessarily a nice one.

Jessica Jones: always interesting, not always nice

The basic story line is standard for a Marvel spinoff. She’s a super-hero, though with the neat twist that she’s retired from the game, making her living as a Private Investigator. She’s up against a super villain (David Tennant) with truly diabolical powers – indeed it’s because she’s a past victim of his that she’s a PTSD sufferer – and, again in an original departure, there’s nothing of the joker about his villainy, which is quite bleakly cruel. Much more like The Bridge indeed, than Guardians of the Galaxy, say.

I didn’t expect ever to feel anything more than slightly supercilious amusement at a comic-strip spinoff, but this one’s a cut or two above that. I’m looking forward to the next episode.


PS In a piece about strong female characters on TV, you might feel I ought to have said something about Nicola Walker. I haven’t forgotten her. Watch this space.

Locke: a classic gem

Occasionally, one comes across a real little gem on TV (and I should say in passing that Netflix is good at producing them).

The latest we’ve watched is a TV-length film, Locke, written and directed by Steven Knight. No, nothing to do with the philosopher. In fact, the eponymous protagonist, played with fine self-restraint by Tom Hardy, is a construction director, on the eve of the greatest “concrete-pour” Europe has ever known. And he’s leaving his post in charge of this historic event…

Locke: short but classically perfect

What makes it a gem? It reminded me of so much from my long-distant student past. I studied French, and therefore, in particular, the drama of the seventeenth century, and its preoccupation with observing the canons of classical theatre. The unities, for instance, of place and time and plot. And the carefully prescribed elements of tragedy.

Tragedy,” explains Aristotle in the Poetics, the authority on these matters, is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvellous in them then than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance. Even matters of chance seem most marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance when the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys’ death by falling down on him when a looker-on at a public spectacle; for incidents like that we think to be not without a meaning. A Plot, therefore, of this sort is necessarily finer than others.

Locke gives us all of this.

The unities are all about plausibility. How can an audience be expected to believe that several years have passed, when they’ve been siting in their seats for only an hour or two? The seventeenth century in fact took a bit of a liberty: the action could be stretched to twenty-four hours and still respect the unity of time, but no more. Locke does far better: it occurs as near as possible in real time – it lasts an hour and a half and shows us an hour and half of a man’s life.

Similarly, the unity of place was designed to limit the need for suspension of disbelief, by not constantly moving the setting of the action. None of the brutal, anarchic shifting around the place as in that uncouth Shakespeare: you couldn’t have a play start in a Royal Palace, continue at Southampton as the King prepares to cross the Channel with his army, and culminate in a muddy field near Agincourt in Northern France. Now Locke handles this unity cleverly: we travel from the English Midlands to London, but always in the protagonist’s car.

Finally, Locke majestically maintains unity of plot: the focus is entirely on Locke, as his life gradually unravels before our eyes, from one mobile phone call to the next.

And those calls? Exactly the components of tragedy for Aristotle: incidents that occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one other. Locke is a man who made a mistake but is true to himself. It is that mistake and his unbending commitment to the principle that he will make it right that will destroy him. There is indeed even a sense that his fate is in his genes, as he explains to his absent, dead father that he has no intention of behaving in the same shameful way, even at the cost this will inevitably inflict on him.

So we sit and watch his destiny grind out stolidly, imperturbably, inescapably, event by event, call by call. Our fear and pity mount for the man who cannot escape the effects of the machine he himself set going. Like Mitys’ murderer killed by Mitys’ statue, one event linked to the other, he is being crushed by its inexorable logic.

Just an hour and a half. A real gem for anyone who might enjoy the classic canons applied, with freshness and intelligence, in a modern setting.