Dion Warren will have plenty of time to hone his superpowers: Netflix has renewed its sci-fi drama Raising Dion for Season 2.
Raising Dion Renewed for Season 2 — TVLine
Ahhh this is good news! I watched the first season and I was like, awww, this is cute and clever and ends on a cliffhanger, no way our TV overlords will give it a second season. But they did!!
Continuing on from my favourite films of the decade, here’s my favourite (not necessarily best) TV shows! Alphabetically, of course, and illustrated with gifs.
Honestly Adventure Time is a masterpiece. A surrealist masterpiece, an animation masterpiece, a masterpiece of children’s television… call it whatever you want but “masterpiece” needs to be in there somewhere. It was weird, touching, occasionally terrifying, and never lost sight of what it wanted to do…for nine years. I’m sad that it’s (mostly) over but so, so glad it happened.
Come 2013 I was suddenly seeing this show everywhere. I knew the names of all the characters before I ever sat down to watch it, and most of the best jokes. That didn’t dent my enjoyment in the slightest. Brooklyn 99 is so, so good in just about every way. It’s funny, it’s smart, it has people in it who you just don’t see as main characters, like Captain Holt. The fact that Fox *spits* cancelled it and then it was almost immediately picked up by NBC just goes to show how much of a impact it had.
Call the Midwife has only been going since 2012 but it feels like it’s been so much longer. (That’s a good thing.) This is a pro-NHS, pro-feminism, pro-LGBT show that goes out prime-time on the BBC and I’m so grateful it exists. It never shies away from the rough parts of history, but instead pulls them out into the light to remind us of our responsibilities. It angers me no end that critics sometimes dismiss this show as frivolous nostalgia for the past, because there is nothing nostalgic about this show. It DESPERATELY wants you to know how horrible it was being a woman even within living memory. It’s a sucker punch to the gut with occasional upbeat ’50s music and some neat dresses.
All the praise to Netflix, because if it hadn’t existed and advertised this show on its front page I would never have discovered it. And I love it. This is an adult cartoon done right, i.e. using animation to tell a story of vast scope instead of using it to tell fart jokes. (Though there are probably a couple of those, even if I don’t remember them.) It’s like… how can I even describe this show… the ambition of Star Wars meets the themes of Guardians of the Galaxy meets the zest of Futurama. AND it has a adorable squishy space pet/planet-destroyer! This show not having a much bigger fanbase is such a dang injustice.
I’d heard of Gravity Falls, and heard nothing but good things, but I didn’t actually see it until several years after it came out. And I’m SO CROSS because the show was set up as a big mad mystery to be solved, and it would have been great to be able to trade theories and decode the end messages along with everyone else. But as it stands… I got a fantastic experience anyway. I knew all the major twists, but I’d never really met the characters properly. So now I love them all, especially Soos. And I also love the show’s central theme, which is that growing up is hard as hell and you need a good support system.
The Handmaid’s Tale has always been one of my favourite books and this adaptation was more than I could ever have dreamed of. It took characters I already knew and built them backstories and new futures. It cast unbelievably talented actors for even the smaller roles. And my god the visuals, the punch-you-in-the-face visuals. The red-and-white Handmaid uniforms are seen at political protests a lot now, and they should be. This show demonstrates how unforgivably close we always are to losing everything we hold dear.
I read all of the His Dark Materials series as a kid and I remember liking them, especially the third book. This TV adaptation brought all of that crashing back and then some. I have some qualms (it’s obvious that the budget couldn’t stretch to one visible daemon for every human, for example) but my gosh, what an absolutely beautiful job they’ve done with everything else. And the acting is wonderful, although Ruth Wilson is the standout the child actors are like… clearly the best in the business, holy hell. I can’t WAIT for the next couple of seasons.
The Last Man on Earth massively lit up my life… for the few years it was on. My god, Fox had no idea what they had on their hands. After the dodgy first season it suddenly turned into this amazing, beautiful, touching tale about life after the end of the world. Characters underwent development! They got married! They had kids! And then all of a sudden… end of show. Right after a cliffhanger ending, a major one. Sigh. I’ll always miss LMOE but I’m grateful I was around at the same time it was.
I’d wanted to watch Superstore for ages but I only finally got to see it when it came on British TV. And even then I managed to catch only the season one finale before anything else. But it hooked me instantly and I quickly went back to the beginning to see what I missed and then forward again to season two. By the season two finale I had utterly fallen in love with it. It’s hilarious but it pulls no punches about how inhumanly terrible the American retail systems are – how inhumanly terrible a lot of systems are, in fact. Also, Mark McKinney’s “Muppet voice” for Glenn is possibly the best comedy voice that has ever been created, EVER.
This show. Rarely have I seen anything so bleak and depressing and yet so triumphant at the end. Marie, who is very VERY closely based on a real person, goes through an amount of trauma and distress which would destroy most people (and very nearly destroys her) but she gets to walk away vindicated, thank god. The intervention of two female detectives saves not only her but a multitude of other women. It seems to me to be so rare that such a terrible story has a happy or just ending, so thank god this show arrived with its pointed message: when it comes to rape cases, we need to be better. So, so much better than we currently are. Please watch it.
Honourable mentions: The Good Place, Steven Universe, the Moffat and Chibnall eras of Doctor Who (not eligible because the show itself started last decade…), Broadchurch, Orange is the New Black, and probably a few more that I forgot, sorry.
Like a lot of Brits I was kinda intrigued by the trailers for The Accident. It looked sort of unimpressive aesthetically, I thought, but it had some good actors attached and an interesting premise. So I watched it. Hooooo boy.
Here is a summary of the first episode of The Accident:
Down-to-earth Welsh hairdresser Sarah Lancashire walks into her 15-year-old daughter’s room and finds her having sex with an older guy. Instead of ripping his balls off or calling the police (as having sex with a 15-year-old girl is you know ILLEGAL) she seems pretty chill about it all and tells the guy (uh, the pedophile) to escape out of the window before the girl’s dad comes back. Okay.
Downstairs the husband comes in and he’s dressed in a banana costume for a fun run. The adults go off to the fun run and while they’re there they listen to some clunky foreshadowing about how much everyone loves the village and will fight for it etc etc. Meanwhile some teenagers including the daughter are meeting up at an old abandoned building.
These are BAD KIDS! You can tell because some of them have DYED HAIR and PIERCINGS. They sneak under the extremely ineffective barbed wire and start vandalising the place. One of them spray-paints a willy which is the only realistic thing anyone in this story does. While the daughter and her friend are painting a butterfly mural on the upper floor of the building for some reason, there’s a massive gas explosion. Oh no! The explosion can be heard at the fun run zone and all the adults decide to go and see what happened. Okay, that I can buy, as I also live in a village and villagers are nosy AF.
The parents hear that kids are inside the building, which is odd cos no-one saw them go in, and start worrying. A phone call comes in from one of the girls (the daughter’s friend?) which confirms that a whole bunch of teens are trapped. Cut to some heroic firemen working to free them, using a angle grinder, WHICH SHOOTS SPARKS EVERYWHERE, in a GAS EXPLOSION. I considered for one second that that maybe was a plot point and the rest of the show would be about prosecuting incompetent rescuers, but… um, it seems not.
Anyway at this point the head of the company which owns the building shows up, despite this apparently being a pretty remote Welsh village, how the hell did she get there so fast?! Sarah Lancashire, whose daughter is trapped within rubble and possibly dead, hits this lady with the mild insult “you built this place cheap as chips!” Um, it’s past the watershed, you can swear, you know. A TV camera is filming this because the TV cameras are there, in this remote village where an explosion happened apparently less than an hour ago.
Then the building collapses completely and kills almost everyone inside! Who saw that coming? Dust fills the air. Everyone looks… peturbed. Maybe shocked at a pinch. And… that’s it for the big scene of horror and grief!
But, seeing as Sarah Lancashire is the main character her daughter survives, albeit so severly injured she might be disabled for life. Emergency services whip body bags out right in front of the crowd, way to go guys. Also one of the firefighters is dead, this is Alan who is married to Debbie, a deaf woman. Casting a deaf actor (Genevieve Barr) to play a deaf character and making her disability not the most important aspect of her is the only good move this show appears to have done, I think.
Okay so Sarah Lancashire heads to hospital with the other parents and watches them one by one learn their kids have died. This is the episode’s only actually well-done scene. One of the mothers (the mother of the daughter’s friend?) walks past SL and snaps sharply and horribly “She’s dead” and that got me right in the gut, credit where credit’s due.
While in the hospital SL talks to a guy who apparently saved her daughter in the building but we didn’t see him there who what why?? Also the nurse lets her go in the room, what the hell kind of hospital is this?
Back at home it turns out SL’s husband has been beating her and is about to do so again. She lets him do it and then comforts him for a while. That scene got a lot of criticism on Twitter (yes, I was eagerly Twittering along with others as it aired, and there was barely a positive tweet in the bunch) but actually I was okay with that, it’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility for a victim of domestic abuse to act that way. Refuge thought so too and posted about it which I thought was a good move.
Nearly at the end now. SL’s daughter starts communicating with her mother via blinking and the grieving parents hold a vigil. Company lady goes on TV, the clip of SL shouting “cheap as chips” gets dramatically played over and over and I found that hilarious, oh god I’m sorry. Not only am I not convinced the writers of this have ever met a Welsh person I’m not entirely sure if they’ve ever met a British person, no one has said that phrase in years.
The ‘next time’ trailer sees the deaf lady being beaten up, so much for a sense of community spirit.
This show is getting rave reviews across all the major British outlets and I have honest to god no idea why. See, it almost reached “so bad it’s good” levels, but the thing is: this was loosely based on two real-life tragedies: Grenfell and Aberfan. The Accident – a show about specifically children dying in a Welsh disaster – aired almost 53 years to the day after Aberfan. If you’re British or keep up with world news I won’t have to tell you about Grenfell, which was only a couple of years ago. Even sidestepping the issue of why there are so few Welsh actors in a drama inspired by Aberfan and so few black and Muslim characters in a tale inspired by Grenfell, the tweaking of the story (the death of innocents caused by bad corporate policy) to make the victims partly responsible for their own deaths leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. No-one in Aberfan or Grenfell Tower were breaking into a building when they were killed. This show, it feels exploitative and just so… cheap.
Cheap as chips.
Unbelievable feels like it could be a sister show to Chernobyl, the horrifying masterpiece which dropped earlier this year. On the surface of things they don’t seem terribly alike (no-one dies a horrible lingering death in Unbelievable, more’s the pity when it comes to the rapist at the center of the story) but both are essentially about how miscommunication, ignorance, and plain old human stupidity can lead to tragedy.
And like Chernobyl, Unbelievable is based on a true story. I’m gonna go ahead and reveal now that Unbelievable ends happily, or as happily as it could do under the circumstances. The girl whose testimony kicks off the story, Marie Adler, she’s alive and well right now, settled down with children of her own. I didn’t know that going into this show, and was terribly relieved to find out.
In the show Marie Adler is played by Kaitlyn Denver, an actress who looks like a cross between Shailene Woodley and Ellen Page and is just as talented as they are. She’s amazing. Everything Marie feels, Denver makes sure the audience feels it too. By the third episode of Unbelievable, as the clock ticked closer to 2am for me, my heart was pounding every time she appeared on screen. I was so desperate for her to get the justice she deserved.
Every episode brought a new horror, you see, a dull depressing kind of horror. Marie’s violently raped by a home intruder. She goes to the police. They decide they don’t believe her. They gaslight her – a vulnerable teenager who’s been abused before – into saying she lied. They charge her with filing a false report. They then send her court date to the wrong address. Honest to god, around that point I was about to hurl things at the screen. Even Marie’s lawyer, who considers her just one more case in his heavy workload, seems bewildered at how she’s been treated. This is not quite the same incompetence that led innocent men to be consumed from the inside out with radioactive poison in Russia, but it’s pretty damn close.
While Marie is suffering from a very different and much more invisible poisoning, a pair of detectives start investigating a string of home invasion rapes. These are Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall, who are also based on real people, and are played here by Toni Collette and Merrit Weaver. They disappeared into their characters so completely I didn’t even recognise either of them at first.
I literally cannot recommend this show enough. I was a nervous wreck by the time the wheels of justice finally started turning, waiting for more horrible things to happen that thankfully never came. Finally, the male officer who accused Marie of lying learns that he was wrong, in a scene so satisfying it’ll be seared onto my eyeballs forever:
Oh, Collette’s face there. Disappointed, exasperated, sad and disgusted all at once.
I can’t think of an aspect of this show which wasn’t perfectly done. For an exmaple of how much thought was put into it – the actress who plays Marie’s therapist is Brooke Smith, aka the victim in The Silence of the Lambs. Because of that, the therapy scene has an extra tinge to it I don’t think it would have had otherwise. Not least because this show is a big middle finger to movies like the aforementioned: Unbelievable is a show about violence towards women, but very little violence towards women is actually shown.
So far, Unbelievable has 97% on RottenTomatoes – that’s actually a higher score than Chernobyl (very deservedly) got. But I hope this show likewise gets embedded deep in the public consciousness. Its message is so, so important.
I binge-watched The Boys in a mere two days, which might have been too fast really. There was a lot to digest in that show. I enjoyed it but its take on current events feels rather… box-ticky, I suppose might be the word for it. There’s no time to actually deal with the #MeToo movement or female-on-male rape or any of the things the show brushes up against because it’s too busy hurtling wildly towards the next Shocking Moment. That make sense?
Of the main characters, I hated them all except Hughie, Starlight, Marvin, Frenchie and Kimiko. Everyone on this show was brilliant at getting me to hate them, the acting was flawless. Where has Antony Starr been all this time?!? I was flat-out terrified of Homelander.
I am amused by how meta it is that a man called “Antony Starr” plays an evil superhero who is wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. Plus his name is very close to “Anthony Stark”! The writers of Reality are getting lazy again.
Oh hey and another brilliant bit of casting: Haley Joel Osmont! As a former child star no less! I hope his brief role in this leads to bigger things for him because I grew up with his movies and yeah he’s not cute anymore but he can act.
I really did like Hughie a lot because he seems to go against the (massively) toxic masculinity that almost everyone around him displays. He walks away from another man who’s goading him and calling him pathetic for not seeking further vengance for his girlfriend. And he even tries to save the man who killed said girlfriend! Now that is what I want to see.
There are a lot of fridged women in this show, far too many for my liking. First Robin (I’m amused by the fact her name is Robin Ward, like Robin, Batman’s ward), then Popclaw, then Becca. I do not – spoiler – like the twist involving Becca. If she really did cheat on Butcher and lead him to believe it was rape, that feeds into such a horrible real-life stereotype that it would frankly sour the entire show for me.
In conclusion: I very much enjoyed watching (most) of The Boys, but I don’t want to think too hard about it. I think Edgy, Gritty Superheroes just aren’t my thing. Give me Spider-Man stopping a train any day.
Oh and also shout out to the poster designers, because I love the poster for this show:
It gives me chills every time I look at it.
So the other day I was watching Louis Theroux’s new documentary, Surviving America’s Most Hated Family, all about the more-or-less collapse of the Westboro Baptist Church. The WBC were essentially the boogyman when I was a teenager. My 14-year-self, crouched in a corner with a laptop watching them scream homophobic slurs, could barely think of anything more evil than them.
Well, obviously my 14-year-old self was very, very wrong. But anyway.
Theroux spends a lot of this documentary being charmingly, Britishly baffled at the actions of the Westboro members who remain. At one point, he’s told he lacks compassion by a man holding a sign saying “WHY DID GOD DESTROY SODOM?” That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with here. It’s almost funny, and I think Theroux expects that we’ll laugh, but it’s also crushingly sad.
Theroux also spends some time interviewing the people who’ve left Westboro. At one point he drops into the house of Fred Phelp’s granddaughter Rachel Hockenbarger, who absolutely DOES NOT look like a member of WBC anymore.
I liked Rachel from the moment I saw her. She let Theroux in and showed him her tattoos. One of them in particular stood out, and the camera lingered on it so we could all see what it said: “Whatever nightmares the future holds, are dreams compared to what’s behind me.” That was a line from Guardians of the Galaxy, Rachel explained, said by Zoe Saldana’s character Gamora. She was a hardened assassin and killer until she changed her ways and became a good guy.
I’m a massive Gamora fan. Huge. However I think Rachel, rainbow-clad Rachel, is the person who deserves the accolade of her number one fan. She handed Theroux a drink in a Gamora-shaped mug. “Does that mean anything to you?” he asked of her tattoo. “Yeah,” she said simply. “Just trying to move forward.”
Is it fair to say superheroes helped rip Westboro apart? When Megan Phelps-Roper left the church and denounced it, she quoted Catwoman to explain why she had done so. “There’s no fresh start in today’s world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks,” was the opening line of her public statement. “Don’t act surprised that I’m quoting Batman.” Catwoman was a thief and a villain until, wait for it, she changed her ways and became a good guy.
In Megan’s first ever non-Westboro statement she explained how the church used pop culture for its own ends. “At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context,” she wrote. But luckily for Megan, and unluckily for the cult she belonged to, you can’t keep a good comic book story down.
The transformative power of fandom has been spoken about many times, by far smarter people than me. People see themselves reflected in the hero, or the villain who becomes the hero, and act accordingly, spurred on by the thought that hey! Maybe the world finally sees them. That’s why we today make so much of the importance of representation. There will always be black children who need a noble king in T’Challa, Polynesian girls who need a steadfast adventurer in Moana, and so on. Favourite characters turn into little voices in your head telling you go on, you can do it, I did.
It was Gamora and Catwoman, lady villains-turned-heroes who aren’t even the main characters of their respective franchises, who transpired to be the things girls like Rachel and Megan needed to see. I find something so, so satisfying in that.
Everyone loves a good redemption story, I guess.
Ok I think I know what happened in The Cry. (Jenna Coleman’s new show.) The shifting timelines keep throwing me off but I THINK Joanna is on trial for killing her boyfriend, not her baby. The baby disappeared in Australia but the trial is taking place in Scotland. And when Joanna was having her mugshot taken she has a black eye. AND when you see the boyfriend’s daughter at the trial, she’s wearing all black. (I can’t remember if the ex-wife was there or not.) I think the boyfriend did something to the baby, arranged for a kidnapping maybe, and Joanna killed him.
Juuuuuuust posting on the offchance I’m right….. (I know it was a book first, so if anyone knows, don’t tell me!)
Currently watching (half-watching. Skipped the beginning, because I can’t stand to watch kids getting killed) Little Boy Blue, the drama about the murder of an 11-year-old boy back in 2007. It’s playing in Broadchurch’s old slot, but the more I think about it, elements of it might have inspired Broadchurch in the first place. :(
I finished iZombie! It was super good! Some thoughts I have had during the watching of it:
-I really like Major. I never expected to like him as much as I do, but I really do. Ravi is a close-second fave
-Blaine and Ravi’s fight scene set to Friday I’m In Love is my favourite, favourite scene in the entire show. Second favourite is the sequence set to One Day More, for reasons that are obvious if you know me
-Blaine (especially towards the end of season 2) is a loving rip-off of Spike, very obviously, and somehow it works
-I wish Liv’s family hadn’t been written out of the show in so unsatisfying a way. I really want to know what happened there, do they even still talk to her, what’s going on?
-Haha Vaughn, you got what was coming to you. (’Villain hoist by his own petard as hero watches’ is probably my favourite kind of villain death, see also Ramsay Bolton)
-The punny title cards are the BEST, and more shows should have them
-I’M SO GLAD THE DOG WAS OKAY
I have watched all of Elementary! Over a period of several days! It was good. It was very good. (I have subtitled it “Clever People Who Are Also Nice”)
Both Sherlock and Watson are compassionate, kind people in this one! Which is a hell of a lot closer to the original than the detached-ness of Sherlock.
I knew about the Irene-Moriarty reveal but it was still very well done. Natalie Dormer was great. (Which accent was her real one? I have no idea.) In a way, I’m almost disappointed that ‘Irene’ wasn’t real, because she was really interesting by herself, but I guess that’s the idea.
EVERYTHING ABOUT the finale was…probably the best thing anyone’s done with Sherlock Holmes in years. Damn. It was clever and engrossing and a love letter to Watson and it was called ‘Heroine’ (heroin, gettit?) and it was MARVELOUS. Yes. I’m very excited for Season Two!