December TV Catch Up

Time for some TV series I watched earlier this year, and now have written up a few thoughts.

****

1. Westworld

I’ve said before that I find Westworld hard to talk about because although it has themes and messages and ideas that are interesting, it also repeats them all from so many different angles and directions that it exhausts its topics. Case in point: when it came up on the TV, the announcer declared “The wait is over.” I didn’t think I was waiting. I thought Westworld was over and only discovered there was a new one the week before. And when I watched it, it’s another turn of the screw, another walk around the spiral.

There are, it turns out, three different timelines. One is prologue and ends abruptly, but is the one with the fun period nonsense, a 1920s America of gangsters and prohibition, with the same storylines from Westworld turning up again, and mostly ignored by our protagonists who are trying to find out something else entirely. And there’s a trick here, an extra storyline in the park, a hidden bonus level repeating another aspect.

Anyway, the humans are now controlled and the world is a playground for the robots (“hosts”). What do they do? They eagerly volunteer to hunt down and kill the humans who escape the programming. It’s Westworld in reverse. In fact it’s not even in reverse. Everything will be destroyed. But maybe – thanks to a lot of simulations – something can be saved.

Sadly the show was then cancelled so a conclusion - an end to the cycles - will not be forthcoming.

Watch This: There’s clever twists and turns and violence and people confronting themselves and getting second chances
Don’t Watch This: You weren’t interested the first time and this is that again, but with less cowboys

****

2. Irma Vep

A TV show about making a TV show (that is a re-make of a silent film serial). Mira Harding, fresh off success in a ridiculous superhero film arrives in Paris to shoot The Vampires, a prestige TV show re-making the classic 1916 crime serial. She’s playing Irma Vep* the dark muse/ female lead of the gang of criminals called The Vampires. She’s taken the part because she wants to work with Rene, the eccentric French director whose passion project it is. It turns out that the money men don’t actually care about the project**, but they do care about getting Mira to be the face of their perfume.

All this is slightly off the point, or maybe it isn’t. The show is about the show they’re making, but also about the people making the show and all their concerns. Mira has recently split up with her girlfriend, who was her assistant, who married the director of the ridiculous superhero film. And when Rene goes missing for a brief period they bring in that director (though not before realising they have one day when they have to shoot before losing the location before he can come in, and getting Mira’s new assistant to direct). But all this is slightly off the point.

Everybody’s cynical, with one eye on the next project, thinking the director is past it, or too difficult to work with. Everyone’s a romantic, putting their heart and soul into this production, a niche period piece that will be forgotten next year. The costumer is working very hard and brilliantly to get the 1916 era clothes to work. She’s also hitting on Mira, who uses her shamelessly as a drinking and partying buddy and to give her lifts around Paris on her scooter. There’s a lot of drinking and partying which really lifts off with the flamboyant, drug-addicted German actor who is playing a rival villain to the Vampires, and who threatens to steal the limelight of all the shows from Mira. But this is, again, slightly off the point.

When Mira puts on the Irma Vep catsuit she starts doing Irma Vep things. In the first scene when she tries it on she goes out the room, sliding along the walls in an exaggerated silent-movie style, up some stairs and into an office where she avoids being seen and steals a card from a handbag. Her occasional jaunts out across the rooftops of Paris get more and more extreme, so that she is able to appear in several hotel rooms in time to observe the final acts of other character’s story arcs. It goes full fabulist in other words, though the only people who, for sure, see it are Mira, who may be losing it, and Rene, who definitely does, more than once. But I think again I’ve got slightly off the point.

So what is the point? The show is quite slippery about this. It’s about making a TV show, has some sly jokes about how TV gets made, and depicts the chaos and the discipline, the money-grubbing and career-climbing as well as the artistry and dedication and camaraderie. It’s about obsession, and living as a nomad, and how things can come together and also fall apart. It’s about the spirit of cinema and how the flawed people – the horrible, self-centred exploitative people – come together to make magic on screen.

Watch This: Funny, sly self-referential meta-television
Don’t Watch This: I was hoping for more cat-burglary

* It’s an anagram
** Though they should break even and it might take some awards which will be nice

****

3. Superman And Lois

Sam Lane makes it explicit that Superman And Lois exists in a different universe to the Arrowverse shows, claiming that unlike over dimensions they’ve heard of, this Earth has only one superhero, Superman. Well and good, though also, eh*.

Talking of other dimensions, this season is very interested in that. The main ongoing plot begins with something in the mines below Smallville that is effecting Superman. It turns out to be Bizarro, from Bizarro world, where everything is backwards. They use this more as horror than comedy, and to cast light on the choices people have made in the regular world by showing alternative versions in the other world.

John Henry Irons, man with a supersuit from another world, here to stop Superman turning evil like he did in his world, was joined at the very last moment of Season 1 by his daughter Natalie. In a complicating factor, her mother is that world’s Lois Lane, which leads to her initial hatred of this Lois. A complicated family relationship.

Meanwhile Superman’s half-brother, Tal-Rho, aka Morgan Edge, is locked up in his red-lit clear plastic prison**, and Superman keeps going to see him. As Sam Lane has retired (or maybe semi-retired) to play more golf and also spend more time with his family, there’s a new general, Anderson, as super-liaison. He wants Superman to support American interests more, rather than being politically neutral. They find themselves at odds, leading to Superman being briefly imprisoned with Tal-Rho. Inevitably they break out.

It's a show about family and also about trust. Occasionally there’s a bit of a mis-step – Clark Kent is off doing Superman-stuff while Lana is trying to get elected mayor of Smallville. This town-wide important event is hemmed in between world (universe?) destroying problems on one side, and on the other relationship stuff – Jordan and Sara’s splitting up, Natalie unhappy with her Dad flirting with Lana, and Lana having split up with her husband. It all seems a bit like the backdrop to all these other stories, and very on the nose when the incumbent mayor talks about family values (hinting at Lana and her husband’s problems) and Lana hitting back, saying that if the town is a family then we love and support each other and not judge, which is, uh, not how families tend to work in practice, especially in this TV show. Though they DO also forgive and reconcile so that’s a thing.

Also they betray each other. Lucy Lane, Lois’s sister, is estranged due to Lois doing an expose on the cult (the Inverse Society) she was/is in. The Inverse Society has a true insight, that there is another world (the Bizzaro world***) and that people from each world can combine to make a “whole” person. But it’s not really about spiritual enlightenment. To the surprise of exactly no one who has studied cults, it turns out it’s about the leader, Ally Allston, dominating the world.

I don’t know about this! It’s trying to be all things, superhero action adventure, small town drama, family drama, high school drama. Superman is given dilemmas, but not usually difficult ones; do your duty or care for your family, well when the world’s at stake the answer is both. When the military won’t co-operate, or do what you think is ethical, then stay at arms length. When no one else can do the job, then at the risk of your own life, do the job. Stop your kid from putting himself in danger, then when he insists, agree to train him (after first telling off Sam Lane for training him, then briefly admitting he was right). I’ve often thought the trick to Superman is not to put him up against an equal opponent every week, but to give him something to do he doesn’t want to. To use his powers in a way that compromises him. And I guess that's a strand of this too.

Watch This: It’s a superhero family drama and you want some of that
Don’t Watch This: In the end it’s people flying into danger and punching each other

* John Diggle makes an appearance this season as well, and he’d changed his hair and beard just as he had in his last (final?) appearance in The Flash. Has he rejected becoming this Earth’s second (third, fourth, fifth) superhero and returned to his family? Was he never tempted here? Or did they book the actor before they’d made their final decision on the relationship with other worlds and decide to use him anyway to lay out this plot hook for the next season?

** Magneto’s plastic prison continues to cast a long shadow over superhero films and shows

*** Did I mention that Bizarro Earth is a cube? It’s cool. No complaints about the effects on that.

****

4. The Blacklist

The Blacklist is a show in which Raymond Reddington, notorious criminal, helps an FBI task force hunt down other, worse criminals, often ones committing weird and baroque crimes. He had been intending to hand over his criminal empire to Elizabeth Keen who may or may not be his daughter (it was definitively proved both ways more than once). But Keen was killed at the end of the last season (again, not the first time she was killed*).

Red left the country and the FBI task force split up. But when Dembi Zuma, once Red’s sidekick/bodyguard, now an FBI agent, is targeted, Red comes back, takes control of a criminal organisation and they reform the task force. Immediately questions about Elizabeth’s death come up, propelling most of the rest of the season, and also Harold Cooper, the task force director, is being blackmailed.

So we have another set of outrageous criminals to chase. As well as the usual assassins and smugglers, there’s perhaps a greater emphasis on hackers, bankers and security experts, people who keep criminals from being discovered. Slightly less emphasis on the medical side, which was a hallmark of the series, criminal doctors setting up operating theatres inside empty warehouses (there’s a bit of this, but it’s part of the background now, like having a couple of black SUVs filled with men with guns, the kind of thing criminal masterminds having lying around in case they’re needed).

With the Red and Keen convoluted mysteries finally ended, there’s room to catch up with the other characters and give them some stories of their own. It turns out they’re all messed up, as you might imagine after ten years of chasing the most weird and horrid criminals in the world, being shot at on a weekly basis, and being betrayed nearly as often.

Watch This: They’ve finally resolved the Keen storyline, so this season’s plot is followable, not just the criminal of the week stories.
Don’t Watch This: There’s lots of call backs to previous characters and events, it’s still needlessly obscure

* I’m confident that they do, in fact, intend to keep her dead, despite the resurrection of another dead character in this series. They even dig up her body in one episode to try and discover clues to her death.

****

5. SWAT

At the end of last season Hondo was demoted from team leader for going to the press about racist cops. At the start of this one he’s on holiday in Mexico figuring out his future, and spends two episodes dealing with a corrupt local landowner. He comes back and they’ve got a new team leader, who’s ambitious, was on the Mayor’s detail.

The rest of the team have been on pause. Luca and Chris went to Germany on a cross training mission, Deacon took the lead on training new SWAT recruits, Street took some medical leave to give some of his liver to his Mum and Tan has been on honeymoon (?). So they can just form back up to deal with the nonsense that the Department pile on Hondo’s head.

They’re all given outs this season. Street gets out of hand when his Mum dies. Deacon’s side-gig with a security company is going well. Well enough that he could retire. Tan probably not actually, again he loses out storywise. Commander Hicks, told to stop working 16 hour days 7 days a week starts using Luca as a deputy. Hondo declines to resign, and they deal with that, and promptly runs into family shenanigans. And Chris keeps finding herself having to stretch things to protect the Latino community, eventually helping support a safe house for undocumented women.

The show has the problem it has had from the start. You can solve problems by kicking down doors and tackling people. And you can’t solve problems by kicking down doors and tackling people, because if that solved problems then you’d be done. Helping women get into SWAT is good, but doesn’t solve systematic discrimination by the cops, let alone domestic violence, which SWAT only comes across when they’re listing some bad guy’s priors; they only deal with extreme public violence. Of course this is both a problem, as I say, and a source of dramatic tension that animates the show.

Most of them are struggling with this. Hondo’s girlfriend runs a community centre and after a couple of odd run-ins he gets involved with volunteers who go to non-urgent call outs, avoiding the necessity of police (who default to arrests and violence too often). Chris as I said is helping the safe house for undocumented immigrant women. Deacon, a devout Catholic, does a prison ministry, where he meets a guy he arrested who claims, convincingly, to be innocent. This storyline brings in Deacon’s wife, who now gets to add lawyer of last resort to her resume (each season they mange to give her a couple of episodes to add to her character and story, having had wife/mother, invalid, and homophobe in previous ones). Luca* is being groomed for command by Commander Hicks, though Hicks is not so old as to be retiring in the near future. I mean presumably he has enough time to get a full pension but all he does is eat, sleep and breath SWAT. (Street and Tan are a bit more peripheral on this).

Expecting television to grapple with real life problems and come up with satisfying solutions that do not insult the viewer’s intelligence (or indeed ethics) is foolish, which is why they mostly don’t, just taking a quick glance then moving on. SWAT, to it’s credit, knows this, and chooses to engage with the difficulties of policing anyway, and admitting there are no satisfying, easy solutions, certainly none that can be put into place before the final ad-break**, or even after 22 episodes. It saves it’s satisfaction for dealing with terrible villains, people who are dangerous and violent, and there is no better way to deal with them than kicking down doors, tackling them, and sometimes shooting them. But you need someone on the trigger with judgment and restraint (one of the potential new recruits finds this out on her first mission with 20 squad. There’s two of them who are recurring characters, looking to be promoted into an empty (female) main character slot). This is TV so the cops always have clarity and foresight, and wouldn’t that be a good thing in real life.

Watch This: Cool police action, and some thoughtful police problems
Don’t Watch This: Fist fights, gun fights, chases and tense standoffs can’t conceal that this is just another cop show

* Luca is the driver of Black Betty, their armoured car. He’s had injuries and been away in Germany, sitting out more episodes either on the phone or back at base. Apparently the actor was injured in the second season so maybe they don’t want him doing stunts.

** So we can tie up the personal storylines in the last segment!