Drama

A Tale Of TV

Yeah, Another Blogger166 Comments

When I sat down to compose this piece about television, I was of the opinion that I’m a casual TV-viewer rather than a TV-viewing addict, seeing that I engage with the boob tube for an average of one and a half hours per day. That’s a fairly modest amount of time. As has happened frequently before, however, working on stories for Yeah, Another Blogger has led me, as if by magic, to discern the truth about things. Meaning, I now realize I’d go half-mad were my TV-watching privileges ever to be revoked. Anyway, what would I replace those hours with? Learning to crochet erotic hand puppets? Attempting to become one of the world’s best tiddlywinks players? Hell, I don’t even want to think about life without television, because I absolutely need TV. I’m addicted!

An ace dial-flipper, I regularly tune in to bits and pieces of news, sports, nature, cooking and late-night talk shows. I’m all by my lonesome when viewing the majority of those bits and pieces. What I catch the most of, by far, though, are scripted drama and comedy series. And I always watch them — in their entireties, unless we ditch them because we decide they suck — with my spouse Sandy. It’s one of our favorite things to do, for we have similar tastes in series fare. Let’s take a look at two shows that entertained Sandy and me recently.

Have you seen Adolescence, a British miniseries? It is a huge Netflix hit and has garnered a lot of media attention. Justifiably so. I place it in the pantheon of series, up there with The Queen’s Gambit, Anxious People, The Investigation and Call My Agent, to name but a few. Adolescence is really, really good.

Foremost among its explorations, Adolescence delves into the mind of Jamie Miller, a seemingly normal 13-year-old lad who, his insecurities enflamed by the taunts of a female classmate, loses all control and murders that young lady after meeting up with her one evening. The foul deed turns his life upside down and deeply damages the lives of the people who love him the most: his parents and older sister.

The show probes its subject matters with precision and honesty. The third episode hits especially hard. Set in the youth detention center where Jamie is being held, nearly all of its 52 minutes are devoted to a talk between Jamie and a court-appointed psychologist. The episode left Sandy and me shaken, so powerful and disturbing are Jamie’s words and actions as the session progresses. In my opinion, Adolescence is not to be missed. Its scripts are as tight as square knots, and each main member of the cast performs magnificently. First-time actor Owen Cooper, for example, is incredible as Jamie. Equally splendid is Stephen Graham, who not only plays Jamie’s father Eddie Miller, but co-created and co-wrote the production. What a talent he is. Adolescence, I believe, will stay in my mind for quite a while.

And then there’s the frothy Loot, a series that tips heavily into the wacky–as–hell category. Your life won’t be incomplete if you skip Loot, whose two seasons are available on Apple TV+. If you decide to tune in, however, you might end up digging it as much as Sandy and I did. It’s light, but it’s also refreshing.

Maya Rudolph shines in Loot, her comedic and dramatic talents fully on display. The show centers around her character, Molly Wells, who goes ballistic when she discovers her husband John has been cheating on her. She loses no time in divorcing him. The dissolution sends Molly reeling. She’s in pain. She’s also unimaginably wealthy, to the tune of over 100 billion American dollars, her share of the assets she and John, a tech industry genius, had jointly owned.

What to do with all that dough? Well, Molly, spoiled but possessing a heart of gold, doesn’t go for the usual approach of attempting to become even richer. Instead, she opts to give it all away, to groups and social causes that will better the human condition. The conduit for her generosity becomes the Wells Foundation, a do-good organization Molly founded while married but then totally forgot about until after the divorce came through.

I’m going to leave it at that, except to note that crazy situations have no trouble finding and enveloping Molly and her Wells Foundation employees, and that I laughed my ass off at some of the lines tossed out by the actors.

Till next time, boys and girls! If you have any series recommendations, please let me know. Sandy and I always are on the prowl for viewing options.

A TV Series, A Confectionery, A Song

Yeah, Another Blogger136 Comments

“Neil, how come you usually write about things you enjoy, rather than about those that, in your opinion, bite the big one?” I asked myself the other day.

“Well,” I answered, “I’ve ripped into people I loathe. Trump and Putin, primarily. And I’ve discussed situations that worry me or piss me off. But there’s no denying that my natural orientation is to comment about aspects of life that ring my bell.”

“I understand,” I replied. “There’s no reason right now for you to mess with your natural orientation. So, let’s take a look at some of your recent bell-ringers. And, maybe, your readers then will tell you what they’ve been into of late. Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong!”

Okay! First up is a miniseries my wife and I watched two months ago: Escape At Dannemora, seven episodes in length and available on Paramount+ and elsewhere. It had been on our to-be-viewed list for a couple of years. Fortunately, we finally got around to it. It bowled us over. I place Escape in the pantheon of miniseries I’ve encountered, along with The Queen’s Gambit, Anxious People, The Investigation, Godless and a handful of others.

Escape At Dannemora came out in 2018, three years after the true events from which it draws its inspiration. Set in the town of Dannemora, in rural upstate New York, the show aims its beam at David Sweat and Richard Matt, convicted murderers imprisoned in Dannemora’s Clinton Correctional Facility, and at the married prison employee (Joyce Mitchell) who became emotionally and sexually involved with them. Ultimately, Mitchell helped them escape from jail.

Escape At Dannemora is not a docuseries. Anything but. All, or nearly all of its dialogue is imagined. After all, it’s not as though conversations between Sweat, Matt, Mitchell and the story’s other principals were recorded. And what dialogue! Completely realistic. No artificial ingredients. I’d never heard of the scriptwriters (Brett Johnson, Michael Tolkin, Jerry Stahl), to whom I now publicly tip my hat. As I do to Paul Dano (Sweat), Benicio del Toro (Matt) and Patricia Arquette (Mitchell), the actors who employed the scripted words to create characters as nuanced as French pastries. Ben Stiller directed the production with economy and precision. As couldn’t be more obvious, I highly recommend this show.

My dad loved halva, a moist, semi-sweet treat that, as I learned from doing a bit of research for this piece, originated well over a thousand years ago in Persia (present-day Iran). Unlike him, I wasn’t infatuated with the product, but ate it now and then while growing up. Halva disappeared from my diet, though, when I was in my 20s, maybe earlier, for reasons I’m not sure about. Possibly my obsessions with pizza and Cheez-It crackers left no room for halva, a product that isn’t easily found in stores in my country (the USA), and which the majority of the world’s population likely never heard of.

And probably I’d never have had halva again were it not for my pals Cindy and Gene, who bestowed sesame-based halva, the variety I am familiar with, upon me and my wife Sandy twice in the last several months (there are other types of halva in addition to sesame-based, as the Wikipedia article, the link to which is in the above paragraph, explains).

“This a weird gift,” I thought to myself when I saw what Cindy and Gene had presented to us on the first occasion. Man, how wrong I was!  Halva was the perfect gift. That wouldn’t have been the case with the too-dense halva made by the Joyva company, the brand I knew in my youth. But the halva they’d chosen, from the Seed + Mill firm, is incredible. Its sesame paste is perfectly balanced with chocolate and salt. And the texture, light and slightly granular, is wonderful. Hallelujah, I’ve been blessed!

And finally: Some songs have the power to bring you up short and make you say, “Holy shit, this is fantastic!” I Want To Know, by the quite obscure rhythm-and-blues group the Gay Poppers, did such to me two weeks ago when the tune burst forth from SiriusXM Radio’s Carolina Shag channel.

I Want To Know came out in 1960, and the Gay Poppers were from North Carolina, USA. Not much else about the song or about the group can I find online. Except that the recording at some point became popular in parts of the dance-club world. It makes me want to dance, because its beat won’t quit, and because the Gay Poppers’ vocal prowess damn well is off the charts. Without further ado . . .