My husband and I just finished watching the second season/series of Staged. What a great comedic take (with a few dark moments) on the twists and turns this pandemic has taken in all our lives!
We also just finished watching all five seasons of Orphan Black. Wow, my hat’s off to Tatiana Maslany, who played multiple roles beautifully and utterly convincingly! Solid ensemble cast and storyline that looked like it was produced as planned, right through to the end.
Mare of Easttown (HBO)
Recently crime dramas like Broadchurch and Hinterland have had a run showing the devastating damage violent crime can have on close knit communities; the pain of the victims, the endless abyss their families find themselves falling - and sometimes the bizarre world perpetrators dwell and prosper in. Most of this can be found exceptionally well realised in this seven part drama with Kate Winslet in a defining performance of her mature career.
Mare of Easttown is a character study of a woman under pressure, a middle aged divorced wife, mother, grandmother going 15 rounds heavyweight against live. And life set its punches well, exactly where they do the most damage and hurt between the shadow and the soul at four in the morning.
But Mare holds on because she’s also a tough cookie and a devilishly excellent police detective. There’s a case of a young woman’s disappearance she’s been worrying over for months - and now it looks as if it might be more than a disappearance as another young woman turns up dead.
Many of the show’s elements will be familiar to readers of Stephen King as well as fans of the crime drama in general. Some of them are used a little oddly, a knowing wink to aficionados of the genre. And the final plot twist seems to stretch the concept somewhat. But overall it’s a great production showing care and passion for a good mystery and nicely drawn characters.
Recommended.
Orphan Black is in my Top 10 faves.
Re: Mare of Easttown, I’ve read lots of good things about it, so that may be our next TV show commitment. The description reminds me a bit of another BBC show we’re watching called Unforgotten.
Speaking of Stephen King, we were also captivated by Castle Rock. Two seasons/series with the same title, but completely different storylines, both drawing from some familiar characters from King’s novels.
Mine, too!
Now, a shocker…
REMINGTON STEELE
Of course, I saw many episodes when I was a young teenager, and I remember that I enjoyed it, like I enjoyed HART TO HART, SIMON & SIMON or THE A-TEAM.
Later on, I was too sophisticated to give it a second look. Cheesy, boring, tepid 80‘s network formula? Oh, we really have evolved so much that we cannot watch this anymore, can we?
During the pandemic my wife and I have searched out more TV comfort food, and somehow we thought it would be fun to watch one episode of RS. Just to be snarky and smile.
Now we are binge-watching it, already in the second season. And I really must say how much fun this is, how well written and shot this show is, and how extremely well acted by both leads. Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan have perfect timing and just radiate charisma. They take their roles seriously and still send up the whole genre with loving irony.
I really have to reverse my opinion on this. RS has become one of my favorite shows ever.
I have the same reaction to thirtysomething, which I loved at the time. I have it on DVD and have been watching periodically. There is still much to admire, but I’m also reminded how far we have come since then. However, the reason we have come so far is because these shows laid the groundwork for story arcs and overlapping/continuing storylines.
I remember watching Remington Steele and enjoying it initially. For some reason, I found it less appealing as it went on. I can’t recall why I felt that way. It could be that happened when the series was cancelled, then brought back again for a final abbreviated season, which we all know about, since that’s why Pierce Brosnan couldn’t do The Living Daylights. (Apparently Stephanie Zimbalist had to walk away from a role in RoboCop for the same reason.) But I think I lost interest sometime before then.
Oh, yes - thirtysomething - what a brilliant show!
Maybe it was the second season change up of the supporting cast, with Murphy and Miss Fox gone in favor of Mildred Krebbs, and the switch to a more “upbeat” theme song and opening credits. That’s where it started slipping for me.
Also it’s funny that after a season of me thinking, “this guy could be James Bond,” it was the second season opener - - with lots of heavy-handed hints of “hey doesn’t this guy seem Bondian to you?” that made me decide, " Yeah, that’s enough of that. "
I kept watching, though, despite the diminishing returns. In general I’d say the more established the romance became, the less fun the show got to be. All shows like this are great in the “will they or won’t they” phase, but once they get to “we need to have a talk about us”, it’s all over but the crying.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. Same thing happened with Moonlighting, which I feel certain got some of its inspiration from Remington Steele. There’s a tipping point in the romantic balance that, once it totters over, never really recovers the spark that made it so engaging.
In my rewatching, I haven’t reached the particular development in Season 4 that just about destroyed me at the time. (I won’t divulge spoilers, in case anyone decides to watch it at this late date.) I don’t know how they kept that a secret from the media; it would be well-nigh impossible these days. I almost couldn’t keep on watching after that … but I did, right up to the end. It’s rare for me to do that, especially when I know a show is on the chopping block. But they managed to take a series that started out a little off-putting at times (the “too whiny/self-entitled” complaints weren’t entirely off-base), and develop it into something special. Sadly, most of the audience lost interest somewhere along the way, just when thirtysomething was hitting its artistic stride. I never saw a TV show from that era address religion, and the schisms it can cause in relationships, as deftly as thirtysomething did.
That´s what I remembered, too. And for MOONLIGHTING it really is true: once David and Maddie have slept together the dynamic changes and the show becomes pointless.
But REMINGTON STEELE, as I am astonished to see, just lets Laura and Steele smooch and embrace a lot (in between the episodes one suspects the characters have plenty of sex) without changing the dynamic of their relationship. Quite modern, actually. Ahead of its time. Then again, the show is about a woman who has to invent a front man in order to have society actually believe in her detective agency. And it´s so fun to see that it is Laura who solves the cases, with Steele having no clue and asking her repeatedly what is going on.
Would a show like that be done today? No way. You wouldn’t find an actor who would play such a man. They always are afraid of “coming off weak”. Brosnan just has fun with this. Like Cary Grant, actually.
…
Yes, CHUCK worked for me, too.
But, yes, Chuck was very an exception rather than rule.
One of the ironies of that show is that the same thing happens to Ms Zimbalist as to her ficitional counterpart. She starts off as technically the central character of the show – or at least an equal partner – and in short order the critical and popular attention shifts to the good-looking male who appears out of nowhere to hog the limelight. It didn’t take long for the viewing public to embrace Brosnan as a more urbane replacement for the cap-and-shorts wearing Tom Selleck in the “TV heart-throb” sweepstakes, and well before the near-miss with TLD, the show was already regarded as “the one with the guy who’ll probably be James Bond” with only a few acknowledgements that “Oh, yeah, it’s got the daughter of the guy from ‘The FBI,’ too.”
That was the central appeal to me: having a character regarded as “heroic” based entirely on his looks was a clever, almost “meta” jab at the conventions of TV storytelling, and Brosnan’s willingness to risk looking silly was tremendously endearing. It never quite degenerated into farce, though: Steele was in way over his head when it came to detective work, but whenever the situation called for subterfuge, stealth, knowledge of security systems or outright larceny, he was masterfully skilled, which was consistent with his “mysterious con man” persona and made his character more intriguing: just what had this guy been up to in his past, anyway? (I’m not sure you could get away with that in the post-911, internet-dominated world of today, but in the 80s it was still just barely plausible that someone could invent an identity from thin air and make it stick).
Another fun aspect was all the movie references whenever Steele offered a “solution” to a mystery. Like the whole “he’s handsome so he must be a hero” thing, it was a playful, fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgement that all mystery shows and movies are fairly derivative of each other. It wasn’t at all unusual to see shows ripping off earlier works, but it was hilarious to have one that came right out and cited its sources. LOL
All this talk led me to pull out my old DVDs and watch the premiere episode of “Remington Steele” last night in hopes maybe it’d hook my 12-year-old daughter (currently working her way through Tenant’s Dr Who with me).
I have to say it still holds up well despite being very much of its time. Brosnan comes off in the first episode much as he did (for me) in GE: a bit stiff and self-conscious and unintentionally comical with his “smouldering” and “intense” gazes, like he’s doing a photoshoot for a cologne ad. But when he loosens up for the humor bits, he’s very fun to watch. He must’ve settled into the role quickly, because I didn’t remember the stiffness.
My daughter would only commit to a “maybe” when it comes to more episodes, but anyway my wife fell in love with it all over again.
Absolutely - but I think these mannerisms are part of the character, someone who poses as a smart hero…
It certainly made it seem he was “posing” as a tough guy in GE.
In this first episode, though ( “License To Steele”), I’m thinking more of the moments where he’s trying to impress/seduce Laura. But even then it could be deliberate as you say; like his character is thinking, “Chicks dig the brooding, Byronic hero thing. Here goes…” Part of the fun is how quickly he transitions between artifices, so it’s fine.
Anyway I remember now why I liked the show so much at the time. It definitely has witty writing compared to contemporary shows, say TJ Hooker for instance, and Brosnan’s character was uniquely urbane in a field of hardboiled, rough-and -tumble TV PI’s.
Brosnan does have a tendency to use mannerisms which seem kind of boulevard theatre-like exaggerations, playing to the last row. But he can dial them back completely, so I guess in those early episodes he was trying out how to play this character. Zimbalist changes her approach, too, getting more playful and humoristic later on. Although that may be a result of chauvinist studio heads to „smile more so you’re more likeable“…