Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece
You know, five years ago when Masterpiece, no longer Theatre, celebrated their fiftieth anniversary and I dedicated several months on my blog to said celebration? Well, spending that year watching old British shows kind of became a habit. In other words, I started watching shows for the fiftieth anniversary and, well, I just never stopped. And now it's the fifty-fifth anniversary and I have watched so many shows in the intervening five years, not all done for Masterpiece, but, well, almost all done for Masterpiece. Or at least PBS. I mean, I had to get Ballykissangel in there somewhere. What this means is that I couldn't let the fifty-fifth anniversary pass without another celebration. I was like a kid in a candy shop searching out old Mobil posters I'd never seen and trying to find just one more series that hadn't been released in any format stateside. YouTube is, surprisingly, my friend now. It might be the biggest shock of the last year. Shows I'd never thought I'd be able to see were available, and shows that I thought I'd hate, well, it turns out I owe the seventies production of Poldark a big apology. Masterpiece helped form who I am, creating a love of literature, art, and England. I have recently made it my goal to somehow watch every show ever aired on Masterpiece. It might take another five years, meaning there's already a sixtieth celebration in the offing, but until I succeed, possibly by bribing PBS employees to help a girl out, let's celebrate what wonderful shows I have watched in the last five years. Are any of them your favorites? I mean, how could you not love All Creatures Great and Small or Downton Abbey? Or are there certain ones that left you cold? For example have you developed an extreme aversion to Ben Cross? Because I know I sure have. Here's to Masterpiece! It's a piece of us all.
Dubliners by James Joyce
Holding is Ireland's answer to a procedural show that is Broadchurch meets Ballykissangel. It's nice and pastoral with crimes that are comfortably in the past even if their shadows are now finally being felt in the present. Everyone is on a spectrum of "hot mess" from secretly binge eating in their car to drunkenly heckling bad karaoke singers to shagging in an abandoned ambulance. Yet somehow everyone is OK with just plodding along. The show is based on Graham Norton's first fiction book and while the show does keep you engaged over it's four episodes you could tell by the very structure that he is a first time author. How you might ask? Well, the ending is just too convenient. When you set up a decades old crime and then in the present have one of the characters dying of Cancer, well, to make the killer the Cancer patient, that's too pat isn't it? Life isn't that simple. Life can't be tied up in a nice little bow that quickly heals the community. Nature being the bringer of justice not to mention the whole "maybe guilt brought on the Cancer" is just lazy. Just because you have quirky characters and a pastoral setting doesn't make this charming. In fact, there's one aspect that skeeved me out so bad that it tainted the entire show. Evelyn Ross is in her thirties and has never gotten over her true loving abandoning her after he beat her to a pulp and she miscarried on the night of his wedding to another woman. Of course his is the body that was discovered. Evelyn, to numb herself, is having an affair with Stephen Chen. Stephen is seventeen and the son of Evelyn's sister's partner. At least they kind of call out the "incest" but they never really call out the whole pedophile aspect of this relationship. So yes, he's technically of the age of consent. But that's a technicality that doesn't get ride of the whole creepiness of it. Plus they are having sex in an abandoned ambulance. How is this sanitary!?! I mean, I just can't on so many levels. And here's the thing, consent is more important than ever and how we talk about power dynamics in a relationship, and if there's anywhere in the world more associated with pedophiles than Ireland, strictly because of the Catholic Church, I don't know where that would be. Therefore to be telling this story in Ireland at this time, I think it needed to be done more sensitively. Just by having the woman being the older of the two doesn't make this OK, just look to Mary Kay Letourneau, may she be singed for an entirety. But what adds insult to injury is when Evelyn apologizes at her sister's wake to Stephen saying that what she did was wrong and him then saying to basically forget about it because he loved every minute of it... Excuse me? He's a child, he might think this way now, but what about when he gets older and realizes that their relationship was actually abuse? It's not cool or sexy or anything to be in this kind of relationship and Holding didn't real emphatically say otherwise. Therefore I can do nothing but look back on this series with a kind of creepy regret. It could have been something, but it was out of touch and unoriginal. 
