Season 21 - Adam Bede (1991-1992)
For about six years in the late eighties and early nineties everyone seemed to fall under the mass delusion that Patsy Kensit could act. She was everywhere. I don't know if it's because of her music career with Eighth Wonder or the, to me, completely baffling successful of Absolute Beginners, but she was the "it girl" of the moment. As an aside, if a movie stars David Bowie and I buy it for a dollar at Half Price Books yet am never able to bring myself to finish watching it, that is the definition of a bad movie. In fact Robert Altman takes the piss out of it in the first few minutes of The Player. Now that is a movie worth watching. As for Adam Bede, the only reason I have this on DVD is because it was included in The George Eliot Collection and it was cheaper to buy the whole set than to buy Middlemarch separately, and I needed my Rufus Sewell. I know you know what I'm talking about. When I got the set ironically the first adaptation I watched was Adam Bede because I was in the mood for some Iain Glen. This was long before Game of Thrones and therefore the reason I was mildly obsessed with him was because of Wives and Daughters. You know I really think Mr. Preston and Cynthia could have made a go of it. But that wasn't to be. And ironically Adam Bede is just another Iain Glen doesn't get the girl story. And yes, it's a recurring theme. The only lasting impression I have of that first viewing is thinking how depressing it was. I also remember that I had some disappointment that Patsy Kensit survived. I mean, if she's going to darken my door the least she could do is slump over and expire on the stoop. What annoys me most about her casting is this is peak early nineties casting, Iain Glenn, James Wilby, Susannah Harker, and Alan Cox! Think how good this could have been without her? Especially when the supporting roles are played by Jean Marsh, Julia McKenzie, Freddie Jones, Patsy Byrne, and George Innes. Oh, and George Innes, he is fabulous. Most known for his roles in The Italian Job and Upstairs, Downstairs, he has only one scene where he's in the witness box and he describes the dead child Patsy Kensit's character has left under a bush, and it's just heartbreaking. Even if she wasn't guilty as sin, for being Patsy Kensit AND for abandoning the child James Wilby got her with, I would have convicted her just due to the testimony against her. To have one actor outshine everyone made you realize how pedestrian this adaptation is. It's nothing more than a girl being seduced by the lord of the manor and getting with child, thus destroying the good village boy who truly loved her. AKA Iain Glenn not getting the girl. Again. So therefore I maybe shouldn't lay all the blame on Patsy Kensit? I mean, her casting technically just adds to the peak early nineties vibe... And it's not like this rather pedestrian story could have been improved. At the end of the day her character was transported to Australia and the much nicer girl played by Susannah Harker got the boy. So, win win in the end? Or maybe it was a Pyrrhic victory?
The Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine started in summer 1992. Seeing as I viewed myself as a sophisticated adult because I was just about to start high school I wasn't the target demographic. That would have been my brother who is four years younger than me. He loved authors like John Bellairs, so of course this fell into his wheelhouse. He wasn't a fanatic because his main loves were video games and WWF and WCW wrestling, but I remember him having a few books on his shelves, particularly Night of the Living Dummy. One thing R.L. Stine gets is what Rod Serling did before him, and that's that dummies are terrifying. Which is lucky, because this season is all about Stine's evil dummy. For the most part. It's about how the dummy has influenced, one might even say destroyed, two generations in Port Lawrence, Washington. The problem is it's hard to categorize this show, there's a nostalgia element but there's a lot of cheese too. You have horrific moments and then you have Justin Long doing some of the most insane physical humor you will ever see as the dummy possesses him. There's no inbetween. And the show isn't able to find a common ground. It doesn't know what it wants to be and I think this is because it's made by Disney. It wants to reach the widest audience possible so it hedges its bets. When it could go dark it goes funny, when it could go terrifying it goes gross. In that regard it does kind of want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even with an alum of that show, the late and unlamented Forrest. But here's the thing, even Buffy wasn't able to find the sweet spot in telling a story about an evil dummy. The season one episode "The Puppet Show" is one of those ones if I was a person who skipped episodes when rewatching favorite shows I just might skip. It's a shame Sid had to show up in the second Buffy video game, because he's a horrible fighter, but it is what it is. What I'm trying to say is that it's like a once in a lifetime situation to get this balance right and in the end Goosebumps failed. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because there are solid episodes here, but the finale left me cold. Instead of bringing our Port Lawrence Scooby Gang together to vanquish the big bad instead we get a rambling episode about the origins of the dummy. We're in Egypt and traveling circuses, we're far away from our core cast. The town then gets possessed by the dummy and everyone has makeup like the henchmen from the Buffy musical as my brother pointed out. And I guess they win, it's very convoluted and Justin Long appears to still be possessed at the end and that's where we're left. Because while the show was renewed it was renewed as an anthology. So guess what? Next season we'll get new stories and characters that they might just as well leave on another cliffhanger. I mean, really!?! I invested my time in this uneven show and I'm not going to get closure!?! Not to mention that I feel like I need therapy because I realized I'm now the age of the parents of the teens on the show. At least the flashbacks to their high school years had the requisite amount of flannel. The flannel is all I have to comfort me now.
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
If you are looking for an author who is a BIG NAME in crime fiction you couldn't do better than Val McDermid. What's more, unlike other similar authors whose work has been adapted to the small screen she has either phenomenal good luck or is extremely involved in the process or maybe she's just incredibly picky because of the two series and one standalone that have been adapted they are all stellar. Wire in the Blood with Robson Green is a classic up there with Inspector Morse. As for Place of Execution? Stunning. It's one of those mysteries that stays with you forever. Every once in awhile I'll think on it and be amazed all over again. That miniseries also did a lot for changing the trajectory of Greg Wise's career to the deliciously dark. So I had expectations for Karen Pirie. But I also was totally blindsided by it because I got the wrong end of the stick. You see when they said that the show starred a "blonde from Outlander" I thought for some reason it was Nell Hudson who played Laoghaire, the bane of Jamie and Claire, instead it was Lauren Lyle who plays Marsali, Jamie and Claire's beloved daughter-in-law. Not that I'm complaining, because Lauren proved how perfect she was for this role, I'm just also really a fan of Nell Hudson because she was amazing on Victoria, though I'm still mad they killed her off. And in fairness I really didn't know how Lauren Lyle would have the time what with also filming Outlander, but thankfully that didn't seem to be a problem. What this adaptation showed more than anything is how to perfectly update you source material for the present day. In the original novel, The Distant Echo, the cold case that Karen Pirie is investigating happened in 1978 and is being investigated in 2003. Therefore to have that twenty-five year gap now this is heavy on the nineties nostalgia, but more than that it incorporates the citizen detective and true crime podcast culture that has just boomed in recent years. As for Karen herself, she's funny, she bounces around like a Whac-A-Mole. She has a sense of humor and lame style, she knows a good joke, knows she's good at her job, and knows it's a bad time to be a Karen. There's a sense of humor too which anyone who knows Val McDermid will know she possess, I remember she was doing a book signing in the US, sadly nowhere near me, but near my favorite bookstore, Murder by the Book, so I got a copy of her newest book for my mom's birthday, and I asked if she'd inscribe it "To Marian who's glad she doesn't live in Bradfield," Bradfield being where her Wire in the Blood books are set. She dutifully signed that and added "As am I." Which just cracked me up and made the present that much more special. So while there was a part of me who felt that the mtstery was a little pedestrian, it was riviting and fun and I am just so glad there's going to be more because I need more Karen Pirie in my life.
It was 2018 when I first heard about Mike Flanagan. He wrote and directed the most perfectly modernized and expanded version of The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix. It was the first time that I really felt that someone understood what Shirley Jackson was trying to do, and yes, that meant no Owen Wilson being decapitated I'm glad to say. He followed this up with 
