Season 41 - South Riding (2011)
I know there are those out there who love this adaptation of the book by Winifred Holtby, but I am not one of them. I even gave it a second chance but I just can't with it. If anything I hate it even more. Given the cast and the crew you'd think this would be right up my alley, but the cat hanging out in the alley trying to upstage Anna Maxwell Martin and Douglas Henshall is the only part of this miniseries that I actually like. If you've watched the 1978 adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you are in the wheelhouse of what I was hoping for with this series. A look at women overcoming the roles they were forced into because of their sex and raising each other up and tearing each other down within the setting of a local community and its school. And there are glimpses of that. But instead there's a prevalent dirty old man vibe that I can't get beyond. The creepy sexualization of children in a school presentation, the lecherous board member, and then the problem of David Morrissey's Robert Carne are too much for me. All the dramatic music in the world won't trick me into liking a series which holds up a rapist as the romantic ideal. But surely, that's not what this series is doing you say? Oh yes. It is. So Robert Carne has a wife Muriel. She is institutionalized and he has bankrupted himself to make sure she gets the best care despite the fact she would rather just be at home. But she wouldn't have had to be institutionalized if not for him. She had been told she is under no circumstance to have a child. Robert knows this. They practice safe sex with a diaphragm. He comes back from the war and finds her flirting with other men in her bedroom, he snaps and proceeds to rape her. Muriel gets pregnant with a child, their delicate daughter Midge, and she loses her mind. From the show you can assume it's unspecified hysteria that probably arises out of postpartum psychosis, though it's never spelled out. But what is spelled out is that this is all the result of having a child. Therefore it is Robert's fault. Supposedly the weight of caring for this woman he has never stopped loving is what has damaged his heart and he will one day succumb to an angina attack. Which, if I'm honest, he deserves. He deserves death and pain and more. If he loved this woman so much why did he destroy her? And he KNEW it would destroy her. Enter radical schoolteacher Sarah Burton played by Anna Maxwell Martin. She is the antithesis of everything Robert Carne stands for and yet she falls for him. She falls for him hard. And I am flummoxed as to why. They have one or two dances at a hotel over the holidays and are ready to jump into bed together, all while he's hallucinating his wife, and that was all it took to steal her heart. Does she have like a Heathcliff complex? That she falls for the worst in humanity? I really would like to know more about her fiance that died during the war. Was he also a deplorable? Because make no mistake, if this were contemporary and set in America Carne would be MAGA. And yet, as Sarah is declaiming her love for him, she says she hates everything he believes in and stands for. Um, girl, what someone believes in and stands for are what they are, so how do you love him exactly!?! As I said previously, I just can't with this. South Riding can go ride off into the sunset. Or better yet, die in a cliff collapse.
When this adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out I tried to watch it. I thought I had only made it through one of the four episodes but apparently I somehow actually made it through two of them. Now you might be thinking, oh, she had a problem watching this because Thomas Hardy is quite bleak and this is about rape, abuse, and eventual death, but you'd be wrong. It's not that I was OK with how horrible this story is, it's that I could barely get into the story due to the piercing headache I got at the hands of the score. Rob Lane's score is horrible, shrill, and just bores into my right eye socket and makes me almost pass out in pain. Every. Single. Time. The strings and the strings and the strings. Just make it stop! If his goal was to make me feel in pain to understand Tess's pain, well, good job. Now hopefully I'll be able to see out of my right eye again in the near future. People talk about the power of music, damn, this music packed a punch. And not in a good way. Just thinking about it makes my face hurt. What annoyed me even more about the score is once I was able to sit with the pain of the cluster headache behind my right eye I realized that the recurring theme of the score was triggering me to hum another song. You know how Tom Petty sued Sam Smith for similarities in Smith's song "Stay With Me" to Petty's song "I Won't Back Down?" Well, if you didn't, you now know. Petty won and is now listed as a co-writer. This came as no shock to me because every time I heard "Stay With Me" I'd get "I Won't Back Down" in my head. The same thing happened once I pushed through the pain here. I started getting the theme to Gosford Park by Patrick Doyle in my head. Which made me extra angry. Because not only is this music horribly painful to listen to, it's not even original. I really just can't with this miniseries. I was promised Anna Massey and instead I have baby voiced Gemma Arterton and a whole bunch of actors I have previously loved either being evil or miserable. Poor Jodie Whittaker, what this miniseries does to her makes the backlash of her becoming the Thirteenth Doctor look like child's play. And what do you get if you actually make it all the way through the miniseries!?! Fuck all. The love of Tess's life, Angel Clare, there has to be a special hell just for him. Let me recount for you what happened at the beginning of the third episode for your enlightenment. Oh, and to set the scene, it's their wedding night! Angel, in the depths of agony: I hired a whore once. Tess: I forgive you. BTW I was raped. Angel: You're a whore! Here's £25. I'll see you when I see you, I'm off to Brazil. Me: Hopefully to die from some horrible tropical disease. Fuck you Angel Clare. Fuck you and your hypocrisy. You could have all been happy, instead you chose misery. In fact, I wish for you to have to listen to the score to this miniseries for an eternity. That might just make up for what you did to Tess. Maybe.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
The Slaughtered Lamb Bookstore and Bar by Seana Kelly
This one is going to be a hard one to write about. I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. I saw him speak twice and got to meet him at one of those events. He seemed perfectly lovely and dedicated to his fans. As we've since learned by the allegations that first broke on Tortoise Media this was all a front. A way for the spider to lure in the flies. The fallout was deservedly harsh, projects were scrapped left and right. The Sandman was almost completely wrapped when the news about Gaiman broke. Therefore production continued. What was to be done with the show could be decided later. After all Anansi Boys was completely finished when it was permanently shelved. Amazon got a nice tax write-off and got to appear as if they're supporting the victims when it was really all about the bottom line. But the thing is, The Sandman has a life of it's own. The fanbase is all-encompassing. Netflix knew that the clamor Amazon was experiencing over Good Omens was nothing to what they would face if this season never saw the light of day. Plus the team were claiming, whether honestly or to cover their asses, that the series had always been planned as two seasons and Gaiman wasn't really involved. Though I do question that second statement after reading some interviews. So season two of the show dropped in July with no fanfare and minimal press coverage. And I honestly didn't know if I'd be able to watch it. While having previously been a fan of Gaiman I had never been a fan of The Sandman comics. And oh how I tried. But I'd get about six books in, up to Brief Lives, and just throw in the towel. I never got any further and at least now I never have to force myself to finish this series. I am done with it. As for the adaptation, I did feel the need to tune in. The show worked for me where the comics did not. The rough edges and the excessive rapes had been sanded away. And at least we now know why Gaiman included so many rapes. Which actually made parts of this season a painful experience, and not just because of the autotuning of Ruairi O'Connor as Orpheus. When Nada confronts Dream about his treatment of her you are horrified thinking about how the man who wrote this put women in this same situation over and over again. And why bring back the rapist author, Richard Madoc as played by Arthur Darvill? Did they want to hit us over the head with the fact that Gaiman basically wrote his sick fantasies into this series? That Richard Madoc was his avatar in this fictional world. I mean, if Gaiman hadn't been such a good showman we should have seen what was right in front of us all along. Oh, the irony of the second series being about reconciliation and redemption after the first one was about reclamation and revenge. Because he denies it all. There will be no reconciliation for him. No redemption. And there can be no separation of art and the artist, he made sure of that. A part of me even wondered if originally Gaiman was supposed to be there at Dream's funeral next to Madoc. Thankfully that didn't happen. And even if their creator will forever be in torment, at least his creations were given a fresh start. They were released out into the world. They were set free. Hopefully not to ever be caught in their creators net again. Forever connected by somehow liberated.
When I heard they were making a miniseries about the last woman executed in England I decided then and there that there would be no way I would watch this series. It would be too depressing. And then I decided to drop my BritBox subscription. I will never let a single day go to waste with a streaming subscription so I started to look for short shows to fill in this two week gap. After exhausting all the Agatha Christie I hadn't yet watched and hearing rave reviews about A Cruel Love, I caved. I blame Bessie Carter. I can do four episodes of about anything so I should have been able to handle this. Well, I should have stuck to my gut instincts. This was beyond depressing. A sort of fever dream of domestic abuse filmed with an almost Lynchian glamour of a woman battered and bloody and bruised. Yet there felt like there wasn't any grounding in reality. They just showed little vignettes of Ruth's life and her love affair with her "victim" David Blakely. Though I think "love" is a stretch. There was no love, cruel or otherwise here, it was people colliding into, using, and destroying each other in whatever way they could. The show seems to be wanting to say that it was the unspoken rules of society that Ruth dared to breach by aiming to better her life that lead to her death, which, while partially true, in that it lead to her being railroaded at trial, doesn't take into account her upbringing at all. She was raised to believe that all she deserved from life was abuse. She suffered at the hands of her father and then all her lovers, even the one "good guy" who basically turned this broken woman into a killer. And yet this is all told elliptically. In little flashes. The horrors of her childhood are mentioned in a throwaway line from her sister, who it should be noted was another victim of men having been raped and impregnated by their father. I just felt like this REAL LIFE STORY has something so important to say. It changed the law, as she was the last woman executed, and within a decade the death penalty was abolished. And yet the weight isn't there. It's more snippets of her degradation while still looking glamorous. There's no real history, what history I read about was thanks to the internet, and seriously, someone has to get onto how Ruth's mother was connected to the Cambridge Five. Now that's a true crime show I do want to watch. But this. This was a woman whose life was destroyed by men and her story is told and controlled by men. She doesn't really factor in until the end. She's about an eye for an eye and a stiff upper lip and not showing how her repeated abuse, her trauma, is what led her to this desperate act. She doesn't want to be seen as a victim and that is exactly how abusers get away with their crimes. They make their victims carry the blame and shame. Only at the end does she realize that she was sticking to a morality the others weren't playing by and by then it's too late to save herself. But maybe that's what makes this work, on some level, at least in the eyes of the reviewers who raved, because it was men who controlled, ruined, and then ended her life, and therefore, it's not really about her, it's about the patriarchy. Personally, I think it should have been about Ruth. But maybe I'm alone in this assessment.
What would you get if Desperate Housewives took a supernatural slant and decided to be about #MeToo? You might get a new spin on The Witches of Eastwick, but you'd definitely get Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale, a tryhard show that never states the obvious conclusions from it's own narrative, that witchcraft really is the problem. Sanctuary wants to be relevant so badly it's painful. Here's a political buzzword as a plot device, here's #MeToo, here's quarantine, here's this, here's that, and at the end of the day this many-headed hydra doesn't work together to vanquish it's foes, it fights itself until it's dead, or until it's lost its audience. And if I'm the typical viewer, that's very fast. And I wanted to love it! It's adapted by Debbie Horsfield, she of Poldark fame, how could she go wrong? I wanted Broadchurch with witches! I wanted it hard. But that isn't what this show is. It wants to be, but it isn't. This show is a politically correct nightmare that I can't get my head around, and what's worse, I don't want to. So I'm now going to spoil it all for you, so if for some reason you actually want to watch it, turn away now. Golden Boy Dan Whithall dies at a party. But Dan has a lot of secrets. The biggest being that when he was younger he died and the local witch, Sarah Fenn, did what she shouldn't have done and brought him back to life. Dan grows up to be a horrible human being, having raped and molested all the young girls in town, though somehow none of the adults know this. His mother, who is a member of Sarah Fenn's coven, decides that if Sarah can't bring him back, again, then she'll blame it all on her and thus ensues a good old fashioned witch-hunt. It escalates as one would expect, but what just gets me is that, well, the witch-hunt was kind of justified. Sarah is supposed to be a white witch, yet she's doing spells on her friends husbands to "help" them out, and then there's the aforementioned bringing someone back from the dead. If she had just left well enough alone none of this would have happened. I mean, yes, you could say that having the power to bring a beloved child back from the dead shouldn't be wasted, but maybe she should have investigated his death a little closer. Because he died the first time when Sarah's own daughter's magic manifested to protect her friend who Dan was trying to sexually assault. Sarah's own daughter who grows up to date Dan and then when they break up he drugs and rapes her. Why did she date him in the first place? I mean, so much of this show was just why!?! I literally don't get any of the characters' motivations. Yes, they are trying to protect themselves and their families, but this isn't the way to go about it. They are just all so self-centered and oblivious I just can't with them. Keep all of Sanctuary in quarantine forever. Burn it to the ground and let's speak no more of it. But before the cordone goes up please send out your interior decorator, because they are fabulous and if it wasn't in Sanctuary I'd move into Sarah Fenn's house in a heartbeat.
Tony and Susan by Austin Wright
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
The Duke and I by Julia Quinn
Country Matters started with delight and surprise. So many favorite actors as fresh faced youths! There's Ian McKellen, Peter Firth, looking about twelve but actually nineteen, and yes, that is Isobel Crawley! It took me about fifteen minutes to confirm it was indeed Penelope Wilton in her second ever television appearance. I mention it to save you the fifteen minutes of confusion that I grappled with. But once you get past these revelations and the discordantly cheery theme music you come to the realization that this series is nothing but unrelenting pain and misery. The second episode almost did me in. I never give up on shows and "The Mill" made me want to throw in the towel. Every single episode just grinds you down with despair. Rape, unwanted pregnancies, prison, disfigurement, stillbirth, lies, affairs, suicide, unhappy marriages, on and on and on, grinding you down more and more. Many people complain that this DVD release contains only eight of the thirteen episodes produced, famously omitting episodes staring Upstairs, Downstairs favorites Pauline Collins and Meg Wynn Owen, as well as a second Peter Firth episode, but most importantly episodes starring Jeremy Brett and Michael Kitchen. All I can say is that if they are anywhere near as depressing as the eight episodes I slogged through we are all better off without them in our lives. Because I can tell you now, there is no way in hell I could have made it through five more episodes, I barely made it through these. Going back to the worst of the lot, "The Mill," it's about a poor girl no longer wanted under her parents feet so she's sent off into service where she dutifully attends to her bedridden mistress while being raped every night by her mistress's husband. She of course gets pregnant and is run off home. Why would ANYONE want to watch this? Episode after episode shows the perils of pregnancy for unwed women, but this was wantonly cruel. All these episodes are adapted from the works of A.E. Coppard and H.E. Bates, and after Bates's "The Mill" I came to dread his episodes, despite the fact he wrote the delightful The Darling Buds of May. Which makes it extra ironic that the ONLY story that could be said to have a semblance of a HEA was his "The Ring of Truth." So if you REALLY feel like after this last year you could do with a big old helping of despair, might I suggest Country Matters for your viewing masochism?
There's FINALLY an adaptation of 
Lengthening shadows, the feeling of being watched, shots from Creature from the Black Lagoon stalking it's prey, a beautiful young swimmer who doesn't know the danger lurking right beneath the surface. No one can say this adaptation of Michelle McNamara's book on the Golden State Killer lacks style. Yet for me it wasn't just the style, it was the substance that kept me turning in week after week. It delved deeper than the book into the subject of being a woman and being a survivor and that made the documentary even more relevant today. A more human approach. Hearing the stories from the survivors intercut with stock footage from the time period and the hunt for the rapist in the 70s and 80s somehow made the era come alive, it grounded everything and made it more real. What's more there's a frank discussion about what it's like to be a woman, the whole idea that women are told to dress and behave a certain way to not become victims instead of teaching men to not attack women. The sheer number of rapists working in one area of California at that time shows the pervasiveness of sexual assault against women and the danger we constantly feel and I felt seen and heard tuning in every week. In fact it got me wondering, would the East Area Rapist, despite his reign of terror, ever have become the boogie man of suburban California with the longevity to be relevant today if he hadn't escalated to couples and then killing? Would he have been forgotten as just another rapacious rapist that was just gone in the dark? Who knows. But Michelle's personal drive, her personal journey was just as important as the other survivors, because in the end she became EARONS last victim.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
