Season 30 - Wives and Daughters (2000-2001)
Wives and Daughters is the most nearly perfect miniseries that exists that I can not watch. Based on Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished novel of the same name it is a perfect compromise between fans of Austen and the Brontës. Because the world sucks and feels the need to always pit women against each other, for the longest time you had to identify as either an Austen fan or a Brontës fan, you just couldn't be both. Which is bullshit and where Gaskell enters the frame. She's like Austen with politics or the Brontës with more balls. She revels in a happy ending and social satire, much like Austen, but unlike Austen she deals with weightier subjects and, like her friend Charlotte Brontë, is willing to go a bit broody and bleak when the story requires it. In simpler terms, she's totally willing to kill characters that you love and have no regrets about it. Which is why I have such a problem watching this miniseries almost to the point I just can not watch it. Which pains me because I love it so very much. The thing is, I am perfectly comfortable watching Tom Hollander die over and over again. I even once had to watch Tom Hiddleston do the dirty deed. What I can't handle is Michael Gambon's reaction to Tom Hollander's death. Hollander is after all playing Gambon's eldest son. It is, to me, the most accurate portrayal of grief I have ever seen and it just rips open my very soul. Just even thinking about it makes my heart hurt. And this annoys me all the more because I didn't much care for Hollander's character, but he was so beautifully acted and pathetic and poignant. But where there is love, there is pain. And Wives and Daughters is probably the closest Gaskell ever got to writing a straight-up love story. Sure, she does go on about the inter-dynamics of mixing a family, but in the end, it's the love of two characters, Roger and Molly, that makes this perhaps the best miniseries I have ever seen. Even more than Andrew Davies's other beloved adaptation, Pride and Prejudice, this broke and mended my heart a hundred times over and left me nearly satisfied. For some reason Davies decided to focus on the fact that Roger's first love with Molly's stepsister, Cynthia, was more about attraction, whereas the love between Roger and Molly was more a meeting of the minds and companionship and mutual respect. I feel that they are soul mates, and in need of a good snog, thank you very much. True love wins the day, so let the curtain close on a kiss. And right there is why this is only nearly perfect. Because Roger and Molly never kiss. They have their HEA, the times, they are a changing, and yet, there is no true satisfaction. I don't know if this is because Andrew Davies had to create the ending himself. Usually left to his own devices he brings something to a miniseries that otherwise would be lacking, I'm thinking in particular of the songs in Tipping the Velvet, which also starred Keeley Hawes. Here he's so close. The proposal, the rain, the admission of love, and then the lack of a kiss. It just doesn't work. Which is why it's best I don't watch this miniseries. It angers and destroys me in equal measure.
Because of this show I have a new life goal. I want Tom Hollander as Truman Capote to narrate disparate events. I want him being snarky about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I want him talking about the jerseys of players during the NBA All-Star game. I need that urbane razor sharp wit taking the most banal of things apart. To make this clear, I do not want him narrating my personal life, it might get a bit too barbed and don't know if I could survive that. But I would totally let him near ANY Thanksgiving feast and let him loose. Seriously, Joanne Carson's Thanksgiving is seriously one I would buy tickets to. In fact, the show needed to be nothing more than this. And yet it is more. The long awaited second season of Feud brings us that little bit of bygone glamor and a glimpse into celebrity that the first season did seven long years ago. A glimpse that I don't think the long speculated Charles and Diana season could have delivered, though I did admire the snarky dig at the Royal Family in the first few episodes. This is about women who were somebodies just because of their rank. They're who the Real Housewives want to be but never will because these women had an undefinable class that taught them to protect their own and close ranks. Their dirty laundry is never aired, never even spoken about, even amongst themselves, which is why Truman's betrayal hurt them so much. They let him in, they gave him the ammunition, and he didn't understand that to stay in their world he wasn't allowed to use it to make his literary comeback. Tom Hollander is amazing as Capote. After the first few minutes you entirely forget that it is Tom and buy into the fact you are just watching Truman himself. And I can think of no higher compliment than that. Except to invite him to destroy your Thanksgiving, but he has a standing invite from me. And while there's a certain elegance to this show, it suffers as all Ryan Murphy shows do by being uneven and overstaying its welcome. The final episode should have been "Beautiful Babe" which showed the passing of both Babe Paley and Truman. Instead we were left with "Phantasm Forgiveness" which is a ludicrous fever dream wherein Truman belatedly tries to offer up his apologies through his writing of Answered Prayers, a book that in reality was never finished and there was no indication that it was. Even if that final episode did give us a little more time with Jessica Lange and insight into Truman's relationship with his mother, that monstrous relationship could have been left unexplored as this whole series was a love letter to the past and to friendship and love destroyed not about seeing Chloë Sevigny, the weakest actress in the series, dance in a Western bar. Because if there's one thing you'll learn about Truman, it's that he is self-destructive. It's not just the booze and the pills, it's the relationships in his life. While he acts naive about the fallout from "La Côte Basque 1965" he knew he was saying what shouldn't have ever been said. Be he couldn't help himself. He never could. That is why a once brilliant writer ended up alienating all those he loved and his output became nothing more than appearances on talk shows. A caricature of what he once was and could have been again had he ever finished Answered Prayers. But at least this is a fitting eulogy, not just to the society he loved, but to the society he helped destroy, the class of hats and gloves, the unspoken affairs, and the friendships that he ruined.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who remembers the miniseries Cambridge Spies. Starring Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Rupert Penry-Jones, and Samuel West as the famous Philby, Bugress, Maclean, and Blunt respectively. This was a whose who of top British talent that followed the infamous spies from their halcyon days at Cambridge up until they were exposed. Needless to say it was kind of a rose tinted view of spying. They had scruples but their idealism, their conviction that they were doing this for the greater good, outweighed the downside. Yes they would touch on issues like Burgess's alcoholism, but I think it was more because Tom Hollander plays a wonderful dipsomaniac than any darker import like guilt. I felt at the time that it was missing a beat. The DVD set I had rented had a documentary on it and I think that did a better job than the entire miniseries in showing how what they did was a betrayal of their country. They might have been idealistic fools but they were also traitors. Which is why I was so excited for A Spy Among Friends. Based on the nonfiction book by Ben Macintyre, this seemed like it would actually give us a version of the truth. Because the truth is that we will probably never know the whole truth. And even here, even in a world of "truth" we are warned that some things aren't as they seem. This miniseries gets to the heart of the old boys network by showing that the education and comradery forged within the upper echelons of British aristocracy was ripe for infiltration because in the world they moved in it was something that simply wasn't done. The question isn't how it was done or why it was done it's a more intimate look at two friends who come to the realization that their shared history isn't what they thought it was. Damian Lewis as Nicholas Elliot was sent to Beirut to interview Kim Philby as played by Guy Pearce and Elliot let Philby run. Much like in the Watergate scandal there was some missing minutes on their taped debriefing and that lead to much speculation. A Spy Among Friends spins out what could have happened in that time and who is playing who. It's a cat and mouse game involving Russians, Americans, Britons, and old old friends. But by pulling back the iron curtain and seeing what Philby's life in Russia was actually like gives his crimes a greater weight. Was this the glorious life he was fighting for? And what of those he left behind and those he's reunited with? Through flashbacks and dreams, we see these two men circle each other. We see the same events over and over again through different eyes with new knowledge. The genius of this miniseries is that it relies on two of the greatest actors today, Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis. They bring a weight to this miniseries that makes every betrayal land a punch. You actually feel the dead Philby's legacy is propped up with. I don't know if I have ever seen a better Cold War thriller and the fact that it rests on the shoulders of so few yet talented actors shows that with the right people and the right material you can make magic.
