When I'm not listening to or writing about music, I like to relax with a bit of telly. Like probably most people these days, I have a SKY Plus box, so I hardly ever watch “live” TV anymore: I record what I want and then watch it when it's convenient for me. Like their tagline used to say, it's changed the way I watch TV, and I'm sure that's true for a huge amount of people too. We no longer have to allocate time to sit down and catch our favourite shows; we can now just rely on “the box” to record them for us and we can review what's recorded and watch whenever we please, whether that's the early hours of the morning or just before we go to work. We can record a whole fistful of programmes that we would never have time to watch during the week, and binge on them at the weekend, when things are less hectic and time is more available.
Personally, a lot of the time I tend to record whole series, or a few episodes at least, and then watch them back to back. The idea of waiting for next week's episode has largely been eliminated. Nowadays we watch what we want, when we want. The upshot of this of course is that we often end up recording more than we can ever watch, and as the programmes stack up on the Sky box we have to make a decision as to either what to watch or what to delete. I've found myself recording things I thought I'd really like to see, but every time I review the list I'm just not in the mood, or there isn't enough time, or a million other excuses, and things just end up getting wiped off without being watched.
Luckily, I went for the terabyte box, which as its name implies means you have 1000 gigs of space to fill up, so it's unlikely to get full anytime soon. Of course, this is a two-edged sword: with so much space available, it's nothing to me to record four, five, six full seasons of programmes and add in movies or specials or documentaries, concerts and so on, and the more I record the more I have to watch. This has resulted in my deciding not to bother after all with some series --- I enjoyed the opening season of “The Wire” but thought the second was a bit flat and uninteresting, and so with about 26 episodes on the box that I was likely never to watch, or want to watch, it was eventually a case of clear out some space by deleting them.
There are shows I watch on the day they're transmitted --- though hardly ever live --- or the day after. Shows I'm following, the news, football etc., and these are the ones where I'm actively waiting for them to be shown so I can see them. But many are just series I enjoy or think I might, and record with the intention of watching to see if I like them. Sometimes this works out, sometimes not. In this section, to move away a little from the music for a short while, I'll be going through some of the programmes I'm currently watching and enjoying (well obviously: why would you watch something if you didn't enjoy it?) --- some of them may be very old to some people, some may not even be known to them. As I live in Ireland, some may be only transmitted on our national channels, but I'll throw in as much information as I can about them.
2 Broke Girls
The first one is one that followed the original pattern I described above, ie I recorded a few episodes hoping it would be good, kept ignoring it as the episodes built up, and eventually one night thought I'd see what it was like. If it was no use, I reasoned, I could delete the episodes and make space. Somehow, whenever I think this, the show ends up being great. And so this proved to be.
A comedy from the same stable that brought us classics “Cheers” and “Frasier” (well, James Burrows is involved), it features two girls from wildly different backgrounds working together as waitresses in a Brooklyn restaurant. Max, played by Kat Dennings, is a tough, streetwise, no-nonsense girl from a poor, working-class background who is doing what she has to do to keep body and soul together. She is joined one day by Caroline (Beth Behrs), a snobby, sexy socialite who is much more used to moving in higher social circles, but whose father has been indicted and imprisoned for running a ponzi scam, and all his assets having been frozen means she has nothing to live on, and must fall back on her completely limited survival skills. Talk about putting a domesticated, spoiled cat out to fend for themselves on the Serengeti!
Anyway, things don't go smoothly at first but eventually the two become on/off friends, and the show centres around their dream (put forward by Caroline utilising Max's baking skills) of opening a cupcake shop. Caroline reckons they need $250,000 to make this happen, so they begin saving, and at the end of each episode, depending on whether they've made or lost money, a total is shown as to how far they have to go to reach their goal.
It sounds a bit cheesy, and I wasn't sure at first, but I quickly grew to love it, so much so that now I'm letting the episodes build up so that I have a few to watch at once! Other good characters in the show are the lecherous and eternally optimistic Oleg, a Ukranian chef at the restaurant, who thinks every woman is attracted to him, and never stops trying. The girls' boss, Han Lee, a short little Korean guy, is also very well played, and it's refreshing in that the episodes don't seem to centre around “crisis of the week” or anything, just the things that the girls go through on their way towards success and riches, both of which it's painfully obvious they're never going to achieve.
The characters may not be original, but they're played with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek humour that you never feel they're taking themselves too seriously, and yet they still elicit your sympathy when life throws a curveball at them. Well worth a look, it's currently on our national station, RTE, but no doubt it's also available through the usual channels. Here's a clip.
The Borgias
Now this is a programme I had the entire series of on my Sky box until I recently decided to give it a shot. I did enjoy it, but I was a little underwhelmed, given the “original mafia” tagline the show had been going with, that it had not a lot more sex and violence in it. Not that I enjoy that sort of thing,
per se, but when you're talking about
the Borgias, you expect them to be more the Sopranos and less the Simpsons. I found the sympathetic line Neil Simon took with the story interesting, but a little unbelievable. Essentially, he was saying that the Borgias were misunderstood, put upon, reviled and there was a real “us against the world” attitude about how they ruled.
This is NOT how I remember being taught the Borgias were! Wasn't the daughter, Lucrezia, supposed to poison her enemies? Yet here she's depicted as an innocent, strong and determined woman, the best side of the family. Well, the image aside, the series is very good: very historically accurate especially in the dialogue (I just hate it when some Roman soldier says “dude” or “guys”, or uses some other idiom that wouldn't be invented for another thousand years!) and the settings, and the story is well written. Jeremy Irons puts in a fine performance as the Pope, but I believe it's Francois Renaud as Cardinal Cesare Borgia and his sister Lucrezia, played by Holliday Grainger, who steal the show. Michel Muller pulls off a star turn as the king of France later on in the series, and Steven Berkoff is his usual scintillating self, though sadly only for two episodes.
I personally thought the ending was a little flat (won't give anything away) but am heartened to see that a second season has been commissioned. Let's hope it gets a little more bloody and raunchy though, or I might just have to stick with the second season of “Game of thrones”!
Here's what happens when you piss the French off!
IRT Deadliest roads: the Andes
I've been into “Ice Road Truckers” from the start, so when they spun off into this other series, where some of the drivers leave the USA and head for the most dangerous roads they can drive, you better believe I was there! The first series had the guys in India, where high, twisting and treacherous narrow roads that barely deserve to be called such put the truckers to their ultimate test. These were the roads to sort the men from the boys (and the women from the girls)! Now they're back, and this time it's in the Andes, where the roads of India must look like a walk in the park, as they struggle with feet-wide mountainous passes, landslides, tunnels cut into the mountains and bridges that even Indiana Jones would think twice about crossing!
For pure adrenalin rush, IRT is great, but the interplay between the drivers is also interesting to watch. On the first series of “Deadliest roads”, one of the drivers gave up on the first day and flew home. I'm not going to give away whether that happens this season, but as I say, these roads are even more dangerous! How they get all those mad camera angles is beyond me: trucks must be festooned with cameras. Currently showing on History. Here's an idea of what to expect.
Death Valley
Do you like those shows like “Cops” where the cameras follow the police around on a “normal” day or night? Do you like vampires and zombies? Have you a healthy sense of humour? If the answer to all three is yes, then do yourself a favour and tune to MTV to watch the hilarious “Death Valley”. It's just so good it should be mandatory viewing. Here's a clip.
Flashpoint
A new series I've just started watching that follows the day-to-day adventures of the Strategic Response Unit (SRU), essentially SWAT team in an unnamed Canadian city. The guys are called upon when special tactics are required, and though they do their fair share of sniper work, there's a lot of negotiation involved too. Yes it's hackneyed and has been done to death before, but I'm really enjoying what I'm seeing so far. Only just started on Universal Channel, but I see from Wiki that it's currently going to a fifth season. Good news for me.
And finally, though it's not showing at the moment and has in fact finished, I'd like to give a mention to one of the “sleeper hits” on my Sky box, a little show that only lasted five episodes sadly, but should have run for much longer.
The Booth at the End
Xander Berkeley plays the mysterious Man who is always at the booth at the end of a diner, with notebook and pen. He is said to be able to grant your fondest wish or deepest desire, but at a price. He will demand you do something for him. If you do, then what you ask for will be yours. But there is no alternative request: you do what he asks you or there's no deal. This can be anything from robbing a bank (seriously!) to setting off a bomb (no, really!) or becoming pregnant (I am serious, I promise!), and the really interesting thing about the short series is that the lives of each of the people who visit him usually intersect in quite ingenious ways, leading to the one getting their wish at the expense of, or in concert with, the wish of another.
It's really quite amazing, a real play on the idea of “how far would you go to get what you want?” Berkeley is brilliant in the role, calm and collected but with both a quiet air of menace, an aura of tragedy and a sense that perhaps he's a victim of his circumstances. In one episode, someone says to him, having heard what he must do to get what he wants, “You're a monster!” He responds calmly, “No, but you might say I feed monsters.” Excellent dialogue all throughout. Check it out if you can, and you'll agree with me that five episodes is just not enough.
That's enough of my telly viewing for now. As I watch newer stuff, or stuff that's on my box but I haven't watched yet, or indeed come across older stuff I may have missed, I'll fill you in on the details. As if you care. But if you want to talk TV programmes with me, or comment on any of the ones above, you know what to do!
We now return you to your normal programme, already in progress...