Some Random Thoughts About Television... [R]

I made it 10 minutes and decided that if I wanted to watch Doc Martin, I would watch Doc Martin.

I do not want to watch Doc Martin. I have watched enough of it.

 

Is she in the Caroline Catz role?
Looks similar.

 

Yes, that thing.

 

I did not like Men Behaving Badly, either. Watch and episode or two and that was enough.

 

This new show "Best Medicine" (which TheJoeGreen was discussing) is an American remake of Doc Martin.

 

Over the weekend binged "Untamed" the Netflix show with Eric Bana as an ISB (National Park Service Investigative Service Branch) police officer in Yosemite. He is investigating the death of an unnamed girl (at least unnamed at first) who fell off of the famous "El Capitan" rock formation in Yosemite.

It was 70% pretty good and 30% incredibly stupid.

The good:
It was well made, the locations shots are lovely.
The pacing of the show made sense for six episodes.
The story of the girl was woven into the rest of the show pretty well (although part of that was idiotic at the same time).
There were too many subplots (as always), but they were not that distracting.

However, there are four main subplots and only one is relevant to the primary story.
The four are
-drug dealing and people being tattooed with a "gold X," which really scares some people for reasons not adequately explained,
-Kyle (Eric Bana) still grieving over the death of his son,
-the mysterious disappearance of Sean Sanderson, who disappeared from the park and was investigated by Kyle back in the day and,
-some dispute that the newbie park ranger (and ex-LA police and junior to Kyle) Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) has with the father of her son (who is also an ex-LA cop).

The idiotic:
The park is 1,000,000 acres, but Kyle manages to find Naya without any problem when she was in trouble.
The park is 1,000,000 acres, but Naya manages to save Kyle, in the dark, without knowing her way around or being able to really ride a horse, just in the nick of the time when Kyle is in trouble (I will not say more, as I do not give anything away. I can say "in trouble" as Kyle is in trouble about three times an episode).
The odds of either of those (especially the second) happening are spectacularly high.
The subplot with Paul Souter (Sam Neill) was completely unnecessary, although it sort of made internal sense (but was idiotic) in the end.

What was interesting to me is that nobody really stood out in the show. Usually, one character or one actor really stands out, even if that character is a secondary character. Here, none really did.
Kyle (Eric Bana) was insufferably unpleasant and way more unpleasant than the character, even with he was going through in his life, needed to be. Of course, he fell into the standard tropes of drinking, drinking and driving, prone to violence, etc., etc. Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Naya (Lily Santiago) was probably the best character in the show, but not a standout. She was bright, a quick learner and began to hold her own as the show progressed.
Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt), Kyle's ex-wife was a bit too "perfect" in her temperament, although that quickly changes and is explained during the show, although it is preposterous.
Scott (Josh Randall), Jill's current husband, was basically a useless of a character. Well, he was a dentist. so that could explain it (why do they always make secondary characters who are dentists completely useless?).
Shane Maquire (Wislon Bethel), a wildlife management officer, ex-army guy and all around dickhead. He is also Kyle's main nemesis for reasons explained and explained in their complete stupidity.
Jay Stuart (Raoul Max Trujillo) who is another park employee (not sure exactly what he does), and provides the indigenous voice of reason and spirituality to Kyle. He seems to know a lot more about what is going on than he admits. He was good in the very, very limited screen time provided.

The show would have been strengthened if they had focused more on Lucy (Ezra Franky) the victim of the crime that is the primary plot point. A small spoiler, in the last 1 episode, her story is explored a bit. However, that exploration of her story and the back explanation of it, DEFINITELY falls into the idiotic component of the program. There are also parts of her death that make absolutely no sense and one major point, about coyotes, that appeared be have been just dropped.

All told, it was worth a watch, but could have been much, much better than it was. It was not nearly as good as people said it was or the 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

Binged the series "Ponies" last night, the newly released Peacock "spy thriller" starring Emilia Clarke as a Russian speaking, American wife of a CIA agent living in Moscow.


Bea Grant (Emilia Clarke) and Twila Hasbeck (Haley Lu Richardson) are wives to two CIA agents (Chris Grant and Tom Hasbeck) in 1976 Moscow. When the two CIA operatives die in a reported plane crash, Bea and Twila are given very little information about the circumstances of the deaths and sent home. A couple of months later, Bea is agitated about the lack of information and decides to head back to Moscow to see what she can uncover. Twila agrees to go back as well, because the apartment in Moscow at the US embassy complex is better than what she has in the US, which is nothing.

Bea has a degree in Russian literature from Wellesley. Bea, conveniently, is completely fluent in Russian.
Twila is, basically, a hick from Indiana who hung out at the local military base and met her husband there. Since then, Twila has traveled the world, but never bothered to try to do, well, anything. Apparently, she and Tom had been in Russia for a couple of years as the show commences but she never learned a single word of Russian.

Some how, the two convince the station director that they should become operatives, despite a complete lack of training or vetting (although I imagine they were heavily vetted previously due to their marriage to active CIA agents), since they are PONIs (persons of no interest) and the KGB would likely not notice them.

It goes on to be a pretty entertaining romp through 1970's USSR and the spy games that went on continuously. Kompromat is main currency it appears and everybody (the Americans and the Russians, primarily) are spying on each other.

The show does partially solve the "mystery" of the husbands, but they do leave plenty of cliff hangers, so there is likely going to be a second season. The ending of Episode 8 is absolutely wild and something we almost never see in American shows about the Cold War. I won't spoil it, though.

I am not sure why three of the leads, Emilia Clarke, Adrian Lester (as Station Director, Dane Walter) and Harriet Walter (as Bea's grandmother Manya Caplan), as well as John Mcmillion (as Twila's husband Tom) and Louis Boyer (as Bea's husband Chris) are Americans but played by English actors. It is odd seeing so many, and some well known, British Actors playing Americans in an American show.

It was a well done show overall.
Emilia Clarke, with her insane caterpillar eyebrows, is decent as Bea. She did a passable job (according to my partner) on her Russian, despite not speaking any Russian. She also had a decent American accent. Seriously, her eyebrows should have their credit, they seem to be able to act independently of Ms. Clarke.

Haley Lu Richardson (who also has extraordinarily large eyebrows) sparkles as Twila. She is tough and fearless and more than a bit cynical. She is absolutely channeling her inner Natasha Lyonne in the role, a mass of sarcasm and way too much curly hair, she even has the pink sunglasses reminiscent of Lyonne's glasses in Poker Face. It is almost as if they wrote the role for Lyonne and then hired a cheaper version. Whatever, it works.

Adrian Lester is a bit wasted as Dane Walter. There is so much going on with the character, but nothing is really resolved with him.

The problem I have with the show is that there are some incredibly basic things they get wrong. Here are a few, but there are way more of them.

Bea has been in Moscow with Chris for six months when the show begins, but she and Twila only meet in the market that day. It is shown in a later episode that their flats in the Embassy Complex are across the hall and just one or two doors down from one another. It is inconceivable that they would not have met previously.

In their first "mission," Bea is to deliver a copy of Anna Karenina to an operative in a tiny Moscow pub. I won't say anything about what happens, but she is giving him a book with the title "Anna Karenina" and not Анна Каренина, the Russian version. Why would a Russian (alleged) give another Russian a book with an English title? That would be highly suspicious, but KGB Agent (and primary antagonist) Andrei Vasiliev takes no notice of this, despite being extraordinarily cognizant about everything else going on in the scene.

Like every spy thriller based on people speaking multiple languages, it falls into the fallacy that a native speaker would not tell the non-native speaker by accent. As someone who has spent most of my life around bilingual people (and not being bilingual myself), it is something I pretty much always notice.

By the way, the great tv show, "The Americans" does a terrific job with this, as they show flashbacks to the training each received back in Russia.

Like in "The Americans," at least this show delves into a bit.

First, Bea learned to speak Russian from her Belarusian immigrant grandmother, so she may not speak Russian with an American accent, as she likely would otherwise (my niece moved to the US at 7 speaking no English, is fluent in both Polish and English, and does not have a discernable "foreign" accent in either. My better half and her sister (niece's mom), on the other hand, who came to the US in their early 20's, still have thick Polish accents, despite living the majority of their lives in the US, perfecting her English in the US living with Americans for the past 20+ years, and my partner went to a program that was designed to help reduce accents).

Second, when they are working on her 'cover' story, it is determined she does not have a Moscow accent, so they decide to say she is from Belarus, which is sort of the truth, and sort of works, until she meets a woman from Belarus, who sees right through it.

Sasha, a Russian asset who works in an electronics company, has a suspiciously large apartment where he lives alone, despite his mother apparently living fairly close. It is odd for a single, 20-something working class man to have what appears to be an 80 sq m apartment in the center of Moscow and to have it to himself.
My partner's family (her parents were professionals, mom was a head mistress for a school and dad an architect) have a flat in a typical bloc in Poland. When they tried for it, in the late 1970's, they had to wait about 8 years to get it (they lived in school housing where her mom worked until their flat was approved). It does make sense that Sasha would have such place to himself.

Also, music is a big, big part of the show, but the show runners get things wrong all of the time.

According to some clues and dates on the screen, the show essentially begins around November, 1976 (George Bush is head of the CIA and has to update "the next administration" about the goings on in Russia) through Christmas 1976 (when the CIA agents have their accident). Bea and Twila return to Russia in February, 1977 and most of the action takes places over the subsequent two months, so we can say no later than April, 1977.

Some of the songs they play:
"Rasputin" by Boney M, did not come out until August, 1978. Also, I question whether it would have been played in a Moscow nightclub at that time, although it was a hit in the Eastern block.
"Watching the Detectives" by Elvis Costello was released in October, 1977.
"Hanging on the Telephone" by Blondie (also the title of Episode 2) was not released by Blondie until 1978.
"Second Hand News" (the title of Episode 1) was from Rumors by Fleetwood Mac which was released in February, 1977, although most of that episode takes place in 1976.

There were a few others (such as "I am a Dalek" by The Art Attacks, also released in 1978), but the above songs stuck out since they tie into the plot of the story quite well.

These are such simple errors, but they drive me nuts when a period piece gets the period just slightly wrong.

Anyway, while it cannot compare to "Kleo," (but very little can), it is definitely worth a watch.