Whether by DVD disk or DVR recording, well-produced television series provide some of the most reliable viewing pleasure you can find. Here’s what I’ve been watching and enjoying lately.
I have read avidly lots of Austen and Bronté, Dickens and Trollope, but it took the BBC to introduce me to the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Having just caught up with their earlier production of Cranford, I was primed for the recently-broadcast Return to Cranford. What a delight to be back in the company of Miss Mattie (Judi Dench) and the rest. Though perhaps a little too plotted, Return to Cranford ties up all the threads neatly, and as much as I enjoyed it, I hope they don’t go back to the well once too often.
But that certainly set me off in search of other BBC adaptations of Gaskell novels. I particularly liked
Wives and Daughters (1999), with most of the same crew and many of the same actors, and the same setting in pastoral England. North and South (2004), however, ventures into Dickensian settings in the manufacturing North to offset the idylls of the South. The view of Manchester cotton mills feels authentic, but the fully-anticipated attraction of opposites, between the mill owner and the daughter of a doubting cleric, is undercut by the blankness of the female lead, so different from the immediate appeal of the heroine of Wives and Daughters, who endures disappointment with saintly good humor until she finally gets her just reward. These two miniseries will put me in search of more Masterpiece Theater classics I might have overlooked.
In the current season of Masterpiece Classic, I didn’t really feel the need to watch Romola Garai as Emma, but did so because my viewing companion is on a Jane Austen kick. I liked it well-enough, but still prefer the Kate Beckinsale version from 1996, which I then showed to my partner and watched enough to confirm my own preference. Now we’ll probably re-watch the Gwyneth Paltrow, also from 1996, and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, because really, one can never get enough of Emma Woodhouse.
Of course one can never get enough of Abraham Lincoln either, so when I heard of it, I had to watch the miniseries of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988) as well. I am a dedicated follower of Gore Vidal’s historical novels, but the highlights of this minimally-produced tv series were the performances of Sam Waterston as the President and Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Todd Lincoln. Never less than interesting in its depiction of Old Abe’s political maneuvering, this is more like filmed theater than grand historical recreation.
On the subject of tv series, I have lately been catching up on dvd with the well-regarded sitcom, Arrested Development (2003-05), which is indeed witty and hilarious, if in the end just a sitcom. I’ve made my way through the first two seasons, and look forward to the third. If you’re looking for a laugh, Arrested Development is definitely something to look at.
Of series currently showing on tv, I have one strong recommendation, one warning, and one heads-up. Friday Night Lights, whose fourth season (MC-81) I was able to catch on DirecTV preview and soon to run on NBC, definitely qualifies as must-see tv, whether you think you’re interested in Texas high school football or not. This portrait of a small-town community just keeps getting better, after a bit of a wobble in the second season when they made a pitch to become more popular and not just a favorite of the critics and cognoscenti. In the fourth season the setting changes to another school and a new set of characters, but doesn’t miss a beat. If you haven’t been watching, you could tune in now, but I would strongly advise going back and watching the first three seasons on dvd. With one season to go, FNL bids fair to enter my all-time pantheon of tv series right between best-ever, The Wire, and long-time favorite, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
On the other hand, in the current season on HBO, Big Love has definitively “jumped the shark,” so intent on injecting ridiculous new twists into the story that even one’s accrued affection for the characters of the three wives is overwhelmed by the implausibility of the husband’s implacable will to power. I watched it, but only with frequent rolling of the eyes and rebellion of the mind. I do not look forward to any more. HBO certainly seems to have lost its mojo with miniseries.
They seem to have ceded it to AMC. We will have to wait till summer for a new season of Mad Men, likely to shoehorn itself into my Top 5 as well, but this week Breaking Bad will resume with its third season. If you can handle the occasional gruesomeness and the pitch-black humor, then you would be well-advised to jump on this critical bandwagon, though I can’t see dropping into the story at midpoint. The first two seasons are already on dvd, and that’s the place to start, as long as you can take the drug-related violence and mendacity that inserts itself into the life of an ordinary high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque.
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