Varieties of television experience

Recently I’ve been keeping up with the just finished seasons of two satisfying TV series, the second of Downton Abbey on PBS and the third of Justified on FX.  (And now I’m avidly into new seasons of Mad Men on AMC and Game of Thrones on HBO.)

There’s no possibility that you haven’t heard of Downton Abbey (MC-84, NFX, PBS), if you have any interest at all in lavish English heritage productions.  The series is an entirely codified crowd-pleaser, but I’m among the crowd who understands and enjoys the code.  It’s no accident that the show is named for its location setting, and what a stately old pile it is!  And then the clothes!  And even the characters who wear them!  The acting is topnotch across the board.  As for many viewers, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is my favorite – you expect to hate her, but can’t help loving her.  Then there’s Maggie Smith, doing her Maggie Smith thing, but perfectly so -- and so many other characters, upstairs and down.  All a pleasant fantasy, even when aspiring to tragedy, but like a soap opera or telenovela, the proceedings are highly addictive.  The second season is too plot-driven, to the detriment of leisurely character development, but otherwise all a fan of British aristocratic period pieces could ask for. 

Justified (MC-89, NFX) is something quite different, a humorous crime thriller set in Harlan County, a modern day Western transposed to Kentucky, and perhaps the best translation to the screen of Elmore Leonard’s brilliant and inimitably witty writing.  Timothy Olyphant is Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who grew up in one of the three dominant criminal families in the hollers, and has now been sent home for his sins, even if his numerous homicides all turn out to be “justified” in the line of duty.  Lots of good acting, lots of action, lots of laughs, a vivid sense of place and character – what’s not to like, as long as you can handle the violence?  Catnip to the ladies, with his cowboy hat. wry smile, and laconic wit, Raylan also has a perverse attachment to the bad guys he pursues.  Hate him or love him, you can’t take your eyes off him, or keep your hands off him.  If you’ve ever enjoyed an Elmore Leonard novel, you ought to give this a try.

Canceling DirecTV satellite service has necessitated slight adjustments in my home viewing habits, so I no longer watch PBS Newshour or Stewart & Colbert while eating dinner each night, but online at odd times.  So lately we’ve been starting the evening by going through whole runs of sitcoms we neglected while they were being broadcast, but now available through Netflix streaming.  I’d finally heard enough recommendations of Parks and Recreation (MC-83, NFX) to give it a try, and now will add my own.  Amy Poehler is excellent, witty and touching, as the local government go-getter in Pawnee, Indiana, who rallies her solid supporting cast for one civic initiative after another.  I particularly like Rashida Jones, but even the off-putting characters endear themselves over time.  It’s all a pleasant blend of the sweet and the tart, the smart and the silly.

When we’d run through the first three seasons of P&R, I took a couple of suggestions from my kids, and wound up enjoying both.  Better Off Ted (2008-09, MC-84, NFX) had a short two-season run on ABC, but I definitely could have watched more of Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi (even better here than in Arrested Development) as marketing managers in a soulless conglomerate, whose lab keeps turning out products of dubious utility or safety, a parody of modern business that has a lot more bite and sass than you expect, along with an endearing silliness. 

I watched all seven of the six-episode seasons of the British sitcom, The Peep Show (2003-to date, NFX), and am now in the cult that eagerly anticipates the promised eighth season.  I definitely get my daily jollies from Jon & Stephen on Comedy Central, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed at a pair of comics as much as Mitchell and Webb.  They play an odd couple of college chums who find themselves living together years later, Mark a maddeningly uptight and self-loathing credit company employee, Jez a blithely self-delusive free spirit and would-be musician, in a collision of pessimistic introvert and optimistic extrovert, such an antithetical pair of guys, neither of whom ever manages to do the right thing.  The particular delight of this series is the subjective camera angles and voiceover stream of consciousness, so you hear what the characters are thinking as they say or do something quite different.  If you enjoy British comedies of discomfort, such as The Office in the original Ricky Gervais version, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.  If laughter is truly the best medicine, then I prescribe The Peep Show.

And if you can’t get enough of British TV costume dramas, then Bramwell (1995-98, NFX) is also worth a look.  Jemma Redgrave lives up to the acting dynasty from which she came, with the slightest hint of Aunt Vanessa, as a young woman doctor in late Victorian England, who opens her own clinic in the East End of London, while her doctor father continues to practice among the posh.  It is universally acknowledged that the series went seriously off the rails in the fourth season, but for 29 hour-long episodes, it presented interesting characters in authentic situations, with a sometimes grisly truthfulness about medicine in the period.  If not as opulent as some BBC productions, it had an authentic and atmospheric approach to scene and setting.

In a different vein entirely, I conclude this interim survey with mention of two European TV miniseries that were also released as films in the U.S.   I didn’t remember the film version with any special enthusiasm, but with the Criterion Collection release of Ingmar Bergman’s preferred 6-hour televised version of Fanny and Alexander (1982, NFX, Criterion), I was more than ready to revisit the flamboyantly theatrical world of the Ekdahl family at the beginning of the last century, as seen through the eyes of the children named in the title.  A languorous and opulent late-life departure for Bergman, it is also a summation of his autobiographical themes: theater, magic, religion, art, sex, death, terror.  While Bergman in his prime was stark and spare, his swansong is lush and rich in color and emotion.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2011, MC-82, FC#6, NFX) is the final work of Raul Ruiz, a Chilean director who worked mostly in France and adapted this mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese novel for European television, which was then slightly abridged to four-plus hours for theatrical release in the U.S., where it was received with eulogies and critical acclaim (see Film Comment ranking).  This is not really like a BBC adaptation of a Victorian novel, but it does have some of the same pleasures of costume and décor.  It’s a multi-generational saga, set adrift in time, flowing back and forth, with bewildering stories nested within stories, beginning, in what is probably not a coincidence, just as Fanny and Alexander does, with a young boy and his toy theater.  From there it spirals in a way that is barely comprehensible but always captivating.  As long as you are content to be mystified, this is a magical tour worth taking.