Winter is over, Spring has sprung – although it’s hard to tell these days, since Europe and America have been enjoying some uncannily high temperatures lately, suggesting that climate change may not in fact have been an elaborate Chinese hoax. I don’t pretend to offer an opinion on the matter (be it the right one or the obviously wrong one) – this is an entertainment news website, and my only standpoint is ‘why not beat the heat by staying indoors in front of a screen?’
1. Fleabag | March 4
As smug as it is to quote myself, I recently ran a column about the delightful Olivia Colman’s early work, where I described Fleabag as ‘a paean to female characters being allowed to be as awful as their bepenised counterparts’ – and I was completely correct as always. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s protagonist – never named, but usually called ‘Fleabag’ by promotional materials – stole from her own family, masturbated to Barack Obama with her boyfriend asleep next to her, and ran the most overpriced cafe in London, and that was within the first episode.
Her awful cafe was saved from slow, certain death in the final moments of the first season by Hugh Dennis’s sad-panda loan manager, freeing her to continue wreaking havoc and making wry comments to the camera, a risky technique which she pulls off as well as House of Cards – and without that show’s unpleasant baggage.
At the risk of pigeonholing the show into that rather tatty box marked ‘gender commentary’, there was an excellent exchange between Waller-Bridge and Dennis in the first season where they reveal what it is, deep down, they want, which really summarises the modern gender divide – Dennis talks about wanting his wife and family and moments of domestic bliss back, and Waller-Bridge just wants ‘to cry all the time’. Makes ‘women are from Venus, men are from Mars’ seem pretty shallow analysis, don’t it?
2. White Gold | March 6
The first season of this greasily ‘80s comedy demonstrated that Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick could play a stone-cold cad incredibly well. This probably didn’t help when he got hit with sexual assault accusations and placed the show’s future in jeopardy, since his onscreen performance had made it all the more believable. Luckily, that all blew over, and now it’s all go for season two.
Double glazing, the white gold of the title, appears to have run its course – understandably, since the business remains, forty years on, a byword for crookery – so this season sees the gang relocate to Spain and get into the timeshare market, a trade which is approximately a gnat’s eyelash more legitimate. The common thread is, of course, profiting from Britain’s fumbling attempts to latch onto ‘80s-style aspiration – and it’s telling that this manifests itself in home improvement and two weeks on the Costa del Sol.
It would have been a fool’s errand to try and continue without Westwick, since his lower-rent Gordon Gekko is really the central pillar of the whole edifice – co-stars Joe Thomas and James Buckley are basically reprising their overgrown schoolboy characters from The Inbetweeners. Which is fine for bumbling second-bananas who are safely relegated to the b-plots, but the idea of either of them trying to carry a show on their own is simply going too far.
3. American Gods | March 11
Time to gush about Neil Gaiman, is it? Cracking. This is on its second season, Good Omens is in the pipeline for a May release, and God help us one day we may even get an adaptation of Sandman which isn’t butchered by Hollywood producers who no longer know right from wrong. While Gaiman’s a wonderful talent, he’s never going to be king of comics, not while Alan Moore’s still out there stalking the night – but at this rate he might just be king of comic adaptations (not counting the MCU, that would be cheating, that’s like comparing a Chateau Rothschild to a milkshake).
There’s a reason the MCU’s been going for well over a decade, while Gaiman’s stuff could only have been done properly on TV recently, and that’s the complexity. Not to get snobby about this, but the average exec is far more likely to sign off on a story of good guys in lycra knocking around some CGI monsters, rather than a tale of a guy getting out of prison and plunged into a conflict between the old gods and the new, where you need to be fairly familiar with ancient theology just to muddle through – which is ironic, because the Avengers are the nearest thing to a Greek pantheon we have.
That’s perhaps the wrong pantheon to cite, since both they and American Gods have incorporated bits of the Norse pantheon, in particular all-father Odin – and knew enough to cast a genuinely heavyweight actor in the role. So, to be clear, this is criticism of execs and their low opinions of their viewers, not the viewers themselves. After all, it was only meddling execs who prevented a Sandman adaptation back in the ‘90s, by insisting it included a giant mechanical spider, which eventually ended up shoehorned into Will Smith’s Wild Wild West (horrifying yet true!)
4. Turn Up Charlie | March 15
Idris Elba is perhaps best known for his roles as drug lord Stringer Bell in The Wire and no-nonsense detective John Luther in Luther, so the next step, naturally, is one of those roles where your uber-tough-guy action star has to, record scratch, look after innocent children. Turn Up Charlie sees the man playing a DJ whose career hits the skids so badly he ends up working as a nanny – or, to give the worst portmanteau I’ve ever seen used in a press release, ‘manny’ – to get by.
The inherent joke is ‘ho ho, this conventionally masculine man is doing something female-coded’. As a lot of these Sergeant Babysitter works begin and end with that, they tend to receive a lukewarm reception at best, being pretty much a period of treading water for the star and crew while they wait for the next action thriller to come along. Elba, however, has proven he has skills beyond glaring down the barrel of a gun and snarling something pithy
The series comes from fine comedy fettle, in particular its director, Tristram Shapeero, the man responsible for French & Saunders, Brooklyn 99, and The Good Place – and even though our primarily American readership are only likely to know two of those, that should be more than enough to make the point.
5. Arrested Development | March 15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXg2_yExgVY
You ever notice how Jesse Eisenb– excuse me, Michael Cera’s character suddenly and inexplicably started doing a lot better in life and being a lot less funny when Cera became an executive producer? Really makes you think, eh? I mean, the whole plotline about him banging a Spanish MILF on his gap year – did that tickle anyone other than his own ego?
It’d be too easy to accuse Arrested Development of skating by on the residual goodwill built up by those original three seasons, but it must be said, since its revival it has seemed ever-so-slightly like an excuse to milk that cow while also giving the cast a lovely day out. The fourth season in particular felt like a distinct misstep, splitting up the Bluth family to no real return, and experimenting with a new style of character-focused episodes which went down so poorly they recut it into a chronological version (which itself had the disadvantage of having to remind the viewer what was going on every five minutes).
Still, as we move into the long-awaited second half of season five, they do appear to have learned from their mistakes – there’s actually a clear plot structure, finding out who’s behind the murder of Lucille 2 (Liza Minelli). And the scripts must at least be good enough that Portia de Rossi considers it worth showing up to filming, as opposed to spending all day lounging in a pile of money with her wife – you tell me with a straight face you’d go into work if that option was on the table.
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