In the light of the success of The Witcher and The Mandalorian, you could forgive the industry for throwing up its hands and replacing all television with a ten-hour loop of baby Yoda singing a high-pitched version of ‘Toss a coin to your Witcher’. Let me tell you, me and all the other TV critics down at the TV criticism factory are thanking our pagan gods they haven’t figured out that obvious shortcut yet. Anyway, here’s what they’ve done instead:
1. LEGO Masters | February 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq56JZRKjNA
Now, I apologise that in an infantilised world I’ve chosen to represent the un-cool toys, but old habits die hard. People have done some marvellous things with Lego over the years – just check out The Brick Testament, or the Lego version of Dante’s Inferno. I for one am very much looking forward to any block-based recreations of the Norse sagas, in honour of their Danish heritage.
LEGO Masters is a step up from pet projects like those, since it introduces a competitive element – just like actual sport! – and is hosted by Will ‘BoJack Horseman’ Arnett. I also have it on good authority that any contestants who attempt to cheat by using Lego substitutes, such as Mega Bloks, will be immediately and violently murdered by Arnett himself.
2. Briarpatch | February 6
Briarpatch is billed as an anthology show along the lines of Fargo, and for a great deal of you, that’s probably all you need to hear. Despite – because of? – some UFO-based flights of fancy, Fargo was one of the strongest works of television of the 2010s, has a fourth season in the pipeline for the Spring of 2020, and was that rarest of all treats: an adaptation that arguably surpasses the original.
To return to the subject – gosh, wasn’t Fargo good? – Briarpatch is the same kind of storytelling, with each season planned to be a separate, self-contained narrative revolving around an unexplained death and the intricate slew of consequences. Rosario Dawson, lately of Marvel’s Jessica Jonesiverse, is the political fixer in the eye of this storm – the kind of character she should know a thing or two about, since she’s going out with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.
3. Interrogation | February 6
The rise of streaming services may have seen new players rise in the industry, but hasn’t had much impact on the actual form of TV. Apart from a few very notable exceptions, like the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the main difference is that now whole seasons come out all at once, so you can stay supine in front of the screen for hours at a time as episode after episode washes over you.
Not so Interrogation, another experiment in the form. Half the fun of murder mysteries and police procedurals is trying to work out whodunit for yourself. Apart from the first and last episodes, Interrogation isn’t designed to be watched in any specific order. Like last year’s Criminal, the meat of the show is a series of police interrogations, only this time you get to pick whose story you hear first. Think this won’t make much difference? Think again – the ‘anchoring bias’, the cognitive quirk where we’re unduly influenced by the first piece of information we get, is used and abused by car salesmen every day.
Unlike Bandersnatch, this format doesn’t invite rewatches in and of itself – but there’s still a comparison to be made in that most people will come out of it having had distinctly different experiences. The major effect of this experiment, then, may be on water-cooler discussion of the show, with viewers having picked up radically varying ideas of whodunit.
4. Slow Burn | February 16
In Matt Taibbi’s foreword to Hunter S. Thompson’s legendary Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72, he described the book’s sheer impact in terms of how it changed political reporting, and how after its release, a few too many hacks found themselves “making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders”. Obviously that’s easier in some elections than others.
But in many ways the Nixon administration really did set the tone for everything that came after it. Slow Burn is a look at the ur-example of all Presidential scandals, the burglary at the Watergate hotel and the subsequent cover-up – so iconic, as big-scale political scandals go, that they still, nearly fifty years on, get -gate appended to their names. Say what you like, the Teapot Dome scandal simply can’t compare: the videogame community was never torn apart by something called ‘Gamepot Dome’.
You may think ‘oh, this is timely, since the current President was impeached recently’, but this would, strictly speaking, be wrong. Nixon resigned and parachuted in a patsy before he could actually be impeached, the actions of definitely-not-guilty men through the ages. And if you think that’s the dirtiest it got, Slow Burn will be all too happy to tell you differently.
5. Year Of The Rabbit | February 19
The cop show has been done pretty much every way round you can think of, making it ripe for parody – we’ve had plenty of examples before, like The Naked Gun, Charlie Brooker’s A Touch Of Cloth, and The Fast Show’s Inspector Monkfish, which summarised the typical hardboiled, plays-by-his-own-rules TV copper in under a minute. Nobody’s taking the genre immensely seriously at this point, so there’s no particular reason not to set it in Victorian times and then let Matt Berry loose to bounce around in it.
As an actor, Matt Berry has only ever really given one performance – but that’s alright, because it’s ‘living cartoon’, a niche which will never go out of fashion and which has looked awfully vacant ever since the tragic loss of Rik Mayall. My main complaint with the Berry vehicle Toast Of London was that he wasn’t overacting enough.
This is, of course, when Year Of The Rabbit will first see light of day on American television. The leap across the Atlantic probably isn’t a bad thing here, not least because Berry’s turn in What We Do In The Shadows will have greased the slipway. Plus, American audiences are a lot less likely to question the accent he uses, a bizarre mix of his native Bedford with affected, Dick van Dyke-style cockney.
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