5 Biggest TV Shows Of November 2018

With Halloween over and done with (except for real purists), it’s now a slow, dark march towards Christmas. The nights are getting longer, the air’s getting colder – so what better time to get really invested into something where you don’t have to leave the house?

 

1. House of Cards | November 2

The Radio Times noted recently that Netflix is a very different place now than when House of Cards premiered some TK years ago. And this may be so – it’s played host to own-brand hits like Stranger Things and The Haunting Of Hill House, as well as its own black-and-white elephant Bright – but House of Cards is also a very different place. The particular elephant here is, of course, the disgrace of the show’s former star Kevin Spacey.

(My idea of karmic punishment, in which this season would see Spacey’s character impeached for acts of sexual misconduct in an even-more-excruciating version of the Lewinsky hearings, was considered ‘unfeasible’ and ‘tactless’ – further, I am led to believe Netflix passed it along to the police.)

With Frank Underwood gone from the Oval Office (probably for ‘health reasons’, that’s the usual line), Robin Wright’s Hillary-esque Claire Underwood now rules the roost. Is Hillary-esque fair? Being a blonde lady politician is a fairly vague familiarity, after all – and Claire Underwood has of course actually become President. Either way, this is, technically, girl power. Stay woke, friends.

Interestingly, the original UK miniseries ended on a similar note – with Mrs Urquhart finally stepping out from the shadows to take the reins, having arranged to have her husband killed to clear the air when it emerged that, as a young man, he’d murdered some guys in Cyprus. And speaking of girl power, by the end Francis Urquhart’s one desire as Prime Minister, beyond bringing back national service or making journalists afraid, was simply to outlast Margaret Thatcher. Given that this is the last season, Frankie and Claire are unlikely to outlast anyone other than 30-day-incumbent William Henry Harrison.

 

2. Escape At Dannemora | November 18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVbOjP1Ziec

A true crime true story, put together by none less than Ben Stiller (who’s taking an admirable step out of his comfort zone here), this miniseries sees Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano playing convicted murderers with a plan to flee justice. The real-life Clinton Correctional Facility breakout was, even at the time, compared to The Shawshank Redemption – making it a shoe-in for a media adaptation.

Del Toro plays – or rather, portrays – Richard Matt, a notorious prison escapee, whose first flight from a secure facility took place at the tender age of 13, and who both pulled off and attempted many more over the years, catching a number of bullets in the process. However, unlike lovable Andy Dufresne, imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and softened by a gentle Morgan Freeman narration, Matt here was imprisoned for a crime he very much did commit – likewise his accomplice, David Sweat – placing the two firmly in our modern tradition of villain protagonists.

Or does it? There’s a philosophical point to make here. The two may have been convicted murderers, but their subsequent escape isn’t necessarily villainous in and of itself. Remember, Andy Dufresne escaped from prison too. Mexico famously doesn’t consider prison breaks to be criminal acts, since it’s human nature to want to escape – though when Mexican prison guards shoot to kill, it’s also perfectly legal, which balances things out a bit. You may find yourself judging the third main character a bit more harshly – Tilly Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), a prison officer who, although married, became involved with both men to the point of helping them escape.

 

3. Sick Note | November 23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asjnvrxo08o

Hey, remember the Harry Potter films? Remember how the kids took their huge piles of money and did basically whatever they wanted with it? You know, Emma Watson became an activist, and Daniel Radcliffe became a proper actor, and Rupert Grint – he, um…

This is the impression anyone might get, but really it’s scanting Grint dreadfully. Of the Potter series’s main power trio, he’s actually the one with the broadest filmography, having been cast in the questionable Thunderpants in 2002, right alongside Chamber of Secrets. Just four years later he was being singled out for praise in the otherwise lukewarm Driving Lessons – and while Daniel Radcliffe seems to be a generally good bloke, he had to go full frontal in the West End to get the same kind of attention.

In Sick Note, Grint plays a slacker who’s diagnosed with terminal cancer well before his time. Does he go full Breaking Bad and become a crime lord? No, it’s a little more twisted than that – as it turns out, he’s been misdiagnosed, but given the tender treatment he received when he thought he was going to die, he’s in no hurry to let on. Starring alongside Grint, as the slapdash doctor who diagnosed him, is Nick Frost, no stranger to serving in a lovable buddy-combo with redheaded men.

 

4. Death by Magic | November 30

Even in the information age, the truism that a magician never reveals his secrets holds true. Penn and Teller’s Bullshit alternately intrigues and infuriates when its eponymous hosts dance around how the contestants have pulled off whatever feat it is – Arrested Development, by contrast, mines the idea for comedy, making the mechanisms in play perfectly transparent every time Will Arnett’s Gob Bluth has a trick go badly wrong. But even so, Gob gets drummed out of the inner circle for it very early on. A magician does not reveal his secrets.

But despite having all manner of gadgets literally up their sleeves to make their act only appear dangerous, if you were to, say, set yourself on fire, there’s going to be an element of risk no matter how many precautions you take. (Likewise the sport of wrestling – so often mocked as being ‘staged’, but there’s only so far you can fake being struck by a chair by a 300-pound man.) Thus, Death by Magic – a documentary about those practitioners of the craft who ended up taking their secrets to the grave with them when their acts went badly wrong.

Probably the most famous example is the legendary escapologist Harry Houdini, whose getting-punched-in-the-stomach routine did him in when someone took him by surprise, although that wasn’t actually onstage. British magician Drummond Money-Coutts walks us through the whole array of those that were – through catching bullets to swallowing razors – and attempts them himself. This not being live TV, fortunately there’s no risk of another Tommy Cooper-style tragedy.

 

5. F Is For Family | November 30

Bill Burr’s take on the nuclear family sitcom returns for a third season. Profane without being flippant, F Is For Family is, these days, among the best of the airwaves’ various Simpsons clones (a category in which I include what The Simpsons eventually became). In large part, this is because the members of the family act like actual people, rather than po-faced props intended to serve whatever the hell punchline the writers feel like shoehorning in. All of them are genuinely troubled, both as individuals and as a family unit – no other cartoon family has seriously seemed in danger of losing their house since the mid-90s.

Whereas most similar shows have a discordant 1980s vibe simply because that’s when the showrunners came of age (and when they were last anywhere near being cool), F Is For Family cuts that particular Gordian knot by actually setting the action during the 70s, with an important backdrop element being the airline unions’ slow death as the spectre of Reaganism looms on the horizon.

Season two ended with the heavy implication that Frank and Sue were accidentally conceiving another child, who they absolutely could not afford. The introduction of a new child character, for weaker-minded audiences to coo over, is considered one of the archetypal forms of a show jumping the shark – so it remains to be seen whether F Is For Family will be able to perform the necessary tightrope-walk between heart and cynicism for this to not kill the comedy stone dead.