Ah, November – month of nothing in particular, the no-man’s-land between the spooky-ooky glee of Halloween and festive tinselly joy of Christmas. If your town’s anything like mine, then it’s cold, rainy, and neglected by central government. But if you’re anything like me, you wouldn’t know about that, because you’re huddled in a blanket, with snacks in easy reach, not leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. And at this time of year, more than any other, it’s important that there’s something half-decent on the box.
1. For All Mankind | November 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3RjayAF0b4
There’s a fine tradition of alternate-history stories which ask one simple question: what if the bad guys had won? The most famous of these is surely Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle, in which the Nazis won the war. This was recently adapted into an acclaimed TV show, whose final season is also out this month, and the most recent Wolfenstein game owes it at least a small debt as well. There was also the abortive Confederate, a show which would have given us a slaveholding Confederate States of America, and which, in the hands of our old pals David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, couldn’t have been anything other than tasteless.
For All Mankind isn’t a matter of ‘what if the bad guys had won the war’, though. Rather, it asks ‘what if the Soviet Union landed on the moon first?’ Which, at the time of the Cold War, was a very pertinent question, given that the Soviets were the first to achieve manned space flight. Unlike the examples mentioned above, this wouldn’t be a matter of America being occupied by the great historical villain du jour, rather the Cold War’s balance of power being tilted in a dramatically different direction.
It’s hard to say exactly how science-fictiony it’ll get, but there’s also a fine tradition of sci-fi having the moon being colonised by earthmen (funnily enough, a staple of Philip K. Dick’s more futuristic stories). So there’s a very real possibility this will involve Soviet moon-bases and all the wacky antics that implies.
2. His Dark Materials | November 4
In many ways, the His Dark Materials trilogy was Harry Potter for slightly older, slightly edgier boys and girls. It took place in a world like ours, but with additional magic and wonder. It was incredibly British, to the point of being overbearing. And it really got conservative Christians’ blood up. The difference in the latter case was, His Dark Materials was doing that deliberately.
It’s found its natural home here, as a prestige BBC adaptation. There was a film adaptation some years ago, but the fact that was meant to be the whole trilogy and only ended up covering the first tells you all you need to know. The film did its best, but was clearly getting some cumbersome guidance from above, including a tinseltown-approved uncomplicatedly happy ending which lopped off the actual climax of the first book.
Being a loss-of-innocence story that draws heavily from Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, it’s not – well, it’s not the sort of thing to be uncomplicated in any respect, put it that way. But, and this is another Harry Potter parallel, it’s also the kind of thing that grows with its audience, so if it’s done properly I predict a new generation of tween-agers really getting stuck into it.
3. Rick & Morty | November 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw6BrzB1drs
Yep, it’s the zany adventures of Richard and Mortimer, back again after another nearly-two-year interval. Which is good, in a way, because it’s given the overly enthusiastic part of the fandom a chance to fizzle out a bit. Similarly, with the previous series, ‘the darkest year of (their) adventures’, over and done with, the fans won’t be proclaiming it to be as bleak and gritty as Kafka.
Which, really, does the show a disservice, given the amount of sheer joyful whimsy running through it. Even the very darkest moments it’s presented still had something cartoony about them – and not simply because it is a cartoon, but because it was gleefully playing about with well-known sci-fi tropes in a way most people simply hadn’t seen before.
The last season ended on a return to the show’s rough status quo of the dysfunctional suburban family (which makes up some 90% of modern cartoon families) punctuated by bursts of high-concept sci-fi rigmarole. But this wasn’t really a step back, since the sci-fi rigmarole’s what we really care about, and that side had seen the emergence of a recurring antagonist. A very familiar-looking one.
4. The Mandalorian | November 12
Disney doesn’t know who you are, but it does have a particular set of skills. Skills it’s honed over a very long career. It can take pretty much any franchise, and grind it down into grey, inoffensive slurry – designed to have something for all the major demographics, not to mention the foreign markets who are more important than ever these days – which can be loaded handily into the box office with a pitchfork. As a result, any Star Wars side-projects are likely to be a lot more exciting than the main film series.
(To be fair, this isn’t strictly down to Disney. The main redeeming feature of the prequel trilogy was the animated series Clone Wars.)
This is doubly in effect here, since the Mandalorians have always been the dark horses of the Star Wars universe. Boba Fett spoke all of twice in the original trilogy, and died in a way that was shameful and undignified, but there’s just something about the look of that helmet and that dinged-up armour that really struck a chord with people. So much so that he, a character whose name was never actually spoken onscreen in his first film appearance, got his own tragic origin story in the prequels.
It’s not actually good old Boba fronting the Mandalorian, just someone a lot like him – a devil-may-care interstellar bounty hunter with a roguish grin and nothing to lose. Played by Pedro Pascal, no less: you’ll remember him as the charismatic one of the two goodies from Narcos. Even on the face of it, it’s a better formula than ‘Disney shamelessly trades on your nostalgia for another two hours’.
5. The Crown | November 17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLXYfgpqb8A
While this isn’t strictly a premiere, it is rolling out a new era within The Crown – that crazy, hazy period in the British monarchy when Claire Foy, to everyone’s surprise, grew up to become Olivia Colman.
It’s a sad truth that actresses who reach a certain age still face a fairly blunt choice – figure out something else to do in the day, or else become a kind of elder stateswoman both on and off the screen. True to form, Gillian Anderson’s been tentatively penciled in to play Margaret Thatcher in future seasons of The Crown. But as for Colman herself, she’s now up there with Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench, who, to the best of my knowledge, actually did head Britain’s intelligence services for a while in the late ’90s.
The plan is for Colman to play the Queen to cover the years 1964 to 1977 – which may have been the Austin Powers-coloured swinging sixities, but also saw the British Empire actively crumbling by the hour. Which is interesting, because one of Colman’s strengths has always been genuinely inelegant weeping – from the affecting in The Favourite, to the grotesque in Peep Show. But this role would seem to demand the kind of stony-facedness that Big Liz showed in real life.
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