I watch too much TV, sometimes binge-watching a show through the night. Thanks to the blessing and curse of many streaming options, there is always a wealth of content.
The rules of what gets into each monthly list are simple. It needs to be a TV show, limited or otherwise, any particular season, and I have to have finished watching it in the month. This does mean I may have started watching for shows that are doing weekly releases some time ago.
Warning: I make no guarantee this is spoiler-free; it almost certainly isn’t.
The List
The list of shows ranked for July to September 2023 are: –
The idea is to rank what I’ve watched per month and then do some ranking at the end of the year.
Heartstopper
If Heartstopper season one had a fairy tale ending, season two is about the expectations of living the reality of that fairy tale. It also raises the perennial challenge of where the story goes when the will they or won’t they dynamic has shifted into well they did.
What you essentially get is a school drama that happens to have LGBTQ+ characters in it. It does do something unique which you rarely see on British TV. Historically, British drama has not romanticised the school experience much (to age sixteen); we tend to focus our romanticised view of an education experience on the time one spends at University (18-21 usually). Heartstopper is a full-on romanticised view of the UK school experience. This is glorious because it’s novel and doubles down by applying that romanticism to the LGTBQ+ experience (which I suspect is even rarer).
I enjoyed Heartstoppers season two.
It’s also interesting to see UK shows taking on the US at their own game, producing shows disconnected from gritty reality for this period in young adult lives, as both Heartstoppers and Sex Education sit in this zone.
Heartstoppers is not for adults. I am young at heart, or I disagree with the statement completely.
Special Ops: Lioness
Special Ops: Lioness is a Taylor Sheridan show, so I would always watch it. I enjoyed it because it turned out to be very different from what I expected. Subconsciously, I was expecting some straight-up special forces action drama, but it’s more complicated than that.
The Lioness reference is a code for a female operative sent into deep cover to locate and kill targets that have proved hard to locate (for a strike) or get close to for a personal assassination. This meant it was a tense espionage show primarily about using and manipulating people to achieve a very difficult and dangerous objective. Needless to say, the people involved have complex lives, psychological problems or both.
The mix of espionage, military and Washington political drama worked well. I liked the relationship between the primary character and her husband as I thought it was unique and interesting to see the family dynamic from the mother’s perspective, who kept having to disappear for reasons she couldn’t explain but were very dangerous.
They also pulled some strings in the casting as it has Zoe Saldana, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman in it.
Hijack
All my expectations were Hijack would be cheap and rapidly tiresome. Any time you get a British drama trying to do the high-concept thriller unfolded in near real-time, it usually ends up not hitting the mark. They feel cheap and don’t have the adrenaline their US counterparts have.
Amazingly, this isn’t the case with Hijack, and it’s really good.
The people who go into this and then drop out because the plot has a strand of the ridiculous always amaze me. The push to the edge of credibility is part of the DNA of these shows, so going into it and then complaining about it is a bit like going into a comedy and complaining because it’s funny. I felt Hijack kept things within the edge of acceptability, and I was enthralled from episode to episode.
Idris Elba deserves much of the credit, as his performance held the whole thing together throughout its run. The pacing is meticulous. The show never falls into the trap of having dead episodes to pad things out. This is helped by the series being seven episodes long and not being padded to ten.
The series does edge on the border of feeling cheap when they’re forced to use other countries as Middle East locations, but the need to do this drops as the show progresses, and I didn’t find it distracting.
Sex Education
I enjoyed Sex Education season four, but it’s not the show’s best, but It’s not bad. I think it’s a satisfactory conclusion, but it is one of those seasons where everyone has decided the show needs to end now, and that is the lens through which every creative decision is made. This means characters must get to certain places no matter where they started.
I was happy with the direction of travel for the primary characters, or at least I can’t think of anything to complain about. I’m very glad they didn’t just end it on a complete downer for the characters, especially Maeve, who has spent most of the show being beaten around the head with the life bat and rarely got a fair break.
The majority of the cast spend their time at Cavendish Sixth Form College, which is, well, let’s say it’s an interesting place. I’m not entirely sure what they were trying to do with it, as even the core characters sometimes seem to find it a bit odd. I’m all for diversity, and these things rarely phase me, but it was very odd how it was approached.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
I enjoyed season two of Strange New Worlds, but I’m left feeling I have three problems with the show: –
- It doesn’t feel like Star Trek. It feels like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer with a Star Trek setup.
- They never actually go to any strange new worlds.
- Its cast is stellar, but you wish they’d be given more weighty things to think about
Star Trek should be a show about challenging ideas. It should make you think. It shouldn’t be a 90’s genre show about characters working through dramatic issues within the crucible of a starship crew. Season two had some good episodes, primarily Ad Astra per Aspera, because it did make me think. Under the Cloak of War due to its intense study of war on individuals and, yes, Subspace Rhapsody because it’s a very good musical episode.
I sometimes think the problem with Strange New Worlds is the season length. When Star Trek had longer seasons, various episodes could be aired without feeling like the core concept of Star Trek was being cast aside for the more humorous or gimmick-related episodes. Disparingly I feel if they had more episodes, I don’t feel they’d use them for more intelligent episodes studying ideas; they’d just pull more wackiness out of their arses.
I’ll watch season three of Strange New Worlds. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but I enjoy it as a weaker version of 90’s shows I used to like. It’s a pity, as the first season had me excited about where they might go with it.
Fifteen Love
Fifteen Love was an Amazon special. This is when a series shows up from nowhere, and you give it a shot. It was a good series about the stress, politics and sexual abuse in tennis. I think I binge-watched it in a single night.
Fifteen Love isn’t a true story but takes its influence from many sexual assault cases in the sporting world. It’s an interesting study of how truth suffers when people actively subvert it, the culture doesn’t want to hear it, and people don’t want to see it due to various personal pressures. The relationship between the two female leads is brilliant, especially in how such a relationship exists in an environment where sexual manipulation is seen as something one has to manage to succeed.
I also liked how the show didn’t take the stereotypical approach to the central character’s journey by allowing her to regain her sports career. She gains a new sense of progress in the sport by both helping her friend and living vicariously through her success. There are episodes earlier in the season when they’re not getting on, and you’re shouting ‘coach her damn t!’ at the screen, so it’s highly rewarding when that dynamic is used.
Well worth watching.
Virgin River
Whis is watching this show?
Grace Randolph, Behind the Trailer
Maybe most people who watch Netflix don’t feel the need to comment about it on Twitter. I’m sorry, but she is a YouTuber who sometimes says some very dumb things in the delusion that all successes are driven by social media chatter.
Virgin River is my guilty secret. It’s not pushing any boundaries. It’ll not be at an awards ceremony soon, but it’s a very competent drama about characters you can’t help but like who get caught up in dramas in a very beautiful place. I find it enthralling even when you can sometimes see the writers making decisions to close stories down because they’ve taken it to a dead end.
Season four of Virgin River was one of the best. There was always something going on. A lot of the characters moved forward. The central event of the forest fire was a great focus. I liked it.
The show also continued to do something few other shows do: it has a lot of great, very old characters, and they are a valid part of the main cast. They are not just people’s mothers or grandparents but full-on characters dealing with getting old and still wanting to be relevant. It has a cast from eighteen to eighty, and it works.
And, Finally…
The shift to doing these quarterly was due to the number of shows I watched. I’ll keep flexing the time range these posts cover based on that. The quarter did feel a bit slow regarding new content I wanted to watch. As Autumn kicks in and nights draw in, we should start seeing more content as it’s assumed everyone is going out less.
I’ll give you a peek into the future: I’m finding Gen V much more interesting than I thought.