British TV

Rumpole of the Bailey

During meals Donna I will fire up Discovery+ and watch something while eating. A few days ago we saw that Be My Guest With Ina Garten had a new episode, this one had a British actor Emily Mortimer on. Never heard of her, but her most famous bit, at least in America, is she was in Mary Poppins Returns. About 10 minutes in Ina starts ask her about her family and mentions her famous barrister and writer father John.

Cue the depths of Brian’s hazy memory – John Mortimer created and wrote a long lost favorite British TV show of mine about, surprise, a barrister called Rumpole of the Bailey. I enjoyed them back in the previous century on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery. I rewatched them again in the early aughts on Netflix discs. Somewhere along the line I managed to rip the entire series into cutting edge AVI files. Well, I still have them saved in the depths of my PC’s hazy memory.

While doing a little Internet sleuthing for the image above I found an article about how Emily and her younger sister Rosie are updating Rumpole and it may feature a female in the lead. Good luck to them, I wouldn’t be able to watch that and not because of the female lead (if it happens), but the show is to beloved in my heart.

Anyway, can you guess what I have been watching for the last few nights?

Bye-Bye Miss Apple Pie

Just a week ago I marveled at my free trial of Apple TV+ and how Ted Lasso was my new favorite show. Well, not only is the honeymoon over, but the divorce was just finalized. I cancelled the last six weeks of available streaming today.

The overweight Bedouin seated on the camel’s back was that I ran out of shows or movies I was interested in. I tried out over a dozen series or movies on the service and watched only two things in their totality, Shrinking and Slow Horses.

If they do a second season of Shrinking I won’t miss seeing it, but Slow Horses was a different story because I’m a sucker for British TV. There were two series of the show and I liked the first better than the second, but that was pretty excellent too. They have renewed it for 2 more seasons and when those are produced I might just create a new Apple ID to get another free trial.

But the straw that actually broke the camel’s back was last Wednesday’s episode of Ted Lasso, it was an utter turd. The folks at IMDB who rate the show gave it a 6.5 out of 10. Of the 29 episodes up until last Wednesday, 3 were in the nines, 20 of them were in the 8 range, with a smattering of them in the sevens. There was one episode that was rated 6.8 in season two and it was pretty bad too, but the one before it was a 9.0 and the next two were in the middle eights. If I remember, I’ll look at the next episode’s rating on IMDB.

71% More Commercials

Last evening at 5:30, having already seen, and probably more than once, anything that was available on our go-to channels (HGTV, Food or Motortrend) we wandered over to TV Land to watch a couple of episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. Troubling thing was we joined smack in the middle of a show. A quick peek at the electronic guide revealed that the episode started at 5:10 and would finish at 5:45. What the heck? The following show ran from 5:45 to 6:20. Next was 6:20 to 6:55, etc.

There was 35 minutes between episodes. I’m fairly sure there wasn’t an extra 5 minutes of unseen footage that could be added back to the original 23 minute prime time run. TV Land had found a way to add more commercial time to the syndicated shows, in addition to slightly speeding up the video of the show and running the credits at the bottom while the top is showing the beginning of the next episode. Five divided by seven equals 71% more commercial time they could sell.

Having exhausted all the British crime shows we could enjoy, I though maybe it was time to try a much heralded show from a decade ago, Sherlock. But it turns out we just couldn’t take Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance. He was like an over the top and unfunny, Sheldon Cooper. He spoke so fast (and quietly) at times we really couldn’t make out what he was saying. So we turned on the closed captioning to see if that would help. Nope, sometimes the dialog was even faster than it could be displayed on the screen.

With all the marathons of Law and Order running on WE and Sundance, we are now on the second viewing of their episodes. While we do enjoy revisiting this show every once in a while, we’d like the gap between re-watches to to be a lot longer than 30 days…

We are now on the home stretch of watching Cheers having started the 11th and final season on Monday. We are getting tired of the show and are ready to move on. The idea of canceling Netflix and moving to Hulu, so we can smoothly segue into Frasier after Cheers, is a good one. Not only would we save a buck a month, but we could also see another Thursday night NBC comedy of that era as well, Wings.

Cheerio

So, in the last 3 weeks we have completed watching all 10 season of Vera. Each season, or series as we Anglophiles say, consists of 4 episodes. In series 1 through 9 they were 1-1/2 hours each. For series 10 they were 2 hours each. Which equates to 62 hours of British Mystery TV.

After polishing Vera off I looked around on Britbox for more shows like this. I picked out a couple more to try: Scott & Bailey and Shakespeare & Hathaway – Private Investigators. We started with Scott & Bailey first and once we got 15 minutes into Episode 1 of Series 1 Donna said she didn’t care for it, so we stopped. So we started with Episode 1 of Series 1 of Shakespeare & Hathaway. Once again Donna was not impressed, but I convinced her to stick it out for the whole 45 minutes. This in many ways was the antithesis of Vera, it was more comedy than straight procedural and every character was broadly drawn. I thought it was OK and even started watching Episode 2 on my own, but gave up early on as it just seemed too strange.

My third attempt on a mystery show turned out much better. Instead of Northumberland County in northeast England and a female DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) for Vera, this was set in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland, with a caring, yet stoic, male DI (Detective Inspector) called, appropriately enough, Shetland. Turns out that both Shetland and Vera are based on books by the same author, Ann Cleeves.

Shetland has 5 Series so far and has been renewed for 6 and 7. Series 1 consisted of just two 1 hour episodes which covered on mystery. Series 2 was six 1 hour episodes consisting of three 2 show mysteries. They changed things up for Series 3, 4 & 5. These were made up six episodes, each covering one mystery each. While the show was great, in line with our enjoyment of Vera, we stopped watching midway through season 5 because the human trafficking story seemed a wee bit weird considering that the Shetlands are in the North sea 330 miles west of Norway and 250 miles north of Scotland (even though it is based on actual events from the early 2000’s.) Another 23 hours of TV there.

When Donna asked, “What’s next?” I answered that I really was intrigued by Scott & Bailey and I might just watch it on my own. She said, “Let’s give it another try.” Two episodes in and we were both hooked. This show was centered around two DC’s (Detective Constables) in one of the Manchester Metropolitan Police Major Incident Teams that are charged with solving murders and other serious crimes against persons. Unlike our past two shows, which were 90% mystery and 10% character development, this has a lot more relationship content between these two women and the others in their orbit to go along with solving a crime. There are five Series with every show being 45 minutes long. Sometimes there is one crime solved per show, sometimes it takes a couple episodes to solve them and others are series long arcs. Series 1 was six episodes, series 2 through 4 were 8 episodes and the fifth consisted of just 3 episodes. Another almost 25 hours of listening to the Queen’s English.

We also, just yesterday and today, burned through six 30 minute episodes of a single series comedy called Scarborough. It is a comedy about life of some small people in a small seaside town. While some of the older British comedy shows are a little obtuse, this more modern one is pretty darn funny to these American ears. Although that maybe partially the effect of watching over 100 hours of British TV…

I have to say that recently, quite a bit of the time, my thoughts seem to be in an English accent and sometimes I refer to myself in the third person. And once the world returns sort of back to normal, I will be relishing the opportunity to use the term knobhead. 🙂

Staying In At Vera’s House

Like most everyone in the US world, we’ve been staying close to home and watching a lot of TV lately. We have been watching mostly comfort TV. When Donna has control of the remote we are inhaling Food Network and HGTV, both live and stuff from On Demand. Sometimes I get control it is usually tuned to Motor Trend TV. On Sunday and Tuesday from like noon to 10 PM we are locked on WEtv because they have the rights to the original Law & Order, all 456 episodes, and run a marathon.

Our Amazon Prime subscription has come in handy. Modern Love was a recent nice find that we both enjoyed. We have rewatched all three seasons of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and I’ve watched both seasons of Counterpart and it is amazing how different J. K. Simmons looks here than in the old L&O’s.

We also subscribe to Netflix and have been devouring Cheers like it was hot buttered popcorn. We are currently up to Season 8 Episode 8. There are 11 total seasons and after we finish the last hundred or so episodes in the run we may watch all 7 seasons of Mad Men next.

But after watching Cheers we might just cancel Netflix and sign up for Hulu so we can watch all 11 seasons of Fraiser. Then if we are still quarantined, Hulu also has all 8 seasons of Wings, another Thursday NBC Must See TV show to binge.

Right now we are locked on watching Vera, a British police procedural. I equate DCI Vera Stanhope with Columbo, she is kind of rumbled, drives a beat up car (1996 Land-Rover Defender 90) and has a tendency to get halfway out the door while questioning folks before turning around and asking. “Just one more thing.” There are ten seasons of the show and each one consists of only 4 episodes, but each episode is an hour and a half long, so they are essentially movies. We started a 7-day free trail ($6.99 a month after) of BritBox to see the show. Turns out we can only watch seasons 3, 4, 5 and 8, 9, 10 there. We have finished the first three and are ready to start on the next three seasons and have until Monday to do it. If we want to see seasons 1, 2, 6 & 7 we will have to subscribe to Acorn TV for those.