TV

She Looks Familiar

On Saturday when I finally gave up on watching Californication with mere minutes to go in the Season 5’s final episode. I once again tried on Hulu for something worth watching and received the same results (what is that quote about trying the same thing over and over again?) My best option now was to open up Plex and pick a movie I own digitally because if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have a copy of it. Ooh, here is one I love and haven’t watched in a while, Ronin. Foreign locales, international intrigue, gun fire and car chases.

Natascha McElhone in Ronin

Early on when the team of mercenaries is gathering a bar in Paris, in walks a woman who is going to be the leader their mission. Hey, she looks familiar. I’ve seen her in something I’ve watched recently.

Natascha McElhone in Californication

I hit pause and open up IMDB page for Ronin, dang, no wonder I thought I recognized her, she is the same actor who plays David Duchovny’s girlfriend/soul mate/baby mamma in Californication, Natascha McElhone.

Californication

I stumbled on this decade old Showtime series on Hulu and thought I’d check it out, solely on the merits of my favorite FBI guy, Agent Mulder. In this show Mr. Duchovny plays a writer named Hank, who tries unsuccessfully to balance his drinking, drug use and philandering ways with his on again off again relationship with his family which consists of a longtime girlfriend and their daughter. In traditional pay cable channel the show includes a lot of profanity, nudity and simulated sex acts.

The first season was pretty good fun, the second had an interesting story line weaved through it and season 3 had an absolutely filthy mouthed guest star turn from Kathleen Turner, but after 36 episodes I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch anymore. This Season 4 Episode 1 review on IMDB by user mtrodeomom pretty much summed up my feelings:

I’ve gagged my way through this series. The premise was somewhat intriguing and the first few episodes were watchable. But with the beginning of season four, I think I’m done. It’s obvious, the writers are only going for as much gratuitous nudity as they can shove into this show. The main character is disgusting. There aren’t any redeemable qualities in him. And frankly, I can’t understand why any woman would crawl into bed with him. He’s semi-famous. But he’s a washed up old writer. He isn’t that attractive, and he doesn’t offer these woman anything. He says he loves Karen and Becca, but he can’t keep his dick in his pants. So, his words are empty. Every time he’s with yet another woman, I want to throw up.

But I was sort of invested in the some of other characters, and hell, I’m still reading Dagwood on the funny pages long after they have have become cliches, so I watched season four, vowing to not go any further. As it turned out that that last show was intended to be the series ender, so it wrapped up all the story threads nicely and as a bonus was a very good episode.

So, you know what happened right? Yep I started watching season five. Why? See Dagwood line above. I got 3/4 of the way through the season yesterday afternoon and told Donna I was done watching for good now. After hunting around Hulu this afternoon looking to find something different I might watch, I caved and told myself I’d just finish the season out and quit. I didn’t make it, got close, but I shut off the season ending episode out with like 10 minutes to go. The twist at the end, in hindsight, was telegraphed throughout the episode, but it was just too much to watch. The initial screw-up in the show was not really Hank’s fault, but since then his bad decision making skills have been the root of all his troubles. Until this one, where it is his ex-New York girlfriend who slips him a Mickey Finn, that seemed to me too a cheap trick.

I’m running out of things to watch…

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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.

Comfort TV

We tried several other different TV shows on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime after polishing off both the 2 seasons The Kominsky Method and 6 seasons of Grace and Frankie and finding only one, Episodes, a little ditty with Matt LeBlanc. It wasn’t great television, but it was fairly entertaining and we watched all 5 seasons while not wanting anymore after we were done. With that finished, we were completely out of stuff to watch that was new to us.

So we opted for comfort TV, we reverted back to watching a show we’ve already watched all the way through about a have a dozen times before, The West Wing. In the past week we have watched 3 complete seasons and the first 6 episodes of season 4. That’s 73 episodes or approximately 54 hours of TV. Hey, it gets dark early out here, what else do we really have to do.

Run Aground

Up until a couple of days ago I have posted here for nearly a month straight (almost as prolific as I was back in the early days), but now I have missed 2 of the last 4 days. I blame it on the fact that now we have sort of settled down into a routine. Eat 3 meals, mostly here in the AirBnB, check our mail at our new PO Box, go to the Y, and visit Fred Meyers every other day, just like we visited Kroger’s back in Aiken.

The rest of the time is spent binge watch TV shows from Netflix’s Geriatric Section. So far we have watched all 16 episodes of 2 season’s worth of The Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas (75-years old) and Alan Arkin (85). Also, we are in the middle of the 3rd season of Grace and Frankie which is exactly halfway through their 6 season, 68 episode, run so far. This stars Jane Fonda (81), Lilly Tomlin (80), Sam Watterson (79) and Martin Sheen (79).