TV

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).

Happy Anniversary Spooky & Starbuck

It was 25 years ago today the X-Files premiered. Like every TV show I really like, that usually warrants repeat viewing, I never get in on the ground floor. I always have to catch up, whether it is several episodes or multiple seasons, because I typically do not pay attention to shows until I find them listed on some TV critic’s best shows of the year lists. So I’m guessing that in 1993 I didn’t see the pilot episode when it was originally aired, I think I caught up the next year during summer reruns.

Because today is the 25th anniversary of the shows premier my Google news feed is full of retrospectives and X-Files episodes to watch. Here is a sample:

I have at one time had digital copies of all 201 episodes of the original 9 seasons, a while back I weeded it out to only the shows I like to re-visit. This narrowed it down to a mere 35 shows that come from the first 7 seasons (I’m sorry, but once it was no longer Scully and Mulder…)

Here for your viewing pleasure is Brian’s Top Ten X-Files Episodes in order of their original airing:

1 Season 2 Episode 20 Humbug
2 Season 3 Episode 4 Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose
3 Season 3 Episode 20 Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’
4 Season 4 Episode 20 Small Potatoes
5 Season 5 Episode 5 The Post-Modern Prometheus
6 Season 5 Episode 12 Bad Blood
7 Season 6 Episode 3 Triangle
8 Season 6 Episode 4/5 Dreamland & Dreamland II
9 Season 6 Episode 6 How the Ghosts Stole Christmas
10 Season 7 Episode 8 The Amazing Maleeni

Chronologically TDTVS

While searching for LOST podcasts I stumbled onto one by two women called “Lost in Order.” Anna & Wendy watched an episode and every week or so dropped a podcast on their thoughts. I can’t listen to it though, it is not their voices or the sound quality, it is in the way they are watching the show.

Not long after the sixth and last season of TDTVS came on on DVD, some genius or madman or possibly Mad Genius, using a timeline found in the Lostpedia re-cut the show in chronological order. Anna & Wendy are podcasting about the results of Mike Maloney’s masterpiece, Chronologically LOST. Mike has taken all 118 aired TV episodes and created 101, roughly forty-five minute long, chronological episodes for a total of 84 hours of LOST watching pleasure.

In a way I wished I’d found out about this a month ago before starting to re-watch the show as I think it would be interesting to see the show in linear time. Would it be more interesting than the non linear original? I’ll let you know someday, I’m a little more than halfway through downloading the torrent. It is going to take about a week to get it all because unlike current popular movies, there aren’t hundreds or thousands sharing it, but each time I’ve looked in on the progress I am connected to anywhere from six to twelve peers.

TDTVS Re-Redux

Ten years ago on the third Thursday of August (it was the 21st not the 23rd) I wrote about waiting impatiently for the fifth season of LOST to start. On this third Thursday of August we watched the first two episodes of season three, having blown through the first two season in the last 2 weeks.

We tried another of The Lost Boys podcasts a couple of weeks ago, but gave up as it just didn’t work out. As with any podcast, even if you are passionate about the subject, if the voices aren’t pleasing to your ears, you just can’t listen. It was sort of a good thing that we didn’t like this podcast as we would have caught up to them in short order anyway as they were currently just starting season two and we were already in that boat with the The West Wing Weekly podcasts.

Because the King’s English from the blokes of The Lost Boys podcast was hard to understand, I went looking for another one for us to listen to about TDTVS. I hit the Jack pot (a little LOST word play) with one called Getting LOST from a couple of dudes, Clint & Adam, who speak in ‘Murican English. Their premise is eerily similar to The Lost Boys one in that one of them has seen the show seven times before and the other is watching it for the first.

Clint and Adam started back in October of 2015, so they have already finished doing podcasts for all six seasons of the show making it perfect for our two-a-day habit. But the two Getting LOST host’s voices are also somewhat similar to each other making it hard to distinguish who is who, sort of like the Flight 815 survivors Scott and Steve who are always being confused for each other by the main cast. Given enough time I’m sure we would have eventually been able to tell them apart, but after a couple of tries at listening to them, they were not to our liking either.

I think we are just going to have give up on the LOST podcast idea as all my other searching has not turned up another show that has done all six seasons or one that is currently in production and I’m OK with this.