Week Two: 07 – 13 January 2019
After starting off strong with four films last week, I didn’t even manage one this week, instead it was all TV.
This was mainly due to real life claiming my evenings – friends, awkward emails, kids with earaches, house inspections – when I did sit down I only had an hour here or there and so TV was my choice.
I did watch the first 7 seconds of Deidra and Lainey Rob a Train on Friday night but then decided to indulge in some gin and human interaction.
So what TV was I watching?
Catastrophe (Series 2)
Creators/Writers: Sharon Horgan & Rob Delaney, Director: Ben Taylor
Watching on All4
One of the amazing things about British televisions series is the short series (season) runs with max 6-8 episodes. It means that you can sit down and watch an entire series over two nights. I’m eyeing up series 3 this week, with a view to starting series 4 the week after.
I have a complicated relationship with Catastrophe. I really like Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. As a fellow Irish woman, I revel in Horgan’s continued rise. The writing is so sharp and off-the-wall – and I like the swearing and the raunch. It is not afraid to go dark places and deal with difficult subjects. Yes, it’s very funny but it’s not a straight-forward sitcom.
But it is still a sitcom – and that’s where I struggle with it sometimes. The characters are just a bit too cartoonish for me to properly identify. I was worried when Series 1 started that it would be too close to the bone: like Sharon, I was also knocked up during a brief fling with a man from another city – that’s where the similarities end so I need not have worried – from the episode where they sexed the baby at the 12-week scan (eye-brow raised), I knew this wasn’t going to be a kitchen-sink comedy or come close to my reality.
And series 2 has moved away from that “couple from two different countries meet and get pregnant” premise – now Rob and Sharon are married and living together with not one but two children and in a very expensive London house. The show has evolved to be about a relationship between two complicated people trying to muddle along – and the dynamic is very good, at times: The show is at its best for me and when Rob and Sharon are behaving like a believable (but very witty) couple and I loved the episode where they go out for their anniversary dinner.
But overall in this series, Sharon is too unreasonable and unpredictable in her reactions to make me believe she’s real – and Rob is too bumbling, too sex-obsessed. It flirts with post-natal depression and failing to bond with your child but then resolves this to easily, and we’ve seen a lot of this before – having a baby is hard, she doesn’t want sex, he’s horny, outside temptations. It flirts with being something more cutting edge but ultimately resorts back to its sitcom roots by making characters (main and supporting) do inexplicable things just to move the plot along.
I’m interested to see where they go with Series 3 and how it pans out when they move past Sharon’s pregnancies and the continued evolution of the central relationship.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (S4:EP9)
Creators/Show Runers: Aline Brosh-McKenna & Rachel Bloom
Director: Kimmy Gatewood Episode Writer: Elisabeth Kiernan Averick
Crazy Ex-girlfriend is one of those shows I put off watching for ages because I thought I would hate it and then watched the first episode, fell in love, and binged everything on Netflix. Now I make people watch my favourite numbers on YouTube.
The show is in its final series and while things feel like they’re starting to align for the endgame this is a meta-show that plays with audience expectations and is well aware of how it “should” play out so I’m prepared to be surprised.
S4:Ep9 lacks any stand out songs for me but it was highly amusing and if you think you’re getting an episode with a plot about yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis on a series written (primarily) by men, you’re mad. And it’s that first-hand experience that allows it to be fresh when it’s dealing with well-trodden material.
Put that with a CATS parody that had me googling the Heaviside Layer and it’s another example of how smart and different this show is without ever forgetting to entertain and make you laugh (and cry sometimes too).
I still miss #realgreg though.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a good counter-point to Catastrophe because it follows a Tribbani Character-Arc: Joey in Friends was drawn with broad strokes at the start but became more nuanced and rounded as the series continued while the others started nuanced and became more and more cartoonish. Crazy Ex-Girlfriends starts with a cast of big broad characters that seems to be a million stereotypes and slowly but surely adds in texture and nuance and lets them grow and change and become something different than before.
Catastrophe wants to appear to be ‘the real world’ but it doesn’t pull off the facade, at least in Series 2, and that causes issues for me. Whereas Crazy Ex-Girlriend creates a world that is able to divorce from reality with its musical numbers to deliver those bigger, weirder moments and also examines the behaviour of the characters and even references how wrong that behaviour would be and is in a real situation.
I’ll be watching both these shows play out over the next couple of months.
Otherwise …
More CBeeBies, Trolls for the 150th time and Olaf’s Frozen Adventure for the 90th – I also highly recommended Barbie: Life in The Dreamhouse on Netlfix if you enjoy meta, knowing children’s programmes.
We’ve also watched Part 1 of 3Below – and I liked how they made the sister the athlete and the brother the brain. I’m also enjoying Nick Offerman as Varvatos Vex – and doing my own Varvatos impressions , which is cracking up the 3-year-old.
Beyond that SAS: Who Dares Wins and Hunted are back on Channel 4 – and I absolutely love these shows that are both starting their 4th series run.
SAS: Who Dares Wins is absolutely fascinating to me. I started watching it last year as research for a feature script I was writing, and I got absolutely hooked. I would never in million years feel the need to undertake the challenges on the show but I love watching the way the recruits handle them and the different journeys that are taken. The DS staff are all ex-special forces and hugely interesting in their own right. Due to the MOD decision to allow women into all combat roles in the British Armed Forces, including the special forces, the show has opened up to female candidates, which chimes nicely with watching women and I can’t wait to see how they progress.
Hunted, on the other hand, has always had female fugitives and a good mix of male and female hunters – and is probably the only reality TV show I’d ever want to be on, though I’d probably get caught in the first week. I challenge anyone to watch it and not start thinking how they would outwit the hunters.
I think both formats are moving reality TV forward and using the form to create compelling Television. Yes, it’s not scripted but these shows are character and narrative focused and will suck you in – be warned.