So last night I watched the new Sherlock. Christ, I was EXHAUSTED afterwards. All that bling-bling sparkle-sparkle LOOK AT US AND HOW CLEVER WE ARE. It was a relief to get back to the more story-and-character-focused calm of Elementary.

I did like the little hat-tip to fanfic writers, though. Cute!

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It's a major disappointing moment for me to be enjoying a movie or TV show, really getting into, only to run smack dab into something so glaringly wrong that's it's impossible to ignore, and thus have the rest of the experience soured every time that thing comes into view. I'm refering to the current series The River, and the brain-burningly dreadful accent of the Latino boatman. It makes me cringe and headdesk at the same time. Every time he opens his mouth I think, "Is it really so hard to find an actor who can actually speak Spanish in Los Angeles, for gods' sakes?" Yes, he's clearly Latin, but a Spanish-speaker he ain't, not by a mile. Funny thing, though: his daughter's Spanish is just fine, which goes to show you how thorough their casting department is. Her grammar is a bit suspect, but that might just be the script. (If the subtitles are anything to go by, it's pretty badly handled. At least half of the sentences she utters are subtitled wrong, some of them very wrong. ARGH.) But the guy - oh man, it gets under my skin every time he says something. And it's too bad, because the actor's quite good; I've seen him elsewhere. But like Al Pacino, he just shouldn't try to speak Spanish. It just embarrasses everybody.

ARGH.

That is all I have to say. - Ten Bears

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Am quite enjoying this new Wilfred smoking game.

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Gacked from ghyste, because why the hell not?


Rules:

- Bold all of the following TV shows which you've ever seen 3 or more episodes of in your lifetime.
- Italicize a show if you're positive you've seen every episode of it.

Also, I added some shows that were disgracefully lacking. Marked with a *.

( My answers, with comments )

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I'm spending some time with a valued friend and mentor, Sister Wendy Beckett. On Monday I picked up the DVD's of Sister Wendy's American Collection, and am now happily roaming the halls of six of America's great museums, in the company of this graceful, unassuming, deeply educated woman, who delights in the creativity of humanity. Her economy of words and richness of ideas are such a boon, and help me see art always in a fresher, more encompassing and meditative way. It's hard not to be captivated by her enthusiasm and fall into it with her, because she's right - art is a supreme way of escaping the individual minutiae of our lives and entering the larger realm of community with everyone who has ever lived.

See? I'm even talking like her.


Sister Wendy's American Collection - Netflix link, where you can see a trailer for the series


She should be required viewing for anyone who loves art, but especially for people who want to love it, but don't know how. She's accessible, charming, and surprisingly frank at times. (You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw her talk about the "lovely fluffy pubic hair" in a nude painting - not something you'd expect to hear from a contemplative nun, that.) She speaks about her involvement with the pictures, how they influence her thinking, and about the process of getting to know a piece and slowly uncovering its secrets. She's not a critic, she's a lover of art, and that's what sets her apart from so many, and makes her such a joy to watch.

Check out her shows. You won't regret it.

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So. Rome is over, and I am sad. True, it was never going to be an extended series; it was intended from the beginning as a set number of episodes spanning a specific time. But it was just so fucking good, I couldn't help but hope it would get a longer life somehow.

However, the production values were simply too high, and apparently there was no way to sustain that kind of cost. Hence the series's short life.

*heavy sigh* Seems the really good series are the ones that don't last, while puerile crap goes on for years. In a better world, a show like this one could go on for as long as the producers wished to keep it going. It certainly wouldn't lack for material; historically speaking, the series could have gone on for at least another eight to ten years, working its way through all the emperors from Augustus to Justinian. Wouldn't that have been something?

Ah well. At least it went out while it was ahead. Good ending, too.

Still bloody depressing, though.

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Watching Sean Bean play an American is really bending my brain.

1) The set decor. There is no way in hell you're ever going to convince me that somewhere in Washington, D.C., there is a government office that looks like that. I don't care how edgy and trendy their department is. Efficient functioning calls for bright lighting, with light-colored walls to bounce it around as much as possible. Nobody's going to get a full day's work done in a place that looks like a faux dungeon.

2) The soap opera. When I watch a show like 24 (or The West Wing or E.R. or L.A. Law), I watch it because the subject matter interests me. Curiosity about the workings of such organizations gets me to tune in (not that TV gives you any kind of factual completeness, of course), not the backdoor gossip and melodrama. Reaching for the personal life storyline is, to me, a sign of weakness on the part of the writers - the sphere of work is where these stories should be taking place. Not to mention that crap like Lynn McGill actually leaving in the middle of a national crisis to go give his sister the junkie some money...oh geez. That kinda pissed me off, because it made me think he was not only an idiot, but that he didn't take this assignment nearly as seriously as he pretended to.

The second corollary to this item is the way people who are at work, in this case in a national crisis as I've said, keep wasting time on intrusive personal issues. All those little hissing arguments about who is (or was) sleeping with who, who's sorry for what. Gods, to judge from the sample I'm seeing on the screen, this must be the most inefficient and hothouse environment of any government department in D.C. Characters can't seem to go an hour without making some remark or having some confrontation with a co-worker that transgresses the proper conduct of a workplace. Which leads me to...

3) The whiny terrier. I've been working in offices for 25 years, including government agencies, and I'm sorry, but Chloe is a completely impossible character. There is simply no way that that attitude would be tolerated. She would have been called into her supervisor's office within the first week if she'd been going around barking like that. Especially in a government office. You don't earn the right to be obnoxious in a goverment office until at least your tenth year, and definitely not that kind of obnoxious. Not the kind that attacks and insults co-workers. I don't care what kind of a whiz kid she supposedly is. She's still a civil servant, she's in a professional atmosphere, and the playground bitchiness is neither cute nor complex; it's just nasty.


Unfortunately, each of these problems is endemic to just about every dramatic TV series that is centered on some specific workplace (that is to say, all of them). Each one of them has its ridiculous decor (excepr for E.R. They were pretty good about that place looking real.). Okay, I can see making offices a little more interesting. Gods know I've worked in some dreary looking places. But do they have to look as if these people are working in a before-hours bondage parlor? (We won't get into the likelihood of a government agency having the budget to hire that decorator, either.) Outbreaks of melodrama tend to set in earlier than they used to, seems to me, but they all have distracting silliness seeping in, as if the writers don't trust the audience to be interested in what these people actually do for a living. And every show, to a one, has some obnoxious, usually young, usually "cute" (though there's nothing so unattractive as the kind of bitchy, pissed-off expression Chloe sports constantly), usually female character who is screaming to be sent to an attitude seminar of some sort.

What I want to know is why. Why do the producers of these shows think this crap is necessary? It's distracting and insulting, and I just can't understand why viewers are subjected to it. What a refreshing thing it would be to see a show that didn't look like a magazine spread, that stayed focused on the reason for its existence, and that reassured us that at least the HR department knows what they're doing.


Ah well, at least they couldn't mess with the decor on Lost.