Cast: large, alcohol units lots. cigarettes not as many as you’d think
As you’ve probably already noticed, Netflix has been quite successful with its worldwide original programming, with its catalogue now bursting with dramas that have been made specifically for Netflix in countries around the world ranging from Mexico to Australia, South Korea to Canada, Germany to South Africa (as of this morning). However, despite being fair packed full of French shows that it’s bought up from the local networks Canal+, M6, TF1, France 2 and the like, there’s so far only been one genuine Netflix French original – Marseille, which didn’t exactly wow the world on the general grounds it was terrible, despite the presence of Gérard Depardieu.
Now we have a second French Netflix original, which Netflix is desperately trying to bill as “not a romcom” – or at least a “romantic comedy as it would happen in real life”. Despite its being an obvious fictional romcom.
Look at how hard they’re trying, both in English…
… and in French:
Isn’t it cute?
At least the English name for the show is a bit more convincing on that score.
Plan cœur (The Hookup Plan)
Plan cœur – which is probably best translated as ‘plan of the heart’ rather than The Hookup Plan, although there is the obvious double reference to the Sacré-Cœur of the show’s Parisian location and a possible pun on ‘plein cœur’ (full heart)* – sees the Bridget Jones-esque Zita Hanrot (Chefs) playing a down-on-her luck civil servant. She still can’t get over her ex, Guillaume Labbé (Hotel de la plage), despite their having broken up two years previously and his being on the verge of getting remarried. She’s also has been forced to move back into her old room at her father’s house, which is somewhat awkward since he’s a doctor and it’s now his waiting room.
In an effort to get Hanrot’s mind off Labbé, one of her BFFs, Sabrina Ouazani (Les Vivants et les Morts) decides to hire a male escort (Le Chalet‘s Marc Ruchmann) for her. Except she doesn’t tell her he’s an escort and instead gives Ruchmann all the inside information he needs to help woo her and make her feel generally lovable again.
What could possibly go wrong, hey, particularly once other BFF Joséphine Draï (L’Art du crime, Nu) finds out what’s going on?
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
WHYBW isn’t quite the proverbial frog in a pan of water, but the observant will have noticed that it’s been getting later each week. That’s not really a grand design, simply my current workload in action. I could pretend it’s so that I could watch all this week’s episodes of Nightflyers; I could also point out that it’s because there’s actually nothing much on Wednesday or Thursday nights in the US, whereas there’s oodles on Mondays and Tuesdays, so it currently makes more sense to have WHYBW on a Thursday or a Friday.
But fundamentally it’s an accident.
Anywhere, it’s Friday and here’s WHYBW! I’ve already watched a lot of the new shows that have come out since the last WHYBW, including Netflix’s 1983 and the first episode of the aforementioned Nightflyers, but it being Friday, a new batch has just come out, any or all of which could be a Boxset Monday or at least feature in a review next week: the third season of Fortitude, as well as Netflix’s Dogs of Berlin and The Hook-Up Plan.
But that means I’ll only be talking about the regulars after the jump: Black Lightning, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Happy Togetherand Titans. The observant will notice Doctor Who isn’t on that list. That’s because I haven’t watched it. Yes, I know it’s on Sundays, so I’ve had enough time, but honestly I’ve felt absolutely no pressing desire to watch it, particularly since all the reviews suggest it’s a particularly terrible episode. Maybe I’ll have watched it by next WHYBW, but I get the feeling I might actually be over Doctor Who – at least for now. It only took about 40 years, but there you go.
As I’ve remarked before, globalisation is paradoxical, particularly when it comes to TV. On the one hand, it can bring us together and help different countries to understand others’ cultures; on the other, it can lead to homogenisation, with TV shows developed to appeal not to that country’s viewers but to viewers around the world.
The latter sounds bad, doesn’t it? Certainly, I’ve stopped watching UK TV almost completely because either the shows are all the same or they’re yet more ethnically cleansed period dramas geared up for international sales. Yawn. Show me something new.
Yet at the same time, watching the first three episodes of Netflix’s first ever Polish original, 1983, I did yearn a little for a bit more cultural homogeneity. Or maybe even a guide book. Perhaps Lonely Planet could start a new market for Netflix boxsets.
2003
The confusion starts with the title. Despite its name, 1983 is actually set in 2003. However, it’s not the 2003 we know. Even if we knew what 2003 was like in Poland.
Instead, we’re in a parallel universe. Al Gore is the president of the US and Poland is still under Communist Party martial law thanks to a terrorist incident that took place in 1983.
Again, confusion since unless you’re well versed in the histories of various Central and Eastern European countries, what exactly the new state of affairs is and whether it is new isn’t obvious. It probably is to Polish people, but to me, at least, not so much.
As much as I can glean, the Soviet Union has fragmented, with Poland having risen up to form a new Second Republic that’s independent of the still viable Soviet Union – or at least not quite under the same degree of control from Moscow as there was. There’s still an East Germany and an East Berlin; there’s still an Iraq war; there’s still a West Germany occupied by the West.
But despite being 2003, everyone in Poland has flat screen monitors, uses Linux with well developed GUIs, and there’s a burgeoning social media app development ecosystem in Poland that’s got both China and Vietnam excited and investing in the country. There’s also a burgeoning market economy, too, by the looks of it, with all the queues of communism only there in flashback.
Was that true in 2003 for real? Is that even true now? Is there even now a police force called the Milica (or maybe Milicja)? I don’t know.
Or is this all supposed to be a highly nuanced, intricate examination of how Polish society might have evolved, reflecting inherent cultural trends? I don’t know.
Conspiracy
Against that backdrop, we have a law student (Maciej Musiał), descended from one of the victims of the terrorist incident, who’s given a photograph by his law professor, who’s then killed in mysterious circumstances. In that 1983 photo are a whole bunch of people, including scientists and soldiers, who quickly ascended to power following the terrorist incident.
Meanwhile, police detective Robert Więckiewicz is investigating the mysterious epidemic of teenage suicides, which may be linked to a new underground rebellion. He quickly runs afoul of the authorities on his own side, as well as the Vietnamese, but soon he and Musiał start to work together to see if their two cases are linked. And there probably is a link in the shape of Michalina Olszańska, who’s a family friend of Musiał, the girlfriend of one of those suicidal teens and a big name in the underground rebellion.
All of which is reasonable enough, but it’s not exactly clear what sort of scenario or even genre we have here. Is this basically SS-GB, in which we’re sat in an alternative universe watching a regular old conspiracy thriller, or are we in The Man in the High Castle, watching a sci-fi parallel universe engineered by some Cold War-era scientists?
Neither is it clear why we should care. At least, if we’re not Polish. It’s certainly interesting to watch a “What If?” piece of television made by people in country who had to go through some terrible hardships and are now asking themselves “What if we never escaped that hellhole of a life?” – it’s different at least from “Here’s what would have happened if that hellhole of a life had happened to us, so let’s count our lucky stars.”
But with so little explained, from the history through to the culture to the political implications, it feels like an answer only Polish people might want to know. There wasn’t even actually a terrorist incident in Poland in 1983, so it’s not like it’s even a “What if?” in the style of SS-GB.
Instead, I’ve just watched three, quite slow-moving hours of drama, in which people talk about a photograph a lot, while I wonder if there’s a reason all the women in Poland are topless all the time, or whether that’s only in sci-fi. Is Olszańska’s character called Ophelia to reference Hamlet (girlfriend of a suicidal teen…) or is Ophelia a popular name in Poland? Was Amazon’s Comrade Detective actually a surprisingly accurate satire of Central European TV, judging by 1983‘s dialogue and the direction?
Conclusion
1983 is at least different from the normal fare we get on Netflix. But seeing as it’s hard to tell:
What things are supposed to be different from modern/2003 Poland and what’s supposed to be the same
Whether the fact everything looks like it’s Equilibrium fan fiction is deliberate
What exactly the point of it all is
I can’t exactly recommend it. The acting’s fine. The dialogue might be brilliant, just not in subtitled English. The plotting is slow. Nothing so far has revealed itself to be ‘paradigm shifting’. I might stick with it, but I get the feeling that unless you’ve got a decent baseline of Polish cultural, geographical and historical knowledge to start from, 1983 is going to be its own biggest mystery.
In the US: Sunday-Thursday, 10/9c, Syfy
In the UK: Acquired by Netflix
Sometimes, two TV shows turn up at the same time and you wonder why. Are the networks stealing from each other? Are they tying into a trend? Or is it simply coincidence?
In the case of YouTube Premium’s Origin and Syfy (US)’s Nightflyers, I’m going to assume that it’s just coincidence that they’ve turned up within the space of a fortnight of each other. I mean two expensive-looking sci-fi/horror shows set on spaceships that slowly see their international, largely British casts slashed away by something gruesome? That’s not a trend. And why would you steal that idea?
Equally, Nightflyers is based on a novella written by George RR Martin (Beauty and the Beast, Game of Thrones) in 1981 and Origin is essentially Paul WS Anderson ripping off his own Event Horizon and Alien Vs Predator, so it’s not like there’s any real inter-show plagiarism going on. But there’s still a lot more in common than I’ve already mentioned, suggesting either a paucity of ideas in the world or a general consensus we’re heading towards a future dystopian nightmare.
Nightflyers
Nightflyers is a generally superior affair compared to Origin that sees the world 50-odd years from now generally going to pot thanks to disease outbreaks and the like. Fortunately, there are spaceships and, equally interestingly, aliens, who might be able to help save us from self-destruction. At least, we think there are aliens, since a spaceship has popped into our solar system. However, despite our bombarding it with signals and probes from afar, the aliens haven’t said so much as a dicky bird in response and are merrily getting on with their lives instead.
Eoin Macken (Merlin, The Night Shift) therefore suggests sending a spaceship off to meet them, the only one within range and ready being the Nightflyer. He populates it with various futuristic sci-fi people: Jodie Turner-Smith (The LastShip), who’s been genetically engineered for space travel; Maya Eshet, who communicates with the ship’s computer cybernetically; xenobiologist Angus Sampson (Shut Eye) and psychologist Gretchen Mol (Life on Mars, Chance).
However, there’s already a ship’s crew, including engineer Brían F. O’Byrne (The Last Ship, The Magicians, Brotherhood) and captain David Ajala (Falling Water), who for reasons best known to himself only appears as a hologram. Said crew isn’t too chuffed by the new arrivals and having their mission changed; they’re even less chuffed by having a “L-1 Teke” on board (EastEnders‘s Sam Strike) – a telepath who can make you think whatever he wants you to think, whether you like it or not, unless Mol administers him some suppressing drugs. But since the alien spaceship is giving off TK energy, it seems a good idea to take along someone who might be able to communicate with them.
Well, seemed, anyway. Because its not long after Strike turns up that everyone starts having nasty visions. And seeing as the first episode starts with a flashforward to Mol warning no one to rescue the Nightflyer and then slashing her throat, it seems it’s all going to go pear-shaped at some point. But why?
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
It’s been another quiet week for TV, thanks to the Thanksgiving break. If you like anthology and true crime shows, particularly ones based on podcasts, you could have course have watched Dirty John (US: Bravo; UK: Netflix).
I don’t, though, so I didn’t. Instead, I watched the rest of Narcos: Mexico. I also gave More4’s new German show, Schuld nach Ferdinand von Schirach (Shades of Guilt), a try and after mentioning it rather a long time ago, I finally made a start on El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time).
I’ll be talking about all of them after the jump. Joining them will be the few regulars that didn’t take a Thanksgiving holiday: Black Lightning, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Doctor Who, and Titans.
