It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Amazon’s The Boys
This week’s reviews
Look at that. It’s September. How did that happen, hey?
Cometh September, cometh the regular TMINE schedule and things are now officially back to normal. Almost. This week’s going to be slightly different in that it’s the slightly unscheduled “Week of Boxsets”, as I finally get round to reviewing all the Boxsets I watched over the summer break.
We started on Monday with season 2 of Netflix’s Mindhunter, quickly followed by season 1 of Amazon’s The Boys.
Today is WHYBW, of course, and the streams can’t cross, but tomorrow we’ll continue with season 3 of Canal+’s Le bureau des légendes (The Bureau), with season 4 concluding the “Week of Boxsets” on Friday.
And then on Monday, I’ll try to do another one. Because it’s Boxset Monday.
What will it be? It might be season 3 of GLOW, it might be season 2 of 4 Blocks, but it’s most likely to be the first season of Netflix’s forthcoming The Spy.
Jack Bannon as Alfred Pennyworth in Epix’s Pennyworth
What’s coming this week
However, that does mean there probably won’t be an Orange Thursday this week, primarily because it’s Wednesday and I’ve not seen any movies this week, but also because I won’t have time tomorrow to write reviews of two movies and a complete season of French TV.
Sorry about that. But I am merely mortal.
I’ve also decided not to bother with Showtime’s forthcoming On Becoming a God in Central Florida, on the general grounds that if it’s not good enough for even YouTube, it’s probably not good enough to watch. Plus I watched a bit of it and came to the same conclusion independently.
But I have watched the first couple of episodes of Pennyworth (US: Epix; UK: StarzPlay), so we can talk about that after the jump.
False Flag
The regulars
With TMINE’s “if it starts in August, I’m not watching it rule” and so many shows in the US having now finished, in preparation for the Fall 2019-2020 season, there aren’t many regulars to talk about at the moment. Thank heavens there are other countries, hey?
So after the jump, let’s talk about the latest episodes of Israel’s False Flag and Australia’s Glitch. See you in a mo.
Superheroes are easily satirisable and deconstructed. Probably the most famous graphic novel, Watchmen, is a deconstruction of both superhero tropes in general and DC’s then-recent acquisitions of Charlton Comics’ superhero characters. But probably the most famous and earliest superhero TV show the average person can remember was a satire.
Amazon’s The Boys, itself based on a comic by Garth Ennis that was a thinly veiled satire of DC’s Justice League, is therefore not exactly a pioneering, radical idea. We’ve been here, done that, seen the Robot Chickens about it.
So super-original it may not be, but that doesn’t mean it’s got nothing to say – or that it’s not interesting.
Injustices league
At first glance (and first episode), The Boys looks like it’s a simple idea: what if superheroes were real? And not just real, but like celebrity actors, musicians and sports stars? Sure, they might originally have got into it to save lives. But with all that cash from movie appearances and endorsements, as well as the political influence they could acquire, how long would it be before they started caring only for number one, rather than the little person?
Against that backdrop we have the story of electronics salesman Hugh “Hughie” Campbell (Jack Quaid). His dad (Simon Pegg, upon whom the character of Hughie was originally based) is a big superhero fan, Hughie less so – particularly when the fastest man alive The Flash A-Train (Jessie T Usher) stops paying attention for an instant and literally runs through Hughie’s girlfriend, killing her.
Soon, Hughie is thinking dark thoughts about the spectacularly uncaring A-Train and other superheroes, particularly Vought International’s top flight team ‘The Seven’.
Meanwhile, good Christian girl Annie January (Erin Moriarty) is over the moon to be joining the Seven, having idolised the likes of Superman Homelander (Antony Starr), Wonder Woman Queen Maeve and Aquaman The Deep (Chace Crawford) practically all her life. However, when the Deep suggests that for her to be assured of her membership, she might have to do something for him (hint, hint…), that dream soons turns into a nightmare.
Annie and Hughie’s paths soon cross, but it’s the meeting between Hughie and the oddly accented Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) that’s soon to transform their lives. Butcher runs a little anti-superhero operation called ‘The Boys’. The supes are corrupt and he’s going to take them down. And soon Hughie is helping him. By sticking cables up people’s butts.
Season one of Netflix’s Mindhunter should have been like catnip to me. Visually styled by David Fincher, director of my second-favourite movie, Se7en, and based on more or less the same foundation as my favourite movie, Manhunter, it should have been a slam dunk for my heart and brain’s allegiances.
But it wasn’t. There was a variety of reasons for that.
It was supposedly based on the creation of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s, in which various agents and psychiatrists went around interviewing ‘serial killers’ – a name they themselves invented – to find out what motivated them and apply that knowledge and psychological science to track down those still at large. Nevertheless, its three main characters were all fictional – composites of real people who worked for the BSU, for sure, but nonetheless characters going through sometimes fictional, sometime real situations. As a biopic or piece of history-telling, that meant Mindhunter lost a little in the telling.
Similarly, it was frequently just a lot of talking, with young go-getter special agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), old hand Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychiatrist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) going to prisons and chatting with serial killers, and having to deal with office politics and their own issues – rather than actual serial killer-catching. Admittedly, that talking could be truly electric in Fincher’s hands, with Cameron Britton’s Edmund Emil Kemper III a genuinely terrifying presence, despite his only ever talking.
Nevertheless, ten episodes of talking isn’t necessarily the best TV crime viewing.
And lastly, the big issue for me was it was very obviously, very deliberately intended to be a multi-season story, with very little resolved in the first season. In particular, every episode featured the same serial killer going about his daily life, in a narrative that in no way connected with the rest of the story.
I ended up concluding:
Combined with its next season, Mindhunter may eventually be seen as a true classic of prestige television; on its own, the first season is more like a drama-documentary with excellent production values, in which we learn how psychological profiling might have evolved.
Now here’s season 2. So is it a true classic?
Not yet. Maybe with season 3. But we can talk about season 2 with a few spoilers after the jump.
