Masterpiece Theater

[Drunk Monk]

Unforgotten

S5 premiere. Or maybe it’s S6. I think I saw the previous season(s). The characters seem vaguely familiar. Honestly, well... I’ve forgotten.

It’s a slow police procedural with decent character development and nice British architecture (Cambridge mostly). It’s more graphic than most Masterpiece programs with gratuitous shots of the decapitated and dehandinated corpse. It’s also dreadfully slow. We got through e2 but then both confessed to dozing off and neither of us felt like we missed much. Might bail.

[Drunk Monk]

We binged through the last 4 eps of Unforgotten. Ep 5 was a major payout and very rewarding. Things took a drastic turn. The mcguffins dropped like boulders in the Ep 6 finale. No cliffhanger. We were stunned.

Remarkable performances by the entire cast. It's a slow procedural - this series is all about cold cases and the cadavers are grisly. It's overly complex - not only is every character dealing with the crime (hiding or uncovering it) they are all also coping with extreme personal challenges. In the end, everything resolved satisfactorily albeit tragically. 

No sword fights, but a deadly pen. Not particularly DOOM recommended.

[Drunk Monk]

Grantchester s6 premiere felt like a Murder She Wrote Ep. The gang takes a vacation and - oh no - a murder. We were disappointed. Stacy guessed the victim right out but missed the twist. I fell for the red herring which put me closer to the victim but off for the murderer. The gay intrigue develops. And while I admire the attempt to be inclusive, the peeps of color seems anachronistic for post-wwii U.K. 

Hopefully next Ep will improve as they return to their pastoral setting.We have pbs passport so Stacy will probably hinge them all quickly.

[Drunk Monk]

S6e2 was a bit better but still had a hallmark vibe. We blame covid. I called the victim right away but not the murderer. Leonard’s outing continues to be the main season story arc and it’s not looking g good. Two new female characters - the hilariously entitled half sister and the one-armed cop clerk both have potential. 

For some reason, pbs access only offers the first 2 eps, not the entire 8 Ep season this time.

[cranefly]

For some reason, pbs access only offers the first 2 eps, not the entire 8 Ep season this time.

Just a reminder, Kanopy has a TV series category that might deliver for you if you're missing episodes of some show on your stream.

[Drunk Monk]

Hmmm, never explored that. I'm sure it'll come up soon. Probably more pandemic issues. The major sponsor of Masterpiece is Viking cruises, who took a major hit during the pandemic. 

It's actually better to have it spoon-fed weekly otherwise we just binge them all.

[Drunk Monk]

E3: The outing of Leonard. It was inevitable since the introduction of the character. Heartrending potential because he’s a beloved character.

I guessed the murderer as soon as he appeared. You just cannot trust mustached writers. That was a subplot tho - the murder of the week. The major arc of this season is Leonard.

[Drunk Monk]

Baptiste S2

3 eps deep. Halfway in one binge.

Another kid kidnapping, two kids, plus a murder. The survivor - a politician (hp1 - Mrs. Dursley) But is it a far right conspiracy? Set in Hungary amidst anti-immigration tensions from Luger wielding skinheads, things get sticky quickly. Told in two time periods, it tells an intricate tale of intrigue, toggling back and forth but it’s clear because Baptiste has a longer beard in the present. And he’s messed up from his kids overdose and his divorce. 

Totally engaged by Ep 3. It went somewhere unexpected.

[Drunk Monk]

I actually saw ep 2 then 3 then went back for 1 because Stacy had already started it. I just watched 4 which oddly picks up right at the end of 1. That was a bit confusing but the show continues to deliver. I understand it's pacing now. The jumping back and forth through time has settled in a good rhythm. Great characters. A good tale.

[Drunk Monk]

Baptiste e5 & season finale

That was immensely satisfying. Well written, well acted (a tour de force for Fiona Shaw - what a complicated role), well paced, all was well. 

I love Masterpiece.

[Drunk Monk]

E4: a bit of a filler Ep. A scandalous death of a US soldier. 

E5: a bank job, but it was peripheral to Leonard’s trial. His trial for homosexuality has been building since the start of the show and he pleads. Coming up on that season finale soon. The murders this season have been meh but it’s really so been about Leonard, which was set up in the first Ep of this season.

[Drunk Monk]

I missed e6 and went on to e7 of Grantchester. Leonard deals with a crime in jail (called it just as he solved the mysterious box - but how that even came to be was never clarified). I find the tolerance of his homosexuality amongst his friends anachronistic. I also find the number of blacks in power anachronistic. I mean sure, there were black cowboys in the US, but were there black curate? And were there black Arch Deacons? This takes place just post-WWII. 

Geordie is having some serious PTSD issues from when he was a POW. That's becoming a very interesting arc and kudos to Robson Green for some superb acting.

[Greg]

I have that same problem with the representation. It's great to see more people of color getting roles but in these period pieces it seems out of place because they wouldn't have been afforded that role in those societies.

[Drunk Monk]

It worked for The Harder They Fall http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomFor...p?tid=6612 because it was...well... critical race theory exemplified. 

But it doesn't work with Grantchester. The Church of England didn't appoint a black Archdeacon until 1982 (thanks wiki).

[Drunk Monk]

I should write for WaPo. They prolly pay better...

Casting Black actors in period pieces isn’t diversity. It’s history.

Listen to article
6 min

Regina King, left, as Trudy Smith, and LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill) in "The Harder They Fall." (David Lee/Netflix) (David Lee/ Netflix)

By Helena Andrews-Dyer
Pop culture reporter

November 7, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EST




There is a moment in “The Harder They Fall” that director Jeymes Samuel can’t stop smiling about. It arrives with a locomotive around the end of Act 1 and subsequently barrels through every preconceived notion of what a western is supposed to be.

In the scene, a White male character gets just the tip of a racial slur out of his mouth before he’s cut down by the outlaw Treacherous Trudy, played to woman-in-the-black-hat perfection by Oscar winner Regina King. Trudy’s fellow gunslinger, Cherokee Bill (played by an impossibly cool LaKeith Stanfield), feigns admonishment.
“He might coulda said ‘nincompoop,’” says Bill.
“We ain’t no nincompoop,” counters Trudy as she fixes her bowler and stalks toward the train the gang is about to rob. “If they say something that even starts with an ‘n,’ they gonna meet the same fate.”
"That’s probably one of my favorite lines from the entire film,” Samuel confesses. Is Trudy talking to Bill? The audience? Movie studio executives? The entire “period piece” genre? Yep.
The moment stabs at the heart of “The Harder The Fall," a western with an all-Black cast led by King, Stanfield, Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Delroy Lindo and Zazie Beetz. The film concerns itself not with what its few White characters think but with what its central Black characters do. The story has no time to spare for those who might have finished the racial epithet, which is to say that Blackness is neither played up, played down or played off. It simply is. That is a rarity for any mainstream movie set in the distant past.
From “Gone With the Wind” to “Tombstone,” period films as a whole — whether set in the Old West or Victorian England — have rarely been kind to non-White characters, who are cast as set pieces (if at all). Historical accuracy is usually the explanation offered when fans point out the glaring lack of diversity, as if women and people of color didn’t exist before 1960.

That omission, said Samuel, is based on lies that even he believed as a child.

“I don’t know if there is a person alive that loves westerns more than me,” said the director and musician, who has been a mega-fan of the good-guy-versus-bad-guy genre since he was a kid growing up in London. When he started to look for himself in his favorite shoot-’em-ups, he explained the absence away, giving the genre a pass: “We just probably didn’t exist.”
“If they show anyone of color or Black, they always have to give a reason for us being there,” said Samuel. “For me that’s the most frustrating thing about westerns and frustrating about myself, actually. That it took me until I was 13 or 14 to be like, ‘Hang on a minute, something is amiss here.’”
Three decades later, the director rights that wrong for anyone else watching. In its very first frames, “The Harder They Fall” announces itself on-screen without question with the title card “These. People. Existed.” The classic revenge plot of the film is fictional, but nearly every character is based on a historic Black figure who, yes, actually existed in the Wild West. There’s Trudy, Nat Love, Rufus Buck, Bass Reeves and more — Black frontiersmen and women who probably wouldn’t recognize the whitewashed West depicted in the genre’s classics.
“I hate when people say I remixed, re-envisioned or reimagined the western," said Samuel. “I haven’t. You guys reimagined the Old West. I just brought balance to the force, like Luke Skywalker.”
That balance is what’s missing in the period genre as a whole, say other creators who’ve worked to bring stories focused on people of color and women to the big and small screen.

Sam Reid, right, as John Davinier, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the titular character in 2013's "Belle." (David Appleby/Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection)

When screenwriter Misan Sagay first pitched her 2013 drama, “Belle,” about a mixed-raced Black woman raised by her White aristocratic family in 18th-century England, the problem, Sagay was told, wasn’t historical accuracy (Dido Elizabeth Belle was a real-life British heiress), but entertainment value.
“It was less that people didn’t believe she existed; it was more that they didn’t believe she was interesting or mattered,” said Sagay. “They just couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that I wanted it to be about Belle.” (In 2014, the film’s titular star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, won the British Independent Film Award for best actress.)
But in the years since the sumptuous costume drama was released, there have been few similar stories on the screen centered on historical non-White characters. Instead, the industry has trended toward “colorblind” casting, in which actors are considered for roles regardless of their race. Think Dev Patel starring in “The Personal History of David Copperfield," Gemma Chan in “Mary Queen of Scots,” or the entire cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.”
And, of course, there’s TV GOAT Shonda Rhimes’s wildly successful Netflix hit “Bridgerton,” based on a novel series and set in Regency-era London. In the slightly alternative universe Rhimes created, Queen Charlotte, several prominent members of the British aristocracy and the coveted duke who is the impossible catch of the marriage season are all Black.
“Bridgerton” has all the gilded flair and melodrama of a successful period piece, plus a diverse cast giving actors of color opportunities to waltz and preen with the best of them, but Sagay wondered if it was true progress.

Golda Rosheuvel plays Queen Charlotte, center, in "Bridgerton." (Liam Daniel/Netflix)

“It doesn’t quite sit right with me, because the other side of it says we don’t have a history so you have to shoehorn us into places, when in fact we were here. We have been here,” said Sagay. “I’m all for actors getting to do whatever they want. But Black people are interesting and we are enough. We don’t need to be in anyone else’s stories.”
Slavery is a part of film history. So why is it so hard to make a good movie about it?
That’s the same sentiment Samuel kept returning to in “The Harder They Fall.” Black people are enough.
There is no White oppressor. No damsel in distress. Slavery is never mentioned directly in the film, which is set in the late 19th century. Samuel said those omissions were “super intentional.”
“When I deal with race, I try to turn it upside down,” said Samuel, who added that his debut movie is “not a Black western in the same way that ‘Unforgiven’ is not a White western. They’re just westerns.”
Now the next time another western inevitably comes around, the casting department won’t be able to use history as an excuse for erasure.
“People used to argue with me that we didn’t exist in those days,” said Samuel. “No one can tell us that we didn’t exist. My film is wicked. And don’t ever call us n-words in your period pieces again.”

I wondered about Bridgerton. Didn't watch it or I'd've reviewed it here.

Still doesn't redeem Grantchester.