There are shows I watch alone, and shows I watch en famille. Here’s three of the latter.
The Cormoran Strike series probably shakes all sorts of skeletons in the literary closet, and for that matter just plain skeletons in general. You can’t talk about a Rowling project without addressing the transphobic elephant in the room, but now I just have and we’ll let it go at that. Suffice it to say that I have not embargoed her work, but also have not embraced her cause. Make of that what you will, because I barely know what to make of it myself. I admit to enjoying the Strike books, until they got longer than, say, Dickens, at which point they are decidedly NOT Dickens, and that was the end of that. (Speaking of Dickens and Rowling in the same breath, you have to rank the two of them at the top of character namers; witness Mr. Murdstone or Severus Snape, for example.) But the TV version is spot on. The actors in the leading parts are absolutely perfect. We just finished the latest series on HBO/Max, but I was happy to find that there’s yet another one in the works. Will Strike and Robin get it on before the series ends?
Speaking of HBO and Rowling, the preview of their new Harry Potter series is inescapable. And, from the looks of it, the series couldn’t be any more unnecessary. Given the difference between movies and TV series, sure, there will certainly be a lot that wasn’t covered in the eight movies, but for God’s sake, people, move on! If you must continue in the Potterverse, make new stories, or new Universal attractions, or anything with the word new in it. How many times can you dig in the same hole and still find treasure?
Speaking of treasure—if you know the story you understand the segue—the second of our family shows these days is PBS’s “The Count of Monte Crisco.” It’s not great but it’s far from terrible, and since I have never read Dumas (oh, the shame of it!) this gives me a chance to finally learn what the story is all about. It’s a Masterpiece Theatre production from the get-go. You either like that sort of thing or you don’t. We mostly do.
And the third show, also Masterpiece T, is “The Forsytes.” Ah, that brings me back. My first real dive into audiobooks, back when they were literally books on tape, was The Forsyte Chronicles, the whole endless cycle of trilogies and interludes and God knows what-all. Books on Tape, in caps, was, if I am not mistaken, primarily a project for the blind at the time. And when cassette players started to appear in automobiles, a project for commuters. I listened, and listened, and listened… For dessert I listened to Churchill’s The Gathering Storm before going on to cover the next 5 volumes on paper. Which relates back to Forsyte, because the very first Masterpiece Theatre was “The First Churchills,” which I watched at the time, and the whole MT series was predicated on the success of the BBC’s “The Forsyte Saga.” It’s all related. Anyhow, the latest version is on the edge of watchable, because it has too many characters in too many small bites to get any real narrative juice going. We’ve watched the first two and will stick with it for at least one more, but if it doesn’t slow down soon we may not finish it. Galsworthy wrote enough books to take over a whole couple of networks for millennia; downing them all in one Cliff’s Note seems either unambitious or too ambitious, depending on your point of view. Anyhow, as I say, we’ll stick with it a little while longer. The performers are all fine; it’s the writing that’s suspect.
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