Armies of creative people work overtime creating content for cable TV. There is a surfeit of entertainment. It seems that half of the world, including those who have been historically marginalized, are making TV. These are several Cable TV shows that I have faithfully watched -- I'm not sure that I would recommend all of them, but these programs were, at least interesting enough, for me to follow them through 6 to 13 episodes. They are not disturbing, experimental work like Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, a series that I will recommend in another post. In fact, each of these series follows conventions that are prevalent in several different genres that still play a prominent role in broadcast and cable TV.
North of North (8 half-hour episodes, premiering January 2025) is an Inuit version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Anna Lambe plays the Mary Tyler Moore role, an attractive single woman who, after a scandalous break-up with a local hero, the great hunter, Ting, reinvents herself -- "she's gonna make it on her own." Lambe is an engaging and winsome actress and she carries the show --"she can turn the world on with her smile / she can make a nothing day turn out worthwhile." The lyrics for the Mary Tyler Moore show assert "that love is all around, no need to fake it / you can have the town why don't you take it?" and these lines generally express the content of North of North. After breaking up with the town's local hero, Siaja has various romantic adventures, some that end in bed. But she is unable to break all ties with the aggressive and selfish Ting since she has a child with him and he is a good father. Forced to fend for herself, Siaja gets a job in the community development office, a place run by a White woman in the show's largely indigenous population -- the show takes place in a fictional village, Ice Cove, on Prince Wales Island (in fact, an entirely unpopulated wasteland near the North Pole). The director of Community Development is played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, the actor who portrayed the IT specialist and support for Kiefer Sutherland's murderous secret service operative in 24. Rajskub has the Ted Baxter role,,playing the part of a self-absorbed, pompous, and obtuse bureaucrat. She's very good and, in fact, North of North understands that successful sit-coms require a strong supporting cast. In North of North, Siaja, the lead character, is given a cute, feisty daughter, and a profane, sexually active mother, Neevee. Neevee is unashamedly a "skank" and refers to herself as an "Eskimo" -- a term that is apparently offensive and a Canadian version of the "N-word." Neevee is effective as a rather fearsome, former alcoholic. Ting is good as the town's best seal-hunter. Siaja's father, with whom she almost commits incest --he's been absent from her life since her birth -- is a White Canadian from Ottawa, also played by a handsome and engaging actor. There's an obligatory homosexual with a female sidekick, a Maori guy who for some reason is running the local indigenous radio station. Many local people play Inuit elders and community leaders -- there are some old men who don't speak English but play chess, a guy who runs the local dump and other figures whose main role is to impart a sense of authenticity to the proceedings. Most of the episodes are light and didactic -- there's an ongoing rivalry between Ice Cove and another Arctic village, various misadventures at work, and an episode in which Ting crashes his snowmobile and has to be rescued. All turns out for the best and people are gently chastised for their foibles. Problems with alcohol in the Inuit community are glimpsed and intimated but not made part of the show's foreground. There are some raucous parties scored to Inuit rap and rock-and-roll. The show's principal appeal, other than Anna Lambe's charming portrayal of Siaja (she wears spectacular fur-lined and quill-work coats and shawls) is its fascinating and authentic representation of the Arctic. The sun never sets in the Summer which remains, however, snowy and the landscapes are spectacular. The show was filmed at Iquilt (formerly Frobisher Bay) the capital of Nunavut (once called Labrador). I suppose this evinces racism on my part but the homes in which the characters live are surprisingly large and elegant --I guess I thought the people would be living in igloos. The program is a production of the APTN (Aboriginal Peoples TV Network and CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company). "Inuit" is the collective word to describe the people who appear in the show; individual members of the group are called "Inuk" (plural "Inuit"). You can watch this show on Netflix and I think it is pretty amusing.
The Righteous Gemstones (four seasons on HBO) belongs to a genre largely perfected by its principal Danny McBride and his director/writer Jody Hill. This is the southern raunchy red neck comedy, a dirtier version of series like The Dukes of Hazard. In these shows, a pompous, vulgar blowhard protagonist, played by Danny McBride, interacts with other whacky characters in a setting defined by some institution important in southern life. (In Eastbound and Down, McBride played a major league baseball pitcher marooned in the minor leagues in Florida; Vice Principals featured McBride playing a school vice-principal with his sidekick and rival, a role acted by the very funny and indelible Walton Goggins -- Goggins is also in The Righteous Gemstones.) These shows play out like extremely obscene and warped versions of The Andy Griffith Show -- they feature bumpkins and fools who all talk like vicious New Jersey gangsters but who also (no surprise here) turn out to have hearts of gold. Gemstones involves a Mega-Church in some benighted part of the South, run for profit by the Gemstone family -- the patriarch of the clan is played by John Goodman who has become frighteningly lean and haggard in appearance. The Gemstone siblings include a foul-mouthed woman (married to a milquetoast husband who can't satisfy her), McBride's spectacularly vulgar preacher who is the heir to his father's multi-million dollar empire, and an another brother who is a closeted homosexual -- he comes out and gets married to his body-builder boyfriend in the finale of the Fourth Series, which is also the end of the show as a whole. Everyone curses incessantly and the plots often take alarmingly dark twists and turns. In the last and fourth series, the Gemstone siblings object to their father's relationship with his deceased wife's best friend -- there's lots of obscene speculation about sexual activity and a few fairly explicit oral sex scenes. The girlfriend has an estranged husband who runs an alligator farm -- this guy captures his ex-wife's boyfriends, tortures and sodomizes them, and, then, pitches his poor victims to the alligators. In the last episode, there's a gory mass shooting. The program is colorful, but repetitive. Goggins is good as an unsavory relative, Baby Billy, who is shooting a series about Jesus as an adolescent called Teenus. The show isn't particularly funny and mostly relies about potty-mouth humor and offensive imagery. Of course, like all big budget TV, the program's makers leaven the nihilistic material with traces of piety and, in fact, most of the characters are secretly compassionate and virtuous. Ultimately, the Bible-Bangers are tolerant. The homosexual son comes out on TV and, nonetheless, is elected "God's Number one Christ-following man." After the mass shooting in the final episode, the three siblings although badly wounded pray over dying gunman and the scene is meant to be taken seriously. The great mystery of this show is why anyone would patronize the garish, lewd spectacles that are presented as worship at the family's mega-church. The show generally stands for the proposition that the faithful are complete idiots, ignorant, and readily duped. I don't think that this is exactly fair and the show leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Are mainstream Christians in the South really as utterly stupid as the worshipers are depicted to be in The Righteous Gemstones? I watched all episodes of this show because it is like observing a gruesome traffic accident or a train wreck. But I don't really like the show and McBride's blustery, obscene style of comedy is mildly offensive to me. (There's a sinister and funny capuchin monkey in the fourth series called "Dr. Watson.")
An even worse time-waster is The Last of Us (second series), also on HBO. This show features lots of brutal torture: people get beat to death with golf clubs and crowbars, one guy gets his hand roasted by a pewter pot that has been heated over a gas flame; there are many gory disembowelments, hangings, and other lurid murders. The premise of the show is that deadly mushrooms have turned most of the population into brainless, cabbage-headed zombies who chase down the unfortunate survivors of the fungal plague, bite them and, so, add, by contagion, to the legion of the undead. The show is based on a well-received and, apparently, equally brutish computer/video game produced by an enterprise called "Naughty Dog." As far as I can see, this program is just a pretentious and overproduced variant of Night of the Living Dead and its innumerable progeny, most particularly The Walking Dead on AMC. Zombies attack the survivors who are divided into fractious cults that all kill and mutilate and torture one another. Periodically, the show pauses for a reflective episode -- last year, there was a moving hour devoted to a homosexual couple living on a ranch surrounded by electric fences and all sorts of traps and snares intended to mete out spectacular demises to the attacking zombies. In the current season, there's a lesbian love affair between two teenage girls; the show is forced into elaborate flashbacks when some inscrutable bad guys torture to death the leading man, played by the handsome Pedro Pascal. Pascal is a legitimate movie star and when he gets a broken golf club jammed into his brain stem, a lot of the wind goes out of the show. Accordingly, the show runners have to slow down the action with some sentimental flashbacks showing the hero (now deceased) acting as a kindly father-figure to the teenage murderess who has become the program's leading character by default -- everyone else having been killed or left far behind by her perambulations through the desolate, zombie-infested Pacific Northwest. For better or worse, this is a quality show with expensive production values and good special effects. The cast is excellent and they emote and orate as if starring in a production of Hamlet or King Lear. There are a number of bravura action scenes, many of them spectacularly choreographed. In one particularly memorable sequence, a thousand zombies attack a fort at Jackson Hole in the snow. The teenage heroine, the strangely autistic-seeming Ellie, is trapped outside the fort. The zombies hurl themselves against a cyclone fence which collapses against the fort's wall and Ellie has to escape the clawing, ravening monsters by crawling for a hundred feet in the cramped space between the fallen fence swarming with monsters and the wall -- it's surprisingly scary and exciting, a pure bit of cinema comprised of orchestrated motion and camera movement. In fact, the show specializes in scenes in which hideous monsters who look a bit like the vegetal Thing from the old movie (and Kurt Russell reboot) attack the show's principals in cramped or confined spaces resulting in desperate displays of violence. At its heart, the show is a sort of apocalyptic Western -- there are huge mountain panoramas and lots of horseback riding. When I was growing up, the Apaches or Sioux played the part that the hordes of zombies now play -- that is, the horrible, uncivilized and barbaric "others" who can be killed by the hundreds but still line up picturesquely to be slaughtered by the forces of righteousness. No one sheds a tear over the thirty or forty undead who get lit on fire or blasted into oblivion each episode in this kind of show -- the bad guys are without culture and infinitely disposable. The Last of Us is hyper-violent garbage but has its affecting moments In one episode, the fort's psychoanalyst gets bit by a zombie and knows he is doomed -- Ellie thinks that they have enough time to tie the man up and haul him back to bid farewell to his wife before he turns into a rabid carrot or carnivorous brussel-sprout. Joel, the hero played by Pedro Pascal, promises to implement this plan and sends Ellie back to retrieve their ponies, incongruously tied at the top of about a thousand-foot sheer cliff. (It would take her hours to ascend this cliff if the show's eccentric topography were realistically intended.) While Ellis is conveniently off-screen, Joel blows off the shrink's head. Ellie is very upset with him and vows to never speak to Joel again. All of this is presented with the utmost conviction and features actors performing in this garbage so effectively that you might well shed a tear at some of their antics. (Catherine O'Hare, who seems to be everywhere on tube at this time, gets to display her chops in an elaborate and painful grief sequence -- she's the poor dead psychologist's wife.) The finale, which is terrible, involves more torture, murder, a C-section threatened to be performed without anesthesia and the like. A number of the main characters have travelled the 880 miles from Jackson Hole to Seattle to pursue Elly who is pursuing Abby who tortured Joel to death midway through the series. None of this makes any sense at all. In a world imagined to be rife with daily, if not hourly, murders and mayhem, it seems weird that everyone is so catastrophically focused on Joel's death, and, ultimately, it becomes clear to the viewers that this event (which effectively excludes the matinee idol, Pedro Pascal from all prospective action) has to be revenged for a simple reason: Pedro Pascal is a major movie star and his killing guts the show and, so, there must be retribution for the slaughter of this movie star; in the nihilistic scheme of things, Pedro Pascal' character is neither more, nor less, consequential in terms of the plot than anyone else is this show, but Pascal is famous enough to be invited to host Saturday Night Live and so his death must have earth-shaking consequences. Ellie's quest for vengeance, carried on at the expense of everything else in the show, terminates when she is unceremoniously gunned-down, resulting a black screen that is redolent of the famous ending (or non-ending) of The Sopranos. After ten seconds of darkness, things brighten up and we see the girl Ellie was trying to torture to death. She walks into a sports arena and a title reads: Seattle Day One. Like a midden heap or garbage dump, it seems that you can just keep adding trash to this ridiculous thing -- I presume "Day One" suggests another season, featuring Abby as the principal protagonist. HBO has a hit with this show and milks it for everything its' worth -- there are sixteen episodes in this year's series, each of them an hour long plus associated podcasts and links to the video/computer game by Naughty Dog.
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