Lunchtable TV Talk

Lunchtable TV talk: Another hit – Jett

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In my effusive praise of Mr Inbetween, in which I listed a number of contemporary TV shows with murder-for-hire themes, I failed to mention one of my most recent indulgences: Jett.

I thought of it again suddenly as I was writing about women characters and their often much more transformative journeys as compared to the men with whom they share the screen. In particular, I reflected on some of the more fearless moves women characters have made, and how some of the coldest, most calculating women characters betray almost no emotion, despite how women are framed as being the more emotionally fragile of the sexes. And then I remembered: Jett, something/someone in the no-man’s-land of questionable and violent actions. Jett (Carla Gugino), is a fresh-from-prison, world-class thief who gets pulled back into this underworld, and repeatedly has to insist that she is “not a hit man” and that she does not kill people. Yet the danger in which she finds herself ensnared leaves her always on the edge of making that choice. She doesn’t always succeed in keeping her hands clean.

While not overtly about a hit man, or hiring people to kill for money, Jett does exist in the criminal universe in which a strategic hit isn’t far from possible. And despite her best efforts, she’s always adjacent to this action. Jett as a character isn’t moralizing and does not appear to agonize over very much, but there are moments when she comes to lines she doesn’t want to cross, and it’s fascinating to see how the character manages these dilemmas.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

 

Lunchtable TV talk: Pure and simple every time… or not

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An article about television recommendations gave a show called Pure its blessing. All I remembered about the description was that a character starts having wildly inappropriate (sexual?) thoughts; possibly something about a brain tumor. I noted the title and forgot about it.

Imagine my surprise then when the time came to start to watching Pure, and I was greeted by Mennonites driving buggies and speaking their own language (I was not expecting a partly subtitled show when my viewing began). It’s a Canadian production, and feels like it – as most Canadian shows do. Same sort of production values, same Canadian extras as usual. I can’t explain what makes a Canadian show Canadian (beyond just the abundance of Canadian vowels and pronunciation). This was not the Pure I was expecting.

I can’t say, having watched two brief seasons of the Canadian Pure, that it’s worth recommending. It’s kind of a different story from what television usually offers, but it feels as though it has missed an opportunity to tell a deeper story. I noticed the same recently in another Canadian show, Mary Kills People, in which a doctor helps terminally ill patients to end their lives. The premise held considerable promise for being able to tackle a challenging topic, but only ever touched briefly on the meatier moral issue, focusing almost entirely on the “the law and the outlaws both have you in their clutches” aspect of illegal assisted suicide. Never mind that assisted suicide has been legal in Canada since 2016, and Mary didn’t even begin until 2017.

Where Pure seems to miss a turn is in having too little time to dig into characters and the path the community’s new pastor follows that leads him to becoming a police informant, as drug trafficking has taken hold in his community. The story unfolded in a too-rushed way that made motivations feel forced and didn’t let all of the actions make sense.

In years past, Banshee had a take on the Amish/Mennonite criminal connection/drug trafficking underworld and the “outcasts” from this world. Even though it was not the central theme of Banshee, it rivaled what Pure managed in two seasons that almost completely focused on the community. The second season seems a bit better paced, and no one can argue with the addition of Christopher Heyerdahl to anything. But overall, perhaps the problem is twofold: Canadians have not yet mastered a six-episode storytelling pace (Brits seem best able to do this); both Mary Kills and Pure suffer from this; secondly, the only time we’d get to see Mennonite (or Amish)-related stories (think back to 1985’s Witness, for example) is when outsiders are involved, which would only likely be an insidious infestation by a criminal element. It’s an insular world, after all.

Photo by Doug Kelley on Unsplash

 

 

 

 

Lunchtable TV talk: “Men’s TV” – The Kominsky Method and Men of a Certain Age

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It’s been a long time since I devoured the rather under-the-radar Michael Douglas vehicle, The Kominsky Method; I won’t be diving into its finer plot points or achingly funny comedic value here. It’s been even longer since I saw Men of a Certain Age, but I think it aligns thematically with the point I want to make.

I watch, let’s face it, an alarming amount of television. For this reason alone, I would not have been able to avoid Kominsky or Men even if I’d wanted to. Not that either show earned popularity or love in the ways they should have. This probably explains, in part, why I found both so endearing.

After watching Kominsky, I recommended it to someone else, who watched and reported back that he loved it, but he was surprised I liked it so much because “it’s kind of a men’s show”. Here he didn’t mean anything sexist but simply thought that the themes were quite middle-aged/older man in nature, and the male characters reflected this bias. The women characters were a bit underbaked and inconsequential, although there was potential for growth. (Not that women or minority groups aren’t used to their stories and voices taking a back seat.)

To these observations, I could only reply:

  • Human stories are not gendered. They may be about gender, but one’s interest in watching them, or even finding them relatable, isn’t that reductive. That’s not to say that some entertainment isn’t offensive because of its depictions of gender, but that is not the case here. Deciding what something is before we give it a chance is one of the worst things about human nature; it may serve us well in not eating something that will poison us, but it does not serve us well in our interpersonal relations (and entertainment prospects).
  • It’s a human show more than a “men’s show”. Perhaps why women (sweeping generalization here) understand men better than men understand women is because we (generally) pay attention to people, what they say, what entertains them, what they fear. By listening to all people, we have a better understanding of humanity.
  • By classifying entertainment by gender or deciding that something is a “man’s show” or “woman’s show”, many stories are being sidelined and left unheard.
  • Pre-determining that a form of entertainment will have limited, possibly gender-based, appeal, we not only don’t give credit to others and the expansive nature of their interests, sympathies and imagination, we create conditions for prematurely canceling or never making diverse stories at all.

Of course, it’s true that different people will be drawn to different types of action, and sometimes this appears to run along traditional gender lines (and again, I know this is a broad and inaccurate descriptor). A lot of research exists about television and its role in sex stereotype acquisition and sex-role behaviors. I don’t plan to write a dissertation on this topic. There’s a wealth of work also on television-based gender discourse. Again, fascinating stuff, plenty of research out there.

I, instead, will highlight a point that struck me from TV writer and producer Tony Tost‘s Twitter feed:

Tony Tost, who has written some great (underrated) shows that on the surface would appear to be “men’s shows” (Longmire, Damnation) but which bubble over with strong, diverse characters, highlights that attention/interest level appears to be gendered on some level. I happen to think Tost has managed to create a balance in his works that holds the interest of the entire audience. This isn’t true of all such entertainment, but even those that aren’t invested in appealing to everyone or being perfectly representative interest me as a reflection of the society we live in. Our entertainment perhaps should reflect the world we’d like to see (maybe we’d have liked to have seen greater diversity in Friends), but would that have been realistic?

I’d like to get past the idea that entertainment has barriers and boundaries, realizing of course that the entire discipline of marketing deals in divisions and personas and targeting them. I want to be able to fall in love with the curmudgeonly Norman (Alan Arkin) of The Kominsky Method while also empathizing with Sandy’s (Michael Douglas) long-suffering daughter, Mindy (Sarah Baker). I want to see Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher at their finest, struggling their middle-aged struggles. I don’t need television characters to be relatable, to always reflect me or even be sympathetic. In fact because the stories told are different, they draw me in.

But I also want to live in a world where a show like Queen Sugar, which is mostly about black women in a single family (but is actually about the entire community they live in, their conflicts, socioeconomics, land rights, and a whole slew of human and societal debts and situations), and is run by women, gets a lot more attention and traction than it gets now.

What kind of a world are we living in when even the most enlightened of people expresses surprise that I’d like something that is about and “geared toward” men? We’re on the road to improving this, but it’s hard to say how we could speed it along. More visible promotion of things like the aforementioned balanced work from Tost, which shakes off and subverts expectations, and much more mainstream focus on nuanced works like Queen Sugar will hopefully go some way toward eradicating assumed preferences and the perceived “gender exclusivity” of entertainment.

Curiosity, interest, attention lead to questioning, and it’s here, in asking and listening to the answers, that we find common ground.

Photo by Josh Kahen on Unsplash

Lunchtable TV talk: The reluctant hit – Mr Inbetween, Barry, Killing Eve & Mary Kills People

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My ambivalent relationship with televisual entertainment has led me into a pattern of overdose, give up cold turkey, and then find some middle-ground, rationing my TV intake. In recent months, however, we’ve all mostly been stuck at home (not that this is anything new for me), I’ve fallen back into my multi-tasking, tv-viewing patterns of yesteryear.

These patterns aren’t terrible, but at some point I’m taking such an overload of information in, I don’t always absorb finer details of what I am watching. The constant stream makes me forget where I saw or heard something – which streaming platform, which character said what, what show was it? Unless I make notes while watching, which I don’t normally do because I am busily doing something else simultaneously, I can’t remember where anything came from and am already on to the next thing, diving into the endless flow of available content.

I preface my brief discussion on the unusual Australian dark comedy, Mr Inbetween, in this way because I want to explain that most things I watch do not affect me deeply. I don’t find myself reflecting on them a lot after watching them. But a couple of weeks after bingeing the two seasons of Mr Inbetween, I am still thinking about it.

When I stumbled on it, I didn’t know what it was – and didn’t know what to expect. Was it meant to be funny, serious? Turns out it was very much… both of these things. Other articles have pointed out the abundance of “hitman”-related shows currently in production – from the offbeat Barry to the histrionic and, frankly, annoying Killing Eve.

“There are two immediate touch points elsewhere on your dial in Barry and Killing Eve, but Mr Inbetween is neither of those. The ethical axis in HBO’s Barry finds its equilibrium too easily, and in Barry an anti-hero too much in need of redemption, while Killing Eve spirals into its own emotional cyclone too quickly, playing fast and hard notes in a way that is thrilling but also dizzying.”

Shows like Fargo also have their share of hit-for-hire ‘workers’. And just this week I discovered a Canadian show called Mary Kills People, which I knew was about a doctor illegally helping terminally ill patients to die with assisted suicide. On the surface, Mary isn’t about hitmen, but its content turned out to be cat-and-mouse attempts to outsmart the police, morally ambiguous “hitman” allusions and a main character who is completely neglectful of her children. The poignance and humanity of euthanasia is almost entirely missing here (you’d be better off watching Louis Theroux‘s Altered States… and its coverage of people who choose death).

This, though, is yet another reason why Mr Inbetween is so extraordinary. Presenting extended moments of subdued comedy mixed deftly with matter-of-fact but emotionally wrenching moments (in particular, a season two moment in which the lead, Ray, assists in a suicide – quite a contrast to Ray’s detached approach to killing people professionally). The “inbetween” is what happens all the rest of the time (“Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring.” –Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am).

Photo by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash

Lunchtable TV talk: Billions – a dick-measuring contest in need of neutering

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I’ve written about Billions before, early on in its run. I mostly thought of it favorably.  While Showtime’s Billions has always been focused on characters who are petty, smug and selfish, it’s reached a whole new level of narcissism, disconnect and cruelty. Featuring a cast that includes Damian Lewis just off his Homeland run, the inexplicably magnetic Paul Giamatti, and the most compelling of all, bringing soul and humanity to a show largely devoid of either – Maggie Siff. There have been plenty of other notable performances throughout the series’ run (five years), but it’s fair to say this trio is the heart of the show.

I use the word “heart” liberally. Because the show really doesn’t have any. It’s always been a combination of soulless Wall Street-meets-tech bro, concocted in a simmering cauldron of rivalry between an aggressive, Machiavellian US attorney, Chuck Rhoades (Giamatti) and hedge fund giant, Bobby Axelrod (Lewis). Stuck in between the two is the US attorney’s wife, Wendy (Siff), who also happens to be the in-house performance coach/psychiatrist to the hedge fun and personal friend/advisor/conscience to Axelrod.

The show has always shakily walked the tightrope between gripping and ridiculous. The decline into full-time ridiculous started last season; the show has completely fallen off the tightrope in the latest season. It’s just become stupid.

There was a time when the ridiculousness was tolerable, possibly humorous, but we are living in the exact wrong moment for the self-satisfied, hellbent-on-destroying-others, dick-measuring contest this show has become. Please neuter it.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Lunchtable TV Talk: Mindhunter and Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered – The Lost Children

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Not unlike many fans of Netflix’s gripping Mindhunter series, I am ashamed to say I had never heard of the Atlanta child murders, a focus of Mindhunter‘s season two. When the actual murders took place, I was little more than a toddler myself, but this is never an excuse for ignorance. After all, I find myself frustrated when I talk to youngsters who claim to “love Ted Danson” but know him only in the context of The Good Place, claiming never to have heard of Cheers because it was broadcast originally long before they were alive. So what? Sergeant Pepper was released long before I was born, but I know it, can sing along with it. The Donna Reed Show predates my entire existence, but I’m fully aware of it. We have had reruns in perpetuity. Perhaps we live in an age devoid of all memory, despite being able to conjure up the past with an instant internet search – nothing is ever gone. We are surrounded by and immersed in noise and content from the past and present. Maybe it’s too difficult to swim through all of it to find the linear path of, for example, Ted Danson’s long television history, given the onslaught of everything we are steeped in and the expectation to keep moving forward.

This digression is altogether too frivolous for the subject matter, though. Watching Mindhunter, I found myself having to Google whether the spate of murders it depicted was based on reality. I wasn’t alone. As the story unfolded, it grew more terrifying and shocking – all the more because, until recently, it is a story that seems never to have made lasting headlines. No one I asked (even people much older than me who regularly followed the news at the height of these crimes) had ever heard of this story. The horror of the crimes is viscerally disturbing enough, but what has disturbed and occupied me since seeing Mindhunter is the widespread ignorance to the fact that these serial murders ever happened.

These disappearances and deaths of children in Atlanta occurred at the tail-end of the 1970s and early 1980s – not too long after the high-profile reign of terror wrought by serial killer Ted Bundy. The difference? The Atlanta murders were all black children. Bundy killed young white women. As ever, who gets the public spotlight? This is not new, so I should not be surprised. Not knowing about the Atlanta children until nearly 40 years later makes me feel hopeless and helpless … not just because I didn’t know about it but also that this information has not been in the public eye at all during my entire lifetime (while Bundy remains, unfathomably, the object of constant discussion and fascination). Only now has a comprehensive HBO documentary series about the child murders been released… and even this does not seem like enough. It is not easy viewing – nor should it be.

My rambling has little point. What does a frivolity like Ted Danson have to do with something so completely soul-crushing? It’s a keen reminder that the past, whatever it is, is easily forgotten. Some of history’s most heinous events can be entirely lost, particularly if too little note was paid to them in the first place. And it’s an even keener reminder that, as a society, we see only what we want to see and what we are shown. It’s no wonder that we live in most fraught, divided and painful times, when not every life – wrongly – is seen as having the same inherent value.

Photo by Ronny Sison on Unsplash

Lunchtable TV Talk: Years and Years

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“We’ve done it. Nice little world. Well done the West. We’ve made it. We survived. What an idiot. What a stupid little idiot I was. I didn’t see all the clowns and monsters heading our way, tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God, what a carnival.” –Years and Years

I never heard of the UK TV show Years and Years when it was released (in 2019) and when I stumbled onto it among my HBO streaming options a few months ago, I thought it looked like a comedy (granted, I didn’t read the description).

I then read this article from The Atlantic about the show and its prescience about the times we are now living in. At moments it feels breathtaking how much it seems to predict about what we are already going through, but perhaps if we had been paying attention all along (as one character reminds us) we’d have seen all the bright, flashing signs that we were screaming at us about impending disaster (or, as is the case, disasters plural, e.g. increasingly insane politics led by monstrous, inhumane idiots, the loss of meaning of words, economic ruin, climate crisis, pandemic… sound familiar?). And yet, just as the article from The Atlantic highlights, you notice almost right away that life goes on. You (as the characters did) thought everything had been “settled” at the turn of the century – the future was bright, and since then, it’s been one confrontation with darkness after another.

This is where Years and Years excels: spectacle as a backdrop to the tragedy and misery of everyday life – refugees’ struggles, marital affairs, love interests fucking robots, minor corruption, and all the helplessness of being just one person or family trying to hold it together and somehow swim against the tide that’s washing away all of society’s closest-held (but fragile) norms and values (things so easily abandoned when challenged). Yet, mundane daily life continues on.

The way I think about it is… as I do any time I’ve been in a situation with even a hint of hardship: you can and do get used to anything. That’s how something like Trump’s never-ending and escalating horror show continues: it ends up becoming normalized (the spectacle in the backdrop). Our brains cannot process and retain that much incoming information, let alone do something about it. Yet, tested, stretched, strained, people live on, move forward even if they imperceptibly have to become someone entirely different or other to survive. In this six-part series, which speaks better than anything I’ve seen lately, to these fraught times, there is the overwhelming sense of doom and the tiniest glimmer of hope – all tinged with the uncertainty that seems to, more than anything, fuel us all.

Lunchtable TV talk: Blue skies

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Music, as we know, influences how we perceive and feel about things in our lives, our environments, and nowhere does this play to its strengths than in films and television. It’s often a subtle piece of the storytelling puzzle, quietly pushing the emotion buttons of viewers.

I ended up seeing this week’s episodes of This Is Us and Star Trek: Picard on the same day, both defined by the song “Blue Skies“. I wouldn’t think this would be so … affecting. Sure, in Picard (the version used is sung by one of the stars of the show, Isa Briones), it is fitting because it refers back to the use of the song in the film Nemesis (a picture complete with a young Tom Hardy, whom I’ve also recently watched in Peaky Blinders and Taboo. Yep, all this from someone who claims not to be watching television content any more). It still seemed surprising for this old tune to turn up twice in emotionally demanding contexts.

But “emotionally demanding” is an interesting theme. In the past you didn’t really expect television to make any demands on you, other than sacrificing a certain amount of time to watch it.

With Star Trek: Picard, you can enjoy it on its surface-level merits, or you can bring a deep knowledge of Star Trek history and lore to your viewing, and assess whether or not it meets the sometimes exacting demands of Star Trek aficionados (Trekkers, perhaps, who can be unforgiving).

Some criticism has been leveled at Picard for making it into something that Star Trek resolutely has never been (bold text mine):

“The reaction, understandably, has been mixed. Some fans welcome Star Trek being brought up to date with the look and feel of contemporary television. Others maintain that such pessimism is at odds with what makes Star Trek Star Trek. The showrunner Michael Chabon, responding to questions via his Instagram page, defended Picard against the latter claim by saying that “shadow defines light”, that “if nothing can rock the Federation’s perfection, then it’s just a magical land”. It is a sentiment that has been echoed in the past by Alex Kurtzman, the showrunner of the other ongoing series set in the same universe, Star Trek: Discovery. He justified its equally violent, profane and dark sensibility by maintaining that modern Star Trek is simply a reflection of its time.”

I don’t know that the “Blue Skies” theme of the Picard finale would bring tears to the eyes of any non-Star Trek fan, but it certainly moved me to tears.

With This Is Us, everyone who knows something about the show knows it’s engineered to turn on the waterworks – you don’t exit most episodes without having a tear come to your eye. And this week’s installment was no exception, anchored by “Blue Skies”, as inexpertly but emotionally sung by guest star Gerald McRaney.

I wonder if This Is Us could possibly evoke this kind of reaction without the music. Could anything?

 

Lunchtable TV Talk: Pamela Adlon

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I woke up this morning feeling cold, cranky and unwell, thinking to myself, “I am so tired and so done.” I was overwhelmed by the exhaustion of extending myself too far, from bending in every possible direction to always show others I love and support them, in particular when it’s so thankless and often feels one-sided. It’s easy to get mired in feeling sorry for yourself.

And then I remembered: oh yes, Pamela Adlon‘s Better Things returns with a new season today, and despite the intentional decline in my television viewing, this is something I am genuinely excited about. Dealing with all manner of topics from being a single mom to three children to being the daughter of a challenging parent to menopause to dating and sex after 50, the thing I keep coming back to Better Things for is the deep wells of love and compassion that Adlon’s main character draws from and shows without reservation. Thinking of Adlon’s boundless love (and talent) kind of helped me get out of bed this morning.

For whatever reason, the picture Adlon has painted, and imprinted so that I continually return to it, reminds me vaguely of a Japanese poem, “What a Little Girl Had on Her Mind” by Ibaragi Noriko. It ends with (italics mine):

“The little girl grew up.
She became a wife and then a mother.
One day she suddenly realized;
the tenderness
that gathers over the shoulders of wives,
is only fatigue
from loving others day after day.“

I suspect, since she writes and directs the show, that its heroine isn’t too different from Adlon herself. I suspect that she, like the character, receives frantic calls for help from her kids, from her friends, at all hours, and despite the agony she feels (and she makes this look realistic, painful and heartfelt), no matter how busy or tired she is, no matter the annoyance and anger she may feel in equal measure, she is overwhelmed by the need to love and support and take care of. Sometimes it’s so palpable in watching her that I almost hope she won’t respond with love, care and understanding. (Take care of yourself, lady!) But she always does. The woman knows what’s important, and I can’t think of a better thing to spend my time watching…

Never mind that I love Adlon and have since she was very young in films like Grease 2, of all things. She was one of the most enduringly brilliant parts of Californication. Don’t get me started on the voiceover work. And even if all of this was lovely, she’s really come into her own and owns this quiet but revolutionary space that is Better Things. She is in control; she runs the show (figuratively and literally in this case); she (Adlon) and her character balance toughness with vulnerability and abundant love. It’s remarkable.

As a side note, I’ve written about my strange, down-the-rabbit-hole viewings of actors interviewing actors, and one of my all-time favorites, which I stumbled on two or so years ago is Sterling K. Brown in conversation with Adlon. I loved what a giddy, respectful fanboy he seemed to be. Imagine my utter delight when I saw that Adlon turned up in a recent episode of Brown’s This Is Us as his new therapist. It was perfect.

Lunchtable TV talk: Prisons of your own making – The Shield and You

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In the closing shots of the now-old (though, for some, not forgotten) “bad-cop” serial The Shield, the show’s anti-hero, Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), has – against all odds – gotten away with it. “It” being all the Machiavellian and self-serving things he did to profit and stay one step ahead of everyone else. That is, he and his crew, The Strike Team, perpetrated some of the most heinous acts in the name of “justice” during the course of the show’s seven-year run. They came under considerable suspicion but always managed to slip the noose. Not without casualties of course. The Strike Team anti-gang police unit – Mackey’s crew of rogue, line-crossing, law-breaking guys  – had once been friends, had once trusted each other implicitly. This trust erodes as the team had to do increasingly dangerous and illegal things to cover their escalating malfeasance. In ‘getting away with it’ – most of the characters here lose everything, up to and including their lives. At the very end (spoiler alert), Mackey finally gets out of trouble, dodges all the bullets that have been chasing him for years… only to end up getting assigned to a desk job with ICE – friendless, trustless, with his family in witness protection, and with his hands well and truly tied. He was the classic adrenaline junkie, corrupt and not above betraying everyone and everything that stood in his way, thriving on chaos and being at the center of colossal messes of his own making. In getting – kind of – what he thought he wanted,  he built a prison that probably ended up being worse than if he’d been caught early on or killed, or even if he’d gone to actual prison.

I thought a lot about this ending at the time, and how well Chiklis conveyed Mackey’s inner torment at suddenly being rendered useless, off the streets, chained to a desk… the worst punishment he could have imagined. But it was not until I half-watched the end of season 2 of the stalker-centric series, You, that The Shield returned to my conscious thought. It’s not my normal fare (but what is, really?), and the subtle parallels between it and The Shield did not reveal themselves until I saw the conclusion of series 2. Or rather, all the parallels became clear in the closing scenes of series 2. In both shows, events that the main characters undertake escalate, get out of control, and the rest of the time is spent trying to cover those tracks, which always results in new missteps that require more cover. You get the point. Finally (spoiler alert), You‘s main character, Joe (Penn Badgley), finds someone who is painfully just like him only even more calculating, more cunning, more deluded, and while this won’t lead to an epiphany or self-awareness, he has reflective moments in which he can see, once he is a victim, how his victims felt once his obsessive behavior was revealed.

One would think – even Joe himself – that finding someone just like him, who truly understands and sees him for exactly what he is, would be liberating. In fact, it’s the opposite. We, as humans, project and see what we want to see. Throughout the second series of You, the signs were there if Joe had really seen the person he was chasing. But he was consumed by the chase, not by what was right in front of his eyes. If we discover another person who is so eerily similar to us, do we feel comforted by the similarity and potential for understanding? Or do we feel more vulnerable than ever and feel trapped by what we sought and invited? I’d argue that Joe’s dual problem is 1. he had never been truly seen, and now it’s too ugly to have it mirrored back to him, 2. he got what he thought he wanted, but it’s the thrill of stalking, discovering, creating delusional narratives and justifications, that drives him.

While these two shows are almost nothing alike, it’s that imprisonment – ending up through a mad, wild series of dramatic events of the characters’ own making – that lands them in the same place.

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash