ZERO DAY

By armen pandola

For those of you who remember a little math, you will recall that any number multiplied by zero equals zero. So 1,000,000,000,000 x 0 = 0.

Why the math lesson? Because Zero Day, the new Netflix limited series starring Robert DeNiro is packed with great actors all doing their best to boost Zero Day into something like a real thriller. But all those great actors no matter how many there are, times a zero script equals zero.

And Zero Day's script is about as lame as it gets. 

Why? Lame choices. It starts out with a nice premise - a cyber attack on the USA that in just one minute kills thousands and sends the country into a cyber-spin of panic. No phone, no internet, no TV, no nothing, for a full minute. The gods help us!

OK, let's say you want to write a political thriller about our troubled times, do you strip the script of any reference to actual issues, actual political parties, actual problems and just count on the audience to crayon in the colorless characters and settings? That's what the show's writer-producers decided to do. 

Co-creator, co-showrunner and executive producer Eric Newman and co-creator/executive producer Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, who created the series with New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt, agree that “the mechanism for which we determine truth is collectively broken,” so Zero Day intentionally does not identify political parties, "so as to not distract from the series."

So it's as if Trump's fascist rhetoric is equal to Bernie Sanders' populist rants. Really? Zero Day actually has a left-wing TV pundit (Dan Stevens) who promotes conspiracy theories and is a thorn in the side of billionaires. As if it is just chance that all the powerful pundits in the US are right-wing apologists for those billionaires. 

OK, back to the actual show. DeNiro is an ex-president Geroge Mullen who lives alone and seems to be starting down the road to dementia. Or not. He never ran for a second term because his son died from an overdose or killed himself - you don't really care because the son is just there for the plot; you never get to even see him except in a couple of clumsy 'hallucinations?' in Mullen's  (demented?) mind.

Joan Allen pops up as his wife (ex-wife?) who wants to get on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals - yeah, that'll get the audiences juices flowing. Why not say a Supreme Court seat? Who knows - the creators have picked every undramatic choice possible. It seems the Mullens are split because he had an affair with his Chief of Staff, Valerie Whitesell (Connie Britton) while President. The idea of this never smiling - and I mean never ever smiling - DeNiro warming up to a woman is about as realistic as his being so heart-broken he gives up the Presidency. 

Lizzie Caplan plays his daughter who is a shadow Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but without the pizazz. I felt sorry for Caplan who has a lot of explaining to deliver in the show and very little actual acting.

Jesse Plemons plays his 'fixer' who fixes nothing. Mathew Modine plays an ambitious Speaker of the House who wants to be President - just a quick reality check, the last Speaker of the House to become President was James Polk in 1845. Angela Bassett is the President - you think the creators had a vision? She has even less to do than Caplan until the end of the show when she gives a speech to a scowling DeNiro about how the truth isn't always the most important thing.

The series is elongated by a lot of nonsense about whether Mullen is suffering from dementia or by a new weapon called Proteus that can destabilize a person's mind. And just to show you how fair the creators are or try to be, the conclusion to this question is - we don't know. That's right, the creators of the show decided that either way works for them.

There is nothing even remotely exciting about this show - except how crazy it is. For example, at one point, Mullen and his wife (ex-wife) are attacked by a mob who kill their Secret Service driver and guards. OK, unlikely but possible. Except that when they are rescued, suddenly, they pretend that Mullen was killed. Why? It's not clear. And when it is revealed that he is actually alive, no one seems to be shocked. 

I have some advice for showrunners of political shows like this set in the USA, watch some British or European TV political thrillers. Those shows actually are political and not afraid of it. The characters are real and so are the plots. And the creators of those shows make decisions - a bad decision is still better than no decision.

Zero Day is zero times zero - it tries to 'say something' but what it says is so much drivel that you cannot believe it took them 6 hours to say it. I'll give it to you here in one sentence: Let's all be nicer to each other.

THE DIPLOMAT

by armen pandora

The title of Netflix’s new series is ironic, The Diplomat. Starring the incredible Kerri Russell as the title character who is anything but ‘diplomatic’ in the usual sense of the word, The Diplomat tries to be that unusual blend of thriller, comedy and witty drama - you know, the kind of thing that Alfred Hitchcock did twice a year.

Co-starring the equally incredible Rufus Sewell as her fellow diplomat/ husband, and including a cast of A-list British TV vets, The Diplomat strives to make you think as you watch - how smart these people are!

And just to show you that they aren’t too smart, too high-brow, its creator, Debora Cahn ( a West Wing alumnae who imitates the Sorkinesque banter style) and her fellow writers throw in references to blow jobs for a husband’s good deeds and every five minutes references to peeing.

The plot has a vague similarity to today’s headlines: an aging president played by Better Call Saul’s kookaboo brother, Michael McKean (it’s becoming his specialty) has a female VP he is soon going to dump because of some vague scandal and is looking for a replacement, who is not a politician and won’t be looking to run after her job is done. Yeah, right. Like a President doesn’t want to hand-pick a successor.

The plot involves lots of twists and turns about who bombed a British aircraft carrier and what should be done about it. To test if Russell can possibly handle the VP job, she is named Ambassador to the Court of St. James - one of the highest-profile diplomatic postings in the world. Reluctantly, she goes there - with her husband.

The series tries to make the politicians all so ‘human’ (like we need convincing) while the civil servants - the diplomats and their ilk, CIA station heads, chiefs of staff, etc, are all striving hard to save the world from the crazy politicians.

The joker in the pack is that Russell wants to divorce Sewell, but she can’t be VP if she does. They have a ‘she loves to hate him’ relationship that is as stable as an NBA lead with five minutes left in the game.

Russell and Sewell make a great match and are like a modern Tracy and Hepburn, but there’s no Garson Kanin/ Ruth Gordon writing team to make the center-court match as good as it should be. The music is the giveaway - a kind of slow beat that provides constant auditory winks at all the shenanigans - and that’s what the plot consists of mostly, shenanigans which is, as Webster defines the word, ‘secret or dishonest activity or maneuvering.’ It’s fun to watch at times, but could be so much more.

FAMILY SECRETS
Or How To Not Get Married
By armen pandola

Comedy is hard to translate. Take the title - Family Secrets or Gry Rodzinne in its original Polish which translates literally to ‘Family Games’ - a much better title for this 8 episode Netflix series about two Polish families that collide into each other. In fact, the series could be called ‘Family Collisions.’

It all starts with an actual collision between Kaska (Eliza Rycembel) and Pawel (Piotr Pacek), two medical students, when Pawel rescues Kaska who is about to get hit by a bus because she is reading her phone instead of looking where she is going. They start a relationship that is at the core of the series - or should I say at the inner membrane since like an onion, this show is a series of layers, slowly unraveling to get at its inner truth. Or truths.

If you are a fan of flashbacks, this series is for you. The story is cut up into so many pieces that, by the end, you can’t help but beg for the final piece of the puzzle to be put into place. And here is a spoiler - sort of - don’t get your hopes up too high.

The major framework is the wedding ceremony of two seemingly ill-matched people, members of the two families that are the Montagues and Capulets of this RomCom series.

The Blizkas are a family of two daughters, Kaska and her make-up artist sister, Alicja (Malgorzata Mikolajczak), mother, Malgorzata (Izabela Kuna), and mostly absent father, Marek (Marek Kalita). They appear to be a middle-class family of some means since money is never an issue for all the foolishness they get into. The husband wants to move to a rural town for a better job while the wife doesn’t want to leave Warsaw. Alicja has a romance that ends in tragedy. All of this is revealed in pieces, small pieces over a few episodes, as all of the other facts of this series’ jumbled plot.

The Jaworowiczs are a wealthy family of three: mother Dorota (Edyta Olszówka) teaches at the medical school, father Emil (Pawel Delag) is a plastic surgeon as is his partner/son, Jan (Bartosz Geiner). Each of them has her/his reason for not liking the other two. Dorota hates her husband’s constant philandering - with colleagues and patients alike. Jan hates him for that reason and more - his father is a much better surgeon. Meanwhile, Emil resents that he had to become a plastic surgeon and waste his talents on fixing noses and tits, all so his wife could have the money and prestige she craves.

The show is a kind of Polish Lives of the Rich if not Famous. There is a lot of glitz and glitter. It looks beautiful - so kudos to the cinematographer, set designer, costume and production designers. The acting is top-notch. In fact, all of the elements are there for a hit show excepting one - the script is so over the top with misdirection and flashbacks within flashbacks that it is hard to follow. Yes, many parts are laugh-out-loud funny, but many are, also, deceptively puzzling - annoying, really. Having to read all the dialogue doesn’t help.

The major theme of the series is that nothing is certain, nothing can be counted upon, nothing is as it seems. So, people seem to drop dead for no apparent reason - and many of them rise again, having only fainted. People jump into each others' arms and then, just as quickly, run from each other. Passion rules and as Shakespeare says:

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs —
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.

Reluctantly, I recommend it - hey, a laugh is nothing to sneeze at. And if you do watch it, watch over a couple of days - not much more or you will never remember all the twists and turns of this series’ dizzy, ditsy plot.

THE UNDECLARED WAR

10 reasons to watch this binge-worthy series

by armen pandola

The title of this British TV 6-episode series, streaming on Peacock, refers to the cyberwar being waged by Russia against the West, and, in particular, Great Britain. But this is no polemic drama in which the good guys are always Americans or their nearest relatives, the Brits, and the bad guys are always Putin or, at least, Russian.

The Undeclared War follows a team of top analysts with GCHQ (the United Kingdom’s version of the USA’s National Security Agency) who are trying to prevent Russian social media tweets and news stories from destabilizing the country just before the 2024 elections.

Here are ten reasons to give it a watch:

10. Seamlessly woven into the drama is the method used by Russia to create fake social media accounts and use them to create chaos in Great Britain. It’s really not that hard to do. If you know what you are doing and what you want to accomplish.

9. While the framework of the drama is this BIG story, the stories of the people who are the foot-soldiers and generals of this war provide the emotional base upon which all good dramas - and comedies for that matter - are based.

8. Simon Peeg. Peeg is at the center of two of the biggest modern movie franchises - Star Trek and Mission Impossible. Amidst all those warp speed treks and almost impossible to accomplish feats of fantastic actions, you may have missed what a fine actor Peeg is. Here, he plays the lead analyst who is under pressure to stop the attacks and, also, retaliate.

7. It’s British. I don’t know how or why but the Brits just know how to do shows like this - political but not polemical, dramatic but not morose, topical but not typical. From Yes, Minister to A House of Cards (remember this is the British original, 1000x better than the American show of the same name) to A Very British Coup, the Brits know how to do contemporary political drama.

6. Hannah Khalique-Brown. Yes, you never heard of her, but you will. She plays Saara Parvin who wins an internship at GCHQ, but is conflicted on taking this job with the UK’s prime spy agency since they do a lot of spying on Saara and her fellow Muslims. Her personal life ends up being almost as complicated as her professional one.

5. Maisie Richardson-Sellers. She plays an American analyst with NSA temporarily on loan to the GCHQ. Of course, she’s British - yes, if I hadn’t read that, I wouldn’t have known. Her accent is perfect. More importantly, she acts and speaks with the authority that a NSA spy would have in dealing with the very much less formidable British equivalent. If you have never seen her before in her short career - look out!

4. The writing. Declan Lawn, Adam Patterson and Amelia Spencer have very few writing credits, but this series is going to change that. In one scene, Marina Yeselova (Tinatin Dalakishvili) has been sent to London as a TV journalist for the Russian TV News channel. She is sent to cover a demonstration where a riot breaks out and she suspects that the Russians had planned the riot. She confronts her editor who readily admits that they did. Look, her editor says, we are here to make people doubt the truth of what the other news shows are saying and what the politicians are saying. What good will that do? she asks. Make people think everything they are told is a lie and then - the biggest liar wins.

3. The director. Peter Kosminsky directed White Oleander 30 years ago. Since then, he hasn’t worked much - a few TV movies and then there was the Wolf Hall series in 2015 and The State series in 2017 and that’s it. He deserves to work more. He is credited with co-writing the first episode, also. One of the most imaginative things that he and the other writers have done is to make the search for the implanted malware a real experience - so we see Saara searching through an eerie landscape for something like a bomb as the visual equivalent of searching through code for the malware that is ready to explode and cause panic.

2. The ensemble. Again, with the Brits, it’s all about having fine acting from the leads right down to the ‘chorus’ - the actors who play the many roles required in a sprawling drama of this kind. Mark Rylance shows up and for once has the perfect part for him - a low-key, long-time employee of GCHQ who doesn’t like too many people and the feeling is mutual. Every actor and actress is pitch-perfect in portraying a world where anxiety is the sixth sense.

1. Trump is never mentioned.

DOPESICK

THE STORY OF HOW A RICH FAMILY BECAME

BILLIONAIRES AS LEGAL DRUG PUSHERS

By armen pandola

Addiction. It’s something that happens to other people, right? You do what your doctor tells you and don’t take anything illegal and you’ll be alright. OK, maybe you’ll be ‘addicted’ to chocolate or ice cream or watching football, but that won’t kill you.

Last year, 100,000 Americans died from a drug overdose. In Europe, less than 5 per 100000 die of overdoses. In the US, over 21 per 100000 die. And the reason isn’t because we are differently made than Europeans - the reason is the story told in the HULU limited series, Dopesick.

In the mid-1990s, Purdue Pharma, owned privately by the Sackler Family, released a powerful opioid pain killer, Oxycontin (for a closer look at this company and the Sacklers, take a look at my review of the excellent book, Empire of Pain). Twice as powerful as morphine, the Sacklers maneuvered to get the FDA not only to approve the drug but to label it as non-addictive. While meant to be used only for extreme pain (as morphine is), the FDA label saying it was non-addictive and the Purdue Pharma marketing campaign made oxycontin one of the most popular drugs in America. And while it was easy to abuse Oxycontin, even those who used it as prescribed ended up addicted to it and many died.

Created by Danny Strong (Recount, Empire), and based on a book by Beth Macy, Dopesick features a great cast headed by Michael Keaton who plays a small town doctor in Appalachia. The story has four threads - Keaton and his patients who work mostly in the coal mining industry, Rosario Dawson who leads the push within the various governmental agencies to get oxycontin properly labeled and prescribed for very serious pain only, Peter Sarsgaard and John Hoogenakker who lead the legal battle to get the Sacklers to pay for what they did and Michael Stuhlbarg who plays Richard Sackler and heads the Sackler Family-owned Purdue Pharma.

The series starts slowly, weaving all its various stories together and firmly establishing the central theme - addiction not only destroys lives, it destroys communities too. There is a clunky device of a new scene starting and the years flying by on the screen to the new time in which it takes place. In fact, the timeline doesn’t matter to the basic story so don’t worry if you lose track of the year - it’s almost impossible to keep track. There’s an attempt to go back to the ‘beginning’ when Richard Sackler’s uncle, the family’s founder and the man who bought Purdue Pharma when it was a small company making laxatives, Arthur Sackler appeared before a Senate Committee to defend his marketing of valium in the 1960s. It’s a segment that doesn’t fit into the four-part story being told since Dopesick isn’t concerned with the Sackler family per se, but only the branch of it that created and marketed oxycontin and in the process made themselves billionaires.

There are so many excellent performances that it is difficult to pick out any one standout, but in addition to the main players named above, Will Poulter and Phillipa Soo, play Purdue pharmaceutical reps in the series with different outlooks on what is acceptable in the pursuit of riches and Kaitlyn Dever gives an excellent performance as a coal miner who gets injured on the job and is prescribed Oxycontin by Keaton then becomes addicted, while her parents, played by Ray McKinnon and Mare Winningham, desperately try to save her the only way they know how - prayer. And seeing that name, Mare, I have to say this - this is sooooo much better than the over-hyped and simple-minded Mare of Easttown - read my review of that turkey to spice up your holiday - and watch Dopesick.

Genre: Drama

Network: Hulu

All episodes now available

Executive producers: Beth Macy, Warren Littlefield, Danny Strong, John Goldwyn, Karen Rosenfelt, Barry Levinson, Michael Keaton

11/20/2022

THE 10 REASONS I HATE MARE OF EASTTOWN
By Armen Pandola

Now that the series is complete, take a step back and look at the mess you’ve been watching. There are SPOILERS since almost every five minutes some phony suspect was being unmasked.

1. Not everybody in lower Delaware County, Pennsylvania is a low life. But according to the writer of Mare, Brad Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, Pa, part of Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs, there are nothing but beer guzzling losers who live in houses full of junk, junk food, booze, empty pizza boxes, Chinese food take-out, etc.

2. Mare ruins people’s lives with abandon - for example, her ex-husband, a local high school teacher. She asks him if he had contact with his former student, Erin (the murder victim) and he says no. In fact, he had helped her buy food and necessities for her baby. When ‘a rumor’ spreads that he is the father of Erin’s child, Mare immediately suspects him of the murder. Why didn't he just tell her the truth when she asked, that is the real mystery, but he doesn’t and she decides to accuse him of having sex with his former, murdered student in front of his new fiance and her teenage son.

3. A local girl has been missing for over a year when a new one goes missing. At first, you are led to believe that they are dead but in fact they are being kept as sex slaves by - ? The audience is shown just the lower pants and shoes of the man who has captured and is abusing the young girls, leading the audience to think the man is a character that the audience knows. In fact, he is not a character in the show, just a convenient plot device. This whole subplot about the missing girls is baloney.

4.Erin is a young mother who needed money for surgery to fix her young child’s ear problems. Does she turn to CHIP, the Pennsylvania public medical insurance program? She would be eligible. No, she decides to become a prostitute for a day or two to earn the money. Really Brad, is that what the young girls from Berwyn would do or is this just another Main Line fantasy you have about poor teens from Delco?

5. Mare decides to plant drugs on the mother of her dead son’s child so she can keep custody of her grandson. Instead of going through one of the many drug ‘informants’ most detectives have, she steals drugs from an evidence locker and plants them WITH THE EVIDENCE MARKERS STILL ON THEM. Then surprise, surprise, she gets caught. Yeah, she’s a great detective.

6. Then she gets ‘suspended’ and not fired. Not only would Mare be fired, she’d be prosecuted. Remember, she admits doing this when she gets caught so there is no doubt about what she did.

7. After getting suspended, she finds a young street prostitute who is able to give her the partial license plate of a man who tried to strangle her. The license plate and description of the car matches only seven suspects and instead of getting back-up and visiting the various suspects, she gets her partner/wannabe lover to go with her to investigate. When they find the culprit, she is unarmed and her partner gets killed. She almost gets killed when she struggles for a gun with the sex predator who is a large man - even though she has only one good hand - then pushes him off and is able to grab her dead partner’s gun and kill the culprit.

8. Instead of getting fired for causing her partner’s death and almost her own by refusing to follow proper police procedures in tracking down a demented sexual predatror, Mare is not only reinstated but is hailed as some kind of hero. Sure, she found the missing girls, but she should have let the police do their job instead of getting her partner killed all because she had to make the arrest herself.

9. Erin is killed with a Colt police gun - and when her adult lover confesses, he says Erin had the gun and he killed her trying to stop her from killing herself. But nobody asks where Erin got the gun from. Then, miraculously, almost a year after the murder, the owner of the gun decides to call her and tell her how the gun went missing on the night of the murder and the only person who had access to it besides him was the kid who mows his lawn who just so happens to be ….

10. When Mare finds out that Erin’s murderer was the teenage kid of the man who actually was having an affair with Erin and fathered her child, does she go to his house and wait for him to come home? No. That would be too easy. She seeks him out at a playground and he runs. When Mare goes to get him at his house, she brings a squad of police cars - as she should have done when she went to the house of the sexual predator. At the house, she has to arrest her best friend’s son - she already had arrested her husband who confessed to the crime to protect his son. AFTER Mare does this, her best friend has an emotional scene when she tells Mare she shouldn’t have done that. But the scene is all after the fact so there is no substance to it - like it might have had if Mare had done it before she arrested the kid. I mean, it’s not as if Mare is some kind of super cop who has to abide by the law no matter what - she breaks procedure and the law throughout the series.

BONUS REASON

I think Kate Winslet is one of the best actresses on the planet, but in this show, she is reduced to making faces. Really. Look at her stare in open-mouthed amazement when she is surprised or frown in constant chagrin as she ruins almost everyone’s life in this sad excuse for a thriller.

by armen pandola

The most thrilling aspect of the new streaming TV capability is the incredible foreign TV series that are now available on US television. Just as American TV in the 60s and 70s was shown worldwide, spreading the message about how wonderful life is in the USA, so these new TV series from abroad are showing Americans what life is like 'overseas.'

Borgen is a political TV series about Denmark - and I bet you don't know a lot about Hamlet's birthplace, so let's start there. Denmark is that piece of Europe that juts out above Germany- on the Jutland peninsula (Greenland is part of Denmark but has Home Rule, i.e., they govern themselves for the most part). Along with Norway and Sweden, it is a part of the Nordic welfare states. About 5.8 million people live in this constitutional monarchy (just like England, it has a in-name-only monarch, a Prime Minister and a Parliament). It is one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the average person making more money than the average American. It has some of the highest tax rates in the world, but the Danes live in a country with free healthcare, free tuition for all schools, including college and post-graduate, a social welfare system that works and one of the happiest places in the world to live - when asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how happy they are, most Danes respond 11.

Borgen literally means 'castle' but in Denmark it is the stand-in name for the government, like White House is for the US Executive branch. Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), leader of the Moderate Party, is a politician on the way up. It is no spoiler alert to tell you that she becomes the PM and the series follows both her public and personal lives. Her husband, Phillip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær), and two children, Laura (Freja Riemann) and Magnus (Emil Poulsen) pay a price for their wife/mother's political career - and the price isn't just being in the limelight. This is a real drama about how a political career can destroy a family, especially if the politician is a woman.

The other lead characters are Kasper Jull (Pilou Asbæk) and Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) journalists and sometime media consultants for the politicians in the series. Then, there is a world of characters who make up the political, media and societal leaders of Denmark. It is a fascinating tapestry of double-crosses, power grabs, idealistic hopes and realistic decisions.

The ensemble acting is something that you expect to see only in a BBC production - incredible. There are moments so gripping that they are difficult to watch - like a scene in season 2 when Brigitte is forced to come to grips with the fact that her teenage daughter is having serious mental problems, likely caused by Brigitte's absences due to her political career. Many times in this series characters have to make a choice between personal happiness and ambition. In a country where happiness is the norm, it is a real dilemma.

It is a joy to watch a series about the leader of a major democracy who is not enthroned in office, with special salutations (Mr. President) and a mansion in which to live and work. The PM is just Brigitte to all and she goes home every night to a normal looking house. But, her job is slowly corroding her personal life and while she is becoming a better PM, she is becoming less and less the optimistic, loving woman who dreamed of changing Denmark for the better.

There are 3 seasons of 10 episodes each to watch on Netflix - and more to come:

"Ten years ago, Borgen helped redefine the global television landscape, showing that great stories can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere," said Lina Brouneus, director co-production and acquisition at Netflix. "We are immensely proud to partner with DR and the whole creative team to bring this worldwide phenomenon back and to give Borgen's legion of fans the chance to be gripped once again."

The target date for the release of season 4 is 2022 - which gives you more than enough time to get hooked.

Creator: Adam Price

NETFLIX - TV14

COLIN QUINN: THE NEW YORK STORY
By armen pandola

Stand-up comedy has changed.

There was a time when a stand-up comedian talked about the weather - George Carlin first hit the big time on the Tonight Show with his hippy-dippy weatherman. The dean of stand-up in the 60s was Alan King, the Grand Pubah of aggravation - here is his routine about airlines. Some stand-up comedians varied the usual diet - here's a Woody Allen story about appliances.

In the 60s, stand-up comedy was no longer about jokes a la Bob Hope. As the audience changed, stand-up comedy changed. Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock - comedy no longer was just about telling funny stories, it was about being funny. While comedians still told 'jokes', they were wrapped in a personality. Rodney Dangerfield got no respect from anyone and Don Rickles had no respect for anyone.

Today, doing stand-up can be dangerous. Making fun of certain people or peoples can be career ending. Funny no longer is the sole criteria for stand-up. Comedians have to navigate through a minefield of potential blow-ups. Even a show that is only a few years old can seem written for a different era. For example...

Colin Quinn's 2016 Netflix special is a film of his off-Broadway show about New York City and its people, directed by Jerry Seinfeld. Quinn's style is cynical cool. He surveys the history of New York by sticking it to every group that ever called NYC home, starting with the Lenape Native Americans and the Dutch. His history survey doesn't really heat up until he gets to the Irish - they are the ones who gave NYC its many Catholic parishes. What's a parish? It's 'a church, Irish people and a bar.' He points out that churches and bars share stained glass windows and kneeling (as in kneeling-down drunk). All cops are Irish because the police academy is just like catholic school with nuns who had an unusual taste for violence.

As Quinn goes through the various nationalities who immigrated to NYC, he hits the funny bone without drawing blood - Italians loved America because the first thing they see in America is a 100 foot statute of mother. Momma mia! Everything about Italians was operatic - big! The Jews made NYC their home when sweatshop workers needed volunteers to complain about the terrible conditions - and so unions began. The Jews not only complained, they raised complaining to apocalyptical dimensions - How was traffic, bad? Murder. Are you uncomfortable? I'm in agony!

Quinn makes certain that he touches on ALL the ethnic groups of NYC, even the Albanians - 'I'm not going to say anything about Albanians and that should tell you all you need to know about Albanians.'

Quinn saves some of his funniest bits for his real target - the NYC of the 1970s when the City was on the verge of collapse. From 'mugger money' (you would carry a $10 or $20 to have something to give) to leaving notes on your car for the thieves ('No radio in the car'), to the pimps outside the Port Authority building who were lined up like Citi Bikes, the NYC of that by-gone era is as distant as Ancient Troy. And even then Quinn throws out a line that is funnier today than when he made it almost 4 years ago - “of course, there’s a lot less racial tension now.”

For an hour Quinn turns on the juice and lights up the ether with fireworks that burn brightly if all too quickly. If there is one down moment, it's the end. While the fireworks in the sky usually end with an incredible, how the hell did they do that moment of sheer bravura, Quinn's show ends like somebody pulled the plug, Other than that, sit back and enjoy. You may never see stand-up like this again.

PS - thanks Steve.

DIRECTOR
Jerry Seinfeld

RUNTIME
62 minutes

RATING
Not Rated

CAST
Colin Quinn

LINE OF DUTY by armen pandola

TV shows about the police have been a staple of American TV since Dragnet (Joe Friday's (Jack Webb) famous business-like catch phrase, “Just the facts, ma'am.”). As TV evolved from its greeting card screen size and dependence on antennae and commercials to 50"+ screens and see-it-when-you want streaming, police shows changed very little. There were a cast of police officer characters who, weekly, confronted a changing cast of criminals in the fight for justice. Some, like Kojak, attempted to tell more nuanced stories. There were crooked cops and good thieves and even some stories that rose to the heights of real tragedy - like the pilot for Kojak, The Marcus-Nelson Murders.

In our new era of world-wide TV on demand, we have discovered that the police drama is not an exclusively American product. From Sweden's Wallander to England's Prime Suspect, police drama has entered a new phase, making the plots, characters and seasons of these shows more like a 3-D puzzle than a simple 'just the facts, ma'am' drama where the good guys catch the bad guys just in time for the final commercial and a preview of next week's show.

Line of Duty is a British BBC television series created by Jed Mercurio (Bodyguard - not the movie but the British police political-thriller television series). It has become the most watched and most acclaimed British TV series about the police in the contemporary era.

Line of Duty follows D.S. Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), an authorized firearms officer (in England, police don't carry firearms but must receive extra training to become an AFO) who is transferred to an anti-corruption unit (AC-12) after refusing to cover-up an unlawful shooting. Arnott is partnered with D.C. Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), an undercover officer (again, in England, police are specially trained for certain work, like undercover). They work under the supervision of Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar).

Throughout the series, AC-12 investigates various suspected corrupt cops. Each series is six episodes long (about 60 minutes each) Each series follows AC-12 as it hones in on one suspected officer - series one looks at D.C.I. Tony Gates (the excellent Lennie James) who has just been named police officer of the year, but things start to fall apart when he helps a former lover, Jackie Laverty (played by the versatile Gina Mckee) after she claims to have killed a dog while driving home from a party. She didn't stop because she already has a drunk driving conviction and a second would mean prison . Laverty reports her car as stolen and Gates helps cover up the incident by faking a break-in at her home. When it comes out that she not only hit a person, but her accountant, it is too late for Gates to put the toothpaste back in the tube - he must continue the cover-up as the situation spirals out of his control.

Each season is headed by a main 'guest' character. In season 2, D.I. Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes), the only survivor of an ambushed police escort of a witness who is about to squeal on organized crime, is an unlikely anti-corruption suspect. Season 3 looks at the web of lies and deaths that encase a group of child molesters and stars Daniel Mays as Sergeant Daniel Waldron. Season 4 stars Thandie Newton (Westworld) as D.C.I. Roseanne "Roz" Huntley. Now, the complications become more life-like as events from earlier seasons become part of the plot. Everything comes to a head in season 5 which starts Stephen Graham (The Irishman and Boardwalk Empire) as D.S. John Corbett and Rochenda Sandall as Lisa McQueen, two members of an organized crime mob that has the edge on the cops due to having an informer in the higher ups of the police.

And that is where all of this is heading - who is the rat in the police department?

As usual with British TV shows, the supporting cast is as good as the headliners and includes Craig Parkinson, Andrea Irvine and Polly Walker (Rome), each in vital roles that make this a truly ensemble cast of stars.

Do yourself a favor and take a covid-19 'nowhere to go' night to watch the first season and I guarantee that you will be back for the rest - and for more! Season 6 began production earlier this year, but had to suspend because of the pandemic. Word is that production will re-start at the end of the year.

HULU has only seasons 2 & 3 available while all 5 seasons of Line of Duty are available on ACORN TV. This is a show where you need to see all the seasons in turn to get the most out of the show's building drama of finding and apprehending 'bent coppers’ - and there is a free 7 day trial with ACORN TV which shows mostly British TV shows.

OZARK - SEASON 3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

By armen pandola

Netflix’s Ozark's premise is as simple as its theme - crime pays until it doesn't.

Financial adviser Marty Byrde and his partner have a nice little second income - laundering money for a drug cartel. His partner gets crazy handling all this money and decides the cartel won't miss a few million - it's the kind of idea that leads to the cemetery. Meanwhile, his wife is about to leave him for greener pastures but her lover gets dead. The cartel is about to kill everybody when Marty talks them into letting them live to launder another 5 million. For reasons you won't remember, the financial advisor has to take his family to the Ozarks to make this happen.

I was never a Jason Bateman fan - he has over 90 acting credits on IMDB and only Arrested Development stands out. I have changed my opinion. Bateman is excellent as said financial advisor, Marty Byrde. Now, he has a lot of good company, namely his wife, Wendy, played by the amazing Laura Linney, his daughter played by exotic-looking newcomer Sofia Hublitz, his employee, Ruth, by the explosive Julia Garner and his boss' boots-on-the-ground representative, Helen, by the ever-threatening Janet McTeer.

The first two seasons have the usual mix of very good plot lines, stories and episodes, but nothing that is out of the ordinary in this new Golden Age of TV. Then, this week, season three was released on Netflix and bam! Ozark has set itself apart with excellent writing.

Mr. and Mrs. Byrde have strongly opposed ideas on the best way to extricate themselves and family from the clutches of a homicidal, maniacal Mexican drug lord - is there any other type?

They bought a casino since casino ownership is Money Laundering 101. Mr. Byrde wants to sit tight, do the laundering and hope somehow they get an opportunity to fly - yeah like a bird. Mrs. Byrde, on the other hand, wants to expand and buy more casinos and in the words of Michael Corleone, go legitimate in the next few years. She reasons that casinos make tons of money (unless your name is Donald Trump) legitimately so eventually they can be 'safe.'

Meanwhile, Wendy's long lost brother, Ben ( Tom Pelphrey) shows up. He's wanted in another state and is somewhat annoying as he goes through various convulsions when he discovers what his sister and her husband are up to. But he is a little crazy - I mean certified - so he falls for Ruth and starts creating havoc wherever he goes. Ben is bi-polar and Ozark is excellent at portraying the problems of dealing with a person you love who is mentally ill. The main problem and what makes mental illness a most insidious disease is that the person who has it denies having it and often refuses all help or treatment.

Meanwhile Helen is involved in a custody battle with her ex over their only child, Erin (Madison Thompson). There's a baby who is being cared for by the poster mother of deranged moms played perfectly by Lisa Emery. Wendy wants custody of that child - it's a long story - and what Wendy wants, she usually gets.

The theme of the season is summed up by the drug lord. He gets enthusiastic about the idea of making money at a second casino and gives Wendy the OK to buy it. When the owners refuse to accept her very generous offer, she explains to Mister Drug Lord that they are acting unreasonably and he offers this piece of advice - if reason doesn't work, try force.

Season 3 of Ozark pits the Byrdes against each other as each of them makes a bid to control their lives. They have to make very difficult choices and the complications of their lives comes close to mirroring the problems of life itself. And isn't that the hope of all dramatists - to write to a story that has some of the complications that real life has? Ozark does that - and it's not pretty, but very, very real.

10 SHOWS TO WATCH WHILE NERO FIDDLES
by armen pandola

Have you finished complaining and worrying and stressing out? There is a bright spot - just a short while ago, Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general were complaining that no one is going out to the movies any longer because there is so much great entertainment at home - from streaming TV to online shows to YouTube where you can spend a month surfing from one great video to another.

So, here are 10 shows worth watching - in no special order.

APPLE TREE YARD - Do you like Emily Watson? Apple tree Yard is all-Emily Watson. This is a family drama, but unlike most, there's a lot of action and suspense. Watson plays a middle-aged scientist married with a couple of adult children who, suddenly, starts an affair with a man she just met played with cool menace by Ben Chaplin. Written by Amanda Coe based on a novel by Louise Doughty and directed by Jessica Hobbs, APY is about how those lies we tell not only morph into a tangled web, but end up becoming a shroud.
4 60min Episodes - HULU

A FRENCH VILLAGE - What happens when the Nazis take over a French village in 1940? Nothing good. But this series over five seasons and 60 episodes brings to life what happens when ordinary people have to make terrible, life and death decisions. Yes, it is melodramatic but then occupation under the Nazis was super dramatic with Jews and other 'undesirables' massacred and speaking your mind was deadlier than the coronavirus.
5 Seasons of 12 episodes each - HULU

SPIRAL - Another great French TV series about the criminal justice system. This series looks at the justice system from all angles - in that way, it is similar to The Wire. A French Village and Spiral have something in common - the great French actress Audrey Fleurot.
8 seasons of 10-12 episodes each - HULU

ROME - How is it possible that another show about Rome could be the best limited series ever made? Yes, all the usual characters are there: Julius Caesar ( Ciarán Hinds), Marc Antony (James Purefoy), Cicero (David Bamber), Brutus (Tobias Menzies) and Augustus (Simon Woods). The story is told through the eyes of two legionnaires, Lucius Vorenes (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pulio (Ray Stevenson), but the real powers in Rome were its women - they are the ones, in this artfully told tale, who control the men. I can guarantee that you will love this series.
2 Seasons of 11 episodes each AMAZON PRIME

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE - What would have happened if Germany and Japan had won the war? The US is divided between them with the Rockies creating a neutral zone. This series has a slow start, but picks up when the story gets to John Smith (Rufus Sewell) an American who joined the Nazis when they took over and has risen to the very top.
4 Seasons of 10 episodes each AMAZON PRIME

11/22/63 - From Stephen King's novel, J.J. Abrams has constructed a thriller limited series even though we know how it all ends. Jack Epping (James Franco) is sent back in time to stop the assisination of President Kennedy. With that premise, the series takes a look at the American Dream and what happened to it over the past 50 years.

MESSIAH - Is a new messiah going to come to earth to save us? When a man (Mehdi Dehbi in the Middle East begins to disrupt the local scene and threatens to go global with his message, the CIA sends an operative (Michelle Monaghan) to figure out what's going on. Watch and you decide.
1 season of 10 episodes NETFLIX

THE LOUDEST VOICE - Did it take a movement to force us to take a hard look at Fox News? Did anyone with eyes have any doubt about what Fox was selling? The formula was simple - buy sports and its predominantly white male audience, add super-right wing 'news' to feed that demographic's well-documented prejudices and add that other ingredient that neither sports nor news gave that demogrpahic - sex. And so we have Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe). Seeing this TV series and the movie Bombshell will prompt you to take a shower - the slime is an inch thick.
7 part mini-series SHOWTIME

THE CIVIL WAR - Ken Burns' epic documentary about The Civil War is a great series to watch for the whole family. This is a 9-part look at the defining event in American history - yet, many people have little or no idea about why it happened and how it came to be one of the most devastating civil wars ever fought - 620,000 deaths, just short of the total number of Americans who died in all the other wars it fought, combined. Every family in America was affected - and while the large battles like Gettysburg and Vicksburg are well-known, the Civil War was fought in a thousand different places with battles occurring almost daily. You can find The Civil War on your local library's emedia site and watch it for free if you have a library card.

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY - Disguised as a series about The Beatles, Anthology is really about rock 'n roll and blues in the second half of the 20th century. The Beatles were influenced by it all - and they can be credited with starting almost all rock, blues and popular music innovations that followed them. How was music made in the 1950s and 60s and how The Beatles changed it all. Another one that the whole family could watch - and you can stream it for free at:
https://archive.org/details/BeatlesAnthology/Episode+1.m4v.

HILLARY - IT NEVER ENDS

By armen pandola

A very good friend of mine, a generation older, hated Hillary Clinton. He was a very liberal, progressive man who was one of the fairest people I knew - except where Hillary Clinton was concerned. Strangely, it wasn't only men I knew who hated her; women were the biggest haters. They hated a fellow female who had done more for empowering women than any public figure I have known.

It all started with a name. Why women take their husbands' last name is something I have never understood. Hillary and I were each married in the late 1970s and my spouse kept her own name with my wholehearted support. But Hillary was married to the soon-to-be Arkansas Governor and her decision became political. So, when Bill Clinton became Governor, then lost the next election, Hillary was told that part of the reason he lost was her name - so she changed it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. In many ways, in coming years, the fact that she was married to Bill Clinton hurt more than helped her, but her haters never saw it that way.

HULU's new documentary HILLARY directed by Nanette Burstein, traces its subject's life from her growing up in Chicago to excelling in school and becoming part of the first generation of women to be admitted into America's elite colleges - in her case, Yale Law School. The idea that Hillary got anything because of her relationship to Bill is quickly demolished by the facts. Arkansas in the late 1970s was NOT a very liberal place, but Bill tells us that the law school where he taught offered her a job on the spot and that, later, when she worked for the prestigious Rose Law Firm, she was its first female partner.

While Hillary and Bill are both interviewed (separately), many others who were present at the events described in HILLARY were also interviewed. The picture it paints of the most visible women in American political life since Eleanor Roosevelt is clear - Hillary loves three things: her daughter Chelsea, her husband Bill and politics. Not the kind of politics of smoke-filled backrooms, but the new politics of inclusion and neoliberalism. And she was a very important part of Bill Clinton's team - in fact, he would say that with them, you 'buy one, get one free.'

In the 1980s in Arkansas, she was appointed by her Governor-husband to an education reform task force and was able to get support for a state-wide change in education that more than doubled expenditures. So, when the Clintons got to Washington in 1993, promising to reform the incredibly expensive and less than efficient health insurance system, Hillary was the obvious choice to head that task force. As Bill relates, they discovered that Arkansas was far less resistant to having its chief executive's wife in a position of power than Washington.

The documentary is full of facts and stories that were unknown, like the way that Bill, at first, lied to Hillary about his affair with a White House intern, then admitted it when he had no choice. Placing these events into a time frame is also important. The Monica Lewinski scandal and Clinton's impeachment for it was part of the 1998 midterm election issues and, for the first time ever, the incumbent President's party gained seats in both the House and Senate. People didn't like the fact that the Republicans were impeaching a President for having an affair. After the election, Ken Starr issued his Whitewater Report, finding that years of investigation and millions of dollars and reams of print had been expended for nothing - there was no Whitewater or Travelgate or Foster murder scandal. The Clintons had done nothing wrong. But, as Hillary points out, what does that matter - most people thought that they must have done something wrong given all the screaming headlines about it. Years later, when FBI Director Comey, just a few weeks before the 2016 election issued a letter to Congress saying that he was re-opening the whole Hillary email investigation because new emails were found, she went from having a commanding lead over Trump to a virtual tie. Two days before the election, Comey issued a statement saying, 'Nevermind,' but the damage was done.

That email fiasco is one of the telling incidents in the documentary and offers a clue as to who Hillary is. Those new emails came to light from the computer of the apt-named Anthony Weiner who was being investigated for unwanted sexual texting. Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, Hillary's longtime assistant. When the news broke, Huma was devastated, hysterical because it looked like her ex-husband had tanked Hillary's presidential campaign. Instead of firing her at once or blaming her, Hillary spent the day trying to comfort her assistant and friend. Is there any doubt that if a similar incident had happened in the Trump camp, the boss would have used his trademark response - you're fired!

It is not shocking that Hillary is somewhat reticent when dealing with the Press given how often it has cried wolf then when all the allegations were dropped whispered, sorry. More than 20 years after the Whitewater fiasco, the Press was once again making something out of nothing - Hillary's emails. The fact is that many people in government used or kept their private email account - Colin Powell being the most prominent. More importantly, what were those emails going to show? Thousands of them were examined and they contained - nothing. And today, many prominent members of the Trump White House, including his daughter and son-in-law use private email servers.

HILLARY is not an apologist film for Clinton stalwarts. It reveals how Hillary can be very righteous in her judgments. Often, she says things that are very easy to take out of context - like Trump's deplorables. What the documentary is spot on about is the role of women in our society and how that has changed in the last 50 years. Hillary is a great subject for such a film since she was one of the best educated, most articulate and powerful women of her times. If the world has treated her less than fairly because of her gender - and is there any doubt that it has - then, imagine what it is like for the rest of women.

In a telling moment early in the series, Hillary and Bill separately relate that in 1992, Bill received a call from a person who worked for then-President George Bush. In 1992, Bush was thought to be unbeatable in his campaign to be re-elected President. The US had just won the first Iraqi War and Bush's poll numbers were high. The person warned Bill not to run, saying that they would destroy him if he did. Hillary told Bill that if he could be put off by a threat, then he didn't deserve to be President.

And so the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ started. You think that's silly? Think about it or better, turn on your TV and watch. To paraphrase Margot Channing, fasten your seat belt, it's been a bumpy life.

BABYLON BERLIN

By Armen Pandola

One of the great questions of modern times is how a country that was renown for its music, theatre, film, philosophy, science and dozens of Nobel Prize winners - how could such a country sink so low in just a few years.

No, not the United States, but Germany in the era immediately before the Nazi take over of the government in 1933 known as The Weimar Republic .

A Netflix series, Babylon Berlin, comes close to answering this question. Now, a new season is available and it promises to be as good as the first two.

It is Berlin in 1929. Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) is a combat veteran of World War I and a policeman newly transferred from his home town of Cologne to Berlin; he struggles with Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome linked to his experiences in World War I and survivor's guilt over the loss of his brother. Secretly, he self-medicates to keep from shaking uncontrollably.

The Berlin police force is riddled with corruption and worse, it is a haven for pro-Nazi and anti-democracy zealots as exemplified by Detective Chief Inspector Bruno Wolter (Peter Kurth) a Police investigator whose complexity is a symbol of Germany during the Weimar Republic. Wolter is a great friend and a traitor, a loving husband and a rapist who forces young woman to have sex in return for not arresting them, a murderer and an excellent detective. At first, he protects Rath, but by the end of the second season, they are shooting at each other point blank.

Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) supports her miserable family stuck in Berlin's worse ghetto. To do this, she is an occasional prostitute at the Moka Efti cabaret, but her real dream is to become the first female homicide detective on the Berlin police force. At first she works as a stenographer for the Police Department, but soon she is helping Rath investigate murders.

Countess Svetlana Sorokina / Nikoros (Severija Janušauskaitė) is a White Russian émigré, and crossdressing singer at the Moka Efti cabaret. The Countess is heir to the Sorokin fortune. When the Soviets took over Russia, the Sorokin family was 'eliminated' except for Nikros who escaped. Now, it is rumored that the fortune owned by the Sorokins was converted into gold and placed in a tanker/train car that is sent to Berlin from Russia, claiming to hold poisonous gases.

Seasons 1 and 2 ran together on Netflix. There are so many threads to the story that it is impossible to summarize them - just know that there is plenty of action and you won't want to miss any of it. Crime bosses, politicians, Communists, Nazis, revolutionaries, corrupt officials, innocent victims, sex, power, money, friendship, family, love - it's all here in a mix unlike any since Godfather II and Cabaret. No one in Babylon Berlin is all hero nor all villain - they are all people, trying to do a job or eek out an existence in a world they didn't make and don't like.

This is TV at its best. The story doesn't unfold in linear fashion, but rather it blossoms in a very organic way. The masks that people wear everyday - husband, brother, policeman, idealist, prostitute, boss - are slowly stripped away and all that is left is the confusion of a world gone mad. Death is around every corner and no one can be trusted. Amid all this upheaval, two germans, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, construct the most revolutionary musical of all-time, The Threepenny Opera - and the creators of Babylon Berlin use its most catchy tune, Mack the Knife (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer), to unite the fractured nightmare that is Berlin in 1930.

The most gentle person in this most decadent city is Greta Overbeck (Leonie Benesch), a childhood friend of Charlotte Ritter who needs a job - unemployment was at 15.9% in Germany at that time. Councillor August Benda ( Matthias Brandt) , a Jewish Social Democrat and the head of the Berlin Political Police, is the most effective policeman in stopping a military take-over of the government. When Greta and Brenda's paths intersect, it sparks an explosion that neither wants, but neither can prevent. There are other explosions, almost all accidental, but each contributing to the breakdown of German society and the rise of the jackals.

Do yourself a favor and watch this series. But take a deep breath first - it's a long plunge into the darkness of a time and place that gave us Nazis, Hitler, concentration camps, World war II and the holocaust.

Starring:Volker Bruch, Liv Lisa Fries, Peter Kurth

Creators:Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten

REPRISAL

Binging TV series has introduced us to a new phenomenon - the moving on decision. Say a series is ten episodes long. You have watched the first episode and it seems like the kind of TV series you like. So, on to episode number two. You like two, but not as much as you thought you would. Maybe it gets better. Episode three is good, better than two but not as good as one. So, you try one more - episode four. That is the key episode. If you go on to episode five, you have gone past the point of no return. Five episodes and you are stuck - you have to go on.

Reprisal got me to episode five and I was stuck. I went with it to the end, but every episode was a decision - to go or stay. There was just enough glitz and shine to keep me from turning it off before the next episode flashed on, automatically - it was a decision made for me rather than an affirmative action on my part. And Hulu knew enough to start the next episode off in mid-action rather than with credits - I may have turned it off if the credits came first.

Hulu's Reprisal has an excellent cast. Abigail Spencer is Katherine Harlow / Doris Quinn, a woman who is part of a criminal gang, but has been tortured and thought killed by her brother, Burt (Rory Cochrane). As they say when Hamlet thinks of killing his usurper/step-father near the beginning of the play - if he does, there is no play, And so Katherine is not dead but returns as Doris to get revenge.

She picks up a pair of uber-thieves, Earl (Craig tate) and Cordell (Wavyy Jonez) and concocts a scheme to rob the gang's front, a strip club called Bang-a-rang, owned by Burt. She cons a young man, Ethan Hart (Mena Massoud) into infiltrating the gang. Queenie (Lea DeLaria) runs the place and is a kind of den mother to the strippers who work there, one of whom is Burt's daughter, Meredith Harlow (Madison Davenport). Ron Perlman shows up at the beginning and end of the series as a mob boss and does his usual excellent job of looking bad, yet sounding reasonable.

There's a lot of blood and beatings that would put The Rock in traction for a month, but, in Reprisal, turn out to be scratches that barely make a mark on the victims. I don't know about you, but these phony violent scenes are getting old. Hollywood has come 360 degrees - at the birth of talkies in the early 1930s, Hollywood set up a 'code' that didn't allow for the victims of violence to bleed. For the next 40 years or so, characters died from gunshot wounds and beatings that left no wounds, no blood. Then, Sam Peckinpah and others brought blood back to the screen. Now, we have gallons of blood and dozens of wounds, but no real injury. Somebody gets pummeled in the face with too many punches to count and the next minute is fine.

After watching this series, I read what its makers said it was about since I couldn't make out any theme:

“At its core [Reprisal] is about family. A family that seeks to destroy each other,” executive producer Warren Littlefield claims. “And the family that you build in order to survive and thrive. There will be themes that will be recognizable. It’s quite universal, actually.”

And the NY Times offers this: "If you like the combination of violent action, sentimental fantasy, literary pretension and periodic slapstick humor that Reprisal offers, you may enjoy it well enough."

In the end, Reprisal is a mish-mash with cell phones and pay phones and 1950s cars, 1980s hot pants and contemporary music. There is something for everyone and enough to keep you clicking to the end, but that's about it. Like Rocky, Reprisal goes the distance, but barely.

Hulu. Ten episodes. Running time: 60 MIN.

PRODUCTION: Executive Producers: Josh Corbin, Warren Littlefield, Barry Jossen, Jonathan Van Tulleken. Co-executive Producers: Ann Johnson, Graham Littlefield.

CAST: Abigail Spencer, Rodrigo Santoro, Mena Massoud, Rhys Wakefield, Madison Davenport, Gilbert Owuor, David Dastmalchian, W. Earl Brown, Craig Tate, Wavyy Jonez, Shane Callahan, Rory Cochrane

THE FEED by Armen Pandola

Amazon's The Feed is a futuristic drama whose premise is that human brains will be wired into a central 'feed' and thereby become able to share thoughts and emotions directly. So, imagine not 'watching' a movie, but, instead, the movie takes place in your brain. Sounds great, right?

OK, so you ever hear of something called Murphy's Law? Right, that's the one that says whatever can go wrong, sooner or later, will go wrong.

What can go wrong with having your brain wired into a super cloud?

How about a super virus allows dead people to take control of live humans and start killing everyone in sight so they can keep on existing?

The Feed is owned and run by a family, the Hatfields. David Thewlis (Fargo, 2014) plays the patriarch, Lawrence, Michelle Fairley his wife Meredith and Guy Burnet, Tom and Jeremy Neumark Jones Ben, their Cain and Abel feuding sons. The dynamics of the Hatfield family relations dominate most of the show, but there are intriguing glimpses of what the world may become if an online super company is able to control a society - are you watching Google, Facebook and Amazon?

Some countries on earth do NOT allow the Feed and they have a thriving tourism business based on being Feed-free. Some people have become so engrossed in the Feed that they are incapable of human interaction and there are psychologists who specialize in helping them to kick the Feed addiction, In fact, eldest son Tom has renounced his family and is a therapist specializing in getting people to kick the Feed habit.

The family dynamics are a little trite - eldest son Tom while rejecting the family is the most loved by his parents and younger Ben while devoted and hard-working feels himself a second class son. But the world of The Feed is fascinating - the world becomes more and more interconnected, but, at the same time, more and more dependent on the Feed to make the world go round.

Does anyone think this state of affairs is going to lead to Utopia? I didn't think so. Based on the novel of the same title by Nick Clark Windo, showrunner Julia Clark has ten different people write and direct the ten episodes and it shows - there is a lack of cohesion and in the final episodes there is a lot of cutting back and forth to various plot lines without any real attempt to build on them toward a central theme. It seems as if the story is moving along fairly well when someone remembers a plot line from the last show and stops the current show to go back and fill us in,

Having said that - watch this series. It's fun looking at a future that could very well happen. More importantly, it speaks to our time - is putting our whole world at the mercy of a few giant digital companies a good idea?

In one of the chilling scenes toward the end of the series, Lawrence Hatfield gives an interview and explains that he is one of only a few hundred people on earth with a heightened intelligence capable of incredible feats of thinking and analysing that make him worthy of being a dictator. He is so much smarter than most people, why wouldn't the world want him in charge of making decisions?

As we blunder into one world crisis after another - 50 years of playing nuclear blinds-man-bluff followed by decades of terrorism and now an existential environmental catastrophe that our nation-states world cannot address yet alone solve - maybe it's time to think about democracy. When people are manipulated, lied to and indoctrinated, can we expect them to make good choices? And finally, how is it that the thing that brings us together, the internet, makes us living zombies less and less capable of human interaction?

All episodes are currently available and there has been talk of a second season. The novel’s plot does go beyond the point where the series ended so it’s possible, but not probable given the lack of publicity for The Feed.

GOLIATH - SEASON THREE by Armen Pandola

Goliath is an Amazon Prime series about a dissipated lawyer, Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton) who lives in a seedy motel room on the beach in Venice, CA. Along with his assistants, Marva Johnson (Julie Brister), JT (Paul Williams) and Patty Solis-Papagian (Nina Arianda) he strikes a blow for truth and justice and along the way makes himself rich.

In the third season, new showrunners (David Kelly is now an executive producer) Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner had a couple of aces in the hole - the first two seasons were pretty good and so the show was able to attract an all-star third season cast: Dennis Quaid as a billionaire central valley landowner, Wade Blackwood,  who is stealing the people's water to enrich himself, Amy Brenneman as his somewhat psychotic sister, Diana, Beau Bridges as their all-too-careful uncle, Wheeler, Graham Greene as a Native-American shaman Littlecrow who runs the casino owned by Quaid and, finally, a return visit from William Hurt as a ruthless (how trite, really) attorney, Cooperman.

The season starts with a bang - Sheryl Fenn is co-owner of a central valley farm that is going under because Quaid has stolen all the water. Suddenly, investigating a strange noise in the night, she walks outside into the fields in her pajamas with no shoes and literally goes under as a massive sinkhole envelops her.

Billy and she had been friends in law school (you have to wait a couple of episodes before they decide to tell you about that relationship - hey, you knew Fenn wasn't going to get killed in the first few minutes and just disappear) so he shows up to help her husband (Griffin Dunn) get justice by suing Quaid and his gang who are stealing the water and may have caused the sinkhole. The plot is complicated but worse, it makes no sense. For example, Wade and friends spend a lot of time lighting up a pipeful of stuff put together by shaman Littlecrow and in episode one, Wade imagines himself singing "The Rose" (yeah, Bette Midler) to an admiring audience. OoooKay.

There are lots of subplots involving Patty Solis-Papagian (Nina Arianda) (there is a running joke that everyone mispronounces her name that gets stale about the 10th time they do it), former prostitute now lawyer wannabe Brittany Gold (Tania Raymonde) and all grown-up daughter Denise McBride (Diana Hopper). The subplots are the best part of the show - they make no sense but at least they go somewhere, like Patty getting pregnant and then finding her birth mother.

Everything that looks like it is going to be a major theme just disappears in an episode or two. Why are Quaid and friends smoking dope? What is going on with Billy's daughter taking to booze, then we see her in bed with a fellow student and she tells him to stop so he does and - yeah, I have no idea. She ends up trying to murder now-Mayor Marisol Silva (Ana de la Reguera) who is in bed with Quaid and company on the water thing. In one scene, Silva is seen at a big LA event with her new boyfriend - wait for it - Matthew Weiner.  Yeah, that Matthew Weiner of MadMen fame. It's a mess.

Maybe the craziest near-plot is the one involving Quaid and Brenneman in an incestuous  relationship - or not. Oh, and Brenneman has two adopted kids, twins, both played by Shamir Anderson - yeah, I guess you're supposed to wonder how they do all those scenes that they are both in - I didn't. I did wonder what they were doing in the series. 

Oh, did I mention Illeana Douglas as casino barfly, Rita. She does nothing, is connected to nothing and has no purpose. I thought she was going to be some kind of Cassandra foretelling doom while being ignored, but, no, she is just a barfly who is just there. A lot like Littlecrow's daughter who inherits everything from Wheeler (apparently he is her biological father) or Applebees (Lauren Tom) who is just a crazy and is there to - wait, what is she doing in this show? 

I wish I could tell you it gets better - I kept on watching thinking, this has to get better, doesn't it? With this cast? My guess is a lot ended up getting cut or re-written because there is no way William Hurt agrees to play Cooperman again with the role he has in the final product. When I looked up writers Ames and Turner and saw that they were mostly producers before, well, it explained a lot.  As someone could say, as writers, this duo are great producers.

Need I tell you that justice prevails? It does, and then it doesn't. You'll see. Oh, I know you're going to watch it since this cast has someone for everybody. The producers did a great job.

THE CHAPERONE

By Armen Pandola

Louise Brooks was different. Born in 1906 in the wilds of Kansas, she became a dance star before she was 16, a movie star before she was 20 and a has-been before she was 25. After that, she was a courtesan, a salesgirl, a movie critic and writer. She lived on her own terms and died many deaths, all of them painful. Along the way, she starred in two of the best silent films ever made, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. She was one of the first to invent a new art form - acting on film, and presaged the natural acting style made famous in a later generation by Lee Strausberg and his pupil Marlon Brando.

When she left home at 16 to become a dancer, she had an escort, Norma, a married fellow Kansasian who was to be her chaperone. Norma was an orphan, born in New York City, then adopted and raised by a Kansas couple who picked her out of a bevy of little girls sent west on a train for the purpose of showing them to couples interested in adoption. At the age of 16, she married a local lawyer (Scott Campbell). They had twin boys and seemed happy enough, but something has come between them, and while it is apparent, like all emotions in that most mid of midwest places, it is suppressed.  

Somehow, out of these two troubled lives, Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) has written a TV movie that is so satisfyingly good, so well written and acted that it could easily have been released as a movie. Instead, it is part of the Masterpiece series on PBS.

We meet Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) at a dance recital that Norma (Elizabeth McGovern) attends.  When Louise's mother (Victoria Hill) comments that Louise will be off to the big city to dance in the famous Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts and, so, they are looking for a chaperone, Norma volunteers a little too readily.

Once in New York, Louise discovers the place where she can become herself - she's a natural vamp and every man she meets becomes enthralled with her.  Norma seeks out the orphanage where she was raised and tries to find the names of her parents. The nuns who run the school refuse to tell her and, so, Norma takes a page out of Louise's book and entices a German immigrant widower, Joseph (Géza Röhrig)  who works at the orphanage to help her. 

Louise takes her first steps to stardom and Norma finds her mother (Blythe Danner). Neither gets what she expected. In the end, Louise loses everything and twenty years later is forced to return to Kansas, broke and broken. Meanwhile, Norma has taken the bits and pieces of a life that was forced upon her and weaves something quite magical - a good life based on deceit and compromise. 

by armen pandola

Soundbreaking is an eight-part PBS series on the art and evolution of music recording which is currently available on Hulu. If you love or even just listen to music, you should watch this series.

The 20th century changed music. Before that, music was made by people playing musical instruments or singing and could only be experienced live, that is, in a place where the musicians and audience shared the same space. Music was ephemeral as performed because it existed only in the moment it was made. Of course, music was written down and preserved by musical notations, so that a piece by Mozart could be played by people who knew the language of musical notation as often as people wanted to hear it. Also, there was an oral tradition, mostly of folk or popular music, which was passed down the generations by those who made music from memory.

Recording music enabled its transmission to great numbers of people who could buy the recording that was preserved on a disc and play it on special machines. Then, radio became popular and another outlet was found so that millions of people could experience a performance as recorded on a disc, all at the same time.

With the invention of the microphone, performers didn’t have to sing through megaphones a la Rudy Valle or have leather lungs like Al Jolson and Ethel Merman. The great singers of the mid-20th century all used the microphone as an instrument and played it to great emotional effect, such as Frank Sinatra singing I’m A Fool To Want You. You could whisper a lament and every syllable could be clearly heard.  

With recording and microphones, what was once an oral tradition of often travelling minstrels, morphed into the popular music of the 20th Century that was as diverse as the people who fell in love with it - jazz, blues, country, pop, folk, rock, hip hop, rap - all kinds of music for all people.

Soundbreaking in its first episode gives us a preview of the great musical geniuses who will be profiled in the upcoming episodes. The emphasis is on the music of the second half of the 20th century and how recorded music went from recording engineers trying desperately to mimic the sound of a live performance to artists such as George Martin and The Beatles making sounds that could never be made in a live performance, such as the ground-breaking Tomorrow Never Knows  from Revolver. If you are like me, Tomorrow is the song I skipped (it was easy because it was the last song on the second side of the album). Soundbreaking will make you go back and listen again - it is this song which started an entire musical movement of invented sounds as music. From there it is but a small step to the Moog Synthesizer and records such as Manfred Mann’s Blinded by the Light.

Soundbreaking features stories about all kinds of music, from the revolutionary discovery of the electric guitar and multi-track recording by Les Paul to Elvis, The Beatles, Stones, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendricks, The Who, Annie Lennox, Adele - the list includes all the great innovators of the 20th and early 21st century music. One episode tells of Stevie Wonder’s journey to break free from the shackles of the Motown sound to the revolution in music that he created in the 70s with songs such as Livin’ for the City. Like all geniuses, Stevie Wonder perfected the music of his time, then changed it into something new and never heard before.

Music changed forever because of the new technologies that were changing the way musicians could make sounds. By allowing artists to make great records in their own homes, on computers, the new technology has broadened the pool of talent that can produce new music and just as the pool of talent was exponentially expanded by the recorded music industry in the early 20th century, so it has expanded again in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In the process, the new music changed us, its audience. Now, music is everywhere - there is rarely a public space that is silent. We are use to experiencing life with our own soundtrack. Working out or falling asleep, music is there to motivate us or to tranquilize us. Soundbreaking tells the story of how that came to be - and hint at where it is headed.

Soundbreaking has a great PBS website that has lesson plans for teachers to use and a wealth of material about music and sound recording. It also has playlists that correspond to each episode so you can listen at your leisure to the greatest sounds of our time.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE - SEASON 3

by armen pandola

The Handmaid's Tale (THT) enters season 3, slowly, literally.  The number of slow motion scenes is almost equal to the number of shots showing a close up of Elizabeth Moss' face wearing a scowl or an expression that mimics what a person looks like after smelling something really, really stinky.

The slow motion scenes are there for a simple reason: what is being shown on the screen is not dramatic and lacks even a modicum of tension so, slow it down to make it look like it is important and dramatic. Everything looks more meaningful in slow motion. Often directors use slow motion in battle or fight scenes to make them appear more balletic. But, THT adds another sure-fire sign of dead-on-arrival scenes - the meaningful song that is supposed to add depth to the shallow slow motion episodes.

Why all this trickery in Season 3?

Remember, at the end of Season 2, we left Offred/June (Moss) tossing her newborn baby to a fellow Handmaid who is escaping to Canada. June won't escape because she wants to return and save her older daughter who has been given to a new family. Many people died so she could have this chance to escape and she, herself, for two seasons has been doing everything she could to get out of Gilead, the new truncated, theocratic, male-dominated USA. The cynical among you may suggest that Offred had to stay in Gilead for the best of reasons - the series is over if she doesn't.

So what is this third season about? Funny you ask because it is not about much. When she goes to the home where her daughter is being raised, she has a 'mom' moment with the surrogate mother of her daughter in which they talk about what a wonderful little girl she is. This scene is repeated when she has a similar moment with Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) about the baby she bore and helped escape.

Serena has a fiery moment of rebellion herself, but it leads nowhere.

THT has to move forward in the only way possible - active rebellion in Gilead by its female population. Margaret Atwood, the author of the book on which the series is based, knew better than to take the story that far since, if she did, the book would be more like one written by Fredrick Forsythe than her. But, that is this series' challenge - to transform itself from a drama about women caught in a country ruled by conservative evangelicals to an action story about the new civil war for freedom.

And that will offer the opportunity for a lot more slow motion scenes, let alone catchy, upbeat tunes telling all women to  - what else? - Let It Go!

by armen pandola

In 1986, the world held its breath as a nuclear plant in the USSR was on the brink of a meltdown. Desperately, the Soviet Union attempted to control both the accident at Chernobyl and the news of what happened there. While much blame was leveled at the USSR for failing to inform the world of the true extent of the disaster, a nuclear plant disaster in 1978 in the United States at Three Mile Island had shown that no nation, democracy or not, was willing to face the consequences of a nuclear plant meltdown. The reasons for their recalcitrance can be summed up neatly in a phrase coined by Herman Kahn, a cold warrior, who used it to describe thinking about nuclear war - thinking about the unthinkable.

The new HBO limited series, Chernobyl, takes us to the core of the disaster by looking at it through the eyes of Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. It is Legasov who has to explain the true extent of the disaster to the Soviet officials (and to us) and how it might be ameliorated. Harris is best known for his work on Mad Men (Lane Pryce) and The Crown (King George VI) and turns in an excellent performance as a man who is torn between what he knows and what he is allowed to tell.

The story begins with Legasov making a tape recording of his version of what went wrong at Chernobyl, then killing himself (this is true). From there, we go back to Chernobyl on the day it happened and watch the scientists and technicians set in motion the disaster.

Nuclear reactors work just like coal power plants work - a fuel (coal or uranium) is used to heat water to make steam which in turn drives a turbine that makes electricity. The big difference is that if something goes wrong at a coal power plant, there is local damage, but no more. Uranium has unique properties that make it far more dangerous than coal. Uranium produces radiation and radiation is deadly. You cannot see, smell or taste it, but you can die from it.

Before Chernobyl, it was thought that a nuclear reactor could not explode. The fact is that it cannot explode like a nuclear bomb, but it can explode like dynamite, and that is what happened at Chernobyl, spreading radioactive debris all around the plant and radioactive smoke for thousands of miles.

Chernobyl, created by Craig Mazin, tells its story by concentrating on those who were there. They can be placed into three categories: the government officials who try to conceal the extent of the disaster, scientists who are trying to prevent the disaster from spreading and victims.

The government contingent is headed by Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård ). He tries to control the message by telling his superiors that all will be well very soon, but the scope of the disaster changes him and he starts working with Legasov to prevent the meltdown which will radiate the entire water supply of the Ukraine (50 million people and now an independent country) by melting down into the groundwater.

Like much of nuclear science in the modern times, radiation is difficult to understand. It is something that can be seen only in its effects, but those effects are horrific. The victims' story is told through the eyes of Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), wife of a local firefighter, Vasily Ignatenko (Adam Nagaitis). When the firemen arrived at Chernobyl on the date of the accident, they did not wear any special equipment and thought that they were putting out a large fire. Within an hour, all were suffering from extreme radiation exposure. Ignatenko ends up suffering a death that is difficult to explain (Legasov tries to explain it to Soviet authorities) and more difficult to witness.

Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson in another stellar performance) is a scientist who forces her way into the small group of scientists and apparatchiks who are dealing with the crisis. She prevents them from making a huge mistake which would have led to a complete meltdown, then is charged with writing a report about how the accident occured after interviewing those who were running the plant when it happened. Those men are dying, quickly, so her interviews serve the dual purpose of providing information on how the disaster happened and, also, allowing the audience to witness the effects of radiation poisoning. These scenes are difficult to watch. It is Khomyak who sees that the hospital treating the victims has allowed Ignatenko's pregnant wife to visit and actually lie next to him in bed. They had no idea of how dangerous and communicable radiation poisoning is.

In the end, Chernobyl is a great story about our modern times. We have discovered the wonders of nuclear fission to not only make bombs but, also, to make energy. There is little doubt that it will be nuclear energy which will power our attempts to reach out beyond our own solar system, but until we can better cope with the potential disasters, nuclear power is more a danger than a benefit.

by armen pandola

In 1961, an unknown author, Joseph Heller, published a novel that was truly revolutionary - Catch-22. It was the story of a bombardier assigned to a US Army Aircorps outfit that was fighting the Germans in Italy. Contrary to other novels and books written about WWII, Catch-22 had no heroes, no great battle scenes, no triumphant endgame of victory at any cost. Instead, it had a lead character named Yossarian who spent every waking hour trying to figure out how to stay alive. It wasn't easy. The officers, his fellow soldiers and the Germans were all trying to kill him - in that order.

The phrase, Catch-22, did not exist before Heller's novel - it became a catchphrase for the insanity of life due to the popularity of his novel. The phrase originates when Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian why he can't ground a fellow soldier, Orr, even though everyone knows Orr is crazy. You see, Doc explains, I have to ground any soldier who is crazy and Orr is crazy but before I can ground him, he has to ask to be grounded. So, Yossarian says, all Orr has to do to get grounded is ask? No, explains Doc Daneeka, if Orr asks me to ground him, then I can't ground him because only a sane person would ask to be grounded. So, Yossarian sums up, Orr is crazy and can get grounded but only if he asks - but, if he asks, then he's not crazy so he can't be grounded. And that is Catch-22.

In 1970, the book was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols. Nichols had made two movies up to then, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate. To say the least, he was on a roll. It ended with Catch-22.  While there are a lot of great things in the movie, it was impossible to put on the screen, in one movie, the dozens of incredible characters and outrageous stories that made up Catch-22. Alan Arkin gave a masterful performance as Yossarian, but the movie never caught on and was a critical and commercial failure.

So, when I heard that HULU was making Catch-22 into a series, I thought - yes, that's what Catch-22 needs, several hours of time to bring to life the incredible story of a man trying to stay alive in an insane world. I was wrong.

HULU's Catch-22, written by Luke Davis and David Michod, is not Heller's or even Buck Henry's Catch-22. Instead, it is as if Oliver North  and G. Gordon Liddy teamed up to re-make Catch-22. Yossarian is transformed from one of the great characters of American literature into a soldier who wants to stay alive - in other words, just like every other soldier. Yossarian is, I find this hard to write, not only patriotic, but a good soldier whose only crime is that he wants to go home. When he meets Heller's take on the ultimate victim of war, the rookie tail gunner, Snowden, he tries to comfort him like a big brother. Oh, where are the Snowden's of Heller's masterpiece?

How is this series different than the book? Well, first and foremost, there are not many laughs in this series. In HULU's Catch-22, Yossarian is a top-notch bombardier  but in Heller's, he is demoted from lead bombardier because he refuses to wait until his plane is over the target before dropping his bombs since his only concern is to get back alive from every mission.  Making Yossarian 'brave' is like some streaming studio re-making The Great Gatsby, but his time, Gatsby lives and marries Daisy. I could go on and on, but just let me say - I read Catch-22, many times, I know Catch-22 and HULU, this is not Catch-22.

Joseph Heller died in 1999. His estate has not done him a favor by greenlighting this version of his great novel. In fact, since TV is way more popular than any other medium, it is likely that many people will think that the HULU series is an accurate rendering of the novel. Sad. HULU's series resembles Heller's book in the same way that light beer resembles beer - and even that is not strong enough to convey what HULU has done. They have taken a chisel to Heller's David, a crayon to his Mona Lisa, dropped a bomb on his Notre Dame. They have defaced a great work of art.

The only good thing that can come from this hack job is if more people end up reading the book. If you haven't already, you are in for a real treat.

by armen pandola

Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (The Wretched) is a wonder. At over 1500 pages, it examines a time, a place and various people as well as any novel could hope.

Published in 1862 (the US Civil War was a year old), Hugo wrote the novel in exile from France. In 1848, Napoleon III (a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was elected to a four year term as President of the France. In 1851, he declared himself Emperor of France and created a dictatorship. Hugo was a vocal critic and exiled for his views.

Hugo had established his reputation over twenty years before with the the publication of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1831. Tha novel helped to revive the fortunes of Notre Dame cathedral by making it the central character in the novel (the French title of this book is Notre-Dame de Paris or Our Lady of Paris) As a result, Notre Dame underwent a significant renovation, including the refurbishment of the spire that fell in the recent fire.

All of this is to say that when Hugo published Les Miserables, he had a substantial following and the reception given to his new novel was unparalleled in the history of publishing up to that time.

The novel follows the fortunes of one man, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. There are too many characters to name, but the major ones all revolve around the story of Jean Valjean. Javert is a police inspector who vows to bring Valjean to justice when Valjean steals again after his release from prison. For over 17 years, Javert pursues Valjean who has changed his name and become a respectable citizen, a mayor of his town and owner of a prosperous business. One day, he dismisses a female employee, Fantine, for lying and her life slowly slips into poverty and degradation as she desperately tries to keep her daughter, Cosette, from suffering the same fate. Valjean regrets what he did and seeks out Fantine and, later, her daughter whom he raises as his own.

Les Miserables has been made into numerous movies and TV series, beginning with a 1909 silent version. The story has so many characters and plot twists that no movie, no TV series, can do it justice. Most follow the main branch - Javert's quest to capture Valjean and Valjean's relationship with Fantine and her daughter, Cosette.

PBS' Masterpiece Theater brings us a new version in a six-part series. What makes this version exceptional is that it is written by Andrew Davies who wrote the original BBC version of House of Cards (take a look at my review comparing the American version with Davies'). Davies knows how to tell complicated stories and, more importantly, is aware of all the previous versions of Les Miserables and knows better than to follow the usual well-worn template. As a result, we see parts of Les Miserables never before explored on film (or in that popular stage musical version).

The cast is outstanding, but then actors have been drawn to these incredible characters for over a century. Dominic West (Jean Valjean) made his mark in The Wire and more recently in The Affair. David Oyelowo (Javert) had his break-out performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in Selma. Lily Collins (Fantine) was in Love, Rosie, and The Blind Side. Olivia Colman, direct from her Oscar winning turn in The Favorite plays the mother of all wicked step-mothers, Madame Thénardier, while Adeel Akhtar slimes along as her husband.

The casting is totally blind as it should be. Davies does an interesting thing with the language - all the characters speak English with no phoney French accents but the background talk, say in a crowd, are in French as are all the written materials - like wanted posters of Valjean. In this way, we get the flavor of the original language within an English version of the novel - very clever and I am unaware of it ever having been done before.

In the end, West and Oyelowo have the laboring oars and propel this version of Les Miserables to the top among only a handful of great versions of this timeless tale - you really cannot help but use cliches in dealing with a book of this scope and depth - and humanity.

by armen pandola

All of us remember the various nature shows on TV - at one time or another, we have seen the lions chase the Thomson gazelles or the humpback whales, all 30 tons of them, burst out of the sea and take to the air for just an instant before crashing back down with an explosion of water and sea foam.

The BBC's Planet Earth was one of the best, but there are dozens of nature shows on TV every year, from PBS's Nature to Jack Hanna's Wild Countdown. The best of these shows not only introduce us to the world we live in but rarely see, they also give us a sense of the community of all living things that inhabit our blue marble - anyone who was around in the late 60s knows when the environmental movement began, it was the day that the Apollo 8 astronauts sent back this photo of the earth, looking back from the moon - earthrise.

Our Planet, the new Netflix 8-part series narrated by David Attenborough, is to the usual nature show like Stevie Wonder is to the usual harmonica player - they're both playing the harmonica but Stevie is on a totally different level.

What makes Our Planet stand out is the incredible photography that will show you things you have never seen before. Oh, I know, you have seen it all - well, as Al Jolson use to say, you ain't seen nothin' yet!

The series' eight episodes of about 50 minutes each tells the story of our planet's incredible diversity and, also, its inhabitants' total interdependence by looking at the world through its large communities - Jungles, Coastal Seas, Deserts, etc.

Conveniently, the first episode is a preview of all that is to come, so you can take a look and see if this is your cup of tea. What you will see is a world where each plant and animal has found a place, a niche, in which to make a living, that is, to survive, but not independently. No, the wild kingdom ( remember, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler) is like a giant puzzle with each piece fitting precisely into his tailored spot.

In the Coastal Seas, when predators such as dolphins attack huge schools of anchovy or herring, above the sea, the hunting birds are all waiting for the feast to begin (no one knows how the birds know when to show up) as smaller fish rise up to the top of the sea to avoid the dolphins only to be in range of the cormorants or petrels which dive into the sea, snatch one up and fly away.

Or the courtship rituals of various birds, the nurturing instincts of wild hunting dogs, the journeys of elephants for water in the desert - the list of fascinating subjects is endless and all tell the same story - how a particular animal or plant has, over the course of millenia, adapted itself to an environment that is quickly changing and may be gone in our own lifetimes.

But Our Planet does not preach, it shows and tells. What it has to show and tell is extraordinary. Our planet has a diversity of life that is astounding - did you know there are spinning dolphins? The best way to convey to you the wonder of Our Planet is to show you the trailer - Take a look and I am sure you will agree. Our Planet is worth your time.

FOSSE/VERDON - A PAIR OF ACES

Bob Fosse grew up wanting to become Fred Astaire.

Problem was - when he grew up Fred Astaire was still dancing and, more importantly, the public didn’t want another Fred Astaire. Musicals were a dying movie genre. 

One thing Fosse did have in common with Fred is that they both lost their hair. Unlike Fred who went out and got a great hair piece made, Fosse started to wear hats. Not only did he wear them, he incorporated them into his dances and, when he started to choreograph, into his choreography.  Hats went out of style but not in Fosse’s world. 

Fosse did get to perform in a great movie musical, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Ann Miller, who played Bianca, tells the story that Fosse did his own choreography in the movie - and with the legendary Hermes Pan (Astaire’s personal choreographer) as the movie’s choreographer, it was incredible that they let Fosse do that, but the result is one of the first modern dance routines to be put on film.

Gwen Verdon was a broadway baby who danced and sang her way to four Tonys in  six years. She was incredibly versatile, making hits of some musicals that have long since been put in mothballs (Redhead). Her lasting fame is as part of one of the great marriages of artists. While they never rivaled the publicity showered on the most famous husband and wife team of their time (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), they made more and better art together. Fosse pulled off one of the great trifectas in entertainment history winning a Tony, Oscar and Emmy in 1973 for directing Pippen, Cabaret and Liza With a Z.

FX’s new series, Fosse/Verdon wants you to know that the iconic musicals produced by Fosse were really a team effort. Written by Steven Levenson and Joel Fields, the series starts with a look at the team in the 1960s. Fosse has directed the movie, Sweet Charity, which he directed on Broadway starring Verdon. Of course, the studio wanted a big name so it hired Shirley MacLaine ( who started as a dancer). If you ever saw that movie, you know that while the movie has some Fosse touches, they get buried in the glitz of then-Hollywood’s idea of a musical. The public wasn’t buying it. The movie cost $20 million ($146m today) and made less than half that at the box office. Strangely, another great director, Francis Ford Coppola, would make his Hollywood directing debut that same year with Finian’s Rainbow which bombed at the box office. Four years later both would make comeback classic films, Fosse with Cabaret and Coppola with The Godfather. Fosse would beat Coppola for the Oscar for Best Director while The Godfather would win Best Film.

Sam Rockwell has transformed himself again, this time as a charming devil who just happens to have a vision of  what the musical should look like for an audience that no longer wants to see Fred and (fill in the blank) dance off into movie musical bliss. 

And Michele Williams does that voodoo that only she does so well, transforming herself into Gwen Verdon.  Williams has taken on some of the most difficult roles and made them look easy - from Marilyn Monroe on film to Sally Bowles in theater.

While there is much to love about Fosse/Verdon, the series does suffer from some enduring cliches, like the Hollywood producers who never seem to understand that great art can be very profitable.  It seems that Hollywood is always underestimating the geniuses whom it hires in the first place because of their genius. I have heard it so often, it must be true, right?

Fosse and Verdon had intertwining careers but as his career took off in the late 60s and 70s, Verdon was having trouble finding good roles as aging actresses always had in those days (are we any better today?). 

The series, judging from the initial episode, looks like a winner. And in trying to tell the story of how great art is made, that is not an easy task. Few movies or TV series have pulled it off and the reason is simple - artistic genius is not easily explained, and, often, defies explanation (think of all those theories about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays because it couldn’t be an uneducated rube like Shakespeare, could it?).

Unlike the streaming giant Netflix, FX is releasing one show a week for eight weeks so you’ll have to be patient - a thing that Fosse never was.

Fosse/Verdon airs Tuesdays on FX at 10 pm Eastern. Episodes will be on FX’s streaming platforms after air. 

ANSWERS:

1. All That Jazz from the musical Chicago which Fosse directed, choreographed and wrote the book while Verdon starred in the original stage version as Roxie Hart.

2. Heart from the musical Damn Yankees which Fosse did the choreography for both play and movie while Verdon starred as Lola in both, too.

3. Cabaret from the movie Cabaret which Fosse directed (winning an Oscar for Best Director) and choreographed.

4. Big Spender from Sweet Charity which Fosse directed and choreographed while Verdon starred on Broadway. Fosse directed the movie which lost a ton of money, many thought because Shirley MacLaine couldn’t do the title role as well as Verdon.

5. From This Moment On from Kiss Me Kate which Fosse starred in as one of the dancing suitors of the Shrew’s younger sister. Take a look at this great dance sequence form the movie.

6. Whatever Lola Wants from Damn Yankees - take a look at Verdon in this classic.

7. It’s Alright with Me from Can-Can which verdon starred in and won her first Tony.

8. Just In Time from Bells Are Ringing which Fosse choreographed along with Jerome Robbins.

9. I Could Write a Book from Pal Joey. Fosse played the lead in the 1963 revival and won a Tony (unlike the movie, the original B’way musical saw Joey Evans as a dancer not a singer and so Fosse was a natural for it).

10. On Broadway from the autobiographical movie, All That Jazz written, directed and choreographed by Fosse. Take a look at this incredible opening sequence of the movie.

HANNA OR HOW TO HAVE ONE IDEA AND MAKE IT PAY TWICE

by armen pandola

In 2011, Hanna, the movie, was released. Written by David Farr and Seth Lochhead, directed by Joe Wright, Hanna made money with a worldwide gross over $60 million and a budget of $30 million. Lots of people thought it was a great movie.

The plot was a little crazy - a 16 y.o. girl, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), is being reared by her father (Eric Bana)  in the wilds of Finland. She is taught to hunt (with a bow and arrow), speak several languages and win a hand-to-hand or foot-to-face battle with anyone.  Why he trains her is not clear but it seems he wants her to be an assassin and when she is ready, she will be unleashed. Meanwhile, a rogue CIA agent (Cate Blanchett) is after her - or is Hanna the hunter?

The movie became well known for its great visuals and its soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers. It came, it was appreciated and it passed.

But in today's world where nothing is allowed a fond farewell, Hanna is back, this time as a limited series on Amazon Prime. The plot is the same, the writer is the same, but the faces have changed. Hanna is now 12 years old and played by Esme Creed-Miles, her father by Joel Kinnaman and the rogue CIA agent by Mireille Enos. And what was a less than 2 hour flick is blown up into an 8 hour series.

For eight episodes, we wonder all over Europe with Hanna. As she kills her way through several fortresses that we are led to believe are impregnable, the death toll rises to mass murder numbers. Here is a TV series showing a young girl cooly machine-gunning down rows of soldiers or cops or whatever. She barely blinks. And the soldiers or cops or whatever never get any smarter - they get mowed down but they keep coming as if they were trained to die just as well as she was trained to kill.

I guess it is progress that now, in our #metoo era, young girls can be marauding murderers too. The point of all this mayhem is a bit vague. Hanna wants to find out who she is and whether her father is really her father and who was her now- deceased mother.  It seems that Hanna was 'manufactured' by a company called Utrex and that it is manufacturing dozens like her. They get the babies from women who seek abortions but get talked - or coerced (not clear) - into giving up their baby. The babies are sent to a facility where they are brainwashed or programmed to be killers. Their goal seems to be, dare I say, world conquest!

If this seems similar to the Fox series, The Passage, join the line. Young girls who are changed into or become killers or monsters seems to be a theme that strikes a cord with modern content providers. May I suggest therapy?

I wonder why someone would want to remake a recent movie that did well at the box office but was not exactly a classic crying for a modern take on it? I think it may have to do with content providers who have no idea what will work and so remaking past 'hits' seems the safest bet. Hey, they got me to watch.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

This is a new FX half-hour comedy about vampires.

Wait, wait, you say, didn't I see a movie called What We Do in the Shadows? You are so cool - yes, you did. In 2015, the movie was an immediate cult classic, but the cult was very small because it was made in New Zealand by two New Zealanders, Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and set in New Zealand's big city, Wellington.

The premise is simple - The Office meets The Office with vampires, except the location isn't an office but a house in Staten Island where three vampires have lived since they arrived with the pilgrims. When their master, who sent them to the New World centuries ago to conquer it for vampires, shows up for a visit, he wants to know if Staten Island is the center of the New World. When informed it is not, he wants to know why the vampires are there and is told, "Because this is where the boat dropped us off."

There is a documentary crew who is filming them all the time and there are all the elements of The Office we have come to know and love, like the characters talking directly to the camera.

There are three "traditional" vampires:

The Felix Unger-like leader of the group is “Nandor The Relentless” (Kayvan Novak), a great warrior and conqueror from the Ottoman Empire who acts as the leader. He complains to the other vampires about the half-drunk crowd that was left in the hall and when asked where the drunks got the booze, he says he doesn't mean drunks, but people who are left half-drunk - he insists that once they start drinking a human, the vampires have to finish him or her before moving on.

“Laszlo” (Matt Berry), the antithesis of Nandor who loves to party and is currently in a long-term relationship (and where vampires are concerned 'long term' is really long) with ..

“Nadja” (Natasia Demetriou): the temptress and seducer.

There is a fourth vampire, an "energy vampire", “Colin Robinson” (Mark Proksch). He walks by day and night, sucking the energy of all whom he meets. Just a few minutes with Colin and every dream of adventure and changing your life just withers away as Colin goes on and on and - you know. When he is done with a human, there is nothing left - not even one drop of life-enhancing blood. It has all been sucked out.

There are, also, 'familiars', that is, helpers who protect the vampires during the day and act as servants and procurers for them. “Guillermo” (Harvey Guillén), is Nandor’s familiar and he expects one day to be rewarded for his service by being made a vampire himself.

As you may have gathered, this is not a show for those seeking the meaning of life's struggle with the dark world. No, this is comedy that harkens back to the era of Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason, one liners and puns and silly jokes - like when their master, Baron Afanas, pays a visit after several hundred years; he has a decrepit body with no genitalia and Laszlo says he remembers that he had genitalia and Nadja corrects him, 'No, he never had genitalia, that's what made the sex so great.'

These are the kind of jokes you want to remember to tell your friends. That's what separates this kind of humor from the prevailing kind on TV as exemplified by Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the case of the later, you cannot really convey the humor without a lengthy explanation of the story or characters. Those shows are dependent on long-time watchers who will laugh when a secondary character knocks on Jerry's door, he opens it and says, 'Hello, Newman.' Big laugh, but you don't get it unless you have seen all of the previous shows of Seinfeld.

With What We Do in the Shadows (the title reminds some of us of Dark Shadows that cult-TV classic of a bygone time) , just tune in anytime. The humor is not  dependent on a thorough knowledge of vampire culture or vampire shows and movies - and there are more than you can count. One night a few weeks ago, I started watching a show on Fox that I thought was about a dangerous virus destroying life on earth when all of a sudden, it turned into a vampire show - The Passage.

AN IRISH WEEKEND

What better time than now to look at a TV mini-series about The Irish Easter Rebellion and its aftermath appropriately called Rebellion  currently on Netflix.

Ireland and England have a long and complicated history, mostly one of exploitation of Ireland by Great Britain. Much like the Brexit debate going on today in the United Kingdom, there were great debates in 19th and early 20th century England about what should be done with Ireland - should it be allowed Home Rule, that is, the right to make laws for itself, or should it remain part of the British Empire? The problem was that the Northern part of Ireland, centered in Belfast, was predominantly Protestant while the rest of Ireland was fiercely Catholic. Of course, the differences were not only religious, Protestants were usually originally British and more prosperous. That doesn't mean they were any less Irish - W.B. Yeats, Ireland's great poet, was Protestant.

Rebellion takes up the story on the eve of World War I in August, 1914. The War aggravated the problems since many Irish thought it would be the perfect time to rebel. Rumors were rife that the Irish rebels were making deals with Germany, England's greatest enemy in the war.

Everything came to a head in April 1916 at Easter. The Irish rebels planned to take over Dublin. While they were greatly outnumbered by the British soldiers, they planned on being reinforced by rebels from the west of Ireland who were scheduled to receive a large shipment of guns from Germany.

There is a rich store of people and events that make the Easter Rebellion a treasure trove of amazing characters and incredible drama, but, instead, Rebellion centers on a few fictional families in Dublin.  

The Butlers are wealthy Irish. Their two children, a young man who is a wastrel and a daughter who is caught up in the rebellion, show two sides of the Irish attitude toward the rebellion; many Irish were unwilling to support the rebellion. At the other end of the spectrum, the Mahons are more typical of Dubliners at the time, poor and living in a tenement. The man of the house, Arthur, has been drafted and was fighting the war in France when he is given leave and arrives in Dublin just before Easter. His brother is one of the leaders of the rebellion and the Mahon family ends up as torn to shreds by the rebellion as Ireland, itself.

Then there is the British high-ranking administrator who has fallen in love with his Irish secretary. When his wife shows up just before Easter, the problems that ensue make the Irish question a very personal one for him.

The Rebellion did not go as planned. While the rebels were able to control parts of the city, they never had a chance against England and its formidable army that had tanks and other armoured vehicles.  In the end, the IRA suffered 82 deaths, the British forces 143 while the civilian toll was much heavier with 260 killed and over 2200 wounded.

The second season of the show is called Resistance and was written by the same author as Rebellion, Colin Teevan.  It centers around "Bloody Sunday" in 1920 when the IRA sought to kill many spies the British had in Dublin. The IRA assassinated about 20 Brits and in reprisal the Brits murdered about 19 IRA members.  Again, the emphasis is on personal stories, highlighting the betrayals and family divisions caused by the Irish fight for freedom.

In Ireland, this series has caused an uproar with many taking umbrage at the inaccuracies they claim in the facts depicted in the series. Of course, if you are looking to brush up your Irish history, TV series are probably the last place you should look. On the other hand, the fictional characters of this series are not half as interesting as the real ones. Teevan gives a prominent place to women in the rebellion and it is true that women did play a significant role, but, also, he uses some very trite circumstances to bring them into the story when none were needed - they were there from the beginning.

Sadly, this series does not do justice to the Irish War for Independence. Neil Jordan, almost 25 years ago, tried to tell the story in his movie, Michael Collins. He failed, too. There is planned a third series that looks at the endgame of the Irish Rebellion when a dubious peace is made, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the island and keeping it British.  This led to decades of battles between the IRA and Britain. With the Good Friday agreement in 1998, peace came, finally, to Ireland. But, now, with Brexit, it is possible that it will start all over again as Ireland is part of the European Union, but if Great Britain leaves, then the hard border with North Ireland will be back. No one knows what that will mean for peace in Ireland.

NETFLIX - TEN FOR THE ROAD

Here are ten shows, all based in foreign lands that are worth a binge. And, you can watch two young actresses who are bound to make their mark before long - Anna Torv and Pihla Viitala.

SECRET CITY

Anna Torv (Fox's Fringe) stars in this Australian political drama, Secret City, as journalist Harriet Dunkley.  All the usual suspects are here: truth-seeking journalist trying to reveal secrets that, like Medusa, will kill if looked at directly.  A great supporting cast of Australian actors and actresses make this twelve episodes over two seasons well worth the time.

OCCUPIED

This political drama from Norway envisages Russia occupying Norway. The excellent cast and exciting plot touch on numerous world-wide concerns such as global warming and co-operation among nations. You will enjoy this two season,  18 episode trek north.

THE SAME SKY

It's 1974. There's an East Berlin controlled by the USSR and a West Berlin, allied to the USA. Lars Weber (Tom Schilling) is an East Berliner who is trained to be a "Romeo" sent into West Berlin to have a romantic liaison with an important West Berlin official. If you liked The Americans, this one season, six episode show is for you.

LA MANTE

French serial killer drama.  The twist is a variation on the Silence of the Lambs with the French police seeking the help of a serial killer who has been imprisoned for 20 years when a copycat killer starts imitating her - and yes, the jailed seial killer is a woman, albeit a French one.

SUBURRA/SUBURRA: BLOOD ON ROME

Italian mobster series. The mob wants to turn Rome's waterfront (Ostia) into an Italian Las Vegas. The plot involves the Italian government, the Vatican, immigration services and, of course, Sicilian mobsters. This is a fun action show that gives us a hint of what 21st century italian life in Rome looks like.

BODYGUARD

British TV thriller loosely based on the 1992 movie of the same name. Richard Madden heads a great cast (really, is it the water that makes British actors so great or maybe the fact that the government supports British theatre so that actors get a thorough education) as the Brit cop assigned to guard an important minister.

MEDICI

This Italian series takes us back to the days of the Italian Renaissance and looks at the most important family of its time, the Medicis who financed much of the great art of the period.  Dustin Hoffman leads a cast that includes Richard Madden - so if you liked him in Bodyguard....

TROTSKY

Russian production that dramatizes the Russian Revolution and the life of one of its founders - Trotsky, the creator of the Soviet Army. It's a lot better than it sounds.

DEADWIND & ARCTIC CIRCLE

These two Finnish crime dramas have a common element - the actress Pihla Viitala.  In both, what looks like a simple crime becomes the seed of a fine crime drama. Arctic Circle has ten episodes while Deadwind has twelve.

SOPHIA

A RUSSIAN BINGE-WORTHY TV SERIES ON AMAZON PRIME

For those who grew up with television, the present Golden Age is a miracle!  Not only the variety and depth of American television, but series and shows from all over the world - Australia, Sweden, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy and now - Russia!

Sophia is an eight part series about Sofia Paleologa, niece of Constantine IX, last Byzantine emperor, wife of Ivan III of Russia.

Huh?

Don't worry - it doesn't matter. All you need to know is that an early Russian czar (late 1400s) decides to marry a young woman who is living in Rome under the Pope's protection and who is an heir to the throne of Byzantium (present day Turkey).

It's a great story about love and friendship and betrayal and greed and religion. The acting is excellent, the story compelling. I would mention all of the actors and creative personnel but you wouldn't know them.

What is important is that, like other series from other countries, this series tells us about the Russian character and history. Religion is as important to these characters as it is to present day evangelicals. The Czar is an absolute ruler whose word is law. He can have a traitor beheaded or, as happens in one episode when the traitor decides to make an anti-Czar  speech as he is about to be beheaded, simply raise his hand and hold up four fingers - meaning that the sentence has been changed from beheading to dismemberment, four fingers corresponding to the four limbs that are to be cut off before beheading. This is one tough country.

I believe that a country's popular culture, its TV, movies and songs, tell us a great deal about the people of a country. And so does its idea of its past. Here, in the USA, we worship the men (very few women) who have created the American character - self-made, a personal code, a belief in fair play and a dream of equality (it's the dream that we worship so there is no need to ensure its fulfillment). The great movies about our history, from the John Ford westerns to the many Civil War epics, rarely told how things really were. As one of Ford's characters says, "When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend." And so we have.

And I am certain, so have the creators of Sophia.

But no matter - Sophia is one hell of a great story, well told and well acted. Give it a try - it's binge-worthy

1 SEASON, 8 EPISODES

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PRIME.

THE CODE

****

Most of the foreign, crime TV series that appear on Netflix or Hulu are from the dark, snow-clad shores of our Nordic brethren. At the top of the list are Wallander and Lisbeth Salander.

At the heart of a lot of these dramas is the hero/detective as a misfit. This idea of a hero/misfit dates back at least as far as Sherlock Holmes, a pipe-smoking, cocaine-addicted, sartorially-challenged private detective who never seems to have any emotions other than those he saves for the hunt - Watson! The game is afoot!

Now, a world away from the aurora borealis, comes a crime drama from Australia, The Code.

Ned Banks (Dave Spielman)  is a web journalist working for an online newspaper that can barely keep afloat. He has a complicated personal life, with an ongoing affair with a political operative, Sophie Walsh (Chelsie Preston Crayford), and a brother, Jesse ( Ashley Zukerman) who is the hero/outsider of the series.  Jesse suffers from - it's not clear - he's just cuckoo, a screw is missing, mad as a hatter, unhinged, out to lunch, lights on but no one's home and whatever else you would call a guy in his late 20's early 30's who has never been with a woman, has no idea how to talk to someone, but - BUT, is one of the great hackers in the world. He's so good, he was arrested for hacking and promised not to do it any longer; however, without hs hacking ability, there is no The Code.  So much for promises from crazy hackers.

The online things are shown on the screen a la the recent british production of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. It makes for a fast pace and with the Aussie dialect, I advise keeping the closed captions on for this one.

The plot is, at first, a mystery. A young girl and her boyfriend (he is driving) get hit by a big truck. She ends up dead while he escapes, but suffers severe lung injuries. What happened? The boyfriend's cell phone recorded it all, but the video is not clear. Ned gets ahold of it and asks his brother to help him clean up the video, but, suddenly, the nerdy Jesse is busy for a reason that seems unlikely - he has a girlfriend, Hani (Adele Perovic). She can hack, too. It's a romance built on the thrill of uncovering a coded message and getting into virtual places you are not welcome.

Meanwhile, the powers that be in the Australian capital (go ahead, take a guess before you look it up) have a problem with a cabinet minister who is shown in photos have a fight with the husband of a woman with whom he has been having an affair. Is this just a diversion to keep the journalists looking at sex when it should be probing the details of a strange car accident in the middle of nowhere?

When the Australian equivalent of the darkest CIA/FBI operatives kidnap Jesse and torture him, the cat is out of the bag - something bad happened in the Outback when those two lovers' car was hit by a truck. But what? Ned starts poking around and he finds Alex Wisham (Lucy Lawless), the local teacher in the Outback who is putting out signals to Ned, but what does it mean?

Six episodes of about an hour each is not too big a commitment in today's binge-watching world to find the answer, but BEWARE, there is a second season that should become available soon in the American market.

Genre: Drama
Network: Netflix/HULU (season 1)
Creator: Shelley Birse
Exec. Producers: Carole Sklan, Greer Simpkin

THREE IN ONE

There is a long history of movies or TV series originating in one country and then being transferred to another country with a new cast and similar plot. Most recently, the most famous movie transferred may be THE GIRL WITH THE ... movies based on the best-selling books by Stieg Larsson and the most famous transferred TV series is House of Cards. In both cases the originals are better.

One of the best of these transfers are the TV series based on the original Swedish/Danish TV series, The Bridge (SE). The series was re-done in English/French and titled The Tunnel and American/Spanish as The Bridge.

The premise is the same for all three versions: a body is found in the middle of a bridge or tunnel on the border between two countries and police from both countries must investigate. In each series, it is a male officer from one country and a female officer from another. In each series, the male officer has serious domestic problems, complicated by his serial infidelity while the female officer has personality problems making it difficult for her to relate to other people.

With that core, each of the series evolves in ways that are appropriate to the countries in which they are set.

The Bridge (SE) written by Hans Rosenfeldt and Camilla Ahlgren consists of four series all broadcast on HULU and starring Sofia Helin as Saga Norén, lead homicide detective in Malmö and Kim Bodnia as Martin Rohde, lead homicide detective in Copenhagen (series 1–2) and Thure Lindhardt as Henrik Sabroe, lead homicide detective in Copenhagen (series 3-4). The first series is about a deranged murderer who uses his crimes to highlight serious social problems in Scandinavia. The murderer develops a relationship with a reporter and the symbiotic dynamic between reporter and subject is explored.

The Tunnel is a joint production between British and French TV written by Ben Richards who worked with Hans Rosenfeldt, the co-creator of the original series; it was originally broadcast on PBS.  The series stars Stephen Dillane and Clémence Poésy as British and French police detectives Karl Roebuck and Elise Wassermann. The plot is similar to The Bridge (SE) with a serial killer who exposes five 'truths' about the ills of society. As in the original, the crimes culminate in a confrontation between killer and cop based on a personal wrong done to the killer by the cop.

The Bridge is the American version of the show, developed by Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid, that was broadcast on the FX network. The series stars Diane Kruger (US) and Demián Bichir (Mexican) in main police roles. Around a series of murders of young women in Mexico, the show explores the usual issues in shows about the US-Mexican border: drug trafficking and illegal immigration. While receiving strong critical acclaim, this series only lasted two seasons. Currenlty, it is available on HULU, also - so be careful in how you search for it: use the (SE) suffix for the Scandinavian version.

All three are worth watching but I'd have to rate the Scandinavian and Anglo-French versions better than the US-Mexican since the problems explored and the characters are more interesting.

Start with the original, then the Anglo-French version and, if you still want more, try the US-Mexican series. Each has excellent casts and you are sure to get caught up in the characters, their lives and the issues explored - what more can you ask from a TV show

Barbra Streisand's voice is "one of the natural wonders of the age, an instrument of infinite diversity and timbral resource.”

That's the opinion of Glenn Gould, one of the great classical pianist of the 20th century - and also the opinion of millions of her fans.

But how did this worldwide love affair with a voice all start?

In the early 1960's, she began to appear on TV variety shows like Gary Moore and Ed Sullivan. That's when my sister, Felice, started to notice her and got me to watch shows that Streisand would be on. It is difficult to convey the impact that her voice and her style of singing had on her audience at that time. Certainly, Streisand's style of singing was influenced by the emergence of rock 'n roll - she sang every song like it was her last, pouring out her emotions vocally, to act out the song.

Every performance was a mini-play about lost love, happy times, found love, etc. And most importantly, songs about a young woman who wants 'much more than keeping house.' Streisand mined the Great American Songbook better than any singer of her generation not named Frank Sinatra. And she too had her own special arranger who could fit any song to her unique style - Peter Matz. His arrangements of both new and old songs put the Streisand voice upfront and gave her plenty of room to perform her vocal acrobatics.

There is one song that epitomized the emotionally charged Streisand style and how it differed from other pop music singers - Cry Me A River. This is a song that Julie London had a big hit with in 1955 - here is her version.  Many female singers recorded it, and, as usual, Ella Fitzgerald's was the best, musically.

Then, Streisand sang it. She starts her version of the song in the manner we were used to hearing it, as a song by a sad, disappointed lover. Then, she kicks into emotional hyperdrive and by the end and suddenly we are looking at one angry lady who really means that she wants her returning lover to cry her a river before she will give him the time of day. She's not just hurt, she's mad - she wants to see this guy suffer like he made her suffer. She wants revenge!

Soon, the networks were banging at her door to do a 'special.' Over the next five years, Streisand did several, starting with My Name is Barbra in 1965. She hired a great TV producer, Joe Layton, to conceive a special type of show that would star only her, very unusual at the time as most 'specials' had many guests stars. Instead, Streisand, alone, held the stage in a variety of situations, singing songs that most people had never heard before. This first effort won all the awards, including a Peabody Award.

Next, Color Me Barbra, found her at the Philadelphia Art Museum, blending into period paintings while singing an appropriate song. One takes her back to the terror in Paris in the 1790s. Streisand is an aristocrat singing The Minute Waltz while waiting to be guillotined (singing a funny song is a lost art - Streisand did it better than anyone had). The second half of the show has her in a live menagerie, singing to various animals. The songs are all exceptional, but listen to her take of a simple song, Why Did I Chose You, and how she can simmer her emotions just as well as she can explode them.

Both of these specials ended with a mini-concert so it was appropriate for her next special to be a concert - and oh, what a concert. One hundred and Twenty Thousand people showed up in New York's Central Park for a free concert - A Happening in Central Park. The resulting TV special and album made musical history - it was the first time a non-rock star had attracted so many young fans to a concert.

I had the pleasure of seeing her in Philadelphia in 1966. I couldn't afford the hefty prices for a ticket ($3.50 to $12.50!) so my sister took me (really, there were complaints about the high prices).  I remember much of that night, but the clearest memory is at the end of the concert when she sang Silent Night. That song is not on the official list of songs performed that night, but she sang it, on a clear warm August night - and she did in Central Park, too. It was magical.

Now, the good news - all of these early TV specials are now on Netflix. Take a look at them and discover why a whole generation of fans fell in love with the voice and the woman who is 'one of the natural wonders of the age.'

FAUDA, THE CHAOS OF LIFE IN ISRAEL - PALESTINE

Fauda is an Israeli written and produced show streaming on Netflix. Like the show itself, the word, fauda, has a double meaning. In Arabic, it means chaos, but it is also used by Israeli Special-Ops members to indicate that an operation has gone bad, for example, if an undercover agent is outed, 'fauda' is the agent's one word signal to his team that something has gone wrong.

Fauda is the story of the Israeli-Palestinian on-going war told from the point of view of a group of Israeli Special Ops forces. When writers Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz pitched the show in Israel, no one wanted it. Israelis were not going to watch a show about the conflict that they were living every day - or so the TV execs thought.

They were wrong. Fauda is Israel's biggest hit TV show of the decade. It is a hit for the same reason that most TV series are hits - great characters and great stories.  The main character is Doron (Lior Raz), a member of the Special Ops team whose mission is to capture Palestinian terrorists. He is married with two children and had resigned from the team at the insistence of his wife, but he re-joins the team for one last mission. He stays with the team because there is no such thing as 'one last mission', an end-story in this war where an eye for an eye perpetuates the violence regardless of the best intentions.

The series has been criticized by Palestinians for being pro-Israeli, but there is more than enough blame to go around. In the series opener, the Special Ops team is chasing a terrorist who has killed hundreds of Israelis in random bombings. The Special Ops team go into the West Bank and pose as caterers at the wedding of the terrorist's brother. The team assumes the terrorist will show up for the wedding and he does, but not before things go wrong when the team's cover is blown.  The team has to shoot its way out and the groom is killed. This random killing of innocent Palestinians happens all the time in the series. Dozens of Palestinians are killed as 'collateral damage' and there is not one investigation, not one protest, not even an apology.

There are about a dozen characters, Israeli and Palestinian, who are central to the story and each of them pays a price for living in the conflict. What distinguishes the series are these well-drawn, complex characters who want to get on with their lives, but who are stuck in a world of double-dealing, lying, violence and revenge. A few on both sides of the conflict straddle the cultural divide, but they are soon killed or forced to chose.

Fauda is not a polemic about the ravages of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.  It is an expertly told story about the people who are trapped in this conflict, on both sides. As the violence spreads like the Black Death over their communities, these characters meet, fall in love, marry, divorce, have kids, argue - they go about doing all of the things we all do in our lives, except their lives are tinged with the sorrow of knowing someone, often a family member, who was killed 'by the other side' in the conflict.

Watching this series from America, you are put into the middle of a war zone where there seems to be no right, just all wrong, just all expediency and revenge. Both Israeli and Palestinian politics play a major part in the series and this layer of politics just adds to the moral ambiguity of both sides' actions. One thing looms over every life, every decision, every attempt to live a normal life - the battle for the land that both sides claim as its own.  No matter how non-political some Israelis and Palestinians try to be, the conflict will find them and suck them into the maelstrom, into fauda

FAUDA on Netflix, streaming all episodes

Created by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff
Starring Lior Raz, Hisham Sulliman, Shadi Ma'ari, Laëtitia Eïdo, Tzachi Halevy, Yuval Segal, Neta Gerti, Tomer Kapon, Itzik Cohen, Rona-Li Shimon
Country of origin: Israel Original languages: Hebrew and Arabic

No. of seasons2, No. of episodes24

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

HULU's The Handmaid's Tale is in its second season and is actually getting better.

The first season paralleled the book by Margaret Atwood. It's the near future in the USA (now called Gilead) and a group of men have taken over the government. When the novel came out in 1985, there was a right-wing resurgence in the US under President Reagan, but, happily for the creators of The Handmaid's Tale, the political climate in the book resonates even more in the Trump era. Gilead is in the grip of a misogynist government that is fundamentalist Christian with an antediluvian justice system and pro-environmental policies, kind of like being a pro-business, anti-law enforcement, fundamentalist pornography-star bedding, gun-toting US government - impossible, right?

Season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale explores a new dynamic: how to survive in a society that looks upon you, at best,  as a means to an end, that is, a baby machine and, at its worse, sees you as expendable. There are scenes of 'unwomen' cleaning up fields of nuclear waste that came from a recent war or the mishaps in a nuclear plant. These 'unwomen,' are the dregs of the new world order - feminists, nuns, professional women, lesbians - all those women who refuse to subjugate themselves to the power of the men.

Bruce Miller created the show. His previous hit was being involved in the TV series ER in the early 2000s. There have been a variety of directors, but the style of the series has been consistent: it has the look of a Dickens' novel, that is, it harkens back to a late 19th/early 20th century look of tudor- style houses and functional, concrete public spaces.

Much of the show's success can be attributed to Elisabeth Moss, playing the lead character, June Osborne whose name is changed to Offred (Of Fred, her master/commander). Moss can project grudging obedience better than any actor on the planet. Her role as Peggy Olson in Mad Men gave her training in the art of being suppressed. With every episode, Moss gives us something new to marvel at; she never accepts her station in Gilead and in every look and gesture we see her fierce refusal to give up the struggle to be a woman, a human being.

Moss carries this series on her broad, capable shoulders, but the rest of the cast provides ample support. Joseph Fiennes as Commander Fred Waterford is the embodiment of the supercilious man of God who routinely rapes Moss' Handmaid in a ritual that the powers that be call the 'ceremony.' Yvonne Strahovski is Waterford's infertile wife who was a conservative icon (much like those blonde attractive TV personalities much favored on Fox News) in the old world, but must now play the dutiful wife who has to hold down the handmaid Offred while her husband 'impregnates' her (so they hope). Ann Dowd is truly scary as Aunt Lydia, a woman in charge of the handmaids' education and subsequent performance as a handmaid. Her solicitous torture of unruly or disobedient handmaids is a case study of how to make over human beings into donkeys, offering  the carrot and, if repulsed, the stick. And there is no better example of this method's success than the character of Janine/Ofwarren played by Madeline Brewer. When she refuses to conform, her right eye is removed; when this doesn't force her to behave, she is sent to clean-up nuclear waste as an unwoman.

You may be reluctant to watch a series that seems so far removed from our world, but then I suggest you think about what has happened since we elected a President with the self-control of a spoiled child. The most incredible things are said and done by him and his minions and there is barely a raised eyebrow in Congress or among those who run this country. Greed, sycophancy, nepotism, self-dealing, mendacity, prostitution (yes, that's what it is when you pay or are paid for sex even if the payment is nominally for an agreement of confidentiality), racism - the list is as long as it is incredible - and now this may become the new normal. And if that happens, can Gilead or something like it, be far behind?

WESTWORLD OR HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED HOW TO LOVE ANDROIDS

In 1973, Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld,  a movie about an amusement park in the future where the androids who were built to give people a real Western movie experience, suddenly rebelled.  A few years later, a TV series called Beyond Westworld was made based on this premise.

The movie was a mild hit, but the TV show was cancelled after just five episodes.

In 2016, HBO made a new TV series based on this premise. Westworld is an amusement park where wealthy guests pay to live out their wildest fantasies.  Set in the old West of Hollywood movies, the good guys wear whites hats and the bad, blackl. The 'hosts' are all androids who look and act as humans - except, they can never harm or kill any guest. The hosts are given elaborate back stories, often requiring them to find someone or some place. Meanwhile, the guests are as good or as bad as they want to be. With no restraints on their behavior, guests can kill, rape, impede or help the hosts.  As one human character says, you find out who you really are.

The first season of Westworld was the set-up. Various guests come to the park for various reasons and we see the hosts being programmed and recharged by the management that runs the park.   The drama is injected into the show by the fact that the original creators and investors have different views on how this unique business should grow.

In its second season, Westworld aims for a higher dramatic arc:what does it mean to be human?  What does it mean to love, to care for, to imagine, to be free?

The androids have rebelled. Delores is an android who gave to the guests in the first season the feelings they yearned for - gentleness, innocence, kindness, beauty.  In the second season, she has turned on the guests and the management - she has become free and, like so many free humans, has chosen to revenge those who had so callously manipulated her. Now, she is a killing machine, willing to do whatever it takes to break free into the 'real' world.

All of the emotions we think of as truly human are questioned. Delores' lover, an android character, is reminded by a human manager that he was built to love someone else; he responds that what he felt for this other woman was 'just words in my head.' And what is love? Is it more than just words in your head? Feelings? What are they if not a way to react to the world or to a person with something that has been programmed inside of us?

Westworld has elaborate plots, complicated characters, incredible sets and costumes - but in the end it is a TV show about soul. What is it and who has it?  As its characters search the depths of the human experience, there are battles, shootouts, excursions into other 'worlds' (such as Empire world that takes place in British Raj India) and flashbacks to the origins of these virtual worlds. Lots of blood, nudity (the androids aren't real, so it's just like seeing a naked doll, right?) philosophising about the nature of being human and some real drama. You may like it if you liked Lost or Star Trek or existential philosophy. Or John Ford movies.

TEN TV SHOWS TO BINGE WATCH ON NETFLIX AND IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS WITH

With the rise of Netflix, the way in which we watch TV shows has changed. No longer must we await the weekly release of a new episode of a show we are watching. Now, we can watch as many episodes of the show as our free time can hold. Bleary-eyed, the next morning, we tell our friends, family or co-workers that, yes, we had stayed up late, but such and such a show was worth it. Our viewing now 'spans the globe' as they use to say on Wide World of Sports. And so here is our list of ten Netflix TV shows that should carry a warning label: BEWARE, THESE SHOWS CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR SLEEP AND CAN BECOME ADDICTIVE.

1. RITA - 4 SEASONS OF 8 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 40 MIN LONG SUBTITLES

A Swedish school teacher has both personal and professional problems, but she is the teacher you wished you had.  No guns, no chases - just a good TV show about life, you know, the stuff that happens while you're busy making plans.

2. HOUSE OF CARDS - 3 SEASONS OF 4 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 50 MIN LONG BRITISH

A leader of the conservative party decides to become the prime minister by any means necessary. This is the show that the Netflix HOC is based on - but is so much better than its offspring.

3. MONEY HEIST - 2 SEASONS OF 9 AND 10 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 45 MIN LONG  SUBTITLES

A group of criminals in Spain is gathered by a "professor' to pull off the heist of a lifetime - from the Spanish Mint. Of course, things go wrong and, so, we have drama!

4. THE FALL - 3 SEASONS OF 6 EPISODES EACH 60 MIN LONG BRITISH

Gillian Anderson and James Dorman give us 100 shades of creepy in this crime drama about - what else, a serial killer. But this is one of the best of that genre.

5. BABYLON BERLIN - 1 SEASON OF 16 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 50 MIN LONG SUBTITLES

Germany, 1929.  A new cop in town is breaking up the old gang, but we know what it all leads to - and it ain't good. This is one hellava show and even the music is addictive.

6. MINDHUNTER - 1 SEASON OF 10 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 50 MINUTES

The FBI, 1977, and a new kind of killer is out there. The FBI has to adapt and figure out how to catch killers who are smarter than your average nuclear physicist..

7. SUBURRA, BLOOD ON ROME - 1 SEASON OF 8 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 45 MINUTES SUBTITLES

The Mob is fighting to control the port of Rome and the casino planned for the area.

8. MARSEILLE - 2 SEASONS OF 8 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 40 MINUTES SUBTITLES

The story of modern urban problems set in southern France starring Gerard Depardieu

9. EPISODES - 5 SEASONS OF 7 EPISODES EACH ABOUT 30 MINUTES

A British couple bring their hit British TV show to Hollywood and changes are made - to the show and to the them.

10. AND NOW THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO TELL US ABOUT THE NETFLIX SHOW WORTHY OF BINGE WATCHING.  GIVE US OUR TENTH SHOW.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

The Bletchley Circle was one of the best dramas on TV when it premiered in 2014. Its premise was simple — in the years after WWII, a group of women who worked together during the war come together to solve crimes. But these are not just any women.

They worked for the British Secret Service (at its super secret Bletchley Circle HQ) to break the German codes during the war, saving untold lives. Thrust back into civilian life, the women are forced to take those menial jobs that were "suitable for women” after the war. There are a smattering of female sleuths on various TV shows, but rarely has it given a group of intelligent women a series of their own. Until The Bletchley Circle.

The Bletchley Circle begins when Susan (Anna Maxwell Martin), a typical early 1950s housewife with two children, sees a pattern in a series of gruesome murders of women. She solicits the help of her former distaff code-breakers, and they discover that a serial killer is on the loose and has been killing women for many years. The police refuse to believe in the serial killer scenario and instead treat each murder as a separate event. The killer has been very smart in setting up a patsy for every murder.

Secret identities

The series is brilliantly written by Guy Burt, an English novelist and veteran TV writer. The characters he has created are unforgettable, not only because of their unique talents, but also for their refusal to give up what they do best — solve mysteries.

Susan's husband is dismissive of her intellectual pursuits — he is always surprised at how readily she does the Times’s crossword puzzle, regarding it as a freak talent. Lucy (Sophie Rundle)'s physically abusive husband doesn't know why his wife can remember the minutest detail of every newspaper story she reads, not realizing she has a photographic memory. Millie (Rachael Stirling), a brilliant linguist, leads a bohemian life, stuck in low paying “women’s jobs” such as waiting tables. Jean (Julie Graham), the oldest, keeps everyone in line; she has no private life at all and spends most of her time at the library she runs.

In their personal lives, none of them can tell their family and friends what they did during the war because, in England, the Official Secrets Act prevents any disclosure of clandestine activities — and this law is not subject to judicial review, so if you break it, you do not pass go, you go straight to jail. Separately, they have woven their lives into the drab quilt that was post-WWII England. Together, they blossom into one of the best vigilante groups of all time.

Each of the stories begins with a small commitment on their part to figure out the puzzle of some crime — it is just an intellectual exercise like breaking a code. Soon, they are forced to get directly involved in order to prevent an injustice or solve a crime, bringing them closer to the danger that they only read about during their code-breaking days.

Ultimately, the series is not about the crimes being solved but rather the true identities of these extraordinary women. Each of them is forced to live a lie, pretending to be the helpless, hapless stereotypes that the male-dominated society of the time forced them to play.The secrets they are forced to keep, including the most damaging one — who they truly are — eventually poison their personal lives. Only the strongest survive that self-betrayal.

In the end, Bletchley Circle does what all great crime dramas do, revealing more about the crime detectors and their world than the criminals and how they are caught.

Cancelled

And then it was cancelled.

Incredibly, its producers, ITV, a commercial public service television network in the United Kingdom, decided not to continue the series even though the third season had already been written. No reason was given for the cancellation.

Is it a coincidence that, in an entertainment industry more and more dominated by movies and TV shows geared to teenage males, a show about a group of adult, intelligent, resourceful women, who show up their male counterparts by combining their unique talents, gets canceled?

No, it wasn't. Until now.

IT IS COMING BACK!

The world has changed because courageous actresses outed a producer pig who used a casting hotel room to prove to himself how powerful he was - hey, he was a pervert not a blind pervert. He knew none of those actresses were coming to his room because of his good looks.

And so ITV sees a chance to jump into the #wetoo movement,but who cares about reasons - Bletchley Circle is back. Sort of.

Two of the original characters,Millie and Jean, travel to San Francisco and join forces with American female code breakers to solve crimes. The migrating women are the characters without a family. We can only hope that the new series will not discard the context of the original, a world in which men dominated every aspect of society. For example,take look at the New York Philharmonic in the mid-1950s. No females (except on harp, the female instrument).

BRITBOX is the commercial arm of BBC so it will only be available for a fee.

ORIGINAL SERIES AVAILABLE NOW ON NETFLIX

CAST:Julie Graham , Rachael Stirling, Anna Maxwell Martin and Sophie Rundle

CREATED BY: GUY BART

Netflix’s House of Cards (Season One)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Netflix has produced a real original series with real stars – Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright portraying a US Congress Majority Whip, Francis Underwood, and his non-profit CEO wife, Claire.

Original may not be the best choice of words – House of Cards is based on a BBC show of the same name staring Ian Richardson as Felix Urquhart (known as FU), a British MP Majority Whip who lies, cheats and murders his way to the top, supplanting a weak Prime Minister, a man FU describes as having ‘no bottom.’

The Netflix version shares many plot points with its British ancestor:

-Underwood gets screwed out of a top cabinet post by an ungrateful newly elected President.

-He plots his revenge with his beautiful and just as cunning wife.

- He and his wife are childless, devoting all of their time and talents to their ambitions.

- He uses a novice daughter-surrogate reporter (with whom he has an incestuous relationship) to get out his duplicitous messages.

- He has a no-questions-asked staffer-fixer named Stamper – as in, he stamps whatever his boss wants done.

- He speaks his innermost thoughts directly to the audience (in the BBC version, this is much more effective as FU re-cycles many of the great lines from Macbeth, the template for both versions of the story).

- He uses a weak-willed underling (who has a loving, lovely assistant) to do his dastardly deeds and

- He has a wife who does not breakdown when the going gets tough but rather screws her courage to the sticking place.

This is the show that started 'binge-watching.'

It’s worth it. The acting is top-notch, the shows production values are evident, the directing is good and the writing, while lacking sense and punch at times, is better than most TV shows – or movies.

House of Cards is just good enough to make you wish it were better.

The problem is that this deck is stacked. It suffers from the age-old problem that all American TV shows about politics suffer – lack of cujones.

In the Brit series, the main character is a wealthy Scot who is firmly in the right-wing of the right-of-center Tory party. He wants to become PM in part to feed his ambition, but also to complete the work that Thatcher began. He believes that England was made by and for the merchant-adventurer. His rise to the top is helped by a crass media mogul who expects in return that FU will let loose the dogs of unbridled free market economics. FU’s style of governing is rooted in his belief that the UK needs firm leadership and as his country’s ‘daddy’ he will put a bit of stick about to get things done – the right way.

In the Netflix House of Cards, Spacey gives his usual restrained pitch perfect performance, this time with the same southern drawl he used in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. While his character is more than willing to put a bit of stick about to get what he wants, he stands for nothing. The Netflix House of Cards can never figure out what they want Underwood to fight for other than his ambition. Maybe that was a choice – what do these guys we elect stand for when you get right down to it, other than their own ambitions?

In the opening episodes, Underwood proves his worth to the President by ushering through Congress an education bill – really? That’s as controversial as you can get? OK, so it’s an education bill opposed by the teachers’ unions because it has some teacher evaluation standards. In order to pass it, Spacey goes toe to toe with a teacher’s union lobbyist who is undone by his hot Italian temper. I was waiting for the alcoholic Irish ward leader and the womanizing French ambassador to make an appearance.

While the Netflix House of Cards touches many pressure points in the American political system, it rarely does so with enough muscle behind it to make us feel the pain of our deteriorating body politic.

In one episode, a former staffer turned lawyer-lobbyist (now that’s an all-too-true cliché) who represents a huge energy conglomerate offers a seven figure ‘donation’ to the non-profit run by Claire Underwood. Her husband cautions her to refuse it, worried about the undue influence the donor will seek in repayment. Mr. Underwood pontificates that money is not the same as power: “Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries.”

But most American pols take the money even if real power eludes them. Just glance at the bios of those in Congress. Most start out firmly rooted in the middle class – living paycheck to paycheck. Then they get elected and go through a wonderful Tunnel of Money. Somehow, they emerge golden, having sloughed off their tin cocoon. Not all. Some leave office with nothing more than when they entered it, except for the generous pension and benefits.

In another episode, Underwood is pressuring two ‘liberal’ congressmen to vote for a Clean Water Bill that is more about creating jobs than saving the environment. The congressmen think the bill too weak to accomplish any real good and want to defeat it, hoping to pass a better bill in the future. The message is that liberal congressmen are unwilling to compromise their principles even if it means tanking an important Democratic initiative. One word kept popping into my head – Obamacare.

In some episodes, the errant details are all too obvious. An up and coming Congressman, Pete Russo, goes home to South Philadelphia to mend fences after he has done nothing to save the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard (actually, it closed in 1995 and every local called it ‘the Navy Yard’). Underwood, for his own reasons, needed the Yard to close and so he threatened to expose Russo’s penchant for cocaine and prostitutes (they always seem to go together in fiction) to get him to lie down for the Navy Yard’s closure. As Russo walks up to a row house, we hear a lonely train whistle in the background – you know, lower middle class neighborhood so it must be close to the train tracks. OK, maybe it’s Two Street. A few minutes later, another house in South Philly and another train whistle, then another row house and another train whistle. Born and raised in South Philly, I can tell you that there are no train whistles echoing down the narrow side streets at 10th and Snyder. Car horns, yes. Gunshots, sometimes. Train whistles, no.

The most interesting character in the series is Claire Underwood, played to perfection by Robin Wright. She has an affair with a Byron-esq Manhattan photographer, and contemplates a life lived purely for the fun of it. But she is firmly rooted in the world of power and corruption. In one telling scene, she visits a member of the security team who guarded the Underwoods for many years. He is on his death bed and confesses to her a long-held deep hatred of her husband for having what he could never have - her. Claire tells him that many men wanted her and that she accepted her husband’s marriage proposal because he was the only one who offered her what she wanted - not happiness, but success and power. You have to take what you want. Then she places her hand under the sheet that covers his dying body. It’s a gesture at once both merciful and pitiless.

House of Cards comes to an abrupt conclusion at Episode 13, but Netflix ordered 26 Episodes so the story of Francis and Claire Underwood is far from finished. Let’s hope that the next episodes add some heft to a colorful but somewhat tepid view of American politics from the inside.

THE VIETNAM WAR BY KEN BURNS AND LYNN NOVICK
By Armen Pandola

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War is a sprawling documentary whose goal is to ‘heal’ the wounds caused by divisions in America about the Vietnam War. It does not succeed. You cannot heal a wound that you refuse to diagnose and treat.

According to Burns and Novick, the United States 'slipped into the War' by trying to assist the South Vietnamese in defending their country. Lip service is given to the fact that the US violated the terms of its 1954 agreement regarding Vietnam in which it was agreed that an election would be held to determine the leaders of a unified Vietnam. The overwhelming amount of time is given to the narrative that the US went into Vietnam with 'the best intentions', but lost because the ‘liberals’ in the US abandoned the cause. It is a message that those who financed this documentary are happy to see given the imprimatur of a Ken Burns-PBS documentary.  Sadly, it is a lie. This documentary ignores the Pentagon Papers, ignores the work of Noam Chomsky and others who wrote about the true reasons for the war, ignores all of the fine books about Vietnam, its history and people, that put the War in context.  This is a documentary that distorts the War it claims to chronicle - and more, it is part of the narrative that has led the US into so many subsequent wars and conflicts that we had no honorable reason to be part of. 

The donors who made Burns/Novak's series possible represent an America that has long refused to face the reality of the Vietnam War, that is, that the US invaded that country for the purpose of maintaining its power in the Southeast Asia region. The ‘domino theory’ was created to deceive the American people into believing that the ‘fall of Vietnam’ to Communism would mean the fall of all Southeast Asia and perhaps even India to Communism. It is a theory which proved to be wrong, but that fact is not given much play in this documentary.

Instead, a great deal of time is spent claiming that soldiers returning from Vietnam were mistreated. Having lived during that time, I saw no such evidence of that. There was a military draft at the time and almost all soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted and forced to serve. Everyone, including those who opposed the War, knew that.  It is sad that this lie continues to be perpetrated without any contemporary evidence to back it up. The only people I saw who were ridiculed were the protestors - those who opposed the War. And the only long lasting damage done to those who served was done by the cancerous agent orange that was used in Vietnam without any concern for those, both Vietnamese and US soldiers, who were scarred forever by it. 

One example of the way that this documentary plays fast and loose with the facts concerns the assassination of the Diem brothers, the US puppet regime running South Vietnam from 1956 to 1963. It claims that the US allowed the Vietnamese generals to kill the Diem brothers because of a series of seemingly innocent mistakes. When the generals asked for US support to overthrow Diem, President Kennedy and most of his administration were on vacation. Really? That’s why the Kennedy Administration threw out Diem, it was on vacation?  The Pentagon Papers clearly states that the Kennedy government both knew of and its ambassador encouraged the overthrow of Diem:

With the coup plotting far advanced and the U.S. clearly committed to the generals' attempt, Lodge seeks to calm Washington's anxieties about the. lack of detailed information on the generals' plans [to overthrow Diem]. He is at pains to oppose any thought of thwarting the coup because he thinks the military will create a government with better potential for carrying on the war, and because it would constitute undue meddling in Vietnamese affairs. Embassy Saigon Message 1964, Lodge to McGeorge Bundy, 25 October 1963 •

And later in 1963, before the coup that ousted Diem, this was Kennedy's order: "[O]nce the coup has started, it is in our interests to see that it succeeds. CAS Hashington Message 79407, 30 October 1963" .

The series concentrates on the stories of individual soldiers both North and South. By concentrating on those who actually fought the war, the series deceives the viewers into believing that the battles, the combat, was the most important thing about the War, but that is far from true. From the Pentagon Papers, we know that the men in power in Washington (there were no women at that time) who were running the War knew that it could not be won in any conventional sense, for example, as WW II was won when Germany and then Japan surrendered. They knew that North Vietnam would never surrender, and that to subdue the entire country would take millions of troops.

The series does little to put the blame where it belongs, with those men in the military, in the government and in the press (yes, there were a few reporters who tried to tell the truth about Vietnam, but the vast majority were content to pass on the daily briefing from the latest General in charge, especially before 1970). It does little to give credit to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who opposed the War and marched or protested to try and stop it. The last word we hear from someone who did protest the War, a now older woman, says she is sorry for calling returning Vets ‘baby killers.’ I don’t know any protestor who did that (some did say it of LBJ and Nixon). Burns and Novak have perpetrated a serious harm to those who opposed the war by portraying them as insensitive monsters. In fact, the protestors were right - this was a War fought not for freedom, but for power.

America deserves a better documentary about a War that tore the country apart like nothing else, not even the Trump administration.

The two most vivid pictures of the War are given no real context. In one, we see the cursory execution of a Viet Cong. The documentary could have told the story of how many Vietnamese were summarily shot and how that effected the will of the Viet Cong who were known to die rather than surrender. In the other, we see a young girl suffering from the effects of napalm bomb, but we are told that the bomb was dropped by a South Vietnamese plane by mistake. US bombers were dropping tons of the stuff and likely this was a scene that could have been photographed every day somewhere in Vietnam. Instead of any real context, we only get a long account from the reporters who took the pictures about how they were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. There is little mention of the hundreds if not thousands of US soldiers who died 30-40-50 years later of cancer caused by napalm.

Are there good things in the series? Yes. The stories of those who fought or were captured are told, vividly. They suffered in unimaginable ways and often their stories evoke tears for the sheer suffering of what they endured. All of their lives were forever shaped by their experiences in the War, and it is obvious that many of them are never going to be able to put it behind them. They cannot do that, and no matter how much Burns and Novick would like to see this series make it happen, neither can we. Nor should we.