Bingeing Series on WebTV in 2020-2021
Reviews by Peter Hulm
The Cliff did it
The Cliff (2009), Amazon Prime till 30 April 2021
Conservation+the supernatural meet crime in Iceland.
Hamarrin in Icelandic, The Cliff delivers a mix of downhome realism in rural Iceland and environmental activism with a regular dose of traditional mythology to confuse this story of crime. The fascination of this 4-episode series (with a second from 2014 provided you pay separately) is the different way police go about their business in this fascinating landscape, compared to what we see in the U.S. and U.K. The male detective is a strikingly likeable character while the young rookie and determined policewoman is steadfastly unlikeable.
A modern Pennsylvanian (!) Western
Banshee (2013-2106)
Despite its 93,100 and 100% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for its second to fourth (final) seasons, Banshee launched with an air of desperation. An attempt by Cinemax to expand its original content, with tax credits from North Carolina, the series was noted for its "parade of sex scenes, soft-porn variety, whose noisiness is exceeded only by their unconvincingness" and violence. It nevertheless gave Cinemax its highest ratings for an original series at that time.
Its first season (scoring 64% on Rotten Tomatoes) was by no means always repellent. The contrasting of American crime against a hardhearted Amish community and a casino-obsessed Indian tribe in Pennsylvania(!) seemed ludicrous until you realized it was an updated Western, and showed (not deliberately, it seems) how ludicrous Western values are, along with the implicit message, common to many films in the genre, that justice has nothing to do with the law (these was even stated explicitly in series three).
Numerous sardonic one-liners enlivened the first series, and it lifted itself up a notch every time Tong Hoon Lee appeared onscreen as a transvestite computer wiz (his smartaleck lines were abolished later on, it seems).
The violence may be frequent but it was not repetitive until series two and after, sometimes taking up to 25 hours to film, according to wikipedia. And you might even notice how well the actors cope with their parts (Antony Starr as the criminal turned sheriff, Ulrich Thomsen as the local villain, ex-Amish kid turned Banshee boss (rancher, here meat packing king) Kai Proctor, Ben Cross as the Ukrainian outside supervillain, and Rus Blackwell as the hapless district attorney.
The main women all seem to run to one type: long straight hair and pouty faces — Ivana Milicevic (the ex-lover), Trieste Kelly Dunn (the female police deputy), Lili Simmons (a young ex-Amish girl), and Ryann Shane (a rebellious schoolgirl). So you may have difficulty telling them apart. Odette Annable as an Indian woman warrior stands out, however, until the series gives up trying to give her an interesting role.
And there's also Frankie Faison from The Wire, Matt Servitto (ex-The Sopranos), Demetrius Grosse from Justified, Julian Sands (Room with a View) and Zeljiko Ivanek (ex-Damages) who give the episodes unexpected class. Presumably they were tempted by association with producer Alan Ball, author of Six Feet Under and True Blood as well as the author of American Beauty.
Ball, some critics have suggested, was seeking to re-establish his commercial credentials after True Blood. "Like True Blood, Banshee is best when it embraces its outlandish story with a sense of humor," was the judgement. "But the show often ends up so ostentatiously bloody and dark that it’s unintentionally funny. This is especially true of anything around Proctor, an estranged-Amish villain so cartoonishly evil that he cuts off a henchman’s finger and feeds it to his dog, so depraved that he has one of the prostitutes he employs service him while wearing an Amish woman’s bonnet and so warped that, as this act happens, we see that he has a full-back tattoo of Christ on the cross [:] cliched pay-cable gore."
Nevertheless, Thomsen manages to make you feel for him and watch to see what he does best.
Those high second and subsequent ratings may tempt you to stick with it past the often risible Season 1. You can't believe some ways the sheriff behaves (particularly on television, where his imposture could be, surely, easily recognized by someone). But it is never less than carefully filmed and edited. Pity, though, that the series leaves all plausibility behind with its battle scenes and stages them as parody while taking them seriously in the narrative. Rotten Tomatoes got it all wrong: maybe its reviewers are all teenage fantasists. And Banshee gives us the two most detestable teenage girls (Simmons and Shane) onscreen this season.
Falling Water, 2016-18
This series should have been so bad: three people discover they are sharing the same dream.
South Korea gets obsessed with historic Grenada, Spain, and virtual reality
Memories of the Alhambra (2018), Netflix original
Surely you will get tired of the soupy ballads, the apparent obsession with shoes, and the long pauses for the stars Hyun Bin and Park Shin to stare at each other. But South Korea's "first augmented reality-gaming drama", apparently inspired by Pokemon Go and the biography of Elon Musk, has enough neat twists from Song Jae-jung, its now 47-year-old creator, to keep you entertained to the end of its 18 episodes.
You might not have realized that South Koreans have become obsessed with Granada in Spain or that Koreans who play guitar have to learn Francisco Tárrega's eponymous classical guitar piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra. But there is also cynical repartee from Hyun, and a performance from Lee Re as the kid sister that threatens to steal the show.
It is also a marketing pioneer. It has a two-hour soundtrack of songs, and the product placement, particularly in episode 12, angered some critics. But if you don't know about video games, you can learn what missions, levelling up and alliances are all about — as well as gamers' obsession with outdated military technology.
So learn to live for the duration with a series created half by a 14-year-old nerd and a teen girl enamoured of romance comics, it seems.
