The Netflix series is rightly being called "the Spanish Downton Abbey." It leaves James Killough hungry for more, but that's unlikely to happen....
My latest random connection is wacky, but it appears from a viral test currently making the rounds of Facebook that I’m almost entirely right-brained. I’m now allowed to be random and wacky with impunity. According to Sommer-Sommer.com I am congenitally creative, chaotic, intuitive, imaginative, curious, and fantastical. I would add tangential to that list of adjectives.
Where was I? Oh, right…
I’ve never made predictions about the Emmys. I’ve never even watched them. But with the shifting dynamic of dramas away from the big screen to the small — and getting smaller as Netflix storms the gates of entertainment with two superlative web series out of four unleashed so far — I’m now not only paying attention, I’ve seen enough of the nominated shows in many of the categories to make predictions.
Cable hasn’t just come of age. It’s now a big, brawny alpha person with an edgy personality
Like any media organization, we have to keep an eye on our stats to determine which kinds of stories are more popular. Despite the fact that our most viewed article on a single day ever, We Own You, Marcia Bachmann, was a political one, in general we do much better adhering to our core competencies: entertainment and fashion. When this site was still a group blog, I used to joke that we aspired to be as fluffy as a Dior tulle gown, and I stick by that joke. Despite the fact Galliano has stopped designing for that venerable couturier, no doubt entirely because of my piece about once having caused him to be spanked, their gowns have become no less fluffy under Bill Gaytten’s design direction.
I’m going to begin this completely off headline and mention the Weeds finale on Sunday night, which was nothing like what I was expecting. And that’s about the only half-assed, backhanded compliment I can give it.
I did a little snooping around the TV fan forums a week or so ago to see what people thought of the last season, which doesn’t appear to be much. It seems I was one of the few who thought it was an improvement over seasons five and six; everyone else thought it was slow, unworthy of the show, which must mean it was leading up to something big. While reading posts and threads, I stumbled on one by a guy, presumably a Ghey, who postulated that this entire season was a dream Nancy was having while in a coma after being shot in the head. Everything was being reconciled in her subconscious: she was moving towards being legit, finally a good mother to her youngest child, and had come complete circle to live once again in the idyllic but more upscale ‘burbs that are Old Sandwich, CT (a play on Old Greenwich). In the last episode, wrote the poster, the story would come back to the hospital where Nancy was really brain dead, and the gang would pull the plug, Nancy’s body would die, everyone would sob. End of series.
No such luck. Instead we were treated to a flash forward nine years or so from the penultimate episode to her youngest son’s bar mitzvah, which brings everyone together for lots of hand wringing and reconciling and moments of not-very-lucid insight into themselves, and then this lame ending with everyone passing around a legal joint, and even Nancy—who has hitherto been limited to sucking on iced lattes through a straw—takes a toke.
The interminable final shot in Weeds delivers zero emotion.
However, as lame as I found it, an online friend loved it, and was howling last night about how an era was over. Then again, he’s Canadian—pot is a birthright for them, and an emotional issue with their hated, hateful cousins south of the border.
So, no more Ma Botwin and her man children. Onward.
Much as we love Elizabeth McGovern and have always been puzzled as to why her career in Hollywood stagnated to the point she had to move to England—which is akin to heading up the 101 freeway in reverse,
BLOGIRADE | THE INDIA FILES
by James Killough
It turns out I spoke too soon about Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey. By the season finale, she’s had more comeuppance than she deserved, and she’s managed to move from super bitch to sympathetic heroine. I have to hand it to show creator and writer Julian Fellowes: superb job on the old character arc, there, dear chap.
Regardless of what happens outside the house, what is at the center of Downton Abbey is the dynamic between servants and their masters, which is always the basis for shows like this, that intricate Upstairs, Downstairs relationship drama, a perverse master-slave relationship that can be seen as a microculture of the whole employer/employee, ruler/subject dynamic of the world at large.
Servants and masters from "Downton Abbey." Very much like a small corporation.
I grew up with live-in “staff” or “help,” or whatever euphemism works best to chase away the sour taste of having to use the word “servant.” And it’s correct to use a euphemism in our case because they weren’t servants as the term denotes in a Downton Abbey way. They really were there to just to help the family, and were treated in as egalitarian a fashion as possible, except for the fact they slept in the servant’s quarters near the kitchen where the laundry was drying, they never ate with us, they called my parents “sir” and “madam,” served us dinner from the left, cleared the plates from the right…. Well, I suppose we did our best not to have servants despite evidence to the contrary.
Very aptly, I am the son of a Mad Man. In the 60s and 70s, my father was with one of the larger ad agencies that are referred to from time to time in the dialogue of Mad Men. He accepted a position to head up the Italian operations of that agency, the purview of which was expanded over time, but we the family were based in Rome while he traveled around. The real reason we were there is probably because the US was afraid to lose Italy and France to the communists during the 70s, so we sent some of our “businessmen” over there to help bolster the interests of democracy. If I were in a pitch meeting and had to do a mash up of references to describe Dad, it would be Mad Men meets The Good Shepherd.
If Dad has a quibble with the authenticity of "Mad Men," my only problem with "The Good Shepherd" is the women in my world just didn't look like that, which means it was eerily real.
I won’t delve too much into The Good Shepherd aspect because much of it is conjecture, albeit conjecture based on high probability. Dad has expressed a desire in this last chapter of his life to tell me his story, and I would like him to feel free to do so without fearing that it’s going to end up in a blog side by side with some willfully salacious anecdote that involves sodomy, haute couture and Class A drugs. Suffice it to say, there is a reason the period we lived in Rome is referred to as the anni di piombo, “the years of lead,” referring to the flying bullets and the bombings that seemed to be a part of our daily lives. After we left in ’79, things calmed down in Italy considerably. Hopefully that was just a coincidence.