THE LONG WAIT

The trip to the Berkshires and back softened the blow of my having come to the end of revisiting Gilmore Girls (Netflix and Hulu). Seven seasons…153 hour-long episodes… of the best kind of network television, and now having returned from my travels, finding myself wishing for more. These folks…Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino… really know how to create and maintain a show. (Note: present tense is deliberate, since the creators went on to make Bunheads, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the current Etoile.)

Once more in front of my home television screen I am (once again) revisiting familiar territory. The Morning Show (Apple TV) is back in its 4^th season which, so far, is almost as good as season three (a high bar and one hard to match with so much time passing between seasons). Now that Netflix has season 7 part 1 of Outlander I am back looking at that well made show, with admittedly less interest since having to wait for what seemed like years since the end of season 6. Oh…wait… it nearly was years, having completed its initial run in 2024.

Outlander is still lush, brilliantly cast, and obviously well produced but the long hiatus has taken a toll. I am not at all sure what the folks behind this kind of distribution philosophy are thinking.

I have looked again at Slow Horses… season two. Good stuff from the UK, worth your while, and something I am comfortable recommending though I am aware it will not be everyone’s cup of tea. I cannot say the same for my return to Amazon Prime and Black Snow. If I had kept proper notes, I am sure I would not have completed the first season (which I am none too sure I had).

Task is the new HBO mystery miniseries. They could have just as easily called it Chore, for that is what I felt it was to watch. Some, I am sure, will like this; “tedious” would be my one-word review. For the PBS series Unforgotten, that one word is … wait for it… forgettable.

One of the major disappointments of this group is the Australian based series, Newsreader (AMC+). Ever since Fringe, the long-ago Network series from the extremely talented J.J. Abrams, I have been a fan of actress Anna Torv. Sorry to report that even at her best she would have had trouble carrying this mediocre, ill-advised, venture. I am even sorrier to come forward with the news that in this, Ms. Torv is far… very far… from her best.

And then there is the Netflix miniseries, House of Guinness. One of the things one learns, early on, about the famous Irish dry stout made in the United Kingdom, is that it “does not travel well.” That is, you should not expect the stuff to taste as good in the US as it does in the UK.

Perhaps that is what has happened here. The show looks good, the sets are impressive, the photography first rate. The cast is respectable enough, and the dialogue occasionally pithy. That should be more than enough, but this Dublin answer to Downton Abbey does not match up very well with that series, let alone with Succession, the American 21^st century version.

Steven Knight, who wrote Peaky Blinders, was also the scribe on House of Guinness. I disagreed with several of his choices… especially the structuring of the first episode, where he blew through an entire season’s worth of valuable/potentially dramatic background exposition in minutes. Clearly his choice to make and not mine but had we been teamed together on this project there would have been some serious debating about this opening episode before anything was committed to film. And, trust me, those fights would have been trivial compared to the one we would have had about Mr. Knight’s decision on how to end the series. Not only did he fail to match Succession in the overall, but for him to think he could pull off an ending a la The Sopranos, which even the fabulous David Chase had trouble defending, elevates hubris to a whole new level.

Watch House of Guinness but get your expectation level set first. It is not at all as tasty as it might have been in Dublin.

 

Barney Rosenzweig