I’ve already argued that the pickings at the multiplex are pretty slim, nor am I a fan of what I have labeled “Heavy TV”, disliking it so much I had to write a sequel to my original putdown.1 My appetite, such as it was, for the doings of sadistic serial killers is pretty much exhausted, and I’m generally either afraid of “The Dark” or bored by it. So is nothing acceptable? Fortunately, there are a few old favorites that are still holding up, and a few other odds and ends—shows that have come and gone that I’m just discovering.
Archer, suave secret agent/dick (both private and public), about whom I’ve raved in the past, on my own blog and for the Bright Lights Film Journal, still functioning, and still tolerably funny in its ninth season, is preparing for its tenth and last on FX. Earlier seasons are no longer available on Netflix (except on DVD) and Amazon Prime makes you pay extra even for Season 1, which strikes me as exceptionally bitchy (or Archery). I’m sure the kids have figured out a way to watch it for free, but I haven’t, so I’m DVDing it.
The third season of Call My Agent!, aka Dix Pour Cent, a semi-favorite of mine is up on Netflix, chronicling the frenzied adventures of the ever-endangered ASK talent agency in Paris. I complained about the excessive coziness of Saison Deux, but I’m glad to report that Saison Trois is both more dry and more droll. As I expected, the cliffhanger from Saison Deux, that big-hearted, big-nosed lesbian Andréa (Camille Cottin) would be shipped off to New York, didn’t happen, allowing her to have her baby (by boss Hicham Janowski, played by Assaad Bouab) in the safety and sanctity of the French medical system. My big complaint in the past was the show’s star-struck approach to stars, showing them as vain and temperamental (at first) but, after a few complications, emerging as gallant thoroughbreds who always come through under pressure and save the day. This time, instead of a handful of European stars entirely unknown to me, we have a true international star, Isabelle Huppert. Isabelle isn’t “bad”, of course. If anything, she’s too generous and hard-working. The thing is, she’s signed a contract with—wait for it—Americans! Who want her exclusively and, mercenary monsters that they are, would foreclose on Versailles and ship it to LA if they don’t get their way!
Fortunately, ASK has both the sangfroid and the savoir faire to hose the Yanks, though it takes quite a bit of frantic behind the scenes running around to carry the whole thing off. Along the way, there’s a funny side plot, wherein the sweet gay guy, whose name I still don’t know and can’t determine, gets a chance to move up to be an actual agent instead of an assistant! Because sweet not-gay Camille (Fanny Sidney) thinks she’s so busy she should be two people, sweet gay guy becomes her, for a day. And then he meets this really cute waiter who wants to be a star, and so sweet gay guy arranges for an audition for him! Both their dreams are going to come true! Well, how else does one celebrate such an occasion, eh, mon ami? But then, well, really cute waiter gets sent to the wrong audition, and he’s terrible, and the studio wants to know why ASK is sending them boyfriends instead of actors, and SGG has to 1) catch shit from Camille for endangering the agency, 2) tell RCW that he isn’t star material, and 3) take shit from RCW, to wit: “You only took me on because you wanted to fuck me! Well, mission accomplished, bitch! Because now I’m totally fucked!” And all because he wanted to make people’s dreams come true! Agents suffer!
A past hidden gem that I’m just discovering is Blandings, a mere 12 thirty-minute episodes from Britain, but I’m lovin’ ‘em. “Blandings”, available on Amazon, is ultimately from the pen of P. G. Wodehouse, the grandmaster of silly ass Englishman light fiction. I’ve previously discussed a series dating from the early 90s, Jeeves and Wooster, devoted to Wodehouse’s supreme creation, the saga of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, which ran through dozens of short stories and perhaps a dozen novels, from the early twenties through 1970. Devotees/obsessives like myself marinated for decades in Bertie’s inimitable rococo narration of Jeeves’ inimitable rococo machinations, all in the service of the inimitable truth, that Amor Vincit Omnia, though not without considerable assistance from Jeeves.
It was surely inevitable that Jeeves and Wooster would fall below the mark unconsciously set for it by aficionados like myself. Despite the ineffable lightness of Wodehouse’s prose, both Bertie and Jeeves were quite complex characters, doppelgangers for Wodehouse himself. “Plum”, as everyone (apparently) called him, was quite unhappy as a boy, but immensely happy at his “public” school—what we Americans would call a prep school—“Dulwich College”. The moral he seemed to take away from it all was that happiness, though possible, is not “natural”—it must be consciously achieved. Furthermore, it is most often achieved in the company of the privileged, and it can best be achieved by holding the world at arm’s length.
In the early short stories, Bertie is always either falling in love or getting engaged, or both, but always to the “wrong woman”—though, in sharp contrast to the American “rom com”, there is no right one.2 As Jeeves repeatedly makes clear, the only way to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is to abstain from the fury and mire of human veins. By the mid-thirties, when Wodehouse had largely switched from short stories to novels, Bertie was as skeptical of affairs of the heart as Jeeves. The turning point was Brinkley Manor, aka What Ho, Jeeves (1934), which set in motion a collection of entangled and star-crossed lovers who, thanks to Jeeves, all married happily, though the consummations were delayed for a good thirty years. The Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius notoriously found it pleasing to stand safely on the shore and watch the sufferings of those at sea tormented by the storm.3 Both Jeeves and Bertie are made of softer stuff, and, confronted as they invariably are by victims of internal rather than external weather, always strive to intervene—Bertie ingenuously and disastrously, Jeeves with the effortless hand of the Creator (or the Author). But in both cases, intervention is only possible if one is one’s self immune to the tempest within.4
Jeeves and Bertie are scarcely three-dimensional characters, and the supporting cast distinctly less so, but over the decades that he wrote about them, Wodehouse rang the changes on the limited notes available to him so ingeniously that—for the addicted, at least—they remained ever fresh and vivid. The result is that, I suspect, all true devotees have a “perfect” Aunt Dahlia and a “perfect” Madelaine Bassett, not to mention a perfect Bertie and a perfect Jeeves, already fixed in their heads, so that the poor actors and actresses (if I can use such a term) who portray them almost invariably appear as disappointments or even frauds, for the perfect is always the enemy of the good.
In the “Blandings” stories, revolving around Lord Emsworth and his kin, and most particularly his prize pig, the “Empress” and set in the “eternal Twenties” of Wodehouse’s imagination,5 the perfect rarely intrudes The few I read from the series struck me as a distinctly lesser creation, stories that Wodehouse wrote as a sort of vacation from the Wooster/Jeeves high-wire act. Without Bertie’s perfect voice—the Blandings stories are written the third person—and without Jeeves perfect schemes, we have little more than a stock company road show of silly ass Englishmen, good-hearted chorus girls, good-natured, big-bellied, empty-headed lords, imperious dames, and sherry-slurping butlers, all wandering around the sort of enormous country estate that drove me half bonkers in the unspeakably wretched Downton Abbey.6 But at Blandings, it works.
Rather remarkably, given the degenerate nature of our time, the producers of the show made no attempt to position themselves as superior to the material, no effort to show what life was “really” like in those bad old days, which was in fact pretty horrible for everyone below stairs and for half of those above it. Wodehouse deconstructed would be a sorry sight indeed, and we don’t get it. The only updating that has been done is pretty much limited to the occasional pig fart, and (probably) more “muck” jokes (manure) than P. G. would have allowed himself. Instead, we have the amiable Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall), sporting a thoroughly “English” set of teeth, his amiable son Freddie Threepwood (Jack Farthing), his unamiable sister Lady Constance (Jennifer Saunders), and his stout butler Beach (played first by Mark Williams in the first season and by Tim Vine in the second), all cavorting and disporting themselves in a suitably Wodehousian manner. Freed from the burden of perfection, and avoiding on its own the burden of pretense, it’s pretty damned good road show all around, and I’m sorry it didn’t get a longer run.
Another invigorating look at the Roaring Twenties with a British accent—more substantial, this time around—comes from Down Under in the form of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, three full seasons of hour long treats on both Netflix and ABC that make Sydney, Australia look surprisingly like London—and sound like it too, because all the leads have surprisingly (to me) posh accents.7 Miss Fisher, played by the charming Essie Davis, is unsurprisingly and unchronologically up to date in all her attitudes, being (of course) independent and quite capable of clambering over walls and scaling buildings in pursuit of evil-doers, even in high heels. Phryne, as her first name is, has a sweet companion, Dorothy Williams (Ashleigh Cummings), somewhat lower down on the social scale and naturally a bit intimidated by Phryne’s upper class lack of inhibition. Both gals have steady Eddies, in the form of Chief Inspector John Robinson (Nathan Page) for Phryne and Constable Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) for Dorothy. The Chief Inspector, virtually a walking Rock of Gibraltar and a titan of middle-class inhibitions, is naturally entranced by the wicked Miss Fisher, who keeps his Herculean physique tightly wrapped around her little finger for all three seasons, and it must be said that Constable Collins’ fate is only a little less circumscribed.
As should be obvious, Miss Fisher is largely a chick show, of particular interest, I would say, to women who worry about their boyfriends’ hair, because both the Chief Inspector and the Constable have coifs that are, invariably, perfect. Some of the “backstory” for the show—the bitterness many Australians felt at the way the “Mother Country” used them for its own purposes in World War 1, for example—shows some real thought. There is, unsurprisingly, a gaping omission when it comes to the subject of race, and the position of the “aborigines”, which in the twenties was entirely deplorable. Most unattractive is the difference in the treatment of two of Miss Fisher’s many lovers, one Chinese and one “black”. The Chinese lover comes from a prominent family, speaks excellent English, and has come to Australia to flee an arranged marriage in order to marry the woman he loves, whose father is a communist. The black lover is an extra in a film, has not a single line, and clearly functions as a one-night stud. Naughty, yes, but not very nice.
For now, that's it. So don't say nothing's on. Say almost nothing's on.
1. Latest and worst heavy TV of all is the execrable Game of Thrones. The sappy English accents alone make it unwatchable, not to mention the entire fur coats, tits, and bloody murder ethos of the damn show. Livin’ in the Age o’ Trump is already terrible, but this show makes it worse.
2. As a young man, Wodehouse wrote “straight” rom com novels like Mike in the City and Leave it to Psmith!, whose heroes were impecunious public school men, rather like Wodehouse himself,
3. The opening stanza of Book II of De Rerum Natura, aka “The Nature of Things”—a Roman catchphrase. People are always taking a look at rerum natura.
4. Wodehouse did marry, Ethel May Wayman, an English widow. They had no children, but Wodehouse adopted Wayman’s daughter, to whom he was quite devoted. Supposedly, Ethel was the Jeeves to Plum’s Bertie.
5. “First and last,” I squealed in impotent and ineffectual rage, “I was overwhelmingly put off by the idea that it’s okay, in any sense of the word, for five people to be knocking about in a house the size of Grand Central Station, with two or three dozen menials rushing about night and day to keep everything looking just so.” Blandings rather shamelessly elides the issue by pretending that Lord Emworth’s immense estate is cared for by a handful of servants, who spend most of their time either feeding cake to pigs or drinking sherry.
6. Actually, Wodehouse’s stock characters are really pre-World War I, as George Orwell explains. Orwell’s essay discusses Wodehouse’s early work in some detail, on its way to giving what I found to be too much deference to Wodehouse’s unthinking behavior when captured by the German Army in France in 1940. Wodehouse gave a radio broadcast making it sound as though being imprisoned by the Germans was rather jolly. Wodehouse’s wife was also a prisoner, so it’s not surprising that he wanted to cooperate, but there’s a difference between cooperating and being coopted. I suspect that Wodehouse, like many rich people, hoped that the Nazis wouldn’t be so bad.
7. A contemporary Australian series, Rake, also available on Netflix, which I gave up on because it kept expecting me to identify with a coke addict, features noticeably less posh accents.
