Speak Up Saturday

[misbegotten]

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

The Commander, Aeason 1 was really irritating as the lead character seemed to make incredibly dumb decisions. But I decided to try Season 2 for other stories. It began with a story titled Virus, however there was no virus involved as the computer attack on hospitals was very specific to individual files, and was done by a person. The directing was awful with weird effects trying to make computer hacking seem dangerous and horrifying. And as is often the case with early 2000s stories, the general ignorance about the internet was reflected in the story. Finally gave up on it at 3/4 of the way in. I jumped to season 5 to see if it was any better but I wasn't taken with it at all.

Tried Armadillo starring James Frain, back in his ubiquitous days, along with the equally ubiquitous Hugh Bonneville. I gave it up after half an episode. It just didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Also tried Monday Monday for about half an episode and just gave it up. I do like workplace stories but I wasn't finding it humorous.

On the other hand I watched all of After the Flood in 2 days. A good mystery and well paced. I'm curious if there will be a S2.

Stonehouse was curiously upbeat. The Creators clearly meant it to be a quirky story. I could see why, but it just made the whole thing seem less interesting, and given this was a real life story I thought there had to be more to it.

Trial and Retribution, I Watched the first season of two episodes. Depressing and highly annoying the way they were constantly doing split screens. I started the second season, noticed the same tendency and just gave up.

I watched a special celebrating 100 years of Agatha Christie. Did pick up one interesting factoid about how she established the drawing room reveal of the murderer, although apparently it was the idea of some editor as she was originally going to set the finale in a courtroom. At any rate it made me curious to see The Mysterious Affair at Styles again. I thought it was very good although it exaggerated a bit much of Poirot's tendencies about order and method. However it also made clear and why I find it so annoying when revisions are made to the stories in a new adaptation. I recently we read The Pale Horse and was positive there had been many changes in the most recent mini-series. Turns out this was true. Apparently they wanted to update it for modern audiences, which never makes any sense to me when these are period pieces!

I watched almost all of the original Father Brown series -- just 1 season it seems and I'm on episode 8. The first one was quite dull but they got better. Very 70ish but I'm guessing these were drawn from the original books and there were interesting elements to the mysteries.