Death and Other Details

[ZoWie]

Mystery movie in installments on hulu, ongoing, something like ten episodes and we're getting near the end of the live showings. Hulu has commercials now, so you pay up front and then they keep stopping the show to get even more money from companies wasting your time with the same silly pitches you see everywhere else and pay for with higher prices. Media really is the perfect racket.

Good show, though. It reminds me of Patrick McGoohan's classic The Prisoner show in which most of the characters besides the leads were unsympathetic and everyone had a past and reality was, shall we say, negotiable. Good acting, pretty much stock characters for a whodunit, sufficiently nerve-damaging directing and editing, and production values up the wazoo.

This time, though, instead of being at a cross between a British holiday camp and an existential theater of the absurd, we're on a ship of fools if ever one deserved the name. Some greedy corporation with plenty to cover up has rented an ocean liner with its own seedy past for them and their equally seedy corporate cronies and their rich-prick families and their predatory lawyers to broker a shady business deal while at sea. Since it's a mystery, someone turns up dead almost immediately, and others have been going out of this vale of tears on a regular basis ever since.

The bad guy who emerges seems to be hiding behind a cyber-wall of heroic proportions (like in the McGoohan show of yore). We don't even know if the arch fiend is a person, a syndicate, a server farm, or ???????????? He, she, or it may even be running the world.

I originally had a problem where I didn't like any of the people, since like in most mysteries, they're all a bunch of rich jerkoffs hiding pretty seedy pasts. However it's become obvious that we're not supposed to like most of them. We're supposed to root for the detective, who also has something of a past, and his female assistant, whose whole life is about finding out which organized corporate crime kingpin blew up her mother. We do root for them.

The plot is typically impossible to follow, getting a bit lost in all the camera and editing virtuosity, but it undoubtedly works out at the end, whenever that is.

[ZoWie]

Well, well, well.

Death and Other Details wrapped up this week. I won't give away the ending. You can't get it out of me. Don't even try to guess it. It comes from so far in left field that it had to jump over the fence to make it onto the playing surface. It provides a satisfying wrap while at the same time leaving a lot of new possibilities for conflict open for another season, if they get one from the money people.

All in all, I give the show a "B." That's pretty good for me. There aren't a lot of "A" grades. One thing you learn in the biz is how to be critical. They rely heavily on multiple unreliable narrators, very post modern and big in book writing, but hard to pull off in a visual medium. There's a lot of the visual version of interior monologues. The viewer really has to pay attention, and even then it's worth reading the recaps on the Internet afterward.

One thing that really gets noticed fast is that the show was during Hulu's phase-in of commercials. At least right now, the first few episodes are commercial free, then they start introducing ads until at the end, when you need to be the most involved, they're stopping the damn show every 10 or so minutes for dumb ad pitches every bit as annoying as the ones on cable. It affects the dramatic arch since the first episodes didn't have to be written with interruptions in mind, and you didn't have to artificially introduce a cliff hanger before every break.

Pay up front, sit through dumb ad pitches just as you were getting into the show, pay more for the junk that's being advertised. Smedley Butler said war was a racket, well media is an even bigger one.

[ZoWie]

I left something out. Remember how I said that my problem at the start was that I did not like nearly all of the characters. By the end, we're supposed to dislike nearly all of them, with a possible exception of the female lead. Even she gets a real lesson in post-modern tactical deception that changes her life.

I commend these writers for dealing with a very unpleasant consequence of the 21st century economic and political system, namely the fact that no one really knows who to believe. The use of a classic literary device, the ship of fools, is well done here, bordering on brilliant.

[rainwater]

.... "consequence of the 21st century economic and political system, namely the fact that no one really knows who to believe."
they dont know what to believe either.

we once fretted this, now, it is perfectly normal to type something on to the ever evolving innernets, something
awful incorrect wrong malicious deadly harmful...well you get the point.
i can type something insanely wrong and zillions will believe it since its on the innernets.

most educated children in south africa who are starving know the innernets. they get to read the insane rw garbage
spewed...if its allowed on the innernets then of course it must be valid.

omg.

i talk to teachers in 'us' who say...these kids dont even know how to read sentences, they cant write spell or count.
they do use the innernets which does it all for them.

Every older i talk with says they fear for their grandchildren. shiverz.

[ZoWie]

I would imagine that at some point people will view everything on the net with the same distrust that newspaper editorials get. Right now we're in a transitional phase where peer group chatter and advertising posing as same(*) looks like the revealed word of God just because it's on a computer screen. Fortunately a lot of teachers have gotten hip. Quite a few parents haven't, but then that's nothing new.

Now it's just a matter of getting the rest of the culture caught up, in other words, business as usual. I commend the writers of this show for getting their part of the dialog as close to right as they could in this media environment. It's a complex issue, and one not well suited for what is still essentially entertainment.

--
* Everything in the PR business right now centers on "Influencers." 17-year-olds get wined and dined by companies as if they were Supreme Court justices.

[rainwater]

* Everything in the PR business right now centers on "Influencers." 17-year-olds get wined and dined by companies as if they were Supreme Court justices.

that is so juvenile bizarre.

[ZoWie]

It's a juvenile and bizarre business. You get older, but the target audience never does.

BTW, Death and Other Details was cancelled. We'll never know the identity of the body that fell from the sky at the end of the last season. The first season obviously made the bosses nervous, since it was about all the chaos their idea of business causes. The excuse that the suits in the towers made though, was that it had two many characters.

That, of course, is utter piffle. It's a mystery. That's a very tight genre. There are always two recurring leads, a detective and an assistant. Someone, usually a rich guy with a whole bunch of people expecting a lot from his will, gets offed in a typically gory manner, and the two good guys have to sort out a whole bunch of repellent rich fracks to nail the one who did it. Everyone except the cop/detective and their tireless assistant has a sordid past. Typically everyone has been screwing everyone else on the sly, often with the kind of results that "good" families can't talk about. It becomes a bunch of people you hate, and one of them goes to jail at the end. You never see any of them again, and good riddance to the whole ship of fools. Next year/ episode/ whatever, the wise detective and the tireless assistant have to nail another bad guy in a different den of iniquity.

Now, if the suits had been honest and said the director could have delimited the personal recollection flashbacks from the current action better, they'd have had something.

People like mysteries. The British make all the best ones.

[rainwater]

canada has made some good ones too. they best come up with some more soon!
i loved The listener.

some of the brit ones get so long and so..geneological i dont care and get bored.

im real bored with the letter shows...ncis this and that.
the miami guy with the red hair?....OHMY HOW ANNOYING CAN ONE GUY BE.

the writers are all bored with killing people. well, get some imagination like leverage.

[ZoWie]

Yes, the British culture, especially at its upper class level, does differ greatly from ours even though the language is more or less the same. Indeed they're very big on lineage and one's place in society, and their mysteries do often tend to be a bit like a CLUE game where you are confronted by a bunch of (to American perception) rather stereotypical people, all of whom seem to have things to hide. The dead guy is nearly always some rich clown in a huge ancestral manor house in the country, with too many relatives all of whom look the same and most of whom have sordid pasts.

Father Brown is a happy exception. He's a Catholic priest in a small British country town. Needless to say, his congregation is not a large one. However, he's getting quite the reputation for solving murders in this country area, where fortunately there still seem to be enough landed gentry around to frequently get offed for their money. It's a funny show, and very entertaining.

Another exception is the one set in Chelsea, yes the London borough with the soccer team, where the cop lives on a boat and the bad guys are nearly always from the working class.

[ZoWie]

Yet another British show is Death in Paradise. It's very formulaic, in that the murder is always before the opening title and credits, and the Agatha Christie "Someone in this room is a killer" finale always happens around 53 minutes after the hour. However the acting is absolute tops, and the recurring characters are very likeable, as opposed to most mysteries where everyone's kind of creepy and/or hiding a sordid past.

It's fun, and it's gone 13 seasons, so they're doing something right. It comes up on US TV on occasion, or there's always streaming. Public libraries often have this kind of stuff for free or cheap.

[rainwater]

Yet another British show is Death in Paradise. It's very formulaic, in that the murder is always before the opening title and credits, and the Agatha Christie "Someone in this room is a killer" finale always happens around 53 minutes after the hour. However the acting is absolute tops, and the recurring characters are very likeable, as opposed to most mysteries where everyone's kind of creepy and/or hiding a sordid past.

It's fun, and it's gone 13 seasons, so they're doing something right. It comes up on US TV on occasion, or there's always streaming. Public libraries often have this kind of stuff for free or cheap.

cool, just bkmrkd it, thx.