Sunday email - 28th January
The death of television; five related bullet-points
The London Times recently carried a thought-provoking article on the 25th anniversary of the television show, The Sopranos. Yes, the 25th!
The Sopranos was novel because HBO was subscription-subsidised and dispensed with advertising. Commercials didn’t pop up promiscuously to wreck your make-believe world every seven seconds. You could live the life of mafia boss Tony Soprano without getting jolted back into the real world by some huckster hawking Saltines or softener. David Chase, the show’s shaman, was able to take his painstaking time and build something brand-new and unbreakable; something that still feels fresh.
Since The Sopranos first aired we’ve lived through the Golden Age of Television. Transmogrification has meant transmitting new, long-format shows that can fill the space created by multiple writers, actors, episodes and seasons. That, at least, is the simplified story. That’s what they tell you. Maybe, maybe not. I clearly recall looking out of the window of my student flat at 9pm on a Monday evening when Main Street was defiantly deserted, and I mean deserted. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. You know why? Twin Peaks.
Such shows were followed by others, equally renowned: Breaking Bad; Better Call Saul; The Wire; The Night Of. Notice how many feature crime? Maybe it took a five-act Elizabethan tragedy like Breaking Bad to encompass crime’s conception, execution, and consequences.
All of that, according to the Times and David Chase, is over now. Crap commercials are back, clogging the flow at Amazon, nurgling the nets at Netflix. Instant gratification is all that matters; shows sufficiently simplistic to follow even while you’re fiddling with your phone. Who has time to build a big show with big characters? We have not just lived through the Golden Age: we’ve lived through it. It’s gone.
Again maybe, maybe not. I say, be more optimistic! A world that still has Richard Price writing TV drama is not without hope. Price, in case you don’t know, is the brains behind shows like The Deuce and The Night Of, as well as that classy classic, Clockers.
If you haven’t already, this week’s bullet list presents five shows you just gotta see. The five greatest crime dramas of this or any other lifetime, as voted for by, well, me:
Twin Peaks remains, in the memorable words of one magazine article, ‘the greatest use ever found for the cathode-ray tube’. Watch the first season (from 1990) even now and notice how fresh this material still looks. And remember, this was before everyone’s grandmother started straining sinews to do the same thing David Lynch could do in his sleep. The original, the greatest, the unforgettable – 30 years later, the theme music gets me thrilling in anticipation, even though I know very well who killed Laura Palmer.
Spiral (Engrenages) – from its first appearance in 2005 to its final season in 2021, Spiral showed a strange, perhaps unique, ability to get better and better. This is even more impressive when you recognise that the first season was outstanding. The show even achieved something nearly miraculous in making Paris look ugly. If you enjoy a police procedural – and who doesn’t? – you need to catch up with this. You’ve been missing out!
Minder looks dated as flares now, but, damn, it was fresh and exciting thing on UK TV screens back in the 80s. We all walked to school humming the theme tune (but only if our parents had let us stay up late to watch). Minder was funny, sometimes clever, and it featured proper actors. All of those qualities were unprecedented at the time.
The Killing – If you’ve only seen the remake, and not the original, you’re in for a treat. This is the frost-bitten, sweater-wearing, frozen, dirty-looking real thing, the great grand-daddy of Scandi noir and the most affecting thing you’ll come across this year.
The Night Of is just great. I picked this ahead of even The Deuce (which got regrettably less gritty as it went on) and Better Call Saul (which you’ve surely seen) even though I love both of them, too. Starting off as a police procedural, the show gradually becomes a steady-eyed study of what happens to decent people what bad things happen to them. And, boy, do bad things ever happen. Riz Ahmed, in the lead, is plain phenomenal. And there’s Richard Price again.
Check out all of these shows! Just please remember where you learnt about them first!!
More on this material in an upcoming newsletter, I suspect…
That’s all for today, Crime and Psychology fans! Please remember, if you like my stuff, and would like to see more of it, click Like, leave a comment, restack, and think about making a Pledge. It all helps. It really does.