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Monday Media Musings - 8/30/21
Leverage: Redemption: It took us a little white to watch these -- I gave T a break from our marathon by watching these episodes at a more leisurely pace, and also I wanted to savor them a little bit. Noah Wylie is a great addition to the cast, but then I've always found him fairly charming. I'm enjoying Breanna, too. Like Parker, I miss Hardison, but now that the rest of team Leverage is well into adulthood, it's nice to still have a kid around. Watching this show pretty much back to back with the original series really highlighted how much the cast have aged, but Aldis Hodge especially so -- he's gone from a rangy, goofy 20-something to a man in his mid-30s, and it shows. (Exception: Christian Kane, who looks almost exactly the same.) I never disliked Nate as much as I know a lot of people do, but I also don't miss him and certainly don't mind that real-world circumstances required him to be written out permanently. Speaking of the real world, it's fun to guess which headlines each plot was ripped from ("Hey, it's the Sacklers; oh, now we're on to the Panama Papers; isn't that Martin Shkreli?"). I appreciate the show's recognition that the situation with bad corporate actors has only gotten worse.
Sweet Tooth: I watched this one with friends over the course of several weeks. It's a show about a pandemic and its long-term aftermath, so there were definitely some "Too soon!" moments. It's also based on a comic series, which I haven't read, and that I gather is even darker than this Netflix adaptation, which although hopeful in many ways was still pretty darn dark (big warnings for child endangerment along with the pandemic imagery). The premise is that a nasty illness improbably called "The Sick" has wiped out a sizable percentage of the population; simultaneously, to the point that no one knows which is the cause and which is the effect, every child born is now a human-animal hybrid. While the show follows the stories of a number of people, our main protagonist is Gus, a boy with antlers, deer ears, and an incredibly keen sense of hearing and smell, one of the oldest hybrid children who has hidden in the wilderness, where he's raised by his father. One thing leads to another, and he meets the gruff loner Jeppard, who accompanies on a road trip to find his mother. This show has reviewed incredibly well, and I suppose I understand why -- it's beautiful to look at, with good characters and some excellent practical effects used to create the hybrids -- but the pacing is awful, with too many mysteries introduced in the last 2-3 episodes, not enough of those mysteries resolved, and about five cliffhangers in the finale. I had been waffling on whether I would watch the second season, but now I feel like I have to, just to see what happens next. One of my friends said she wished for just one or two more episodes to wrap up some of the plots and move the story into a new phase, and I think I agree.
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They did it in the original series, too -- John Rogers has talked about how they often had to tone the stories down from real life before the network would consider them believable! -- but I feel like the parallels are a lot more obvious, this time around.
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Exactly the same reaction here!
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It's so satisfying. I'm looking forward to the second half of the season next month!
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The first Leverage series premiered in 2008, two years before the first season of Sherlock, and "ripped from the headlines" villains has always been its trademark, so I doubt there's any influence in that direction. Interesting thought, though.