everything I've binge-watched recently
as I made my way through manuscript edits, day job, Goan monsoons, shifting homes and weekends kayaking
Here’s some stuff I’ve binge-watched lately. Not all of it is television, but all of it is binge-watching (I know it’s been 3 months since I updated this but let’s act like it hasn’t? Also sorry and thank you)
The Bad
House of Dragon - so bad, so cringe, just. sex and violence. Prequel to Game Of Thrones really struggles hard to live up to the hype of original GoT. Of course, the last few season so GoT didn’t live upto the hype of the books and now the show certainly doesn’t live up to the hype of the insanely successful series. It wants to be a greatest hits playlist of Westeros at its meatiest. Family members make promises they cannot keep as they connive and betray each other, in secret and in plain sight. There is jousting, romping and fighting. There are dragons, of course. There is a drunken orgy, an axe to the face, a caesarean without anaesthetic, seeping wounds, severed limbs and severed organs, too. George RR Martin’s world struts its way back on to our screens with confidence but makes little sense. The CGI is better but not the plot or the storyline.
Obviously, it is about the Targaryen dynasty, and though other familiar names are mentioned – a Tully here, a Stark there, an arrogant Lannister dropping by – this is the Targaryens’ story. With such detail, if it had darted between Houses and their various seats of power, then I am not sure I would have been able to keep up.
Ravenous fans of Game of Thrones may be pleased at first, but it quickly becomes clear that despite drawing from several of Martin’s short stories, the source material is as slight as J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices, with studios left to either fill in the blanks or hope that fandoms won’t mind the ones that remain.
Dracula - A four and a half hour long disappointing, bait-and-switch pastiche of a mess. While the new series is similar to Sherlock in structure, with three 90-minute episodes, its ambitions are a little less clear. It doesn’t set out to be a modern-day take on Dracula at first; instead, it reinterprets Bram Stoker’s original novel across a wider canvas. It starts in a similar place: Jonathan Harker, the hapless 19th century real estate appraiser, is sent to Transylvania to mediate Count Dracula’s long-distance purchase of land in England. Dracula quickly begins to deviate from its source material. The series immediately suggests Harker might meet a fate that’s very different from the one in the novel, the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing is now a nun named Agatha Van Helsing, and the rules of vampire fiction that Stoker’s novel established are slowly picked at. Unfortunately, the show isn’t actually interested in being as subversive or different as it leads you to believe. If the entire series had maintained the sense of humor and gruesomeness of the first episode, during which Dracula tosses a severed head at a group of nuns like a bridal bouquet, it might have been among the best adaptations of the source material. In the present, in a concluding episode that feels half-written, and has none of the compelling weirdness of the previous two episodes. Hell, there’s barely any action, with much of the time devoted to Dracula adjusting to modern life (with the requisite jokes about the internet and feminism) and interminable conversations about the nature and science of vampirism.
(spoiler ahead)
The tragic-romantic ending in no way flows with anything that happens up to that point, and feels completely unearned. It suddenly gives Dracula a soul where no evidence of one existed before, and effectively negates the most entertaining part of the miniseries. Bang’s take on Dracula is witty and philosophical, but he’s no misunderstood antihero crossing oceans of time to find his lost love. He’s a monster, who really seems to enjoy what he does, and that’s so rare in these uncertain economic times.
Though Bang brings a lot of “this Dracula fucks” energy to his performance, it’s surprisingly restrained in that regard. Oh sure, here Dracula doesn’t discriminate between men and women when it comes to victims (and if that bothers you, I suggest you read up on the life of Bram Stoker), but it feels as though the creators drew a very distinct line they were unwilling to cross.
The Good
Dopesick - This eight-part drama unpicks the immorality and greed that led to the rise of “miracle painkiller” OxyContin. It’s based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Beth Macy. The show tackles it from all sides. The miniseries comprises three strands.
The first is the tale of Dr Samuel Finnix, played with commendable unshowiness by Michael Keaton. Finnix is a devoted doctor in a tiny Appalachian mining town, targeted by Purdue as part of its mission to overcome doctors’ reluctance to prescribe opioids for long-term use because of their well-documented addictive qualities. He is persuaded by eager young Purdue rep Billy Cutler (Will Poulter) to start some patients on the new drug. An early prescription goes to Betsy (Kaitlyn Dever), who works in the mines alongside her father, and suffers a back injury. She can’t afford to miss work, especially as she and her girlfriend are saving to start a new life in a more welcoming town. As she becomes dependent on OxyContin, Betsy’s story combines the impoverished circumstances, bad luck and sense of hope that turned such towns into ground zero for an epidemic so explosive it would virtually remake the country. Almost the first words Finnix speaks on screen are at a hearing in 2005, speaking about his patients: “I can’t believe how many of them are dead now.”
The second strand concerns the legal efforts to pursue Purdue and its owners, the Sackler family. It is largely through two US attorneys and the composite character of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) deputy director Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) that we come to understand the dangerously porous nature of the boundary between public and private work – allowing, for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators to leave government employment to work for the people they had previously been regulating. We also see how Purdue’s marketing strategy changed attitudes towards pain and pain management among both the general public and the medical profession, and appreciate the massaging and outright abrogation of truth and responsibility required to create a market for OxyContin in the first place.
The third strand focuses on the Sacklers – specifically Richard (Michael Stuhlbarg)– the prime mover behind making OxyContin palatable for wider use in order to supersede a lucrative patent held by the company, which is about to run out. He takes a lesson from his Uncle Arthur’s playbook, who was commissioned by 1960s pharma giant Roche to develop a marketing campaign for their anti-anxiety medication Valium.
Abhay and I were a sobbing mess once the series was done and immediately devoured all the Opioid-adjacent content available online. There’s at times way too much going on in the show, with the story jumping between timelines, the beginning and perpetuating of the full-blown Opioid crisis that’s now snowballed into a fentanyl problem. It is perhaps best experienced as a companion piece to the excoriating documentary on the same subject, The Crime of the Century.
Into The Inferno - Halfway through watching footage of throbbing magma in this unnerving documentary, I welled up, embarrassingly. There is a nihilistic awe with which Herzog presents his primeval images of churning red lava, pulsing beneath the Earth’s crust with their terrible destructive power. He flies over volcanoes in a helicopter and looks down directly into the boiling epicentre. It triggers a kind of Conrad-esque horror. Or perhaps ecstasy. Two sides of the same coin with Herzog.
In carrying forth with his tradition of documenting man in nature (in Grizzly Man, Herzog sets out with a a thesis: that Timothy Treadwell’s life as a “kind warrior” protecting the grizzly bears of the Alaska and his tragic but predictable death becomes a kind of allegory for his troubled soul, his alienation from humanity, and ultimately, the unsentimental view of nature towards all mankind), in Into The Inferno, despite its title, Herzog does not explicitly compare volcanoes to hell. The nearest he comes to theology is a final monologue, delivered in his unmistakable rasp: “It is a fire that wants to burst forth and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike.”
Like Klaus Kasinki in Aguirre and Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, this documentary hinges on the beliefs and fears of many such men contending with their own mortality; Clive Oppenheimer, an English volcanologist, a tribal chief from Vanatuau, Kampiro Kayrento (the fossil hunter). Herzog travels to North Korea, Iceland, Indonesia and Ethiopia and investigates people and how their Fate is intertwined with both the unstoppable forces of nature and the capricious sands of geopolitics.
Herzog casts an anthropologist’s eye on them, and sees how these people have developed customs and rituals that are part fearful, part celebratory. They bow the knee to the volcano; they draw strength from its awful power but also cower and convert their fear into religious myths. In Indonesia, locals have evolved the legend of a supernatural American GI called John Frum who will one day emerge from the volcano to spread his bounty. Herzog's camera sits alongside Paektu Mountain, a huge volcano that’s considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean people. A group of young men in uniform approach, marching in formation. We, along with Herzog, assume they are soldiers, but it turns out they are university students, come to pay homage to the volcano. They sing, and as they do, Herzog pans across the line of them and solemnly entreats us to consider the same spectacle ever happening with university students in California.
"Everything we saw was an act of presentation, and we went for it," says Herzog. "There is no way to see this enigmatic country other than how it wants to present itself."
Soon we discover that Kim Il-Sung, who fought the Japanese and became the first president of the country (eventually declared "president for eternity," Herzog informs us), established his secret military base at the volcano, effectively co-opting the country's religious mythology about its own origin to establish his place in its pantheon of gods. Several guides take us around the mountain to different sculptures and, eventually, to the secret base itself, which Herzog says is a place that carries roughly as much weight in the North Korean imagination as Jesus’s birthplace.
Into the Inferno is less interested in science than it is in humanism, in prodding the civilizations that live in the shadow of these volcanoes. Every civilization has tales of its own creation and of future apocalypse — what if both were contained in a mountain, and that mountain loomed over your life? Imagine living beside a mountain that both gave rise to your world and could wipe it out at any moment. Would you fear it? Worship it? Sing about it? All of the above?
The Bad (but pretending to be Good)
The Humans
Family drama through the lens of horror. We’ve seen it before in Hereditary, The Shining, Us. It’s adapted from a 2016 award-winning Broadway play by Stephen Karam and the result is a kind of expressionistic horror in the vein of Polanski. Family gathering at Thanksgiving where the dysfunctions and micro-tragedies of all the characters come into sharp focus. These people look like the last group of humans left alive after some apocalyptic catastrophe, the remnants of homo sapiens being watched and examined at a distance by aliens. The grimly damp and undecorated duplex in which they have assembled could almost be a mass hallucination, triggered by a trauma worse than anything they’re talking about. Karam and his cinematographer Lol Crawley will often record their conversations at a distance, as if they have these people under surveillance. Often, the camera will home in on the damp patches bubbling and cracking the walls, or the clanking old pipes along which weird echoey sounds travel. Sometimes a conversation will take place behind a fiercely detailed closeup of a pigeon feather on a window sill, which has been torn off by one of the anti-vermin spikes. The impending sense of doom and the uncanny takes The Humans beyond miserablism. Are these people sleepwalkers? Or is this all a dream or memory that one of them is having? Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.
Or is it just trauma from the experience of shifting into a new house in New York when you aren’t rich?