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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Two series you can actually stand to watch
By
Published: May 01, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
I’ve turned the TV on so rarely in the last five years that the Young Adult has to do it for me.
I’m often asked, “Didn’t you love X [some universally beloved binge on HBO or Netflix”]?”
I explain I don’t watch TV.
“What do you do at night?”
“I collect copyrights,” I say. Meaning: I work the night shift. I finish books and plays, some of which are produced and/or picked up by film/TV producers.
So I am absolutely no help to those of you who have watched every first-rate — and many fourth-rate — series in the last few months. As ever, I’ve been working the night shift.
But I do want to tell you about two gold-star, all-time 10 best series I watched. Neither is available on a streaming service.
It’s fascinating to note that “Borgen,” made in Denmark, has been picked up for a new season by Netflix, which will feature the original cast –- and will be filmed in Danish. You’ll see it in… 2022.
Equally pleased to tell you that “State of Play,” the genius BBC series, was so great it was remade as an American movie. It was to star Brad Pitt, who quit a week before the start of filming because the script was a significant deviation from the BBC original. Russell Crowe replaced him. It is to be avoided as surely as you’d reject a knock at the door from a plumber you have not called.
STATE OF PLAY
Bill Nighy stars. He’s been in a million things, but you probably recall him in “Love Actually.”
“State of Play” starts simply. Sonia Baker falls to her death in a London tube station. Did she fall? Commit suicide? Or was she… pushed?
That’s the last simple question in the mini-series. For, that same day, a kid gets killed in another part of London. No connection. Not possible, really — Sonia Baker was a young research assistant to Steven Collins, chairman of the prestigious Energy Select Committee. The kid? A nobody.
At the newspaper, investigative reporter Cal McCaffrey and his colleagues start to dig. It just happens that Cal was once the campaign manager for Steven Collins. And has long had a crush on Collins’ wife. A meaningless detail? Not when Cal learns that his old friend was having an affair with the research assistant — and that Collins might have been planning to leave his wife for her.
From here, the complications multiply exponentially. For into the mix come politics, international oil companies and the corporate concerns of the paper’s owners, to say nothing of their personal and professional conflicts. Add the romantic triangle, and the stew pot overflows. Smarties will love trying to stay current and think ahead.
And the dialogue! When the cops show up in the newsroom, the editor is wonderfully arch: ”If you want to talk to busy people, it is best to make an appointment. Otherwise, you risk disappointment.” Later, when reporters ask if they can run the story, he deadpans: “How much paper do you think you’ll need?”
After the first episode, the reviewer for The Guardian wrote that “State of Play” is “bloody magic… If you can count the best dramas of recent years on the fingers of both hands, it’s time to grow a new finger.”
Typical British understatement.
[To buy the BLUE-RAY from Amazon, click here. Do not – no no no — buy the DVD. It will not play on American systems.]
BORGEN
“Borgen” is shorthand for “the castle,” the home of the Danish Parliament and the government’s executive offices. It’s where Birgitte Nyborg — in the series, Denmark’s first female prime minister — spends every waking hour trying to keep the support of her modest majority and move the country forward. It’s not an easy task, and it’s not her only task. She’s married, with two children, and her husband and her kids also need attention.
In Europe, “Borgen” was huge. It riveted 40% of the citizens of Denmark —– okay, the population of Denmark is only 5,600,000 –— and was a major hit in England and France. In the United States, Stephen King beat the drums for it, calling “Borgen” the best show of 2012.
“Borgen” asks compelling questions. One, can you acquire power and still be yourself — and is there a psychic law that says you lose some connection to yourself every time you gain more power? Two, is it possible to have a career and a meaningful family life and marriage at the same time?
That second question has been regularly asked in bestselling books by female American executives. Their answers —– “lean in” or “get more sleep” —– are grotesquely superficial and inadequate. In “Borgen,” they have grit and bite.
There’s no Danish actress better suited for the role of prime minister than Sidse Babett Knudsen. (You may remember her as the rich man’s wife in After the Wedding.) In an American series, she’d be written as Kevin Spacey in “House of Cards.” But Birgitte Nyborg is written and played in defiance of that easy, lazy characterization. Watch:
[To buy Season 1 from Amazon, click here. If you buy Season 1, you’ll want Season 2. And then you’ll want Season 3.]
TODAY’S POEM
Louise Glück, “Afternoons and Early Evenings”
The beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dying
but could still enter into random conversations with strangers,
random but also deliberate, so impressions of the world
were still forming and changing you,
and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer
though by then everything was happening more slowly—
boutiques, restaurants, a little wine shop with a striped awning,
once a cat was sleeping in the doorway;
it was cool there, in the shadows, and I thought
I would like to sleep like that again, to have in my mind
not one thought. And later we would eat polpo and saganaki,
the waiter cutting leaves of oregano into a saucer of oil—
What was it, six o’clock? So when we left it was still light
and everything could be seen for what it was,
and then you got in the car—
where did you go next, after those days,
where although you could not speak you were not lost?
WHAT’S STREAMING IN THE “THEATER”
From Theatermania:
Find out the shows and events available online in the coming week.
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES
Everything, all in one place.
UPDATE: EO Hand Soap is available again.
UPDATE: I spoke with a NYC lung specialist. He endorses Vitamin D, but warns you not to double/triple dose. In large doses, Vitamin D becomes toxic.
BONUS VIDEO: BILL NIGHY AT THE ART MUSEUM
