Showing posts with label David Hare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Hare. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Private Faces: notes on Roadkill and Life
Collateral was my favorite TV drama of 2018. With only two months remaining, I’d be surprised if Roadkill doesn’t wind up my favorite drama of 2020. Both were written by David Hare, and in tone and construction, they couldn’t be less alike. Essentially the only thing they have in common is that both are masterful. So basically, what we have here is a 73-year-old playwright and screenwriter at the peak of his powers, which, offhand, might just be the most encouraging thing I can say about 2020.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Crime Pays: The Best of 2018
My annual TV year-in-review, the key difference this year being that the essay is ten months late. But truth be told, when I finished my final Knots Landing essay in July of 2018, I felt perhaps it was time to lay this blog to rest. Maybe I’d said everything I needed to say. I’d written up all fourteen seasons of my favorite series, and the other show that had most inspired me — Doctor Who — had fallen into a creative black hole that rather dampened my desire to discuss it. But recently I was moved to start writing again, and came across a list I had meant to publish last January, of the series I’d most enjoyed in 2018. So I’ve written it up. As always, this is not the sort of “best of” list proffered by formal TV critics, who have to watch (and have access to) every quality show they hear about; I never purport to have “watched everything.” These are simply the shows I saw that I loved the most. As always, they’re a pretty eclectic bunch. And happily, since time isn’t a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, all eleven series are still available for streaming, ten months later.
But first, a warning:
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