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Reviews
Endeavour: Zenana (2020)
A Pivotal Poiint
Not a spoiler to say the design and costuming of this three episode series is simply magnificent. Violetta of course but Morse is at his most mod, short thin tie nearly always loosened and Thursday has a top coat (mackintosh?) in a horizontal pattern. Not tweed or tattersall but a style that sets off his dour dark tweets and brown hat. The sets includes Morse's restoration of the iconic Oxford house (pricey for a policeman even a DI), the vivid boho house of Violetta's Lebanese's dancer's house, the interior of a fictional Oxford women's college warden's office, and of course at last Venice. The hotel room and the opera house are worth the price of admission.
If there is a quibble, it is that there is perhaps too much going on, even if all the strands are necessary to travel up into the knot that one just knew explained certain tendencies of the older Morse. But if things move faster than usual, there are still scenes where characters get to reflect for a beat on their part in the series of tragedies. And the original series itself often ended on exactly the same kind of operatic note.
Of course I will rewatch for the fashion and the interiors. Not a draw always for the quintessential Oxford procedural avant la lettre. But of course we come for the forensics filtered through a strong personality but we hope for the almost too clever literary solution as much based on Morse's gut instincts as his sharply analytical mind. Rather like what solving a crossword is like.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Targets of Obsession (2011)
CSI Goes All In
And the show nails the landing in both stories. One story is complete by the end and genuinely a nail-biter. The other is an episode of an arc, a duel between Haskell and Langston, but a duet by Bill Irwin and Laurence Fishburne. Hard to imagine an episode of television where an actor who is magnificently external as Irwin who is a a movement and performance artist as much as a character actor, and another who is as internal as Fishburne, who has as textured a face as James Edward Olmos or Danny Trujillo, but is almost always calm in his line readings.
The additional elements: suggestive but maybe junk science involving genes, FMRi and a "warrior" disposition, a common abusive background for the serial killer and the forensic scientist (Dr Langston). This begins a series of episodes in which CSI does its own Hannibal story, where the investigator must (it seems) identify with the killer to solve the crime. That it is a riff on on the Hannibal Lecter oeuvre is because Fishburne spent four years as playing Jack Crawford on "Hannibal", the same Crawford from Silence but in the origin story of Lecter, brings in the neurodivergent detective, Will Graham back into the field. And of course William Peterson, the first star of CSI, played Will Graham in his first appearance on film in Michael Mann's Manhunter. Oh, and Jason Bieber does a fine job as the son of a white supremacist.
I have to add: Only viewers who think operatic touches in a procedural are "too dramatic" but they are basically clueless viewers. Robert Goren's tricks in the interview room may have made clear the melodramatic heart in the best of procedurals, but it has always been there. Recall Ben Stone's quiet but mant defense of liberal pieties. McCoy always could second-guess his second-guess how his beliefs squared with the law, though never in the courtroom; there his reedy tenor was pitch-perfect when it came to inducing guilt and judgment. But the punchline of how procedurals enable melodrama and operatic touches is of course that Paul Sorvino who replaced George Dzunda.as Mike Logan's partner on fons origo of procedurals, Law & Order, was also an opera singer. Once one sees the key, it unlocks a lot: courtroom speeches and intense interrogations are arias and duets, the detective (even if they deny it) are the knightly combatants against the chaos outdoors and, lastly, very few of the detectives and lawyers are in the final instance happy, partnered and balanced people. This is why Ted Danson's DB Russell from the west coast and cosily married knows he is the weirdo.
Evil: E Is for Elevator (2021)
An Adult Show About Usually Adolescently Treated Subjects
Which makes Evil a unique show, particularly in the supernatural/horror space, one that crosses over with the comic fanboy demo. Thus it is no surprise that several written reviews basically react with horror at the very mention of race--which is not the first time that race or what the Incel/Fanboy Right calls politics which automatically destroys this genre for these snowflakes who have a computer always at their hands.
What is unrealistic and annoying is how insidiously a show like The Walking Dead avoids confronting politics as politics. And this starts from the first season where the beginning promotes Morgan and his boy from the walk-on they have in the comic on. But Morgan leaves the narrative almost as soon as he is invoked. This type of representation is in fact a signaling, but the TWD is almost comical in its undermining of this gesture. By the third season, viewers could bet on when a black member of the cast would die as the sole red shirt in an operation. The same thing can be shown in how the show treats women or even the fact that the collapse embodied by the zombies was actually in progress politically and environmentally. To a naive viewer--the fanboy mentioned above--this avoidance with allusion may seem "sophisticated", while the show's figuring of white male vigilanteism as canny, when it embodies a wish fulfillment of a correlative accelerationist attitude that fans of TWD probably indulge in.
If any show is spoiled by how it treats politics, it is TWD. Evil on the other hand is as subtle in its treatment issues of religion, race, gender and conflict as it is surprising in how its premises are developed. It is no surprise that fanboys looking for jump scares are intimidated by a show which is thrillingly realistic about how comic book style "evil" can enter people's lives.