His series of six near-future nightmares asked questions that possess us in 2016. Read moreĬharlie Brooker is showing us the abyss into which we are amorally plummeting. A shocking reflection of a society and a system in which facts have become relative. It was perceptive in its representation of race in the US, and its structure was thrilling, with the accused alternately positioned as victim and unreliable narrator. It had a harrowing central performance by Riz Ahmed, and a documentary realism about the horrors of imprisonment on Rikers Island. A cop summarises the evidence excitedly: “Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll – and he’s a Muslim!” Yet this apparently simple “solve” remains, across the whole of this HBO eight-parter, ambiguous to the end – and possibly even beyond it.
When Naz Khan, the 23-year-old student son of a Pakistani American cab driver, is found leaving a crime scene containing the corpse of a young woman with whom he spent a wild night, the case seems clear-cut. As richly satisfying and devastating as you could have hoped.
#VIMEO EROTIC HBO FULL#
In a world full of shiny dramas whose characters don’t feel rounded, watching Wainwright’s people endure their tragedies then keep on is a glorious, restorative sight. Sarah Lancashire was the linchpin again, of course, as Sgt Catherine Cawood, shouldering burden upon burden in the absence of any alternative. As always in her work, women were – simply, unapologetically, vitally – at the heart of it. The violence was less bloody, but Wainwright’s pitiless examination of the human condition as it plays out in the Calder Valley was bleaker, more brutal and braver than before. The second series of Sally Wainwright’s masterpiece was arguably even better than the astonishing first.
#VIMEO EROTIC HBO TV#
And from the deep-dive discussion of the plot to the soundtrack, the endless memes and a new star in the shape of Millie Bobby Brown, Stranger Things provided a genuine 2016 TV moment.
It quickly spread its narrative into a string theory-twisting, sci-fi horror via CIA conspiracy thriller with a side of high-school romance. Set in the fictional Indiana town of Hawkins, it’s the story of the mysterious disappearance of Will Byers, one-quarter of a gang of nerds. The Duffer brothers took the best of 80s pop culture – elements of John Carpenter, Steph(v)ens King and Spielberg, shoved them in with Dungeons and Dragons, New Order and Winona Ryder – and ended up with an algorithm-busting, genre-melding, word-of-mouth smash. The key ingredients barely need repeating. And it’s why, a decade from now, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is going to be a national treasure. It’s why Amazon picked up the series and made it so buzzworthy Stateside. It was a stupendous ending, and it launched an already brilliant series into the stratosphere. The series opened with a monologue about anal sex, sped through a terrorist-incited bathroom panic attack and rows and rows of plaster-cast penises – to that finale which threw you totally off-kilter. Read moreīold and filthy and utterly self-assured, Fleabag was unlike anything else on television this year.
That’s its umbrella distinction, its overarching achievement: it is a teenage kick, a transport of wonderment that adult life mostly only reminds you of. Planet Earth II made me reach into an emotional vault I haven’t accessed for decades. The dynamics of such scenarios, triumph and disaster, the symphony of co-operation, the elation of escape, underdogs battling desperate odds – these are the cornerstones of narrative, the stuff that drove us to invent language in the first place. The iguana hatchlings chased by snakes were the jewel in its crown, closely followed by the famished lions making an Ocean’s Eleven, last-ditch punt at a giraffe. But I find myself transfixed by its first principle: that we all have a visceral connection to nature, root for it, mourn with it, rejoice with it. The editing is seamless, the scripts are arresting, the perfectionism is there in every particular. And there is more going on than the majesty of nature. Planet Earth II is a stunning ensemble of talent, beyond David Attenborough’s sober poetry, which he deploys judiciously, modestly and obliquely to remind the audience not just that macaques are cheeky, but that the cameramen are shit hot as well.
0 kommentar(er)
