TV Review: 800 Words, Seasons 1-3 (Acorn TV).

Hello, and happy late summer!  I noticed my last few reviews were on rather weighty topics, in the midst of a nerve-wracking and perilous time here in our country: assassination attempts, shake-ups in electoral politics, the rising heat around the planet, and another dangerous wildfire season. So for this post, I’m going to share a lighter treat.

 

Given what’s been going on in the real world and the news, I was beyond pleased to discover a truly delightful, happy and enjoyable dramedy (drama/comedy) from Australia on Acorn TV. It’s a number of years old (it wrapped in 2018), but perhaps it just never made it here until recently to any of the likely streaming venues. Or maybe I just missed it for a while. In any case, it’s one of the most pleasant TV series surprises I’ve stumbled upon in quite a while.

 

The basic plot is this: George Turner, a middle-aged newspaper columnist from Sydney, has lost his wife of 20 years, run down by a speeding car in the street. A year has gone by, in which he’s tried to recover from his grief, and help his two high-school age children (an older daughter and a younger son) get their lives back on track. But it’s not really working, at least not for him. So in a moment of impulsive desperation, he decides to move the three of them to Weld, a small surf town on the coast of New Zealand.

 

His reasons for uprooting the family, and going to this particular little rural community, seem to be nothing more substantial than the fact that he used to go there on summer vacations as a kid, and he’d never managed to learn to surf back then. He thinks perhaps he can learn how to do that now, and maybe also get himself and his family back on track, in this nostalgically-remembered far-away place, where he won’t constantly be surrounded by reminders of his beloved wife.

 

George’s job is one that is transportable. He writes regular columns about life that always total exactly 800 words (hence the title). As he moves the family to their new home, his process of writing and reading the column out loud to the viewers becomes the mechanism for sharing his own internal monologue about the process he’s going through with the viewers.

 

That’s the situation as the series begins. What makes it so funny and heartwarming is not just the interactions of the three family members (and the late wife, who makes occasional appearances), but the delightful ensemble cast of oddballs and quirky local characters, and the encounters this little family of Australian outsiders immediately begin to have with them as soon as they arrive.

 

There are a number of very charming romantic plots occurring throughout the series, as all the local unattached women check George out and vie for his attention, while the two kids (Shay and Arlo) enroll in their new high school, and begin to get to know some of their local schoolmates. There are also “big city people” versus “small-town country people” themes and subplots, and intriguing stories about some of the histories and relationships of the various white folk in town with their Māori neighbors (who are also sometimes family members).  

 

And of course, there is all the comedy and drama of the dad, the daughter and the son at the center of the story, as they each slowly grow wiser, become community members, and come to terms in their own ways with the loss of the wife and mother.

 

In trying to come up with an analogy to another TV show that had a similar feel, I immediately thought of The Gilmore Girls. That had a similar kind of story about a small family of strong individuals, with a sad backstory, who were constantly fighting and arguing with each other, and getting into comical situations, but also clearly loved each other. It also featured a gossipy small town setting, full of amusing and eccentric characters, who surround and support the family members at the center of the story.

 

800 Words has the added benefit (for we Americans, anyway) of being set in the beautiful South Pacific island location of New Zealand, with their fun accents, and their very different culture and history from ours. It’s such a treat. Even with the Olympics going on, and all the electoral upheaval, we couldn’t help but binge all three seasons this summer, until we’d reached the very satisfying series conclusion.

 

I did notice and was actually impressed by the fact that this show only lasted three seasons. I’ve often thought in recent years that many good TV shows go on for far too long. The writers and producers often start with an intriguing situation, and initially do a good job of exploring the characters and how they might react to a number of plausible scenarios, but then try to keep it going year after year, long after the original story and situation still justifies it or can keep our attention.

 

The producers of 800 Words didn’t do that – they told a rich, complex story about believable, likable people and their community, played the various plotlines out to a lovely set of endings and resolutions, and then walked away from it, leaving the audience satisfied and feeling good about how it all worked out. That’s how it should be done!

 

I found 800 Words to be remarkably uplifting. I really loved the whole series -- it made me genuinely happy to watch it. I also thought the casting, acting and screenwriting were all excellent, and there was plenty of beautiful scenery thrown in, along with the occasional nice surfing clip. Truly, I enjoyed everything about it. Very highly recommended.

TV Review: For All Mankind (Seasons 1-4). On Apple TV+.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a comment somewhere by an entertainment reviewer who mentioned that “of course” she had immediately started bingeing the latest season of the science fiction space exploration series For All Mankind on Apple TV+. That caught my attention, since for some reason I had been avoiding checking it out, even though I am currently in an Apple TV-watching phase (like many of us, I began economizing by turning my various streaming subscriptions on and off in turn several years ago).

 

Perhaps I was avoiding it because I’ve never been much of a fan of alternate history stories, particularly when they focus on the period of time I’ve lived in. And fictionally riffing on realistic space flight and real space science, rather than the fantastic and magical worlds of most science fiction, somehow sounded kind of dull to me.

 

I was so mistaken. I don’t remember the last television show I’ve watched that has so immediately grabbed my attention and refused to let go. This is an amazing, incredibly exciting piece of television. It works on so many different levels, and explores a vast range of human, social, technological and political topics on (and off) our own world. I’ve been bingeing it for the past several weeks, which is a large project, given that there are currently four seasons of ten episodes apiece, with each episode an hour and a half long. I’m only finishing season 3 now.

 

The basic concept for the series is this: the story begins in the summer of 1969 with the dramatic announcement of the successful landing of the “first man on the Moon”, which as we all know was accomplished (in our version of history) by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission. But in the show’s altered version, the Russian space program gets there a month before the U.S., and not only that, the first person on the moon is a woman – a female cosmonaut.

 

This shocking pair of twists kicks off a frantic escalation of the space race, where human exploration of the moon and Mars are not abandoned for the next fifty years (as they have been in our reality), and where women get an earlier and more prominent role in the U.S. space program than they actually did in the version of reality we have lived through.  

 

These alterations to our familiar history trigger an astonishing new version, peopled by a large ensemble cast of characters that changes over time, as heroes die or move on, characters age, and new players arrive on the scene. The casting and acting is consistently excellent, the scripts and plots are superb, the drama is intense and riveting, and new challenges and dangers are constantly introduced, as individuals and nations vie for power and dominance in space.

 

The structure of the series is essentially this: each season tells the story of the ongoing space race in successive decades. Season 1 takes place in the early 1970s, Season 2 moves the story into the mid-1980s, Season 3 is set in the mid-1990s, and so on. Apparently there are plans to continue out through seven seasons, which would put us somewhere near our own real time (in the 2020s) at the end of the series.

 

Even though there are many characters, there is a core group at the center of the story over time, made up of a few individuals on their own, and several families whose members all have their own individual and familial relationship stories. There are even some characters who are based on real people from our space program, like Deke Slayton and Sally Ride, as well as real major political figures and other celebrities we recognize.

 

At the beginning of For All Mankind, in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Season 1, many of the important characters seem to be taken almost straight out of Tom Wolfe's book (and the movie) The Right Stuff. They’re macho, driven, daring military test pilots (from which the original NASA astronaut corps was built), along with their long-suffering wives and children. As in real life, the family members have to balance the pressures of instant fame, constant press scrutiny, and rigid role expectations as public figures in the American space program, with the recurring terror of waiting for their husbands and fathers to come back from their space training and missions, or perhaps dying on the job.

 

As a group of American women pilots is hastily recruited to compete with the Russian female cosmonauts and their role in the Soviet space program, though, new social and political elements enter the story. With each new plot development, familiar human and social conflicts from our era appear, slowly changing not only the space program, but the society and the course of the altered history itself, as issues like feminism, equal rights for women, gay rights, the civil rights struggle, and many other social pressures interact with the diverging reality and timelines created by the show’s accelerating space race.

 

The show does a terrific job of depicting the lived experience of the people who have built our actual space program, as well as the fictional accelerated version we see in the story. We witness the whole range of emotions, behaviors and plots among the characters: love, ambition, jealousy, loyalty, bravery, heroism, self-sacrifice, selfishness, irrationality, sex, infidelity, addiction and betrayal – really, anything you can imagine in a human drama shows up somewhere in an episode.

 

There’s an important point being made thereby, which is this: no matter what astonishing new worlds humans may visit or inhabit, and what brilliant technologies we invent to get there, we will take our essential natures and problems with us. Humanity and our societies will not be perfected or cleansed of our imperfections by finding new worlds to live on.

 

Another thing I wanted to mention is that this show, more than most science fiction, is steeped in the science and engineering of human space flight and space travel as we understand it. There are no warp drives, death rays or light sabers. It’s telling that several of the most important characters are engineers and scientists.

 

We see them at work in NASA’s Mission Control and Johnson Space Center, and later in private industry, trying to design the equipment the astronauts must use to survive in the hostile environments of space, and often responding to emergency situations reminiscent of our real Apollo 13 mission, where accidents and equipment failures in space have to be remedied in a hurry by NASA Mission Control and the astronauts working together, using whatever materials are at hand.

 

These aspects of the story are made more powerful by the impact of the outstanding visual storytelling throughout the series. We watch as the equipment, the interiors and the backgrounds on Earth slowly change with the technologies and fashions we recognize from each passing decade (along with some new inventions we've never seen before). The producers have done all this with wonderful attention to historical period detail and authenticity.

 

Did I mention that since this is essentially a Cold War story, we’ll also encounter all the familiar dramatic plot lines that come with that genre too? With the U.S.-Soviet competition in space, we also naturally get espionage plots, domestic political conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, and even the threat of battles and war in space. Just in case there aren’t enough tensions and dangers in space exploration itself to keep the story lively . . .   

Another truly impressive feature of the series is how convincing and lifelike the landscapes of the Moon and Mars appear, with astronauts trying to live and work in their primitive habitats on those distant worlds, and inside their tiny spacecraft on the way. It all looks so real, just like the video and pictures we’ve seen taken by our space program’s astronauts and remote rovers.

 

There are apparently extensive podcasts that accompany this entire series, which delve into the science behind each episode and its plot developments. I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of those yet, but it seems to me it might be a further bonanza for anyone who is interested in learning more about space exploration, and the challenges humanity faces in trying to survive off this planet, traveling in deep space and on at least to our nearest planetary neighbors.

 

For All Mankind is simply brilliant television, a compelling, entertaining and vast epic about humanity’s quest for the stars, as well as an exploration of our own society, our world and recent times from the perspective of a subtly altered reality. Very highly recommended.   

TV Review: Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Season 1). Netflix.

A friend who recently found her way into the vast world of South Korean television on Netflix suggested we take a look at this show. We were not disappointed, although it was quite different in many ways from any other show I’ve watched before.

There were a couple of hurdles we had to get over when we first started watching it. The first was that, like most foreign TV shows, it required reading sub-titles. That problem resolved itself while we were watching one of the later episodes in this first season, when I noticed a message while bringing up the show in Netflix that dubbing in English was now available. 

Without doing anything to my settings, when the show came on, it now had American English and slang coming out of the characters' mouths. That was actually a little jarring at first, since we knew from prior shows that these are Koreans in their own native land, who definitely aren’t speaking English. But we got used to it, and it did help not to have to read the sub-titles thereafter.

The other hurdle was getting used to the different norms, cultural standards and behavior of South Korean society, as opposed to our own, and figuring out from the plot what those differences were. It took a little while to get used to that, but it was well worth it, and also culturally enlightening.

But now, the show.  The series tells the story of Woo Young-Woo (played enchantingly by Park Eun-bin), a petite young Korean woman just beginning her career as an attorney. However, she is no ordinary new lawyer, as we find out wonderfully from the opening scenes from her childhood. 

She carries the heavy burden of a serious autism condition, with many of the characteristic abnormal physical mannerisms, difficulties with noise, touch and sensory over-stimulation, and the tendency to make abrupt “too honest” statements that create awkward social situations for her. She also carries the built-in disadvantage (perhaps even heavier there than in our society) of being one of the few women in an ancient profession dominated by men.

But she is also “extraordinary” in that she has a photographic memory, an IQ of 164, and the ability to rapidly analyze every law and statute of the South Korean legal code in her head, and apply it to finding creative solutions to the civil and criminal cases before her. This brilliance, which led her to being the top student in her law school, is a super-power, but it also makes her (at least initially) the envy of her fellow young aspiring attorneys, who are all jockeying for position in a high-end law firm.

Then there is the curious mystery of her parentage. We know who her father is, and he is the loving parent who has raised her, who she loves and with whom she still lives. We don’t know who her mother is at the outset, but as that plot line develops, it becomes another important part of the story, and adds to the more serious and dramatic aspects of Woo Young-Woo’s new life situation as an adult and a lawyer.   

And of course, eventually there’s romance, although it’s no ordinary challenge for her to navigate that otherwise normal life process. How does a person with her disabilities and especially her aversion to touch navigate learning how to love and be close to another person in a romantic way? Yet the results seem both realistic and very satisfying.   

This is an almost unbelievably sweet and enjoyable entertainment. Not unlike most of our TV shows from the United States, the cast is filled with good-looking young actors who are persuasive and engaging in their roles. But at the center of it all is Woo Young-Woo, and the amazing performance of Park Eun-bin in the role, with all her endearing odd behaviors, her kindness, gentleness and wisdom, her search for a role for herself centered on her search for justice and fairness in a tough and complex world, and her encyclopedic knowledge of and love for whales. 

Apparently the show has been renewed for another season. And it’s just so fun!  It's one of my favorite new TV series from the past year, and a great introduction to South Korean television. Highly recommended.

TV Review: Alaska Daily (2022). ABC.

Our local Seattle paper, The Seattle Times, is one of a few major city newspapers nationally that is still family owned and independent. Four generations of the Blethen family have owned and shepherded the paper through more than a century of American history, including wars, depression and recession, the rise of the internet, and the onslaught of the colossal media empires that have consolidated (and frequently gutted) most of the other news organizations across the country under the control of a few super-rich owners and private equity firms.

Because of the paper’s own history, The Seattle Times editorial board carries regular coverage of the ongoing struggle of local journalism to survive in the face of massive revenue losses and media consolidation, and the paper advocates tirelessly for the support of local journalism as a critical source of important news and investigations on the local level, as an indispensable component of a functioning democracy. 

So it was not surprising that in a column I read in The Seattle Times on this same topic last week, there was a review and a pitch for a new prime-time ABC dramatic series, just launched, called Alaska Daily. 

Loosely based on a real newspaper, The Alaska Daily News in Anchorage, it tells the story of Eileen Fitzgerald, a successful, driven New York investigative journalist (played superbly by Hillary Swank). Disgraced and unfairly forced out of her prestigious job because of an inadequately sourced (but true) story about a corrupt official, she is recruited by an old colleague to move to Anchorage to work for a small, poorly funded local newspaper, the fictional Daily Alaskan.

Having now watched the first two episodes of Alaska Daily, I am really excited about this show and its prospects. I don’t watch many shows from the “big 3” old networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) – The Good Fight is the only other show from these networks in my active list at the moment – but this one is off to a great start.

I generally enjoy a good “fish out of water” story, especially the ones where the main protagonist is a big city slicker suddenly forced to survive in a smaller, rural community, where the opinions, resources and relationships are different, but the people, their lives and loves are just as real as back in the city, and where the need for personal change, adaptability and growth (for all the characters) are the inevitable drivers of the dramatic tensions in the story, and the clash of two cultures.

In just two episodes, Swank has set up this story and her character powerfully and convincingly. As a journalist, she comes across as a force of nature – fast-moving, quick to understand how to get information and find sources to interview, yet direct to the point of rudeness, arrogant and inflexible in her dealings with her colleagues, and almost ruthless in her determination to get the story.

She seems cold and unlikable on first impression, but she also struggles with emotional anxiety, and shows glimmers of a passion and care for the people whose lives are affected by the stories she covers that hint at much more depth than the self-centered careerist ambitions we (and other characters) might assume are driving her. In other words, she’s a complex and interesting character, ripe for the sort of change and personal growth we expect in a "fish out of water" story like this.  At the same time, it's clear already that her big-city sophistication will bring new tools and effectiveness to the dedicated small-town reporters around her.

I would watch this show just to see how her character develops, but there is a lot more going on too. Much of it has to do with showing the fascinating reality of the lives of local journalists – the relationships between the reporters, editors and newsroom staff, the perils of asking tough questions of vulnerable and often hostile sources, and the creative ways investigative journalists find information and verify it in solving mysteries and telling stories, much like police detectives, but without the power of guns and the state to compel cooperation on the part of witnesses.

One of my other all-time favorite shows was The Newsroom (on HBO), produced by Aaron Sorkin, about a fictional cable news organization during the Obama presidency (also highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it). Alaska Daily is the first dramatic series I've seen since then that appears to be ready to portray the lives of working reporters investigating real-world stories. 

The Newsroom gave a fictional view of cable television journalists following major national news and politics; Alaska Daily instead shows print journalists in a small media market, working on major regional stories, beginning with the ongoing tragedy of Indigenous women who continue to be abducted, trafficked and murdered at a horrifying rate in Alaska and across the west, in most cases with little apparent notice or accountability.

This particular first investigation in the show mirrors a real one that has been conducted and published by The Alaska Daily News. But I expect in the course of Alaska Daily’s opening season, and perhaps future seasons (if the show is continued), we will see other story lines and investigations as well.

One other thing that is noteworthy about this new show – it’s about Alaska. In 2019, just before the pandemic, my wife and I took our first trip to see Alaska, including Anchorage. And it really is a special and unusual place, which I felt again immediately when I started watching the show.

Alaska has such unique features, like the fact that you can’t get to many places in the state except by flying in small planes; the routine presence of very large wild animals nearby, like moose, elk and bear; the extremes of the seasons, the long summer days and the long winter nights, the bitter winter cold and isolation – all of these factors and more make for a special kind of place, where communities are small and close-knit of necessity, yet are still torn by the same political splits, personality clashes, prejudices and competing economic interests we find everywhere else. These are themes I also expect to see explored in this show.

One can never make a completely accurate prediction about the fate, or the ultimate quality, of a brand new television series, based on the first couple of shows. And I may be wrong, but I think that Alaska Daily has more going for it out of the gate than most other new series I know about, particularly on the big 3 networks. Check it out, and see what you think! Highly recommended.