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.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Erik Larson (2024).

In our fraught era of social and political polarization, we’ve become accustomed to hearing from pundits about how “there’s no precedent for this” and “we’re in uncharted territory” here. On a superficial level, of course that’s true. Our technology, our news media and modes of communication, our population demographics and so many other things that shape political behavior and life are very different now than they were earlier in American history.

On a deeper level, though, the history of the United States contains far more examples of similar events and tendencies to those in our modern era than we may remember. As the old saying goes, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. Fortunately, several excellent historians and social critics, most notably MSNBC’s popular anchor Rachel Maddow, have begun to turn their eyes and historical spotlights on earlier periods of conflict and strife in our nation’s history that resemble our own situation in important ways.

 

Erik Larson is one of the most popular and readable historians of recent years, and he has also provided us with a disturbing sense of historical parallel with his excellent new book, The Demon of Unrest. His usual storytelling approach is to revisit some event or period in history through the actions and memories of a small number of participants, to bring alive for the reader the lived experience of those who were there. He tries to recreate the look and feel of each era, and the period details and conditions that shaped it, through the lives and recollections of a small number of participants.

 

In Isaac’s Storm, he used this approach to revisit the calamity of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the birth of modern weather forecasting. In The Devil in the White City, Larson told the intriguing story of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and its architect and builder, along with the story of a notorious serial killer’s spree that happened nearby at the same time, and the dogged police investigation to apprehend him. Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts captures the descent of German society in the 1930s into its Nazi nightmare, as experienced by an American diplomat and his family. Dead Wake portrays the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania during World War I, and the experience of those aboard. And in The Splendid and the Vile, Larson gave us an inside look at the Churchill family’s travails, relationships and exploits during the Blitz.

 

Now Larson has turned his adroit historical storytelling to the months leading up to the beginning of the Civil War. The scene is primarily set in Charleston, South Carolina, and begins with the election of Abraham Lincoln as the next president of the United States in late 1860.

 

Larson’s main characters include the U.S. Army commander of Fort Sumter and the other defensive forts in Charleston Harbor; a Southern radical bent on fomenting southern secession from the United States; and a Charleston society lady, who kept detailed diaries of the social life of the city’s notables as they went about preparing for separation from the north.

 

Of course, the human drama of all this is obvious to us now, knowing what lies immediately ahead for these hapless humans going about their ordinary lives in the midst of a developing political crisis. The dramatic tension builds steadily throughout the book, as wrong assumptions are made on both sides about the intentions and beliefs of the people on the other side of the growing divide between north and south.

 

One of the great strengths of this book is the manner in which Larson explores belief systems and social norms in the world of America in the early 1860s. I’ve noticed of late that more and more recent works of history, whether in books, film or television, seem to display a  heightened awareness of the centrality and importance of slavery to understanding our society, thanks no doubt in large part to works like The 1619 Project, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

This positive trend in giving appropriate significance to the social effects and role of slavery as an institution throughout American society is evident here too, as Larson delves into the extent to which the southern aristocracy perceived an existential threat to its way of life in the face of the growing northern abolitionist movement in the north, and in the western territories.

 

Larson details much about the southern aristocracy that embraced the idea of secession. He talks about their own name for themselves, “the Chivalry”, their sense of ancestral continuity and entitlement going back to old world pre-colonial Europe, and their view of themselves as the landed nobility of a near-feudal society. He describes the extent to which the ancient “Code Duello” was widely accepted in the south as the playbook for honorably resolving conflicts, through displays of manly bravery, chivalry and valor. We begin to understand the deep differences between how members of the political power structure of the south saw the world and its place in it, in contrast to the more modern industrial managers and urbanized elites of the north.                

 

What resulted was a tragic misunderstanding with catastrophic results. Although both sides made beginning steps toward bolstering their offensive and defensive military capabilities in the months before the cannons first fired at Fort Sumter, neither side seemed to believe that the other side would resort to arms to resolve the crisis over the issues of slavery and abolition.

 

The north didn’t believe the south would truly push for secession from the union. The southern states, believing they faced an existential threat to their way of life, didn’t believe the north had the determination or the bravery to resist their secessionist plans. Both sides believed things would ultimately be resolved in the normal course of peaceful negotiations. Unfortunately, neither side understood that its demands, and its view of the appropriate outcome, would never be acceptable to the other side.

 

The book ultimately manages to convey two important points about the months leading up to the Civil War, points which feel eerily relevant to our own tumultuous political era. One is the extent to which war arose because two halves of American society had little or no sense of what the other half was thinking, or what was most important to them, and weren't able or willing to communicate effectively with each other. Situations were misjudged, bad decisions were made, actions were taken or not taken, all based on a fundamental misreading of the mood and beliefs of the other half of the country.  

 

The other important insight is that we never really know what disaster awaits us just ahead, an idea as valuable to keep in mind now in our current situation as it was more than 150 years ago. We live our normal lives, and hope for the best. That’s what they did then, and it’s still what we have to do now. There are storm clouds all around us, but we don’t know if or when the storm will come. 

 

This is an excellent social and political history of American society and individuals on the brink of a devastating civil war. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff Goodell (2023).

I read this climate change non-fiction book some months ago, and it’s taken me a while to get around to writing a review of it, but I believe it's still an important review to write and share. The author, Jeff Goodell, is an editor for Rolling Stone magazine who has written several environmental “travelogues” of sorts, which combine accounts of his eco-tourism trips (for journalistic research purposes) with focused discussions of specific elements or results of the climate change phenomenon, the effects of which he observes and recounts from his travels.

In one of his other books, for example, he did a global review of the impact of rising seas from melting ice on Earth’s geography, mankind and our technological civilizations. In this one, he looks at the impacts and feedback loops of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.

 

He begins with an introduction and an overview about a fact which most of us already know and acknowledge is happening: the earth is warming rapidly due to our reliance on burning fossil fuels for much of the energy that powers our societies. He then gives some well-chosen examples of calamitous effects of heat which we are already seeing around us.

 

Next, he moves on to the topic of the effects of heat on the human body. He begins with the particularly grisly and heartbreaking story of a young California couple a few years ago who died with their infant child on a backpacking trip when they failed to plan for the dangers of heat exposure during a family day hike. From this, he moves on to clinical descriptions of how rising heat affects the human body, and how it will soon make increasing numbers of currently-inhabited places around the world no longer fit for habitation, particularly during the warmer months of the year.    

 

From there, the author provides well-researched and organized chapters on a number of other aspects of the effect of rising temperatures on the world. In one chapter, he explores the threat to crops and global food supplies. In another, he discusses the increasingly dangerous effects of heat on outdoors workers, including how extreme heat might prevent the delivery of crucial services in the future. He also explains why we need to develop new work health and safety standards to protect our essential workers who must work outside in hot weather from the extreme heat conditions of the near future.

 

Another chapter provides a close-up look at Antarctica, and the particular dangers to the planet from melting ice there, especially including the potential for sea level rise. He also reviews some of the scientific and engineering ideas that have been proposed to try to slow down and minimize the damage from warming on the polar ice fields and glaciers.

 

Goodell then proceeds on to hotter climes, and raises the problem of tropical insects like mosquitoes and ticks now on the move into many warming temperate zones. He analyzes the extent to which those insect migrations to new ranges will likely spread tropical diseases and epidemics into new regions and human populations, ones which haven’t previously been affected by these problems.

 

In another interesting chapter, he provides a description of how air conditioning works, and how current air conditioning technology actually makes the heat situation worse, both from burning fossil fuels to power them, and because of the heat released in the air conditioning process, but is still necessary to make many parts of the world habitable during the warm season of the year.

 

Toward the end of the book, he moves more toward creative problem-solving, by attempting to identify ways we can adapt to and survive the ongoing rising heat which seems inevitable. For instance, he talks about large-scale “heat events”, like the high pressure “heat dome” that has been over much of the country this summer, and asks whether we should start naming and tracking these high-heat extreme weather events the way we do tropical storms and hurricanes. He goes on to propose some possible approaches and ideas about what it would take to retrofit our modern urban areas for heat survivability in the near future.

 

Much of what is in this book has been in the news in various forms for years for those who are paying attention, as the age of human-caused climate change has settled upon us. However, the author has done a very nice job of focusing the conversation on the heat-related elements of the problem. He does it by taking us on a world tour to see some of the areas where rising temperatures are having early effects, analyzing how the various elements and impacts of rising temperatures fit together, and reporting on some of the means by which we humans may try to mitigate and adapt to the worst environmental effects of rising temperatures around the globe.

 

This is an excellent primer on the coming crisis of heat, and rising air temperatures around the world. Recommended.

Book Review: Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian Klaas (2024).

In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?”  Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.

 

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores  these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.

 

Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.

 

In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.

 

In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.

 

One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.

 

The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.     

 

I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.

 

In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.

 

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.  

 

Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of  contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.