Young and Full of Fluff

I’ve been watching Midsomer Murders, because it’s there, really. It’s on Netflix streaming and there are 18 seasons, with 4-5 episodes each, each episode an hour and three quarters, or 126 hours altogether.

They are WILDLY variant in quality, episode to episode. I can actually tell which ones are based on Caroline Graham’s books and which ones aren’t, though I’ve never read any, because Graham has a way of creating capital-C Characters—kooky undertakers and strange ladies that live in train carriages. She also has a bit of an obsession with incest and with crazy old people. I enjoy those episodes; they’re very twisty, and there’s always something interesting going on.

Then there are the…others. Like the episode about people dying in an old folks home where it’s revealed that they all just died of natural causes! No conspiracy or murder! Just senile old people being paranoid. WHAT AN EXCITING TWO HOURS OF TELEVISION.

There’s one more thing about the series that kind of bothers me, though. And that is Det. Barnaby’s wife, Joyce. She is the perfect little homemaker, in that she doesn’t appear to do anything else. In the first episode, she’s cooking him Julia Child-style lunches—by the end of that season, they’ve decided it would be more interesting if she were a terrible cook. And from then on she’s constantly getting ribbed about her awful cooking. But here is her role, from week to week: she cooks meals that Barnaby then jumps up from, having had an epiphany; she makes plans to spend time with him that he bails on; and she listens to his exposition. There’s a lot of her listening to him talking about his day, and not much reciprocated.

They have an adult daughter, Cully, who at least has her own life (as a stage actress). But she’s always around helping her mom take care of her dad. There’s a whole episode based around Joyce going to her mother’s and Cully thinking she’ll get father-daughter bonding time, only to spend the whole week cooking meals he doesn’t eat and making dinner plans he doesn’t show up for. This is a lesson, you see—she needs to learn that this is what it’s like to be married. (Not really exaggerating about this.)

And of course, should Joyce ever want something, like to renew her wedding vows, or do something on her own, like judge a local contest, it goes disastrously wrong and ends in murder. That’s the kind of show it is, but it also reinforces this image that she’s really not allowed to have her own life outside of her husband’s work.

These are all old saws, of course. And this little family is meant to be loving and idyllic. But the repetition of these sort of Norman Rockwell tropes—of having the woman constantly striving to have the perfect home only to have the man’s needs run rough shod all over it—is really grating to me, precisely because it is taken as so normal as to be completely unquestioned.

After a few episodes, I engaged in a thought experiment—are there any shows with female lead detectives who are married and who have the same dynamic? I can think of plenty where the woman has no success in love at all because she is so focused on her career. But I can only think of one, The Closer, where the woman is in a successful long-term relationship in which she is constantly running over the man’s emotional needs and breaking commitments because of her work. And even then, Fritz is an FBI agent and they frequently get into knock-down fights about her disregard for him. Compare that to Midsomer Murders, where Joyce not only doesn’t get mad about her husband’s behavior, but when her daughter does, counsels her to just accept it.

- I watched This Means War, which is the most horrid conglomeration of offensive rom com cliches I've ever seen in one place. If you ever want a demonstration of what not to do, watch that movie. It says something that a movie with Chris Pine and Tom Hardy as best bros, where Tom says can you imagine having what we have with each other with a woman, and Chris says no, where they watch surveillance tapes of each other having sex, and it is still the least slashable movie in history. The least of the problems is that the two of them are inexplicably cousins.

I confess that I was mostly using it for background noise while completing other tasks, but it still made me feel like I needed a shower.

- On the other hand, I've started watching Foyle's War and it is fantastic. It is a police procedural set on the south coast of England during World War II. So though it's a procedural, and though it's on the homefront, it's really about the war. (And I need to warn for all sorts of horrible war related things. Let's just say, people of all ages die, and if you don't want to spend two hours bawling, skip the third episode.)

What I love about it is how it shows the little ways that the war changes things: like one character running late because she disabled the car the previous night, in case the Germans invade, and now can't find the missing part. Or that the only people around are children, old men, and women. And the few RAF pilots on active duty. That the town is populated by World War I vets, all of whom deal with the shadow of that war differently when facing this one. And that the crimes are largely opportunistic--people who think the war will cover for them.

It's really quite good, and packed with oh, it's that guy!s. In the first few episodes alone, you've got James McAvoy, David Tennant, the dude who played Brutus in Rome and some women who I swear were in Austen adaptations I've seen.

The only drawback is each episode is an hour forty minutes, so you put one on thinking you'll watch a little bit and take a break and next thing you know it's dinner.

I've been watching Coal, which Netflix told me was a documentary series when it is, in fact, a reality show. It's basically a Deadliest Catch knock-off set in a coal mine. For reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, I'm interested in mines--I've read about coal mines and went to Kiruna specifically to tour the largest iron mine in the world. So I've continued watching despite all the cheesy reality-ness just for a chance to see a working coal mine.

The show is about a start-up coal mine, and it becomes very clear very quickly why these two prospectors could get the mineral rights for this seam. Because all the big coal companies concluded--correctly--that it would cost more to mine the coal than the coal is worth.

In the first few episodes, you see that the amount of coal that has to be mined each shift to break even--that is, just to cover the cost of the mine running for a day, not even to recoup the initial investment--is the very most that has ever been mined in a single shift. When your peak performance (which you almost never reach) is your break even point, you're doing it wrong.

And when they actually once manage to exceed the minimum, just by a little, they discover that the company they contract to truck the coal away from the mine isn't capable of hauling that much coal. The trucks have to go over a bridge with a weight limit to leave the mine, which means they can only be half full.

So, to reiterate, in order to turn a profit, this mine would have to:
a) Mine as much as they have on their best day every single day and
b) Truck more coal than they are capable of trucking.

Not to mention, lots of shit goes wrong in a coal mine. And not just of the life-threatening variety. The most common injury for these miners is actually back injuries, since the mine is only three and a half feet tall. You spend your whole day bent double hauling heavy things, you're going to injure your back. Clearly related to this, pain killer abuse is rampant.

And there's the fact that this mine only has one of every piece of equipment and is running all of it twenty hours a day with no maintenance scheduled in. They need absolutely every piece of equipment to run for the mine to work, and they're not maintaining any of it. So shit breaks down. CONSTANTLY. Plus, their generator isn't actually big enough to power all that equipment, so if they run the miner any more than gingerly, it trips the circuit breaker. And every time that happens, it takes fifteen minutes to reset. Not because the machine takes that long to reset, but because somebody has to walk up a hill to the generator. Given that they trip the circuit breaker fifteen times a shift, you would think it would be logical to make the guy stay next to the generator, rather than waste almost four hours of a ten hour shift waiting for him to walk up a hill.

And we also find out that they are underpaying the miners by calling them temporary workers who just happen to be operating whatever piece of equipment, rather than calling them equipment operators and paying them appropriately. And they don't pay benefits. Coal miners. With no health insurance.

Which means management spends all its time yelling at the miners for being crap when a) anyone who could get a job at any other mine would take it rather than staying in this shit hole and b) it's not the miners that are making the production so low, it's the incredibly crap equipment held together with gaffer tape and barely powered.

The big drama of the season is building up to a fight between the miners and the owners and I'm sorry, but that's self-inflicted. There's bad management everywhere, but there's something especially morally repugnant about watching terrible management of a company where the employees are literally risking their lives, both in the short and long term, every shift.


As a side note, have you ever paid attention to subtitles in reality TV? A lot of the time they use subtitles because the recording conditions aren't optimal, but there also seems to be a degree off of standard American accent that automatically gets subtitled. As these miners all have thick Appalachian accents, they are almost always subtitled, though I almost never have trouble understanding them. There's something vaguely...I don't know...offensive about how and when producers choose to subtitle.

In TV news, I started watching The Guardian. Because Simon Baker is cute, and for previously stated reasons, I can't bring myself to watch any more of The Mentalist.

The premise of The Guardian is that Baker is a spoiled rich lawyer who was busted on drug charges and has to do community service providing legal aid to abused children. Cue twee heartwarming shmaltz, you'd think.

But--I've only watched a handful of episodes so far and in pretty much every one, he fails. He pulls out all the stops, performs genius heroic legal theatrics, and he still fails. The girl runs away with her abuser, or the kid still gets taken away from his loving stepfather and put in an awful group home, or the kid dies, or the kid is so traumatized that nothing Baker does actually makes any difference.

And it's not the perverse voyeurism of Law & Order:SVU, where the whole point is to shock and horrify the main characters so that you can end the episode with ominous music and a slow pan away from their gaping faces. Nor does it really seem to be about him Learning A Lesson, though that's clearly the underlying arc of the show.

It's more like the constant grind of trying hard and being disappointed is what this kind of work is about. And at least so far, Baker isn't throwing himself at these cases because he's looking for redemption or becoming a better person, but because he is a stubborn asshole, and you give him a bureaucratic mess of a broken system and he's going to try to prove that he can fix it. Even though he can't.

He's also...not a nice character. I mean, his character is a flaming douchebag in Mentalist, but you're clearly meant to see his assholery in that show as him "not taking any crap" and "cutting through the red tape" or some nonsense. In this show, there's an episode whose entire plot is that he slept with a sixteen-year-old. Not too many shows would do that to a main character.

So I'm left wondering how this show possibly stayed on the air for an entire season, let alone several. It so skillfully eschews all of the cheesy, tearjerker moments the premise seems designed for. I haven't decided if I like it yet, but...at least it's something different.