Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey!

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2021.  

#19 : Line Of Duty

Now overshadowed by its finale, dismissed as anticlimactic by viewers and aggressively defended at length by Jed Mercurio, Line of Duty’s sixth series was just as tight and knotty as ever. And it absolutely pummelled everything else on television to pieces. Sixteen million people watched its final episode in May. In 2021, that’s incredible.


This is the third one I've seen on the list and I'm not entirely sure what I can say about it - it was pretty much your standard twisty Line Of Duty fare and you're either going to be a fan or not (I like it).  All the usual players played their usual parts with Kelly Macdonald being a welcome addition to the cast who slotted in nicely and Anna Maxwell Martin making a particularly nasty return.  I'd also completely forgotten about the very bizarre role that James Nesbitt plays in this season until I saw it mentioned on Wikipedia.

Yes, there was a bit of a fuss about the finale but to be honest I was happier with it being the way it was rather than some kind of (SPOILER ALERT) "it was Ted all along!" nonsense which I think would have resulted in much more of an uproar.  I also liked the very end of the finale which was an "everything continues to be shit" coda which feels very appropriate for the country at this particular point in time.

If you haven't seen Line Of Duty, then it's well worth a watch but don't start here - it's definitely a series that merits starting at the beginning and working your way through it (and don't worry when they call back to characters you don't remember, because no-one else did either).  To my shame, I still have to watch season 2 which I still plan to do despite knowing pretty much what happens in it from later seasons.  The other thing I'd say is don't get too attached to characters - Line Of Duty has a great line in killing people off quickly, particularly in the first episode of a season.  I wouldn't say this was the best season, but it was still very watchable - and lots of people did.  Including you, probably.

#18 - Enjoyably odd
#20 - TLDR

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more