This isn't a fight! Oh, it fucking is now.

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2022.  

#38 : Cheaters

Was this the easiest show to tear your way through in 2022? Served up in juicy 10-minute morsels, it followed the lives of Fola (Susan Wokoma) and Josh (Joshua McGuire), who meet on a work trip, have a one-night-stand … then fly home and realise they live directly across the road from each other, with their partners. It sizzled with tension and chemistry throughout. What fun.


I've heard this is good but I must admit I'm not convinced by the ten minute episode thing - is that going to be enough to get into something before it's time to wrap it all up?

Hmmm - I'm not sure.  It feels well written and well acted, but I just didn't get into it - I gave it four episodes (out of a possible 18, which feels like a weird number) and I didn't hate it but just found I didn't warm to any of the characters, so I didn't really care whether any of them cheated or not.  I also found it it a bit tonally uneven - it couldn't quite decide if it was drama, soap opera or pantomime.  The acting was fine, it all looked fine - but I just didn't care enough to follow it to the end.  And the ten minute thing did feel like a gimmick - maybe someone had decided that "the kids" don't have a long attention span these days, but the episodes ended as soon as they begun.

So, I gave up on it - sorry, cheaters!  I'm sure plenty of people would like it, although I'm not sure who - it feels maybe more of a female friendly program, but I could be way off there.  I am, however, looking forward to seeing Susan Wokoma on the next season of Taskmaster.  Hmmm, I wonder if The Guardian have ever included Taskmaster in their end of year list - it totally deserves it!

#37 - Well worth a watch
#40 - Unfortunately unavailable

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