So what have I been watching on TV?
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
My journey through The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel continues albeit a bit slowly. After several weeks, I'm only now finishing the first season.
Which is weird as I am enjoying the show a lot. The writing is funny and witty. And I think I might be in love with Rachel Brosnahan as Midge.
She's a woman ahead of her time but also evoking the presence of a classic film star. And any time Rachel is sharing screen time with Alex Borstein as her erstwhile agent Susie is just electric.
As is the case with TV shows built for streaming platforms, this show is taking its time to build to the central premise. It takes 8 episodes to get Midge to being the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. On one hand I appreciate all the care and detail that goes into building the foundation of Midge's character and her development from safe and secure housewife and mother to ground breaking comic. On the other hand, I was impatient to see her get there. 8 hour long episodes seems a long time to tell an origin story. I want to see the stories of stand up comedian Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I guess we'll get there with season 2.
Snowpiercer
Back in the 1990s, director David Lynch took TV by storm with his bizarre off kilter prime time soap, Twin Peaks. The series kicks off with the murder of Laura Palmer. The murder was a plot device for Lynch to jump start this strange landscape known as Twin Peaks.
The murder at the heart of Snowpiercer's first season is a plot device to bring us into this strange world of the super train carrying what's left of humanity through a frozen, barren Earth. Much like Twin Peaks, the murder mystery for Snowpiercer is a device to introduce us to a strange, new world. The murder mystery itself is secondary to the big picture of Snowpiercer itself.
Is it really true that "Snowpiercer is all that is left of the world." The opening narration from Jinju suggests the possibility of others who exist in bunkers.
Episode 4 does break down the murder mystery with Andre Layton uncovering a conspiracy of murder involving a young woman in First Class and her bodyguard. But the larger picture about Snowpiercer still unfolds. Melanie Cavill surmises that Layton knows the secret of her true identity. As we learned at the end of the first episode, Melanie IS Mr. Wilford. This is dangerous information for Andre Layton to have as we see at the end of Sunday's episode.
The show is not subtle about the class divisions that run the length of the train with the resulting tensions that threaten the balance of life on Snowpiercer that Melanie is determined to maintain. The comparisons of this building class war to the real world we're dealing with are inescapable.
Other stuff
Sometimes while channel bopping, I'll land on something that I never heard of before.
This past weekend, I was up very, very late when I landed on Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network where I discovered a truly bizarre, mind bending show called Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.
It is a live-action series on Adult Swim that's been around since 2013. This is the first I've heard of it.
It's a workplace comedy about Gary, an associate demon, as he attempts to capture souls on earth in order to climb the corporate ladder of the underworld. Gary and his buddies are not that smart.
Among the 15 minute episodes I saw in the wee hours of Friday night/Saturday morning was "The Party Hole". Gary and his demon pals try tempt people on their deathbeds to enter hell by way of a 'party hole'. It doesn't work that well but they find they get better results by just kidnapping living people and imprisoning them in a cave in hell. This bolsters their numbers a lot. Gary's demon team target groups who have signed up for escape rooms.
In another episode, Gary is drafted to be an attorney for a guy who may have an unjustly been consigned to Hell for eating meat on a Friday which is apparently no longer a punishable sin on the books. The guy in question was a barbecue restaurateur who fed the homeless. The trial is going well until we find out who the BBQ guy was feeding the homeless to and then things take a decidedly bad turn for everyone involved.
And there's the episode where a tortured soul named Eddie is promoted to a demon. Eddie is thrilled with this promotion that he will be a demon forever and ever. Smash cut to a scene with the real life actors in a make-up session where the actor who plays Eddie is complaining about the painting process for demon characters and doesn't want to play a demon anymore. Back to the show and Eddie is back to be a tortured soul again and no longer a demon.
This show is some weird shit.
Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell is a strange, pastel hued fever dream of a TV show that made me question reality. That such a thing exists defies my concept of self and my place in the universe.
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