I'm going to start the touchbase with a BBC TV special the family watched last week that originally aired in 2016. The special was Peter Pan Goes Wrong which is based on the play by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields of the Mischief Theatre Company, creators of The Play That Goes Wrong (2012).
The premise as it is with all the "Goes Wrong" productions is that the actors and crew of Cornley Polytechnic Drama totally ruin a production of the 1904 play Peter Pan through petty bickering, questionable acting skills and pretty much not knowing what the fuck they are doing.
Somehow actual professional actor person David Suchet (best known for his portrayal of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot) gets roped into this thing as the narrator.
As you can guess from the title, things go wrong.
An oversized actor in a dog costume gets stuck in the doggy door.
One overworked female actor forced to play multiple roles in rapid succession isn't quite always ready from one character switch to another.
A techie has been drafted to perform as an actor at the last minute. Don't worry, his lines will be fed to him via a hardly noticeable head set. Except the head set is a pair of big bulky head phones from like the 1970's or something and he's being fed his lines, his stage instructions, random commentary, scandalous gossip and random signals from passing emergency vehicles, all of which the techie is repeating and at full volume.
A rotating stage will not stop rotating and ultimately the pirate ship comes loose from its moorings on stage and spins off through other BBC programming including Teletubbies. The pirate ship returns to the stage and yes, there is a giant Teletubby on board the ship.
It is a lung bursting hilarious experience that we got to watch as a family on the night before Randie and Rosie headed back to college.
OK, from the hilarity of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, let's turn to the NOT hilarity of The Sandman.
This adaption of Neil Gaiman's acclaimed comic book series from DC dropped on Netflix months ago but I'm only now getting to it.
It's been more than a few years since I last looked at The Sandman comic but it remains indelibly imprinted on my mind enough that I recognized how remarkably comics accurate this TV series is.
The series opens as does the comic with a misguided necromancer trying to summon Death but capture her brother Dream instead. This summoner and his cursed progeny hold Dream captive for over a century but gain nothing for it. They gain no power or wisdom as Dream says nothing from within his glass spellbound cage. All they gain is a lifetime of fear and rage. They know they've captured a being of unimaginable power who gives them nothing in exchange for his freedom. All they know that should this being ever get free, they will be damned.
Dream does eventually escape but finds much has gone wrong during his long captivity. The Dream Realm has fallen into ruin and his objects of power, his sand, his helmet and his ruby have been stolen and lost.
As in the comics, the return of the sand is accomplished with the help of Constantine. Unlike the comics, this series gives us a female version, Joanna Constantine played by Jenna Coleman. The change in genders does nothing to change Constantine who is still a ruthless arcane manipulator. Think Clara Oswald with less empathy and a propensity to say "bollocks" and "fuck" a lot.
Following the pattern of the comics, Dream has to go to Hell to recover his helmet and this means a confrontation with Lucifer Morningstar. Again, for the TV series we get a gender flip on the casting with Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer Morningstar, the ruler of Hell. OK, I understand why this was done, to bring the depiction of Lucifer more in line with the Sandman comics which differs from Lucifer's depiction in the Lucifer TV series. But while Christie is perfectly fine as Lucifer, I can't help but think that Tom Ellis would have been so damn good in this sequence.
The recovery of the Ruby is a more dire matter and the story from both the comics and how it is told in this series is gut wrenching and terrible. John Dee (David Thewlis) has the ruby and is seeking to make the world a better place by making it a more honest place, stripping away lies we tell each other and ourselves, the facades we put up to show the world. Dee's unravelling of lies is centered around a 24 hour diner.
Bette, the waitress, thinks she has a sense of about people, their hopes and dreams. Well, maybe not.
- She thinks the power couple in the corner booth celebrating their anniversary are the epitome of happy. They are not.
- She thinks Kate and Mark would make a cute couple. Kate is a lesbian.
- She thinks diner cook Marsh is in love with her. He's not, he's gay and in sexual relationship with her 21 year old son.
Over in his corner of the diner, John Dee manipulates the ruby and over the course of 24 hours, no one can enter or leave the diner and those trapped within commit various acts of sexual depravity, self multilation and murder. Both the original story and it's adaption are emotionally and violently brutal.
Meanwhile, the TV monitors in the diner are showing news programs that this shit is happening all over the world. But it's not the worldwide scope that makes the story terrifying but it's intimate confinement to this one diner.
Dream intervenes, stripping John Dee of the power of the Ruby.
The 6th episode adapts two issues of the comic book series. "The Sound of Her Wings" is the story of Dream following his sister Death on her appointed rounds. Dream learns more about humanity and also watching his sister fulfill her role makes him realize what his role and his approach to it should be. It is an emotional tale as Death comes to claim her charges. The old man who gets to play one last song on his violin and say a Hebrew prayer before he accompanies Death is how we would hope death might actually come. When we see that a baby in his crib is on Death's list, well, that's a bit harder to take. It is a devastating scene.
The last part of the episode adapts "Men of Good Fortune" which is about Dream's relationship with a man named Hob Gadling who simply refuses to die. Death is a sucker's game and over the centuries, Dream visits him every 100 years. Hob sometimes is enjoying good fortune, sometime not. But even in the hard times, he never relents from his belief that death is just simply not for him.
There's not a lot of levity to be found in The Sandman but we do get some relief from Dream's raven, Matthew, voiced by Patton Oswalt. It's not all jokes with Matthew with some surprisingly nuanced acting from Oswalt between the snarky comments.
And there's some set up that Dream's sibling Desire is up to sketchy shit. The gender neutral Desire is played by gender neutral actor Mason Alexander Park which is kind of weird since Park is also the really cool good person Ian on Quantum Leap. Seeing the person who brings us loveable Ian being all sinister and shit, that's going to be weird.
The Sandman is a faithful adaption of the comic but with just enough differences to make the show it's own thing.
And that is that for the Tuesday TV Touchbase this week.
Next week, we'll catch up the mid season returns of Quantum Leap and Young Sheldon.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
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