Andrea and I are catching up on the 2nd season of Julia, the Max series about the early days of Julia Child on her PBS cooking show.
Andrea and I came to this show for David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwith who had appeared on Frasier (original series). I'm also interested in shows that are set in this particular late 1950's/early 1960's era (such as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).
Sarah Lancashire is Julia Child, cookbook author turned unexpected TV star via her public television cooking show, The French Chef. The 2nd season begins with Julia having agreed to make another season of The French Chef for Boston's WGBH now hiding in France working on another cookbook with her sister Simca, a brittle tetchy woman who clashes with Julia's more exuberant passions. Simca wants recipes that perfectly practical and Julia wants to make food that is FUN!
I am all in for a dalliance in the French countryside but season 2 has spent 3 episodes there and I really want to see Julia interacting with the gang back at WGBH. And there's stuff going on there.
Poor producer Alice Naman, isolated as only a woman of color can be in a white male dominated TV industry can be in the early 1960's, is struggling. Her duties of overseeing The French Chef seems to have extended to saving all WGBH. And she has a pregnancy scare. She has unprotected sex with her boyfriend and 4 days later she's scared she pregnant because she has to pee a lot.
My wife Andrea who is a woman agrees she's pregnant.
I am a man and I'm thinking she can't know she's pregnant after 4 days and she probably has a UTI.
Alice shares her concerns with Elaine Levitch, a woman Alice hired as the new director for The French Chef. Elaine tells her it's probably a UTI.
Do I have a better understanding of female biology than my wife?
Anyway...
We're 3 episodes in and I think we're finally getting Julia on a plane back to Boston.
I know I should just sit back, relax and enjoy that people get to do that: just drop everything, go to France and do something else for 3 months.
Instead of enjoying it vicariously, all I can think is, "Well, I just CAN'T just drop everything, go to France and do something else for 3 months!"
Meanwhile, Andrea and I are slogging through the 6th (and blessedly final) season of The Crown or what I've come to call That Damn Thing.
The 6th season opens with what we know is Diana's death. A black sedan zips by on a Paris highway closely pursued by other vehicles. The sedans zooms out of sight into a tunnel and we hear a heartrending crash.
The screen goes to black and we see a graphic: "8 weeks earlier"
It seems Diana can just drop everything, go to France and do nothing.
(Not the time and place, Dave-El. Er, sorry.)
Diana is in France at the invitation of Mohamed Al-Fayed who is working double time as matchmaker to get Diana together with his son Dodi despite Dodi's protests and being engaged to another woman.
The first 4 episodes that have dropped so far for season 6 tracks the events of the 8 weeks that lead to the deadly accident in that Paris tunnel.
It's hard to watch for Andrea and I. This is history we lived through, watching on the news with the desperate hope that Diana has survived and the dread realization as time passed that those hopes we dwindling. Diana was genuinely a person beloved around the globe and the news of her death is so terrible and violent a way was difficult to process.
While all that is going on, back in England, Prince Charles is in a tizzy of a snit that his efforts to get the people to accept and like Camilla keep getting upstaged by Diana's activities in France.
But when Diana dies, Prince Charles actually seems upset by that and is ticked off by his mummy's reluctance to allow a full royal funeral. Yeah, she got divorced from Charles and was no longer part of the official royal family but damn it, the people loved her and they need closure.
And may be a few words of solace from their Queen?
Prince Phillip as he has aged and moved further away from Matt Smith has become a bit of an obstinate hard nosed prick and urges Queen Elizabeth not to give to us such tawdry displays of emotion.
Fuck that! She's the bloody queen and can do what she wants. And she finally makes an address to the nation to express that she understands and shares in their grief.
Another 6 episodes of That Damn Thing... I mean, The Crown will drop in a week or so and then we will be done with this.
We really should've left when Matt Smith left, you know?
Next week the Touchbase, I will post about a new Australia set crime show called Deadloch. Think of a cross between Broadchurch and The L Word with Australian accents and a large seal.
I'll get to season 2 of Invincible.
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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