500 programmes and nothing to watch: Top Ten TV series of 2019
Friday, 29 March 2024 10:04

500 programmes and nothing to watch: Top Ten TV series of 2019

Dennis Broe reviews the best TV Series of 2019

I could not fit all the series I liked this year into a Top Ten so I have what amounts to a Top 30 best series in global television. At first glance this might indicate that series are improving but let’s not be so hasty. In the US alone, not to mention worldwide, there were nearly 500 series produced in 2019 on network, cable and streaming services, so the fact that there are a rising number of watchable and even quality series is more a product of the number of series as a whole increasing.

Peak TV

We have gone from what used to be called the Second Golden Age of Television, which in truth may have finished around 2004 with the period’s ending marked by the demise of the HBO series Deadwood, to what is now referred to as “Peak TV.”

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The name denotes a phenomenon where the market, as happened with oil, is glutted, and one has to dig down much deeper to refine or find a watchable series. Yes, there are more quality series but there are also more mediocre series with the vast majority being simply unwatchable, just niche series with a very limited appeal or pre-packaged rip-offs of previous series or movies. In the supposedly quality era of streaming TV we are actually getting closer to the phenomena of cable, that is 500 channels, or in this case series, with almost nothing to watch.

Streaming Services

That is the first major trend, saturation or peak TV. The second of course is the rise of the streaming services, with Netflix and Amazon now joined by Disney+ and Apple TV+ and with NBC Universal, titled Peacock, and AT&T Time Warner, titled HBO Max, still to come. A wave of consolidation accompanied these behemoths with Disney buying Fox, AT&T absorbing Time Warner, CBS merging with Paramount Viacom, and, finally, Comcast, one of the largest cable companies in the US, also now owning NBC and buying Europe’s leading satellite company Sky. The goal in many of these mergers is to both create original series and lock up movie studio back catalogues, so that the service provides a seemingly endless array of product.

The other unstated goal of these conglomerates moving online is to use serial TV as a way to harvest data on users and sell the data to advertisers, so that advertisers are paying not only to advertise on the streaming service but also for data collected by the service. Hence, AT&T, the conservative company from Dallas, on merging with Time Warner bought a company that allows it to send targeted ads to all devices and Disney+ contracted with Publicis, a company which is already adept at collecting data from TV sets and selling it without the viewer’s consent. So, the movement now allows these entertainment complexes to become full-fledged members of the surveillance economy, and converts the “freedom” of Serial TV into a device for creating and manipulating consumer interest, and then spying on and harvesting it.

A word about my particular bent in terms of series TV and in general. Manny Farber, way back in the early ’60s, wrote a crucial essay on the difference between Elephant and Termite Art, Elephant Art being big-budget, “meaningful” art with a socially uplifting purpose and Termite Art being low-budget, degraded, prickly art with no apparent redeeming social value. He might as well have been saying bourgeois art which caters to an upper-middle-class taste versus working-class art, enjoyed by the masses and discounted by the critics. I am almost always on the side of Termite Art. On TV this would be the Nancy Drews, Burden of Truth, In the Dark rather than the Elephant Art of Succession, The Morning Show, and Billions/Black Monday

tv Succession       

The other trend is that this year saw the first wave of post-MeToo series come down the  pipeline and the prognostication is positive. Female leads in Stumptown, In the Dark, Proven Innocent, Burden of Truth and Nancy Drew generally were part of a formula that produced series that were nicer, less violent, and more social and political than previous series with male leads. This was apparent for example in the difference in two series on Apple TV+, the more patriarchal, typically apocryphal Mad Max-like See and the more matriarchal, looser and more quietly questioning the persistence of the colonial social order of Dickinson.

 I should add also vis-à-vis my Top Series that a successful series is one that gets on the air, not necessarily one that has a long run, since so many of the best series are cancelled quickly, with cancellation in a commercial medium generally having little to do with the quality of the series.

Top 15 TV Series

 tv homecoming

Homecoming – Much more than a Julia Roberts vehicle, this Amazon Prime series, originated as a podcast which made for an extremely tightly constructed half hour, the equivalent plot-wise of most hour series. Robert’s slowly coming to grips with a corporate-induced amnesia shed light on, and was one of the few series to tackle, the nefariousness of Big Pharma as the opioid crisis persists.

Bad Banks – Season One of this German-Luxembourg series, now airing on Hulu, with Season Two soon to come, boasted one of the most outstanding pilots beginning with a run on a bank and flashing back to the financial crimes that led to that collapse including millennial bankers cheering wildly at a California earthquake, which resulted in their profiting from a financial instrument that pays off on catastrophes.

Bob Hearts Abishola – Much better Chuck Lorre series than the Elephant-like The Kominsky Method. This touching on-again, off-again courtship and romance solidly rooted in the day-to-day conflicts of its female Nigerian hospital nurse and male Detroit small business owner, has its share of embarrassing stock sitcom characters (Abishola’s aunt and uncle, Bob’s sister and brother) but the leads, and especially Folake Olowofoyeku’s Abishola, aided by the writing of Gina Yashere make this an extremely heartwarming series.

Bloody Vienna – BBC2 mystery series, likely soon to circulate on BBC America, that maps the reactionary anti-semitism and stifling militarism of post fin-de-siecle Vienna as well as its grappling toward modernity in its Secessionist art at the dawning of psychoanalysis. Both are embodied in the young Freudian Max Lieberman who aids a working-class Austrian detective by employing this new science of the mind to solve crimes that originate in the repressed atmosphere of the upper reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Who is America – Sasha Baron Cohen’s one-season wonder on Showtime in which he inhabits four characters in Candid Camera-like situations but exposes the innate racist and violent nature of the actual American personalities he catches being themselves. The best character is his Israeli officer Colonel Erran Morad whose own militarist impulses allow those of the Southern Old Boy subjects he encourages to emerge on screen.

Jeux d’influence – or Game of Influence, now broadcasting on Amazon Prime. This French series lays bare the disastrous effects of lobbyists who in this case are aiming to keep a cancerous agricultural product, based on Monsanto’s glyphosphate, on the market. It’s a well-told Zola-esque view of the industry, its farmer victims, and the politicians of all the legislative parties, who, knowing the product is murderous, delay banning it, just as in fact Macron’s government has done with the actual product.

Proven Innocent – Fox, the network where all good series go to die, broadcast 13 episodes, then cancelled this show about a female attorney who fights to free unlawfully jailed victims of the Chicago criminal justice system and in so doing exposes the inequities of that system. This is the antidote to the more conservative procedural Cold Case since here the back case is about proving the defendant innocent. A marvelous complete in itself 13-episode arc also ties the original murder, for which Rachel Lefevre’s attorney was imprisoned, back to Kelsey Grammer’s prosecutor, now running for attorney general who persecutes her, with the show linking the actual guilt to the post-Citizens United world where unlimited money furthers unjust candidates.

Folklore – HBO Asia series based on the fact that as its creator Singapore director Eric Khoo says “Everyone in Asia believes in ghosts.” But, the catch, in this marvelous horror anthology from six Asian countries, is that, unlike Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone, which took a while to become relevant, this series right off the bat combines ghost stories with the actual horror of ordinary people’s lives on a continent where the disparity between rich and poor is vast.

Back To Life – Airing on Showtime, this is a second stunning and funny series from alumni of the too-soon-departed satire of the television industry Episodes. Following Steven Mangan’s Hang Ups, Daisy Haggard’s series about a woman sent to prison for murder returning to a town that rejects her is a bittersweet version of Rectify, but here the humor and the pathos is more direct, as Haggard proves herself first a marvellous comedian, then a marvellous actress.

tv Grisse

Grisse – Another HBO Asia series, this one condensing 200 years of rebellion against the Dutch in a province of Indonesia into a single uprising that employs the iconography and attitudes of a Sergio Leone Western to make its point about Dutch colonial brutality amid native resistance and compliance.

Nancy Drew – One of the year’s outstanding pilots as we find out that the CW’s contemporary Nancy Drew, is not at all your mother or grandmother’s female detective. Nancy’s mother died of pancreatic cancer, her father is a not-to-be-trusted scheming lawyer who defends the rich in this coastal New England town, Nancy’s African-American boyfriend served time for manslaughter and there are two murders in the town of its leading wealthy daughters, one of whom still haunts the area. The difference between the dream world of the original and the far tougher world of the Veronica Mars present is what lends this series its frisson.

Burden of Truth – CW again in a trend that is seeing American and Canadian production companies collaborating, meaning Canada’s more critical social democratic spirit fuses with American neoliberal television to create more socially relevant series. In this case Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk stars as a corporate lawyer who secedes from her father’s scurrilous corporate law firm to battle over two polluters causing brain damage to their children and data harvesters. Couldn’t be more relevant and utterly overlooked by mainstream critics.

Chambers – Netflix cancelled this series after one season and again critics despised it for being muddled in its presentation. In truth, the series, though sometimes a bit obscure, was not at all unclear about its sharp class presentation of the distinction and potential menaces to its Native American/African American heroine living in a trailer by the upper-middle-class Sedona type patronizing couple who employ Me Generation healing tropes in their mansion to attempt to coopt her. 

The Mandalorian – Best post-original Star Wars creation. This tight, terse horse opera about a bounty hunter with a heart operating in the nether spaces in the time after the empire has collapsed, that is after the end of the first trilogy, takes up the question of how life is lived in the wake of a shattered evil empire, a question the US may be facing at the moment as its imperial reign comes to an end.

Late Night with Seth Meyers – Not strictly a series but perhaps the funniest show on television and best of the late night hosts. Meyers’ humor, in his “In The News” and “A Closer Look” segments almost always with a political or social point, is the sharpest in late night, though lately he has gone overboard and is sounding a little one-note on impeachment. Along with him is the funniest person on television, Amber Ruffin whose segments “Amber Says What” and with Jenny Hagel “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” all of which can be watched on YouTube, constitute the most precise take anywhere in American media on the inequality of black-white relationships in Trump’s America.

Honorable Mentions

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 Damnation – USA, now-cancelled, series currently on Netflix about the effects of the depression on an Iowa farming community, featuring a scene where farmers intimidate bankers at an auction to get their foreclosed property back, right out of King Vidor’s film made during the Depression, called Our Daily Bread.

 In the dark – This series about an alcoholic blind girl becoming a detective brings the feistiness of Jessica Jones to network TV, with a Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Scooby Doo-like group replacing Jones alcoholic isolation.  

 Killing Eve – Two seasons now of this intriguing are they or aren’t they lesbian relationship, spy thriller, with television’s most compelling female lovers since the two combatants on Zena Warrior Princess.

 Stella Bloomquist – Icelandic series, available on Viaplay, about a sexually liberated female lawyer who wades into and runs afoul of the patriarchal power in the upper echelon of her world as she defends the marginalized of that society.

 Floodlands – Dutch-Belgium series about a nebulous border area between the two countries with a female Euro/African detective investigating the traumatizing of a young African immigrant and in so doing exposing prejudice on both sides of the border.

tv Godfather of Harlem

Godfather of Harlem - Chris Brancato’s best entry since the first season of Narcos boasts superb performances by Forest Whitaker’s wily gangster and Giancarlo Esposito’s sleezy Adam Clayton Powell, but what raises the series above the usual mobster fare and gives it its moral fibre is the revolutionary presence of Nigel Thatch’s Malcolm X.

 Dickinson – This life of the poet Emily Dickinson utilizes the Sophia Coppola/Maria Antoinette school of history as respecting the period details but making ultra-modern the language and music, so that Emily complains when asked to fetch water from the well that “This is such bullshit” before doing her chores over a rap montage. Best episode is her own championing of the environment while finding Henry David Thoreau a crass opportunist. 

X Company – Too quickly cancelled Canadian series, streaming on Netflix and Hulu, about a bevy of male spies behind enemy lines in World War II, led by a Jewish female who burrows deep within the Nazi hierarchy as the series moves over its three seasons from France to Poland to Berlin and as she extracts her own revenge on the worst of the calculating murderers of her people.

The Loch – Above average Brit detective series, now streaming on Amazon Prime, featuring a female detective in charge of her first murder investigation in Scotland’s Loch Ness, with the monster emerging at the end not as horrific otherworld creature but as the embedded evil of the region’s patriarchy.

 Cloak & Dagger – USA series from Marvel about a male/female black/white friendship between two teens each with their own power and both plagued and tramautized by the corporate malfeasance and police brutality that mark their town.

C.B. Strike – Based on the series of novels by J.K. Rowling, this noirish detective show features an intriguing, professional relationship between its seasoned and cynical private investigator and the female assistant who wants to break into the field herself.

Requiem – BBC series streaming on Netflix about the haunting of a young female cellist after her mother’s suicide which seamlessly but in a sophisticated way mixes the psychological and the supernatural.  

tv Mystery Road

Mystery Road – Australian series streaming on Acorn TV featuring Aaron Peterson’s Aboriginal detective here teamed with Judy Davis’ tough local cop as they investigate both the murder of a young girl and Davis’ white settler family legacy which pollutes the town and perpetuates the brutality and inequality which marks the country’s history.

Ozark – Netflix series whose second season, with the hardening of the Laura Linney character, could not match its first but which still refreshingly concentrated on the financial nuts and bolts of money laundering in a part of the country long left for dead.  

 Stumptown – Cobie Smulders as an alcoholic, sex-addled war vet slowly turned private detective as part of her recovery process in the darker recesses of Portland. The town’s teenage drug pushers ,under stress in the competitive quest for college entry grades, mirrors the problems of the country as a whole, while providing a female take on those problems.

Five Worst  

 The Morning Show – Perhaps the worst show of this or any season. This Apple TV+ “blockbuster” manages to waste the talents of its Two and A Half Comedians (Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell and Jennifer Aniston) by taking the silliness of morning television seriously, portraying it as deadly accurate journalism at a time when the actual news media is more frivolous than ever and when an Episodes-like satire would have made this a show to remember.

Succession – The Rupert Murdoch clan as King Lear. What a falling off is this, in HBO’s entry in the “wealth porn” genre. The Financial Times noted the show had no likeable characters but still fascinated us, meaning that while more people now despise the superrich that is no reason not to continue to be obsessed with their every move. Equally yucky is Black Monday, the African-American version of this phenomenon which originated with Showtime’s Billions where self-serving material gain is the only value.

Tin Star – Tim Roth as an ex-British cop in the Canadian West pursued by his demons and inflicting them on his family. A repulsive character whose detecting method is to simply exert violence by beating suspects. A hero for these times perhaps, but not the hero we need.

Dollface – Supposedly feminist series starring the superb Kat Dennings as a woman quickly dumped and trying to return to the world of female friends. Sounds good in theory but on the ground, takes the powerful in-charge, working-class, waitress from Two Broke Girls and transforms her into a weak and whimpering relationship buffoon.

Secret City/Deep State – The first is a promising Australian series with Fringe’s Anna Torv as an investigative reporter boasting a dark conspiracy theory visual overlay that unfortunately is undone by its rampant and exhausting anti-Chinese sentiment. The second has no redeeming social value in a Fox Sky TV produced series that is not about undemocratic Western intelligence operations as its name implies but is instead a cheering section for a black ops team tasked with assassinating Iranian scientists, making Trump’s prelude-to-war gesture of merely cancelling Obama’s nuclear pact seem humanitarian. A new low even for Fox.

Note: You can find out more about the ins and outs of contemporary television in Dennis Broe's book Birth of the Binge.

Uma Thurman at Series Mania
Friday, 29 March 2024 10:04

Serial TV: Platforms, Concentration and The Same Old Thing

Dennis Broe reports from the Series Mania festival, previews some of the new series due to hit our screens, and surveys trends in the ever-concentrating, hugely profitable industry of digital media

There certainly was mania, with over 60 series being screened, three days of industry panels, and with masterclasses (extended interviews) with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s writer and Sharp Objects showrunner Marti Noxon and Uma Thurman presenting her new show Chambers, all at the Series Mania festival in Lille in Northern France last week. Series Mania has now become the leading international television gathering in the world and is staking a claim on being for television what the Cannes Festival is for film.

There was mania, but there was also anxiety as those in the European television industry readied themselves for the coming onslaught of the American streaming services which they greeted alternately as partners who would expand their options for producing series, or as moneymakers invading their market and against whom they could not compete.

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The streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the coming NBC Universal, Disney/Fox and Time Warner-AT&T as well as Apple and Facebook) have been challenged in various ways by governments, associations and unions. While the conference was underway the European Union passed a directive increasing the power of copyright holders affecting mainly print media, but perhaps applicable to television as well, which could aid local producers.

The directive was announced and celebrated by Pascal Rodard, Director of the French Society of Authors and Composers in a panel titled “Towards a New Balance Between Creators and Platforms.” Director Kaat Beels, of the Netflix series Beau Sejour, described a Danish work action against Netflix in which creative personnel were championing their right to be paid residuals from the streaming services, which tend to pay upfront and then build libraries as the main asset, which last in perpetuity and increase the value of the service – but the creators receive no more payments.

Howard Rodman, a former president of the American Writer’s Guild West, explained that the Guild had lost the right to residuals in the 1980s and 1990s on VHS/DVD sales and had subsequently staged one of the most important strikes in the history of telecommunications in 2008 when, after a 100-day walkout, Hollywood writers won the right to negotiate residuals with the streaming platforms. That power grew in 2017 when a threated strike forced the owners to increase residual rights by 15 percent.

Ominously, outside the festival the news was of profit accumulation being pushed within an ever narrowing concentration of players in moves to flatten the content of the streaming services in more of a big-tent approach, to attract wider audiences which would make these companies more like the networks of old. With cable services declining (subscribers in the US having gone from a peak of 100 million to 90 million today) the coming streaming services will grow more powerful. Last week, AT&T essentially forced out the heads of HBO and the Turner Networks and replaced them by an executive formerly from NBC, signaling that the coming AT&T/Time Warner service will move HBO and Turner from boutique audiences to more of a one-size-fits-all model.

The size and profit level of the existing services, particularly Netflix, is also daunting for European producers. In Britain, in order to compete, the BBC and ITV have formed a streaming service titled Britbox. However, the total funds available for production is around $184 million which is not small unless it is compared to the $13 billion Netflix spent last year. Both Amazon and Netflix promised increasing attention to telling local European stories but this drive toward what is becoming a streaming service buzzword – diversity – comes in the wake of a European law requiring that at least 30 percent of the product available on the streaming services come from European countries.

Perhaps the last word came from a European distributor who said that because of their global reach and budget, the streaming services were starting to treat European markets much like American television networks treated them in the 1980s and 1990s when their product was dominant on European screens.

Elsewhere Marti Noxon, who cut her feminist writing teeth on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, talked candidly about her career and her life and about the importance of putting imperfection on the TV screen. Her latest series is Sharp Objects, with Amy Adams as an alcoholic reporter who returns to her small hometown in Missouri to solve what might be the serial murder of young girls. Noxon described her own bout with alcohol, including an evening when she staggered out of an LA bar and passed out in her car in downtown LA without locking the doors, a scene that is replayed in the series.

Uma Thurman, however, was coy and tight-lipped about her life. At one point when asked if the working environment for women in studios was changing on account of Me Too, she dropped her guarded attitude for a moment and said that frankly the attitude had to change, that the environment couldn’t get any worse. But she quickly amended that to say more blandly that things were getting better. Her Netflix series Chambers premiering in late April, does though indicate a degree of self-awareness, presenting her tight-lipped, proper, Anglo-bourgeois mother as the terrifying villain of the series.

DB the red line

Opener of the festival was The Red Line, one small step for Serial TV but one giant leap for its highly conservative network CBS. The series, set around the Red Line metro in Chicago which crosses several race and class boundaries concerns a black-white gay couple and their black daughter. Noah Wylie of Emergency stars as a high school teacher left with grief that he is for a while unable to express after his husband is shot and killed by the Chicago police. The best thing about the series, and the radical element for the older audiences on CBS, is the way it normalizes a gay school teacher making him compassionate and sensitive.

The series claims to present a cross-section of the city but actually there is really only about two degrees of separation between its characters and it does not explore in real depth, as did say Steve McQueen’s Widows, the history of class antagonism in that city. It adopts the “everyone has their reasons” cop-out in exploring the lives of the city’s white police force, while ignoring the structural reasons for the long history of race and class tensions in the city. It doesn’t help that the most charismatic and interesting character, the Afro-American gay husband, is killed in the opening sequence; but the series may get a boost with the recent election of Chicago’s first black, female, openly gay mayor.  

NBC checked in with Manifest, about a plane that is lost for five years. When it lands its members both sport unnatural powers and spout religious mumbo-jumbo about the miracle that is happening to them, a sign perhaps of the presence of the conservative owner of NBC Comcast. The plane somehow breached five years in time while actually in network time 15 years have elapsed between this series and its forebear Lost. Minus the heavily religious overlay, the series unfolds as an interesting mystery.

One of the most garish series of the festival was Showtime’s, which is CBS’s sinister cable side, Black Monday about the events leading to the 1987 stock market crash. The pilot is co-directed by Seth Rogan whose protégé Adam McKay directed The Big Short, all of which raises the expectations that the series will be an exposé of Wall Street. Nothing of the kind though. Instead it simply wallows in money and its largely black cast headed by Don Cheadle makes it simply the minority version of the other Showtime hit Billions. Both series amount to “wealth porn” in an era in which inequality, especially for black workers, continues to grow.

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The real exposé came in the form of a Norwegian series Exit, based on a fictionalized version of actual interviews with four financial magnates in banking, hedge-fund management, and investing. The financial violence they inflict on the society is mirrored by each of the four engaging in actual violence in the episode that centers on them including knifing a sex worker, beating senseless an annoying guest at a party, and kickboxing a passerby after a drunken spree. The lead character’s violence though is psychological, making his wife believe that she is the reason they can’t have kids by concealing his vasectomy. Exit was named best series in the Panorama, or Global, section of the festival by a student jury. The show is a tough-minded anti-Billions which no doubt benefitted from the student jury and it is unlikely that a more “mature” – meaning comfortably bourgeois – jury would have awarded the prize to this hard-hitting show.

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Another top series was HBO Asia’s Folklore, created by Singapore director Eric Khoo, who claimed at the screening that “Everyone in Asia believes in ghosts.” Folklore is a horror anthology with each episode in the Asian language of its origin. The first episode from Indonesian director Joko Anwar, titled “A Mother’s Love”, is a kind of Babadook exploration of an itinerant mother’s cloying affection, while also situating her haunting within the context of the street poverty of Jakarta.

In the second episode, directed by Khoo, the series hits its stride as a Singapore developer conceals the finding of the body of a victimized young girl because it will reflect badly on the construction complex, and then pays the price as the girl rises and haunts the site. This episode was very good on the migrant Chinese and Malay workers in Singapore, themselves victimized by the developer as was the young girl. An antidote to the remaking of Singapore into a Hollywood shopping complex ala Rodeo Drive that was Crazy Rich Asians.

Funniest and most satirical series of the festival was British actor and co-series creator Stephen Mangan’s Hang Ups, a remake of Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy, that sparkles not only with Mangan’s deadpan and hilarious reactions as an online therapist – this veteran of the Showtime series Episodes really is the modern Bob Newhart – but also with the wit to suggest that even instant therapy in the online era may no longer be possible, because personality has been evacuated. In the era of instant attention and gratification there is no ego for a therapist to work with – as exemplified by one client who is only using the supposed insights in the therapy session to increase her online followers.

Eerie in a different way is the horror series Chambers, which resuscitates the oldest horror story possible – stitching the parts of someone onto another, and then having that person take on or be threatened by the donor’s personality. This is the theme of the German Expressionist Hands of Orlac, the ’30s Hollwood Mad Love with Peter Lorre and Eric Red's Body Parts. The previous versions though, tended to have the upper-class artist threated by a lower-class criminal. Here that situation is reversed and the reversal adds a completely new dimension to the tale. An African-American/Native-American high school girl is given the heart of another female student from a wealthy suburban Arizona family. She and the uncle who raised her are then in various ways threatened by the New-Agey, Sinona-type, parents of the donor and most creepily by Uma Thurman’s perfect but nefarious upper-class wife with a closet full of secrets. Keeping the focus though on the young girl’s struggle against the class enemy that now inhabits her makes this a series to remember.

DB chimerica

Just awful was the big budget Chimerica, from the usually reliable British Channel 4. The muddle-headed, trivial, and simplistic conceit of the series is that China lost its chance at democracy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the US is losing its democracy under Trump. China retains socialist characteristics and collectivist tendencies within an autocracy, while in the US the oligarchy is replacing a democracy in decline long before Trump finished it off.

The series, which validates the supposed ethics of an objective journalism – a laugh in itself given the recent CNN/New York Times debacle over Russiagate – concerns the efforts of a discredited photojournalist to find a witness at Tiananmen called The Tank Man, who stood up to the Chinese army’s rousting of the square. When they find him, his colleague claims breathlessly that what she can’t wait to ask him is, “what he was carrying in his bags,” a perspective that exactly characterizes the trivialization and distortion of the truth by Western media that this show seems entirely unaware of.

Equally confused is the big budget splashy Netflix French series Osmosis, about a brother and sister team of entrepreneur and programmer who claim to match their clients with their soulmate. The series focuses on how this match supposedly will fix the troubles of the modern world as one young test subject hung-up on porn believes finding his mate will cure his addiction.

Capitalism often proposes that psychological problems caused by the increasing tensions of growing inequality can be fixed with a pill, but here the fix involves big data’s claim to have mapped the world’s personalities. The series though obscures the massive surveillance that is needed to build such a database as Netflix equally obscures its own surveillance of its customers, which has been used to construct projects like this one.