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Rivals (2024)
Faithful to the book but spectacularly poor casting
The UK is awash with excellent actors and yet.every character is so poorly miscast and executed if a book fan watched an episode with the sound down they could not discern who was whom. Helen was a great beauty - the actress is not. Maude was described as ethereal and.awe-inspiring - the actress is not. Lizzie was not a village frump. Cameron Cook was not a ghetto chick. Taggie was described as a black-haired beauty with purity of soul. The gay characters were hilariously subterranean camp, not overtly mincing and queeny. Declan is supposed to be one of the most handsome and charismatic men ever, not an Irish thug. Danny Dyer is perfect as electronics mogul Freddie and Lady Badingham is exactly as she was written. Perfect casting and fantastic acting.
I was ahorse mad 80s teenager who lived for Jilly Cooper books. Such a shame the casting has let down an otherwise fantastic script.
Gilmore Girls: Partings (2006)
What happened to this series?
I haven't watched it for 20 years and didn't remember the quality drop in Season 6. It's terrible. Annoying characters (Luke's daughter. What is the point of this story arc except to block Luke and Lorelai), the childish squabbling of the grandparents with everyone, Rory being a non-stop entitled brat, Lorelai's endless babbling, Christopher's awful kid, poor Lane's storyline (why would she end up with that lump), Luke and Lorelai's inability to discuss anything.........why can't any of these people behave like adults?
I never realised that Alexis Bledel is not a very good actress. Her range is very limited.
I fast forwarded through nearly all of the April scenes and Paris's meltdown was overwrought and pantomime-ish.
What a mess.
Marriage (2022)
Tiresome
What is wrong with this couple? They've been on the planet 5 decades and they don't seem to have acquired basic language or social skills.
It's so boring/turgid/depressing I'd rather watch sheep grazing.
Why don't these people know how to speak in full sentences? Why is the husband so creepy? Why is the wife working in an office of juveniles instead of a grown up law firm?
In short: Marriage is boring, stifling and tiresome. The reason the Beeb drama department rarely acknowledges the existence of these types of couples is why bother? It's all terribly sad and sadder still for being so mundane.
The opening music is idiotically chaotic and LOUD.
White Heat (2012)
A bunch of kids share a house during uni....
...and continue to prosecute their teenage grievances 30 years later.
Clunky dialogue and annoying characters. The real problem with the series isn't the haphazard history, it's the utter implausibility of the friendships it depicts. There's not much here that's genuinely novel and for a show centred on twenty-somethings discovering the pleasures of the sixties there's precious little joy to be found.
Quickly proves to be a warmed-over and tepid mishmash of changing-times clichés. By the last episode I just didn't care whose flat it was.
Clichéd, whiny drivel about middle-aged disappointment and people whose emotions are seemingly stuck in aspic.
As Time Goes By (1992)
Did not age well....
I loved this series in the 90s. I was in my twenties and found it comforting and amusing. Watching it 30 years later I wonder why I didn't find it disturbing.
The mother's boyfriend hits on the daughter, the daughter's boyfriend hits on the mother and every older man on the show makes mildly to very creepy comments about young women. The daughter clearly has some kind of granddaddy weirdness in that she flirts with her stepfather and dates a series of elderly men.
The Lionel character is so curmudgeonly he's inexplicably rude to nearly all the nice reasonable people with whom he comes in contact. The Jean character, who runs a modestly successful typist temp agency and carries on as though she's running the NHS, is rude and imperious to her staff, discriminatory to her temps and seems to be operating on 80s tech.
The 35-year-old daughter and her friend move into the mother's place and never leave. 8 seasons later both are still boyfriend-less and both working in the same dismal temp agency in which the mother, long past retirement age, still interferes.
Fantastically, both the daughter and her friend are still hopeful of happy marriages and children and the show pretends that this is still possible for these, now, middle-aged women.
The daughter is shrewish and endlessly complaining and, as the series progresses, becomes chubbier and more matronly. Her on/off boyfriend, who is written like a cartoon character, is a playboy with a very successful business. We are expected to believe that he has been pining for this unpleasant, portly lump for ten years. Unlikely.
Add to this a series of silly, poorly written characters who I assume are to pass for English eccentrics. A sister-in-law and her long-suffering idiot husband and a gardener character are all fantastically well written and acted. The rest of the eccentrics are cartoonish and unbelievable. English actors acting as Americans are woefully bad.
There's a bit of a mean streak that runs through the series narrative. Every person with which the couple becomes involved is either an idiot or weird or are something to be mocked. Weirdly, none of the four members of the household seem to have any friends outside of the four.