OffStage – June 2, 2023

The Lasso effect

My wife and I struggle to find TV shows we both enjoy, and like many others, we found a cozy home with Apple TV’s series Ted Lasso. Critics both professional and not have been tying themselves in knots this season and last as the series veered from its original fish-out-of-water feel-good comedy into … something else.

Watching the season finale this week illustrated both what’s right with the show and its writers and where, IMO, it went a bit off the rails. Jen loved the many neatly tied plot threads in the finale, particularly the one where Rebecca runs into the studly dude she sorta hooked up with one night in Amsterdam earlier in the season. I kept quiet for the most part but the many holes in the story still grated on me, and some of it felt like simple laziness on the part of the writers and show runner. (I thought Alan Sepinwall’s piece in Rolling Stone summarized it pretty well.)

Without getting into too many details, the one storyline I just couldn’t give a flying floobah about was Nate the Great and his supremely uninteresting girlfriend What’s-Her-Name. His fall from grace and betrayal didn’t seem to make much sense, nor did the team taking him back, nor his reason for leaving an amazingly lucrative job coaching a professional soccer team in England simply because his boss is a sleazebag. And I also felt like the much-more-interesting character of Keeley was somewhat forgotten and given very little to do after her fling Jack dumps her a few episodes back. Poor Juno Temple was relegated to handing out snow globes to Ted and Beard in the finale — and not much else.

Anyway, I guess we’ll see whether the series will rest as-is or — which is much more likely — it gets picked up again in some fashion.

Nuggets – yay!

I hate the sound of sneakers on basketball courts — I mean really hate it. And I also don’t like the sight of men’s hairy underarms. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have literally never watched more of an NBA game than it takes to see it’s on and change the channel.

But I do love Colorado and am always happy to cheer for the home team. My similarly disinterested son Andy and I watched the first game of the NBA playoffs and we both truly enjoyed it! Fair-weather fans we are indeed, and it’s comforting to know that the team most likely will win because, well, they really look like they know what they’re doing out there.

I can’t promise I’ll watch all the rest, but my long NBA drought is now broken.

Valhalla-bound

Speaking of hairy men, I’ve been enjoying two Viking-centric series lately: The Last Kingdom and Vinland Saga, both on Netflix. The live-action Last Kingdom is based on a series of historical novels by Bernard Cornwell and stars Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbangurg — a Saxon raised by Danes whose equal parts asshole and hero. It’s incredibly well done, with high production values that really bring you back to the day when instead of an iPhone, you carried, you know, a giant sword.

The Last Kingdom ended a year ago, but I’m still catching up and plan to finish off with the related film Seven Kings Must Die, released this past April.

Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbangurg in ‘The Last Kingdom’

I only ever watch anime with Andy, and he got us started on Vinland Saga this past winter. New episodes are still coming out, and we’ve followed the action of a hard-core little fighting dude named Thorfinn. There’s some overlap with The Last Kingdom as both occur during the time when Danes controlled parts of England.

If you think The Last Kingdom is violent, it’s a pony show compared to Vinland – although being animated, of course, it’s a little easier to manage all the beheadings and dismemberments. I’ve wearied of action shows that feature guns, and there’s something primal and appealing about the days when life was short and guys rode around on horses doing crazy shit like attacking each other in open fields with swords of bronze and shields of wood.

Glad I’m a writer just watching from the sidelines.

So where The Last Kingdom is fairly traditional in its storytelling, with linear plots depicting people making mostly sane decisions, Vinland is very much an anime. That means a lot of crying, wailing, moaning and dragged-out drama that is quite alien to Western storytelling. An entire episode can be taken up with one seemingly minor event, and in manga world, it’s perfectly acceptable to play it for all its worth and damn the time spent.

I always wonder what the script writers do for the many “lines” that are simply mild grunts or exhalations — an anime trope that always amuses me. Instead of saying something like “holy shit” or “you’re kidding me” or some other such reaction, they make that little anime noise that, who knows, maybe appears in the script as an unpronounceable symbol.

Happy hour

Jen and I just snuck out for a quick drink and a bruschetta board at the Postino here in Highlands Ranch. Things are starting to look up around here from when we first arrived in 2012 and it was just Chick-fil-As as far as the eye could see. It’s still a bit of a restaurant desert down here, but improving just a bit. I’m now getting ready to head to the Metzger Farm in Westminster for The Catamounts’ production of Pride of the Farm. Review to come!

Happy Friday!