Tag Archives: tv series

Fiction, Reviews

Tale of the Nine-Tailed: A Well-Written Fantasy TV Series

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Recently, a TV adaptation of a popular Marvel comics storyline ended its run by tripping over its feet and kissing the synthetic rubber track. Many superhero fans didn’t even watch, and many others hated their experience (not everyone, just many). The director said he was told not to read the source material and that he didn’t want to make a story that leaned into its own genre, so the show introduced story elements and tone only to set them on the shelf. I don’t know what the producers were expecting. It’s the latest installment of high value entertainment prospects that failed.

If you’d like to watch a fantasy series that is actually well-written and different to most Americans, look up Tale of the Nine-Tailed, a 16-episode Korean series starring Lee Dong Wook and Jo Bo Ah and directed by Kang Shin Hyo. The story focuses on mythological foxes (gumiho), who are traditionally wily and mischievous. The old stories say the nine-tailed fox is seeking to become human by some trial over a thousand years. The main fox of this story was once a mountain god who fell in love with a young woman. When that woman was murdered, he gave up his divine position in hopes of finding her reincarnation one day.

At the beginning of Tale of the Nine-Tailed, Lee Yeon, the fox, is hunting down lesser foxes who are posing as humans and killing them. I forget why he is hunting them, if it’s more than just defending humanity. TV producer Nam Ji Ah is building evidence for her version of X files when she notices Yeon’s distinctive umbrella. Somehow, she ropes him into accompanying her to a remote island village where she hopes to find a clue to her parents’ disappearance (her motive for researching paranormal accounts). In these 3-4 episodes, the show has a horror tone. Traditional Korean shamanism is displayed throughout the series, and you see some of the ugly practices in these episodes. It lightens up after this, leaning first into a romantic storyline and plunging into fantasy for the rest of it. Yeon is plagued by many things, primarily his murderous half-brother Rang, who resembles Loki in attitude and miscreant behavior. The tension between the brothers is compelling to watch.

I mention it here because the writing is strong throughout. Wikipedia credits Han Woo-ri for this. Bravo. Yeon is presented as crafty with great, but not unlimited, knowledge. Many mythological foes come after him, and they never lay a hand on him because he’s an idiot. He works the situation, turning the tables when he can. None of his victories feels forced or as if he has read the script. Once, the irritating trope of loving her so much he can’t tell the truth is used to bridge two episodes, but it’s short lived and nothing else stands out as clichéd.

A second season was released this summer on Amazon. I hope I can find a way to see it.

In other news —

Reviews: Bad reviews can be helpful. “Instead of specialties, we were known by our critical styles: We were the Shredder, the Beheader and the Fredder.”

Funny Stuff: “A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”

Fiction, Reviews

Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power

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Last month, one of the showrunners for Amazon’s The Rings of Power enthused about the series, saying it wasn’t their story but Tolkien’s. I think that’s how deeply deceived fan-fiction writers feel about their stories. This isn’t Tolkien’s story by a far cry.

I watched the remaining episodes of The Rings of Power yesterday, and all the wind has been taken out of my sails. Reading a bit from the showrunners has depressed me. Hearing from a few critics has soured me. Spoilers ahead.

I wasn’t hoping or expecting the show to become awesome in the last three episodes, but some errors hit you differently than others. You can roll with some lines of dialogue, some character motivations, and with others you can’t. Others just rattle the wheels right off your wagon and leave you on the hillside, wishing Santa would make things that last for a change.

They make up an origin story for Mithril to compel Elrond to push Duran IV to mine for it, because King Duran III believes it’s too dangerous to continue digging for it. They say a tree with the light of a silmaril is fought over by an elf and a balrog, is struck by lightning, and creates mithril by sending all the light into the rocky mountain earth. The elf king pulls out this story in episode 5 to say another tree that’s tied to the life of all elves is dying all of a sudden and if they don’t get that mithril stuff, all elves will be forced to flee to Valinor. It was a point in which the king seemed deceptive and manipulative. And the whole thing was dumb.

At the end of episode 8, they handle the creation of the elfin rings like any other TV drama. A main character, regardless of supposed skill, has to suggest the solution to the master craftsman. They hint that this craftsman is being manipulated, but please. There’s no strategy working here. It’s a line, a plot point, a touch of authenticity to say they know Tolkien’s history and are telling his story. The rings themselves look like trinkets (image via LOTR Fandom).

In episode 7, there’s a battle, and the “good” villagers give up their most defensible position for one that trained solders would have difficulty defending. And in doing so, they give the enemy the freedom to unlock an old plan that would nonsensically ignite Mt. Doom. Which is a big problem, but it doesn’t come before they mop the floor with their enemies because the elves and Númenórean men, whom Galadriel has been attempting to rally for half of the series, finally show up on the horses they brought overseas. How this cavalry knew the Southland village would be under siege at that moment is not important. What is important is that had the villagers stayed in the defensible outpost they fled to days ago, the cavalry would not have been able to charge in like they did.

A Kodak moment, I tell you.

Continue reading Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power →
Fiction

Superpower Upends She-Hulk’s Career – Isn’t That Fun?

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We tell superhero stories in a variety of ways. The lone gunslinger fighting rebels and outlaws, hiding his identity to avoid the repercussions. The agent/family man who was targeted but not killed and now brings his particular set of skills back to the field to punish evildoers. The burger maid who delivers warm burgers and fries to your table or car just after you pay for them. Actual heroes walk among us in the stories we tell each other before the boss joins the video conference.

And superhero stories probably have room to play around, find some diversity, and do fun things. Fandom talked to some people in the new show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law about motivations and what’s going to happen. Does this sound like superhero fun to you?

“One of the biggest themes of this first season is about acceptance, because I think it’s very unrealistic to expect a normal average everyday person to suddenly out of the blue get imbued with superpowers that they didn’t ask for [and just embrace it].”

“So much of her identity is based on her career. . . . So the idea of being handed something that changes her life and blows up all her plans is not appealing to her.”

“Suddenly she’s thrust into this whole other identity and people sort of look to her for all the expectations that you put on a superhero. But she really has a full life outside of it.”

People getting superpowers, like, out of the blue, powers they didn’t ask for? You mean, people like Spiderman, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and even the Hulk himself? Many others have come back from the dead or from fatal injury with powers greater than the average bear, so they should qualify as not asking for power. And many villains have been caught in accidents that only amplified their twisted desires and turned them into presidents of home-owners associations. So stories of unsolicited power leading to a few bumps in the road, yeah, we know a few.

This show appears to be a long But Actually to Uncle Ben’s well-known advice.

Fiction

Amazon TV is working on prequel series of LOTR

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What would you say is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, that’s not this. With an estimated cost of over $1B, the new Amazon series will look into all of those details we get in the appendices about Aragorn’s life as the ranger and heir to the Gondorian throne. When Gandalf took Bilbo and the dwarves to Rivendell, the young heir was there, though perhaps not around them. A few years later, he was told who he was, that the sword of kings of Arnor was his, and that he needed to watch his back. That’s when he began to roam Middle Earth and later served under two kings for many years.

Lots of good material for them to, you know, ruin. I know they want a new Game of Thrones, which would be bad, but I hope they don’t give us a medieval Gotham, which would be like saying, “You know all of the hope and purity of Middle Earth that you’ve loved all your life? This ain’t that.”

https://nerdist.com/lord-of-the-rings-prequel-tv-series-amazon-everything-we-know/

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘Norsemen’

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Norsemen

I really wanted to like Norsemen, a Viking Age comedy produced by the Norwegian NRK network. The series is filmed at the reconstructed Viking farm at Bukkøy, which is associated with the North Way Interpretational Center at Avaldsnes, Karmøy, Norway. Avaldsnes is the parish where my great-grandfather Walker was born and baptized. I’ve been to the Viking Farm, so when I watch this show I’m looking at a familiar place.

In the first episode, a shipload of Viking raiders under the command of Chieftain Olav return to their home in Norway. Olav’s brother, Orm, has been in charge in his absence, and he’s so bad at it that old men are reduced to jumping off a cliff to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Orm’s wife, Frøya, was along on the raid as a warrior, while Orm himself is pretty much useless with weapons. She despises him. Olav’s chief warrior is named Arvid. Olav arranges for Arvid to marry a widow – or rather, she becomes a widow after he’s killed her husband. But they find themselves incompatible. Meanwhile, the chief slave, Kark (saga fans will recognize that classical reference), gives instruction to the newest slave, Rufus of Rome, a professional actor who seems to think he’s on a pleasure cruise and keeps complaining about the accommodations.

What you’ve got here, essentially, is the History Channel’s Vikings series, crossed with The Office. The costumes and hair are intentionally similar to those on the Vikings show (which is to say, even worse. Black leather, which real Vikings never had, abounds). But the dialogue is straight out of The Office, with people talking in 21st century jargon. That dialogue concerns a lot of killing, which is played for laughs, and it’s also very smutty. The program was filmed in both Norwegian and English, so what you see on Netflix is neither dubbed nor subtitled.

I watched three episodes. The first two, which mostly introduced us to the characters, seemed to me kind of rudderless. But the plot began functioning at the end of Episode Two, and I went on to watch the third one. I could probably continue, because the story got more interesting once I detected a plot, and realized that the characters I’d felt sorry for were pretty much as awful as the characters I’d hated. What it boils down to is that this is one of those shows about appalling people whom I don’t care about at all. And considering the level of profanity (very, very) black humor, and casual violence, plus a little nudity, I don’t think I’ll continue with it. And I don’t recommend it to our readers.

Reviews, Uncategorized

Two TV shows about one-armed men

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The most famous one-armed man in television history is, of course, the murderer hunted by Dr. Richard Kimball on The Fugitive. But I don’t have him in mind in this post. I never actually watched The Fugitive much.

But I have fond memories of two television series from my childhood, each of whose main characters had one arm. Why one-armed characters resonate with me, I cannot say. The reasons are probably emotionally complex and embarrassing (I had one character lose a hand in my novel Wolf Time, and another lose a whole arm in Troll Valley). But I’m delighted that YouTube has made it possible to rediscover these series, at least in part. My viewing report follows.

The Vise

The character of detective Mark Saber had an interesting evolution. According to my internet research (not always coherent), he began as a British detective working (for some reason) on the police force of a large American city on an early US TV series called Mystery Theater. He was played by Tom Conway (not to be confused with comedian Tim Conway). Tom Conway was the brother of famous movie heavy George Sanders, and spent his career in his brother’s shadow. His character dressed nattily, and (judging by the one episode I found on YouTube) fought crime more with fisticuffs than with deduction or forensics.

The show ran from 1951-1954. Then in 1955 the character was resurrected back in the old home country in a new series called The Vise. Mark Saber was now a London private investigator, and was now played by Donald Gray, a native of South Africa who lost his left arm in France in World War II. I’ve only found a couple episodes of this series on YouTube. Here’s one:

Continue reading Two TV shows about one-armed men →

Reviews

Netflix review: Rebus

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In the wake of the considerable pleasure I took in watching the BBC TV series, Luther (review further down the page) on Netflix, I went ahead and tried a different British detective show, a Scottish series based on the Rebus novels by Ian Rankin, of which I’ve read a few.

The main surprise awaiting the unsuspecting viewer is that the series, as packaged and presented on Netflix, is actually two series.

The original four episodes, from the year 2000, starred the actor John Hannah (whom you may know from the Spartacus cable series, if you watch that sort of thing). It hewed fairly close to the original books, presenting the dark, gritty world of lower-class Edinburgh, where Det. Inspector John Rebus works. Hannah’s Rebus is a tortured man, plagued by inner rages and a serious drinking problem (not the kind that TV writers add to a character as amusing color, but the kind that messes up both his job and his family life). The detective often makes serious mistakes, and his job security is shaky.

An interesting element is a few suggestions that Rebus retains a tentative hold on some kind of religious faith.

Then comes Season Two, which first aired in 2006. Not only do we have a new production team, there’s a new cast, new sets, and a new, slicker look. Even when Rebus stays in the slums, they look less depressing, more bright and airy. The Edinburgh of this series is one you’re tempted to visit. I wonder if the Scottish Tourist Board didn’t apply pressure to make that change. Continue reading Netflix review: Rebus →