What I'm Watching Now

I just spent the past couple months watching every single episode of Vera, which is a police procedural show about a grumpy old lady who heads a murder squad in Northumbria. Partly I love the dialect, but also it was fun watching a woman be mean and unreasonable. Usually only men get to be unpleasant in media. Also the landscape was beautiful -- it's Northern England (I think?) and on the east coast, so there are a lot of fisheries and rolling hills and farmlands. Lots of ancient castle-like buildings too. There's a bit of copaganda, of course, but the show makes a point of having the police actually help people -- providing liaisons for victim's families and so forth -- showing how that can be done.

The show also makes a point of having disabled characters as police officers -- one character is an amputee, and two others are in a wheelchairs -- as well as featuring characters of color as police officers, as well as in Northumbria in general. The crimes weren't all murdered women, too, which was a refreshing change. It's available on Amazon Prime, though you have to subscribe to Britbox to watch it.

I also finally got around to watching Derry Girls on Netflix. I'm probably the last person on the planet to figuring out how much fun this one is. Again, I love the dialect; and the characters, especially the grandfather, are just great. It's about a group of Catholic schoolgirls during "the Troubles" in the 1980s, but that conflict is mostly in the background. The main business of the show is these girls (and one guy) in their daily lives. I was sorry this one ended.

Now I'm watching The Gentleman on Netflix. I almost quit watching this one in the first few minutes because it looked like it was going to your typical hot guy does hot guy things. (The lead, Theo James, is very pretty indeed.) But I stuck with it because I liked how the siblings interacted -- like actual siblings, I mean -- and I'm still mostly enjoying it. It's about a duke who discovers his father was maintaining the ancient and enormous estate by leasing out part of it to a weed-growing consortium. The duke soon discovers, much to his chagrin, that he has a certain talent for criminal enterprises.

It reminds me a little of Breaking Bad, except the duke is likable, unlike Walter White, who was always something of a jerk and who got worse as the series progressed. There are still moments in every episode where I wonder why I'm watching this, but it's charming enough that so far I have stuck with it.