Word to the wise: it's TV not film

As I’ve written before I’m not a great fan of Netflix. It’s movie samplings are meagre and play to the midstream. I’m amazed so many professional critics still laud the site…..For example, this week, I tried in vain to find a film I hadn’t seen in the theatres that approached a semblance of interest, and landed on Peace Love and Misunderstanding (Bruce Beresford, 2011) starring Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener (I’ve now seen three Catherine Keener-starring films over the past couple of weeks: two in theatres, Nostalgia (Mark Pellington) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)). The film was light-hearted but predictable in the clash between conservative/straight and hippie/wanderlust; guess which side wins out? ….. But it seems a lot of people use Netflix for watching – or binge-watching – television shows, something I don’t do, since no shows have appealed to me. But yesterday, after reading a New York Times digest of current edgier TV series, I decided to take the plunge, and sampled three series…...Two of the series Babylon Berlin (pictured) and The Same Sky were from Germany, and from England, Peaky Blinders. I watched the first episode of each.  Both Babylon Berlin and Peaky Blinders offered an overflow (a good thing) of atmospherics, both set in pre-WW II Europe. But plots (each had at least two simultaneous threads) were ever-so-slow starting and drawn-out, and therefore seeming convoluted. It left me wondering if this is the nature of TV.  After all, if you have one or two major themes, you must develop them over six hours or more, instead of a film’s average hour and a half. Consequently, it wasn’t obvious what each series was about. Babylon Berlin depicted the decades of the Weimar Republic, showing the period’s libertine values – a porn studio - and the nascent start of Communist-Nazi street battles. But what was the uptick after episode one?  Peaky Blinders depicted a street gang in Birmingham where members wear razor blades in their peaked caps to, yes, blind their opponents, but thankfully the episode wasn’t as violent as expected. Again, there was a slowly-emerging plot but great sets (amazing what computerized effects will do to create pre-war scenes of Birmingham’s factories and Berlin’s Alexanderplatz) and superb wardrobes and styles. Both series get the “look” of the era down. But, scintillating, grabbing plots? Not in the beginning, at least ……Then there was the series The Same Sky, set in the mid-1970s in a divided East and West Berlin, where spying across The Berlin Wall was rampant. This series interested me more, maybe because I’m a student of that era’s Berlin. But it also had interesting well-directed scenes that showed how a Communist spy was recruited with side stories of the characters’ family lives. However, the series took one hour build up to the start of the key scene; a movie would have nailed this in 15-20 minutes. Maybe TV has always been this way, and it’s been so long since I’ve watched it that I now notice how its plots just slog along.