Last night we finished watching Midsummer Night, a charming, five-episode Norwegian series, and, because it came up, and because I knew it had been popular, we started watching Killing Eve. We gave it about 35 minutes, then turned it off. I have no patience for shows during which I envision a writers’ room full of hip young people – apparently many of them, these days, Ivy League grads – with no experience in the world they’re depicting. Their goal, it seems, is to churn out dialogue that is sharp and clever irrespective of whether it has any relation to reality. This is the problem I had with Succession; the writing was too good to be true. In The Sopranos, and the French series The Bureau, the writing was brilliant, but it also had the ring of verisimilitude.
