My friend Ardy and I were at lunch yesterday talking about all the things one accumulates over a long lifetime, and I mentioned that I have most if not all of the Sun-Sentinel Travel sections from the fall of 1989 to the end of 2007.
“What are you going to do with them?” Ardy asked.
“Give them to the Smithsonian,” I said.
It was a joke, of course, but they are artifacts: sections of ten, sometimes more, pages filled with ads and charts (those odious and instantly erroneous airfare ones) but also lengthy stories and beautiful photos of interesting places around the world. Those times when I am sent digging into one of my Travel section boxes I am astonished anew by the riches the paper provided weekly to its mostly unimpressed readers.
The New Yorker asks readers every week to supply a caption to a cartoon. The Spectator has a more challenging competition that changes every week. A recent one asked readers to rewrite the Hokey Pokey in the style of a famous poet. Winning entries included the Hokey Pokey written by Philip Larkin and the Hokey Pokey written by Emily Dickinson.
The TV critic for The Spectator, James Delingpole, has a rule for streaming: For high quality, you have to get something with subtitles. (Though in our case, that includes British shows.) His latest recommendation, Eternaut, is an Argentinian series which we tried but, because of our aversion to science fiction, we stopped after one episode. Though I did see its merits. What I’m looking for is not exactly another Shtisel, but a show that, like that one, is about “love, loss and the doldrums of everyday life.”
We watched the last two episodes of “Douglas Is Cancelled” on Britbox the other night, and never have I seen a series take such a dramatic and worthwhile turn. The show that starts out as a witty take on cancel culture becomes, after the halfway mark, a gripping drama about predatory men – and insensitive men who blithely accept the behavior of their predatory colleagues – in the workplace, in this case media. It’s also, winningly, about the strong women who stand up to them.
Last night I went on BritBox to watch the third episode of “Douglas Is Cancelled” and couldn’t find it anywhere. It was not there under “Continue Watching” – as it was a few nights ago – and it was not there under “Recently Added.” And I thought: Has “Douglas Is Cancelled” been cancelled?
Or, after yesterday’s post, have I been banned from it?
I’ve been looking forward to “Douglas Is Cancelled” (now on BritBox) since reading a glowing review of it in The Spectator last year. For one thing, nobody is killed in it, only cancelled. Plus, it seemed to address, as few shows do today, an important aspect of contemporary life. And to do it, as the review made clear, with great humor.
Watching the first episode, I occasionally laughed out loud. The writing is brilliant. (Husband to wife about their teenage daughter: “It’s like we’ve lost her to a cult.” Wife to husband: “We’ve lost her to a university, which is the same thing only you still have to do their laundry.”) But the characters seemed a little undeveloped, as if their sole purpose was to deliver great lines. The writing got in the way of the drama. I thought of "The White Lotus," where none of the characters utter witty lines but the show is full of understated humor and suspense.
Last night we watched the second episode, which was even more disappointing. The characters seemed to be caricatures, with fewer good lines and lot of exaggerated behavior. It’s still interesting, and better than a lot of things we stream, but not the modern classic I had hoped it would be.