I'm so over . . .
My most recent thing to be over is Grantchester, a BBC/PBS series. I am not entirely sure why I kept watching it this season because it was devolving more and more into soap opera, and it has hit rock bottom.
The premise was intriguing: young, good-looking Anglican priest who has psychological wounds from WWII and whose long-time friend decides to marry wealth instead of the person she should; I assume she doesn't share his mission and wants to make her family happy. His work in the parish leads him into helping the unbelieving police detective solve local crimes, mostly murders.
It would have done better to say with the mystery-solving, but it became more about the sins of the characters. The priest character is like the worst priest ever, and he gets away with things that never would have been tolerated in 1950s Anglicanism. Of course, there has to be a homosexual character, which ends up being the nerdy assistant priest, who is a better priest but who wants a relationship with a local photographer, but decides to try to get married (that's doesn't work out) and attempts suicide. Since the main priest is so tolerant of his own sins, he's pretty understanding about the gay character, far more than would ever have been (it was a crime in England at the time, not just something the church didn't "like.")
This is to say nothing of the fact that the lady love, who divorces her husband so she can badger the priest to death about marrying her, even though it's forbidden for him to marry a divorced woman, is the most unlikable character on the show. No, I take that back. The police detective is a d-bag, as my son would say.
Whoever wrote this stuff just wanted cheap drama, not verisimilitude.
So, I say all that to say that this almost always happens with TV dramas. They do well for a few years and then the viewer thinks, why am I stuck on this? Is it a bad habit, a sense of wanting to finish what one started, or are we just entranced with cheap drama? I don't plan to tune in again.
The premise was intriguing: young, good-looking Anglican priest who has psychological wounds from WWII and whose long-time friend decides to marry wealth instead of the person she should; I assume she doesn't share his mission and wants to make her family happy. His work in the parish leads him into helping the unbelieving police detective solve local crimes, mostly murders.
It would have done better to say with the mystery-solving, but it became more about the sins of the characters. The priest character is like the worst priest ever, and he gets away with things that never would have been tolerated in 1950s Anglicanism. Of course, there has to be a homosexual character, which ends up being the nerdy assistant priest, who is a better priest but who wants a relationship with a local photographer, but decides to try to get married (that's doesn't work out) and attempts suicide. Since the main priest is so tolerant of his own sins, he's pretty understanding about the gay character, far more than would ever have been (it was a crime in England at the time, not just something the church didn't "like.")
This is to say nothing of the fact that the lady love, who divorces her husband so she can badger the priest to death about marrying her, even though it's forbidden for him to marry a divorced woman, is the most unlikable character on the show. No, I take that back. The police detective is a d-bag, as my son would say.
Whoever wrote this stuff just wanted cheap drama, not verisimilitude.
So, I say all that to say that this almost always happens with TV dramas. They do well for a few years and then the viewer thinks, why am I stuck on this? Is it a bad habit, a sense of wanting to finish what one started, or are we just entranced with cheap drama? I don't plan to tune in again.
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