Grown-up thrillers and unsatisfying endings

Yes, I do occasionally watch stuff on TV that isn't meant for kids and/or nerds. Mostly, though, I have to say, these trips into grown-up land remind me why I usually prefer TV shows for kids and nerds. The slowness and portentousness of "mature" TV can be a trial, and the payoffs resulting from the slow build-ups aren't always worth the wait.

The Undoing on HBO is a case in point. In some ways it reminded me of another six-part thriller relying heavily on relationship dynamics, Behind Her Eyes on Netflix. Admittedly, the ways they tackled the ending of the drama were very different. In Behind Her Eyes, there was a big twist based on a wacky premise, whereas in The Undoing, there - wasn't. But in both cases, the pace was glacial, and I was close to quitting at times. Perhaps writers of thriller series should consider putting a three-episode restraint on themselves. They'd have one episode for the set-up, one for the build-up and creating of tension and atmosphere, and one for the conclusion. That is quite enough. Now, in The Undoing, we basically get a whole episode about the female protagonist Grace Fraser freaking out because she can't reach her husband after a mother of a kid at their son's school is brutally murdered. I liked Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies, but a little of her neurotic Grace goes a long way. It's no wonder the cops find both her husband and herself suspicious; she claims she hardly knew the victim while at the same time acting like a nervous wreck.

Much of the time spent on Grace's anxiety could have been cut without harming the tense atmosphere. And yet, it's not the build-up of this series that has been criticised as much as the ending. And yeah - it's not great. But then, thrillers like these have a tough job when it comes to pulling off the ending. Their viewers are mostly seasoned consumers of crime drama and fiction and very hard to surprise, let alone in a good way. The ending of Behind Her Eyes was surprising, but it did rely on that wacky premise I mentioned. The Undoing sticks to more realistic scenarios, but that means that whatever you come up with, some of the viewers (or readers - the series is based on a novel) will already have thought of it. There are only a handful of people that could have killed the luckless Elena Alves - I make it four or five at a pinch - if you discount roping in a stranger or a bit player like Grace's best friend as the killer. Like Ariadne Oliver in Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, we in the audience can cheerfully suspect all of them, one after the other, thinking up the most likely scenario for the murder in each case, so when the truth is revealed we are unlikely to be blown away.

When disappointed viewers say that "any other ending" of The Undoing would have been better than the one we got, I'm not so sure. It wasn't satisfying as the solution of a mystery, certainly, but I can think of at least one ending that would have felt equally "meh", and in terms of fall-out for the characters that were not guilty of murder it could have been a lot worse. Not that you care desperately about them (and this is another problem with a lot of "grown-up" TV dramas). The ending, to my mind, felt flat, but it didn't feel insulting.

What bothered me rather more was a plot point where a tragedy in a character's past - and said character's reaction to it - is given undue weight when the reveal draws near. That the character in question shows "neither grief nor guilt" over what happened is seen as a grave point in their disfavour. But the tragedy wasn't the character's fault, and they still got blamed for it - in such circumstances, I would also have been wary of expressing any grief freely. 

But the series has points in its favour too. Hugh Grant acts his socks off as Grace's husband Jonathan, who thinks he can charm his way out of any scrape (I preferred his disarmingly flippant moments to his emoting, but maybe that's partly the point). Donald Sutherland is badass as Grace's father, who as a bonus likes to hang out in front of the appealing paintings in the Frick Collection; Noah Jupe is affecting as the Frasers' precocious son, who has to watch his world fall apart; Mendoza the cop was cute, and I enjoyed the scenes with public defender Robert Adelman and super-expensive private lawyer Haley Fitzgerald respectively ("not feeling the vibe here, team" quips the latter when things are going especially poorly). It's to be expected: David E. Kelley, the script-writer, is an expert on courtroom drama.

All the same, if you're looking for a thriller that will have you murmuring "wow, that was clever", this isn't it. But then, how many thrillers are?                                    

The well-structured fantasy world of Netflix's Shadow and Bone

Now this is more like it. A little more than a year ago, I was hate-watching and groaning over the Netflix series Cursed. This year, Netflix provided a much more solid fantasy offering in the shape of Shadow and Bone (a second season has been confirmed, whereas I believe that Cursed has been cancelled). 

This series seems to have benefited hugely from being based on a string of novels written by Leigh Bardugo, which are neither graphic novels nor Young Adult. Without being as dark and brutal as Game of Thrones, the series felt more grown-up than most of the graphic novel- or YA-based stuff I've seen (though it's still fantasy - in terms of grown-up-ness, it'll never be Middlemarch). The characters were more complex and interesting, and the dialogue was funny and sharp, which leads one to believe that the source material must be well written too.

Book adaptations have their own problems, and Shadow and Bone doesn't avoid them altogether. The first season did feel a bit over-stuffed. There's a whole side plot about a girl called Nina which has no bearing on the rest of the story until the second season is set up in the end. I'm sure that in Bardugo's novels, the reader is given plenty of reasons to care what happens to her, but in the series so far, her scenes are more of a distraction. The two main plots - about a girl who is discovered to have magic powers and a gang of doubtful characters who are tasked to abduct her from a heavily guarded castle and bring her to their city for a life-changing amount of cash - don't gel as well as one would have liked. Barely are the protagonists from both story lines united, than they are separated again, and the stories run parallel most of the time instead of becoming fully integrated with each other. Nevertheless, what the series has is promise: you feel that there is a solid foundation in terms of the characters and the world they inhabit which can be further built on in future seasons.

Now, the show's not a new Once Upon A Time. I don't think I'll ever become obsessed by it or care desperately about what happens to anyone in the series. But I didn't care overmuch for the characters in Game of Thrones either, and I still had a good time with it (mostly). If you like fantasy which is fairly light-hearted without being downright daft or ridiculously formulaic (as in Cursed), it's well worth a watch.

What helps to ground the series is that the author of the original books has clearly put some thought and work into the world building. In this world, magic is wielded by the grisha, which consist of different groups with different skill sets. There are those with traditional elemental magic skills like fire magic or wind magic, but there are also other kinds of specialities. There are healers, heart-renders - who can do anything from manipulating your feelings to downright killing you, but it's all connected with the heart - fabricators who have a magic skill for inventions etc. 

Though I have a weakness for fairy-tale-like magic where anything goes, this kind of specialised magic-wielding and the rules and limitations it imposes add some structure and are a safeguard against making any one character too powerful. With shows like Once, magic objects with wonderful properties can suddenly appear and be used to solve a problem (or raise one) in an episode or story arc, but then quickly be forgotten, which leads to plenty of plot holes ("but why didn't they use object X from episode Y?"). Also, if you have extremely powerful characters, new ways must constantly be found to temporarily divest them of their power or limit it so they can get into trouble when the story demands it. Here, the limits of the magic are built in: if you are a grisha who can wield shadows, then that's what you can do, but you can't, say, heal a loved one or control the wind. I was also relieved that the magic-making wasn't merely connected to the four elements (which is so often the case), because frankly, that concept has become a little old. Not only the magic, but the politics of the different countries and regions feels thought through. Here should be plenty of material which can be made use of in the future.

It's true that the central romance between the heroine Alina - who is discovered to have the legendary power of "sun summoning" which many believed to be just a myth - and her childhood friend Malyen (Mal for short) left me pretty cold. They are both orphans who have been friends forever, and when Alina's powers are discovered they are separated and long to be reunited. Their behaviour made me impatient - if they are so crazy about each other, how come they didn't manage to work themselves out of the friend zone long ago? Alina's pining makes her reluctant to embrace her new powers. There's a large, dangerous shadow-realm divide called the Fold dividing her country, which she is supposed to be able to consign to oblivion. Maybe she should focus a little more on that and a little less on Mal, who never had the guts to put their relationship on a less platonic footing? The Crows - the would-be abductors - are more colourful and bring more zest to the proceedings.

What of the villain, then, General Kirigan? (Yeah, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that a shadow wielder called "The Black General" turns out to be the villain.) Well, he's pretty good, though for my part I wasn't blown away. He's built up so well that the first proper meeting the viewer has with him feels like a let-down. Kirigan is played by Ben Barnes, who also played Prince Caspian in the Narnia films. He's conventionally handsome, and for a villain-lover like me it's a disappointment when a villain looks too much like a traditional hero. It turns out his pretty-boy looks has its uses, however, and it has to be said Barnes can glower very convincingly when he needs to be menacing. Not in Rumple's league, then (which could hardly be expected), but preferable to most of the awful bad guys in Game of Thrones, and decidedly better than evil monks.