maybe not today, maybe not tommorow

It really seems like Dexter and Hannibal would be worth comparing, but I got nothing.



What happened to you, Dexter Season 7? I'm trying to catch up so I can watch S8 so I can find out how it ends, because i'm genuinely curious about that, but unfortunately i'm no longer curious about anything else. It's just soooo boring. All the character arcs are just repetitive and flailing and I couldn't care less about the overall story. Also, what happened visually? Dexter used to be such a pretty, striking show, very bright and precise, all those colors and compositions of sun and sky and blood. This is just messy, hackneyed, terribly uninteresting gyrating strippers and, oh, a burning church. Gosh, that's new.



Hannibal - I'm kind of watching it, (I think I have two episodes left on Season 1) when I can get my sister on board so I have someone to snark at. (It gives me enjoyment, which I think is the point, so whatever works. When I watch it alone I tend to fall asleep.) I still think the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous, and in it's best moments very funny in its outrageous sort of way rather than at all harrowing or scary or whathaveyou, but there's a couple of undercurrents I find somewhat intriguing.

I was very fond of Hannibal's-patient-who's-name-i've-forgotten, and the theme there about the attraction of sociopaths and all that, and I actually felt very bad for him. (Re my earlier Hannibal complaint, his misery and neediness and the way the world was using him as a chewtoy is not made sexy. Just hurt, no comfort.) There's also the whole thing about psychiatry and therapy, and the tension that those relationships would seem to have. I've always been terribly, terribly uncomfortable with the idea of therapy (and my few actual experiences - which I freely admit I entered into skeptical, largely against my will, and did my best to sabotage - have done nothing to assuage that.) Not, you know, the actual notion of mental health, but just that I don't know how to process that kind of relationship, even in fiction, when I read it or it's in a show or movie. It seems to me to be a very complex, fraught sort of thing, even while I understand that I'm really making a mountain out of nothing.

Anyway, so, I find the exploration of that at least sort of interesting, with all these untrustworthy, even utterly destructive therapists and yet with everyone tied together in web of relationships that straddle friendship and professionalism in various complicated, fuzzy ways. Most of the time I find the show's dialogue to be kind of absurd, but sometimes it does fall into place, because they're all so extremely highly educated, in fields where very careful, very precise communication is key, so occasionally I can see that breaking through instead and the very rarefied, almost-meaningless dialogue suddenly becomes quite organic to the characters, and then I can wonder whether all that carefully cultivated skill of understanding and expressing is actually helping or hindering communication and that at least adds some layer of interest to all the sillyness. Oh, and Eddie Izzard appears to be having a blast.

All that said, I still don't like it very much.

Hannibal, eps 1&2.

Oh come on. Gosh this is silly. I absolutely cannot take this seriously, at all, not for one minute. I just kept giggling throughout. Mushrooms! (Oh, the mushrooms! I must be horrifically insensitive, but all that did was make me want to cook some mushrooms.) That's fine, i'm not sure it wants to be taken seriously, but i'm not sure what the point is either. Is it deconstruction? parody? What am I watching this for, exactly, once I get bored of mushroom porn and architecture porn and clothes porn and possibly some amount of porn porn?

Ah, hang on, you say, this thing has characters! Usually, one watches things to find out what happens to the people in them, right? It's just, OMG, do not care. They're too goofy. The depth of Will's carefully conveyed, much-discussed, pretty, pretty angst is just as silly and parodic and ridiculous as the mushrooms.

There's just something about the portrayal of intelligence and social isolation here - which also bothered me in Elementary - where it's just so dignified and downright ennobling. Loneliness becomes this terrifically elegant thing. These guys have a world of people just waiting at their door to protect and befriend and defend their vast specialness, while they gaze out at the rain in their apartness. I could live - just about - with Will. The vast chunks of time devoted to other people discussing how broken and special and broken Will is? It's both absurd in it's intensity, and it just bores me.

Good grief, i'm going to end up watching the Big Bang Theory again, aren't I? Where all sleeves comes with special pockets for hearts and the only thing loneliness does to people is to strip them of dignity and slowly peel them raw. I will seriously take an episode of quasi-funny sitcom featuring two people sitting on a couch and trying to touch and mostly failing for no particular reason, except that it would require them to be ever so slightly braver or kinder than they are, over a season of Will just being too impeccably sensitive or Sherlock being too clever for this mean, mean, muggle world to comprehend. All day long.

Er, tell me it gets better?