Glad you located "Weissensee" on MHZ. Do they still have a free trial? Perhaps if you are interested in only that show you could see it during the free trial--since all three series seem to have come out.
I waited with anticipation for the third series when the Wall came down, because with very serious (and evil) Stasi guys involved, I wanted to see what happened to our fave Stasi family, but felt oddly let down by the end.
It wasn't bad. But the third series did not seem up to the quality of the earlier two. It reminded me a great deal of "The Lives of Others" film. In that genre.
If you know the era you can pick up on things that are not spelled out in "Weissensee." They are visuals. Like the big house showing just high up in the government they are. The nice furniture they had, unavailable to everyday people. The good food they enjoyed. And did you notice the walls of books? How did anybody in a Soviet regime country have access to that many books? Books were anathema to Communist controlled regimes.
I remember going through Customs in the USSR in the mid-70s and they took every magazine and book away from us incomers--they considered Western outside info poisonous and it was controlled and banned. Visited East Germany back then, too, and it wasn't any better.
After many years wanting to take time for it, finally saw the entire "The Wire" last year. Classic doesn't even cover it! One of the greats of all time.
The final season was my least favorite, but still great. The quest for newspaper awards was something I knew about first-hand, so maybe it was a bit too close to home to enjoy it as much as when it was focusing entirely on the police and city hall.
After the arc with Idris et all it lost a bit of lustre for me, but still worth the binge time. Also, Dominic's lengthy absence at one point apparently to spend more time away from the US and more family time back in the UK hurt the show a bit, too.
I remember when Simon wrote his first book "Homicide." Folks at my paper were reading it. The police reporter in my office who also covered the Baltimore courts on occasion knew Simon and they'd talk. I remember our guy coming in one day and saying "Man this guy in Baltimore has written a great book." Only later I realized it was "Homicide" after Simon became famous.
It was funny, too, because our reporter and Simon were talking about cop-shop-reporter stuff and I seem to recall Simon telling our reporter that his observation was that ER nurses and cops often had the most adulterous affairs, because they were always meeting up at night during work and often the cops would hang around the ER waiting for perps to be treated.
Also, back then is when cops began being assigned in ERs to work a shift, because in Baltimore druggies and other criminals were knocking over ERs for their drugs. So lots of opportunities, there! haha
Weird factoid that--about the nurses and cops at the time. It might have made it into the book, I don't remember. But for some reason, just remember our reporter saying that after having coffee with Simon when he was still just a reporter for the Sun.
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CobblersAwls
7 years ago
Ah yes, MHZ.
Alas, they sold out a few years ago and gave up their PBS type of status and became a subscription thing. They went through a few phases of ever more restrictive viewing until last year or so they settled on this total subscription thing.
Though the 9 p.m. slot every night still shows their foreign selection live, so that's something. My tv digital antenna picks up MHZ's various stations, so it's watchable.
But once they went sub last year they loaded up their catalogue with some good stuff. For a price, ha.
Gone are the days almost 30 years ago when that good old PBS station that probably 100 people total watched out of Goldvein VA was our only foreign show provider in the DC area.
It was old Channel 56 on that clunky VHS dial. haha Had to put loads of tin foil on the old rabbit ears on the tv to pull it in before it was on cable later.
Other than the new A&E cable station when it truly was arts and entertainment, that Channel 56 was the only place for those who wanted foreign tv shows to go.
Channel 56 had "Chancer" with Clive Owen before he was famous. I first reveled in the McManus's "Taggart" there. Think they also did the classic, "Edge of Darkness."
The uppity PBS Masterpiece Theatre wouldn't touch those shows back then. It was the less famous stuff that rarely made it across the Atlantic. It was like heaven and had a real cult following.
Sadly, it's no more. Bought out by some company and converted from a PBS model to fully corporate. At least it's the one place that has all the "Beck" shows. Those can be tricky to find.
Not sure if MHZ has these now but other streaming services do. A couple of "cut above" foreign shows:
"The Eagle"
"Detective DeLuca" (MHZ--really unusual. About an Italian cop and what he goes through right at the end of World War Two when Italy is in chaos. You don't get a setting like that often, it's a one-off).
And worth mentioning is probably the best series I've seen since "Jewel in the Crown" and "The Wire."
It's "A French Village." It's hard to find and is on Acorn.
I've never seen a French film or series that dealt honestly with what the French did during the German occupation. This one does. And you cannot look away for at least four series. (The final one at the end of the war is coming out in February on Acorn).
The French never deal honestly with "what did you do in the war daddy." This one is brutally honest and detailed historically.
I've not seen anything like it since the legendary "Jewell in the Crown."
The yard stick being--compelling fleshed out characters; a setting in an historic moment in time that pulls no punches; detailed and critically honest historic detail with no prettying up the charcters or their actions; filled with morally and ethically ambigous characters you can love, hate, pity and want to know better at the same time!
One of my faves is their brutal honesty about the lauded "resistence fighters." Two mobs--the Communists and the Socialists--fighting it out for power within the Resistence. My fave are the Communists who always seem to disappear when it's time to get their hands dirty and into danger--like the unlikeable Communist party spokesperson who manages to find a meeting to go to "with the comrades" someplace every time it's necessary to tool up and go out and do something really dangerous. ha
It's also fascinating to see the ugly aftermath toward the end of the war when everybody from the village, the Resistance and all comers turn on each other like rats as the Germans retreat. As I said, it's raw and honest. Something French film makers have shied away from for decades. It's not a pretty picture. But you cannot stop watching--perhaps because you sense its truth.
It's a stunning achievement. AKA "Un Village Francais."
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NoSugarAddedGFW
7 years ago
What a goldmine you are!
Duly noted.
And yes, I've watched most of Montalbano.
I might keep MHZ, all things considered, and based on what you said, and get rid of Hulu. I got it to watch "Chance" starring Hugh Laurie. It's good no doubt about it, but I'm not a TV watcher so little else appeals to me.
Again, great reading you. And I'll get back to "The Wire" then. I thought that it was dated and like current cop shows, but what I've seen I like. I totally understand what you mean about Idris ("Luther" must have been offered along with movies) and West ("The Affair") not being there it loses its 'juice' so to speak. Love watching actors, well, act.
GFW
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NoSugarAddedGFW
7 years ago
Loved "The Jewel in the Crown" as a kind of teething ring to my 'love' of Masterpiece Theather... and foreign entertainment. Sounds like we live in the same area and have similar tastes (viewing-wise,) but your life sounds pretty fascinating. The travel, the 'friends' as well as The Job. IMDb can be iffy but still has its gems, and it seems I've found one by way of "Berlin Station" ... you!
Another guy on here from "Berlin Station" sent me a link to watch and suggested another good show found on YouTube, where, by the way, I watched "Berlin Station." It's a pity really it couldn't / can't be seen in the DMV area. Makes no sense. I wonder what's behind it? I recommended "Transport: The Series" starring Chris Vance from "Mental" and he said he'd give it a watch. And what all that's fun about all this is being able to chat about what you see with fun like-minded intelligent posters.
GFW
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NoSugarAddedGFW
7 years ago
I didn't get to read it! Why'd you delete it? I have email notifications on, but am also at work so didn't move too fast.
Oh well...
GFW
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CobblersAwls
7 years ago
JITC aged well, too, because it dealt with a specific time and place and classes of people.
The first time I saw it was not yet au courant as it were with the nuances of the British class system, so it was just a great story about a time and place.
Decades later, watching it, if you've been around the British class system for a long time and can pick up the clues and spoken and unspoken moments in JITC where it rears its head, you can notice every little moment in which that class system plays itself out among the characters with their rigid identifies cast from both the "empire" Indian world and also their places in their own caste system--the British class assignments.
It's like when "Ronnie" keeps saying "oh I was just a Grammar School Boy you know." He' is admitting to people he's working class but was smart and passed the 11+ exam to get where he is.
Yet he's the officer and the sergeant played so wonderfully by Charles Dance is a Chillingborough "old boy." It's the reversals of class and position that they've pulled off to show that no matter how high you go in work, and if you choose to be a sergeant and not an officer like Dance, Merrick will always just been the grammar school boy who on a burser who tried to get above his station and will never be accepted by the officer class of public school boys.
But my favorite moment of "class" is when Ronnie the copper meets Harry Kumar the first time at the mission. He sees Harry and that he's Indian and Merrick just bristles with superiority as the police officer of the region, so Merrick simply assumes he'll be the "superior" person in that encounter.
(Merrick's character is another comment on the folks who went out to "the colonies" to "get on" because back home they'd be more held down vastly due to their working class backgrounds).
There is a fantastic moment when Merrick confronts the hungover Harry Kumar and asks him a question in his only partially cleaned up "Northern" accent. Pigott-Smith's accent was a thing of beauty--every word you could detect him trying to clean up a working class accent by emphasizing the wrong words in the wrong places, etc. so that his roots kept showing through. Masterful performance by P-S just with the accent.
Harry responds in a clipped, upper class public school accent with aplomb and off hand kind of way. Very old school.
The camera lingers on Merrick's shocked face. Accent is everything. And the second Harry opened his mouth with his public school boy voice and confident attitude, Merrick knew that a native Indian was outclassing him on the spot!
Then when he found out he was a Chillingborough boy, too, that drove him over the edge.
Merrick simply couldn't handle it--that with all his work and striving to get above his class--Harry of Indian descent was automtically ahead of him in the pecking order. And everything from there on ensued in his persecution of Harry.
The entire series is filled with scene after scene like that all carefully nuanced with the class battles that were going on within the story.
The first time seeing it back on PBS in the '80s, all of that went over my head. Only years later did I see the genius of the writing and characgters and how carefully they were drawn to highlight class and that particular "empire" world.
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