Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: I had high hopes for this but was left mostly underwhelmed. There were a few stand-out exceptions, but I think only one truly great episode of television: “The Autopsy.” That single hour was everything I wanted the series to be—scary and clever and weird, keeping me guessing until the very end. Nearly all of the other episodes, meanwhile, did basically everything I’d expect from an anthology show. (The stand-out exception to that, of course, was “The Viewing, “probably my second-favorite episode, which is mostly just a vibe of never knowing what to expect. The thing is, though, I don’t think there were any particularly bad episodes, even I could have done without the double helping of Lovecraft and would have liked a better experience overall.
Inside Man: I don’t know that I’ve been actively avoiding Steven Moffat’s work in recent years, but after the excesses of his Doctor Who and Sherlock—and that one terrible episode of Dracula I made myself endure—I haven’t exactly been seeking it out either. His new miniseries, Inside Man, isn’t likely to change that. It’s more like two very underbaked shows Frankensteined together, wildly chaotic in tone and built on a knot of implausibility and contrivance. What the show demonstrates, more than anything, is that for all his good qualities as a writer, Moffat simply doesn’t know how to stay out of his own way. His impulse to appear clever above all else occasionally works—his characters do sometimes say clever and funny things—but it’s more often at odds with the dark and serious subject matter, the interesting questions he’s asking about morality, and it undercuts much of the empathy we have for any of those characters. By the end of the four episodes, I kind of hated it…and yet it was strangely compelling, carried largely by strong performances. Indeed, if there’s one thing I hated most about the miniseries, it’s that I think I might actually watch a second one.
Prime Suspect: I watched the first two or three series of Prime Suspect when they aired on PBS in the early 1990s, but there were four subsequent series, including two made in the early 2000s after an extended hiatus, so I decided to watch them all. (I like Helen Mirren and I have a BritBox subscription.) It doesn’t exactly work as cohesive whole, maybe thanks to that hiatus (or just the nature of British television), but each of the individual stories are fairly compelling, and Mirren’s unsurprisingly terrific even when they’re not. The final series, in particular, isn’t afraid to show the cracks and flaws in Jane Tennison as a character, and, not to spoil anything, but it gives her as satisfactory a send-off as she could probably ever get.
