The Hour Season Two

Season Two of the BBC series The Hour has made its appearance on BBC America recently and having watched the first two episodes I feel compelled to give the series a huge positive rating.

So few shows are intelligent and compelling. We can find shows that intrigue us, Revolution, The Walking Dead, for example. We can find shows that are intelligent but rarely both. With it's nod to history and the assumption that we as viewers have a basic knowledge of it, The Hour is a superbly done show.

The first season centered on the personal relationships of the staff of a new British news show in the fifties. The British government is in the middle of the Suez Crisis, and Eisenhower is far from the most popular figure on the right side of the pond. The cast is led by Ben Whison as reporter Freddie Lyon, Dominic West as anchorman Hector Madden and Romola Garei as Bel Rowley.

Hector Madden is the stereotypical anchorman, portrayed as handsome, charming, and incredibly self indulgent and centered. Freddie Lyon as the young reporter and best friend, Boy Friday of the female lead, Producer Bel Rowley or Moneypenny as he calls her. Rowley has a face that one does not forget. She is not attractive in the modern women as stick way, and not in the over the type Jane in Mad Men crazy way, but in one of the most alluring ways I can recall. For me Rowley is not a woman to take your eyes off and her character in show is just as alluring. When one thinks of the woman she is portraying from that time period one must come to appreciate those women even more.

Along with the Suez Canal we have a second storyline involving a former acquaintance of Lyon who as Lyon looks into her death uncovers a Communist conspiracy.

Season two starts up nine months later, Freddie is gone after being fired, and Belle is carrying on. In the first two episodes Belle is producing away, with a new producer who is asserting more control than she likes, soon into episode one Freddie has returned from his travels and has been hired back. Bel is glad to have back, however she is perturbed by her not being consulted, and even more shocked by a surprise he unveils.

Hector, if anything, has moved further down the road of decadence and seems to be self destructing at a rapid rate, his wife moving from being constantly feeling abandoned to resolving to live her life next to him but not with him. As Season Two takes off Hector's self destruction moves at a rapid clip and embroils everybody in it's wake.

The news, the history, the backstory of Season Two is if anything is more interesting than the first, Britain has gained a Nuclear Bomb and the government is fear-mongering to move attention from a crime wave and with British censors being a constant antagonist as the producers struggle to air the stories they wish is continual.

Few shows you will watch can place you in a time period as well as The Hour. Mad Men at the beginning did so, as the show has moved into the mid sixties the efforts to place the characters in the historical time period have seem contrived and stilted while those same efforts in The Hour are seamless.

The cast is strong, intriguing, and not to be forgotten. Watching the British shows on PBS, these shows on the BBC America Wednesday night block one wonders if there is a reason that British network, not cable mind you, network television appears to be so strong in comparison to ours.

It is a question well worth asking. In the meantime this is not a show to be missed.

Summer Television and I Don't Care

There are many new summer television shows each year. This summer is no exception. I had intended to check out Charlie Sheen's new show Anger Management and even thought that revisiting Southfork with the new Dallas reboot might be interesting.

Howard Stern made America's Got Talent something to check on for a week or two but some of the acts they put through are just so bad it became a farce of itself.

I know that Big Brother has returned and I know people still watch it but I do not know why. HBO has a new series starring Jeff Daniels but we are HBO less this summer and we never invested in True Blood so we are not watching much TV this summer.

My wife loves Ellen and even she has been off for over a month. Perhaps the networks need to just go off the air in the summers, tell people to go outside. Can you imagine if that happened.

Do not get me wrong. I love television. I heard about the return date of The Walking Dead in the fall and was very excited and I know that a great many people are anxiously awaiting the return o Breaking Bad tonight even.

Still for me, I am tan, I have been reading about six books at once, eventually i will finish them then it will not look as if I have taken the summer of from reading too, and I have enjoyed spending time with my wife as she is off in the summers.

We have watched a few Netflix movies, she has watched some cooking shows as she and my daughter enjoy those and soon enough we will be back in the school routine. The networks will then entice us to watch them again but for now it is a nice quiet summer.

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead wrapped up Season Two last weekend. This is a flat out great show. The Zombies add an excitement to the show but the fact is there is much to like on this show even without them.

My middle son who is an avid devotee was stating that he could not believe he had to wait until October to see more of the show. This is one of the rarest of things these days in television. A show that one cannot wait to see the next episode. Lost, Mad Men, there are few shows that are the watercooler shows.

The Walking Dead is one of those. If you are not watching this show yet you now have the summer to catch up. You absolutely should.

The Walking Dead

Our newest show, and when I say ours I mean mine as the wife will not have anything to do with it, is The Walking Dead. When this series appeared last fall I had little interest. The commercials made it look like it was more zombie than story.

Still the reviews were very strong and when the first episode debuted to ratings that broke records I wondered if I was missing something. So I started watching.

In watching it becomes quickly apparent that the show is not so much as a zombie show as one of many aployptic shows that have come and gone that happens to also feature zombies.

The cast is not full of people you know. Andrew Lincoln plays Sherriff's Deputy Rick Grimes, as close to a traditional hero as you might find. The show starts strong. A member of a group of survivors is chained to a pipe on a roof in Zombie infested Atlanta. His brother, who as the show goes on becomes more and more likable, is not too happy about this and blames the Sherriff.

Still as time goes on the group has to get through obstacle after obstacle. Season 1 ends with the group learning that the CDC in Atlanta will not save them. Thus far in Season 2 we have lost a little girl in the woods and had a boy shot by accident. On the plus side more survivors who seem to be good folks have been found. With eleven more episodes scheduled for this season much is to be determined.

The story is strong, the characters have depth. For me some of the characters are a bit much, the Sherriff speaks too eloquently about his feelings, his wife has conflicts of her own and the blonde girl who just wants her gun needs to settle down but overall this show is full on great.

The zombies are not that scary,,more like comic book gore.