skygiants

(I think you would like it if you ever do get around to watching it! And I'd be very interested in your thoughts if you do, but I assume Slow Horses was also an extremely good way to spend your television budget although I know very little about it.)

Thank you! I do not object to the recommendation or the interest; I just seem to watch about one or two pieces of television a year and usually miniseries rather than open-ended shows. I am not sure why television is so much harder for me than movies, but it really is.

(I may or may not combobulate enough to write properly about Slow Horses, but it is a non-spoof about disaster spies, wickedly funny with appropriate stakes and a cleverly visible descent from le Carré and Len Deighton. I watched it week by week as it aired with my mother. It was one of the few things I was able to do last month.)

I did not watch Homecoming nor have I heard of that either! What was the premise?

Please accept that the premise has been slightly overtaken by history; it happens to the best science fiction; the show was filmed in 2018 and half set in 2022 and in any case appears to take place in a mild AU with deliberately mid-century aesthetics such as caused me to exclaim to spatch in the opening scenes, "What is this, desaturated Douglas Sirk?" On one side of the central mystery of the plot, the protagonist is a counselor employed at a couple of sub-contracted removes to work with veterans of multiple tours of duty in America's forever wars. On the other, she waitresses at a crab shack and lives with her mother. Her co-protagonists are her last patient and, four years later, an investigator at the Department of Defense reopening a long-shelved complaint that said patient may have been mistreated at the residential facility. I found it extraordinarily good at a kind of low-grade skin-crawling creepiness which nonetheless manages to avoid all clichés of evil shrinks—while leaning gleefully into all clichés about evil corporations, including the banality of the tech bro—and runs in tandem with a really goofy sense of humor played bone-dry straight. One of the most important lines in the entire ten episodes is delivered by a man who has just wiped out into a rack of bicycles like Harold Lloyd. (He also tries, with exquisite unsuccess, to take a seat on one of those overstuffed artificial leather chairs in modern offices that should be classified as hostile architecture. He is my favorite character. I figured it was obvious.) It is not impossible to discern from early on where the general drift of the sfnal creepiness is going, but the narrative uses its multiple strands for more than just dazzle camouflage: there's a lovely stretch in the mid-season where the investigator looks to the protagonist like the government hunting her down and she looks to him like the linchpin of a cover-up and each of them is in their own separate conspiracy thriller and the audience can see it's more complicated and also kind of can't disagree. It was adapted from a podcast that I have never listened to and therefore cannot rate any fidelity to, but I was impressed by the show and mildly puzzled it got no look-in at the Hugos, even if it would inevitably have lost to The Good Place like everything else. Starring Julia Roberts, Stephan James, and Shea Whigham, with memorable support from Bobby Cannavale, Sissy Spacek, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. There is also a pelican. And in-jokes in the cinematography. I also agree with moon_custafer who got me into the show in 2020 that two out of three of its protagonists can and perhaps should be read as autistic, in which case it is a show which places autistic people caring at its front and center. There's a lot of pattern recognition in it and it isn't cold. Avoid, however, if you don't like dolly zooms.

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