What We're Watching

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Now that we've totally filled our TBR lists/stacks, how about a catch up on what's filling our time when we're NOT reading.

In our house, we are glued to The Pitt every week. I have loved Noah Wyle since he was baby John Carter on ER, but even so I never imagined he would do something this good. The acting (from the entire cast) and writing and directing are fabulous, and the show is a look at America today that tells you more than any news story. And the camera work! Watch, if you will, how the scenes are set up, how the camera pans from one group to the next as the scenes change. It's really brilliant. Alas, after today there are only two episodes to go. Will Dr. Robby get to take his sabbatical?  

We are also watching a series called The Capture on Prime, starring Holliday Grainger, whom you may know as Robin Ellacott in the series adapted from Robert Galbraith's Cormoran Strike novels. I'd read that The Capture was the best police series since Line of Duty and halfway through season 1 we are gripped!! It is currently in the third season and if I had the time I'd be bingeing it.

From Wikipedia, which gives a better summary than I can: "The series is centred on DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), a fast-track Metropolitan Police detective drawn into a vast conspiracy involving real-time deepfake technology, mass surveillance and manipulated video evidence." Yikes!

It will definitely make you want to avoid CCTV cameras!! 

And since you can't be serious all the time, I am enjoying the spring season (how many ever this is...) of The Voice, my guilty pleasure. Coaches this season are Adam Levine, John Legend, and--yay!!--Kelly Clarkson, my favorite Dallas girl. (Actually, she's from Burleson, which is a suburb of Fort Worth, but close enough.)

Also, we are watching the new season of The Rookie. Yes, I know it's preposterous, but it's also funny and sharp. We've watched every season for eight years and are very attached to the characters.

Fellow Reds, what's on your screens these days?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, we saw The Capture, and loved it! We are in PARADISE, so clever and smart and scary. Total escapist, in a way. Or terrifying.  YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS with Jon Hamm (who is not my fave, but he is so good in this!) Also THE MEMORY OF A KILLER, about an  ice-cold mob hit man (leading a double life as a middle-class husband/ copier salesman) who is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. (what could go wrong?) Such a good premise! 

RHYS BOWEN: At the moment TV has to be super distracting and not in any way stressful. So Britbox. Escape to the Country. Glass blowers. Etc. luckily there have been two major tennis tournaments I’ve watched non stop 

LUCY BURDETTE: The only thing I’ve been watching is the new season of The Lincoln Lawyer. It’s comfort viewing in its own way, and not as silly as it was getting in the last season. (Lorna, in those silly new lawyer outfits drove me crazy.) I will have to ask John about The Capture and start it with him if he hasn’t seen it. 

We are also watching basketball–both of our UCONN teams made it into the Final Four, the men capturing the slot in a last minute 3 pointer that had all the tension a writer could want! The following weekend will be the Masters so that will keep us busy too:).

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Everyone I know is raving about THE PITT, so I guess I’m going to have to give it a try. I DO love Noah Wyle.

As usual, I’m going to put in a plug for Kdramas. I just watched two fantastic shows back to back. TEMPEST, streaming on Hulu (or Disney+) is both an international political thriller and an amazingly heart-pounding romance. Part of the story is set in DC’s State Department, with John Cho (love him!) as an undersecretary trying to stop a nuclear attack on the Korean penninsula. It’s only nine episodes (many Kdramas are 16) so it’s a terrific way to dip your toe in.

For something more immersive but equally riveting: CRASH LANDING ON YOU available on Netflix. This show has everything: mystery, intrigue, humor - loads of humor, heartbreak, delightful found families and, most importantly the best couple chemistry you’ll ever see from Hyun Bin, playing a stern-outside, marshmallow-inside North Korean officer and Son Yi-jin as an heir to a fabulously wealthy corporate family who, as the title says, crash lands on him after a crazy paragliding accident. The chemistry was real - the stars got married after the show was released and now have a three-year old! 

Jenn, if you haven’t seen this already, I think you’d love it.

JENN McKINLAY: I loved CRASH LANDING, Julia!!! So good! Very interesting to see the differences in North and South Korea. My recent fave K-Dramas are VINCENZO, Italian mafioso who is also Korean - very edge of the seat action with a solid bad guy, and ROMANCE IS A BONUS BOOK, set in a publishing house where their love of books and writing was just so nice and refreshing. Love me the K-Dramas!

Hub and I are watching ROOSTER, starring Steve Carrell as an author in residence on a college campus, very fun. And we just finished The LOWDOWN, starring Ethan Hawke, small town newspaper writer/bookstore owner in Tulsa who gets embroiled in political crimes. Also, excellent.

HALLIE EPHRON: I've been looking forward to seeing PROJECT HAIL MARY on the big screen and my daughter Molly and I went last weekend. The theatre was packed and the movie was a lot of fun. Highly recommended. In the meanwhile I'm slowly streaming the rest of RIOT WOMEN. It's heavy/heady stuff and requires many deep breaths between innings.

DEBS: Such fun suggestions! I love John Cho so will definitely check out TEMPEST, and ROOSTER and THE LOWDOWN sound fun.

How about you, dear readers? Tell us what you're watching!

Comfort Reading and Watching by Lucy Burdette

 

LUCY BURDETTE: I’ve said this before, and I’m sure it’s tiresome, but these are difficult wearying times we live in. I have often found myself looking for something familiar and comfortable to read or watch--something in a series so I know the characters. Sometimes a good murder mystery/police drama will do, like the many episodes of NYPD Blue. I love these people! John and I often say to each other, are we going to spend some time with our friends tonight? I watched an episode last week where the detectives were called to the scene of a dead man with his head in his lap. How can that possibly feel like comfort watching, but it does. I think it’s because of the lovable, wonderful, quirky and endlessly surprising characters in that police precinct. You always know that even if their world is filled with bad guys and violence, the good guys will always win in the end.

 I was also obsessed this winter with reading Jenny Colgan‘s series set in northern Scotland. You might guess because we live in Key West half the year now that I don’t like winter. But I like the idea of it, because it lends itself to coziness. Winter on Colgan‘s fictional isle of Mure is absolutely wicked, cold and windy, plus dark for many many hours in a day. Yet by the time she’s finished describing it, I can’t wait to get there because of the bustling pubs and the crackling fires and the sips of special Scottish whiskey. Each of her books in this series highlights a different character so you get to see the family and the community from a different point of view. Lots of bad things happen, people die, people are refugees from Syria, families are difficult. But Jenny makes them all palatable, maybe because community and good food trumps all ills?

Do you find yourself reaching for comfort books and television or movies? (Now this is making me wonder if this applies to food as well…)

RHYS BOWEN: I’m a great one for comfort reads and watches. I have all of Agatha Christie’s books. I stare at the shelf and see which one I might not quite remember then read it again. Usually I’m halfway through when I realize i do know whodunit. But it’s still quite calming. 

The same for television. Thank God for Britbox. I can watch Poirot, Marple, Sister Boniface, Rosemary and Thyme etc ad nauseam.

I can also re-watch the Vicar of Dibley, Miranda or any of the silly comedies when I really need cheering up.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hmm, I don't really read books again. But I can always always watch My Cousin Vinny, or any Alfred HItchcock movie, or The Devil Wears Prada, or Say Yes to the Dress, or Chopped. I used to love What Not To Wear–is that still on? I love makeover shows. I can always watch Born Yesterday, or the Die Hard that’s at the airport, or absolutely any Tracy and Hepburn.The Philadelphia Story, and High Society. Any Fred Astaire. And oh, That’s Entertainment. I think if I sing along, I’m fine.

HALLIE EPHRON: oh, cousin Vinny!! Or Singin’ in the Rain. Or ET. Comfort watches rather than “reads” for me, too. I was just re-watching Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple series. And New Tricks hold up over and over.

JENN McKINLAY: I almost never reread or rewatch anything because so many books and shows, so little time. However, I did recently watch the K-Drama Crash Landing on You and much to my surprise, I watched it again. A South Korean woman crash lands into North Korea and is found by a Captain and his soldiers and it’s just soooo good. So, I guess that’s been my comfort watch. Now I’m looking for my next. As for a comfort read, I can’t think of any book that I’ve gone back to repeatedly but I am always on the hunt for a series to fall into. The most recent being The Shepherd King duology by Rachel Gillig, it’s a two volume series that reads like a fairy tale. Loved it.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hank, I am tickled by your “comfort” choices including Alfred Hitchcock and Die Hard! I might go with Die Hard–we all want to see the bad guy get his due–but not Hitchcock.

Lucy, I do get detective series being comfort watches, but medical dramas work for me, too. How that is possible with blood and gore and people’s lives in danger, I don’t know, but somehow it does. We just finished The Pitt, Noah Wyle’s new series set in a Pittsburg ER, which is astonishingly good. I had to check afterwards, and yes, all 19 seasons of ER are streaming, so if we run out of things to watch and want to check out baby Noah… That said, I don’t actually tend to re-watch a lot of stuff.

My reading has definitely been skewing towards the comforting lately. Here’s a recent find that I absolutely loved: MRS. QUINN’S RISE TO FAME by Olivia Ford, about a woman in her late 70s who applies for the fictional equivalent of Great British Bake Off. Also, Jenn’s I CAN’T EVEN, which I adored and it still has me thinking about the characters and wondering how they’re doing:-)

LUCY: John loved the Pitt too–the students annoyed me so much that I quit watching. Loved Mrs. Quinn, and have Jenn’s book on order! I meant to say Jenny Colgan and NYPD Blue aren’t reruns for me, I was just far behind the rest of the world!

DEBS: Lucy, I wish you’d stuck with The Pitt! The students get better! But here’s a fun TV crossover. If anyone is watching LUDWIG on Acorn (so fun and not really as silly as you think at first–there are undercurrents) the actor who plays Whittacker, the student from Nebraska in The Pitt, is actually Welsh, and is Detective Constable Simon Evans in Ludwig. His American accent was flawless–I would never have guessed he was British!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My daughter and her wife are DEEP into The Pitt, so I suppose I'll have to try it.

My comfort rereads? The Murderbot series by Martha Wells (which is coming to Apple TV in May and will get me to re-up my subscription!) Eva Ibbotson's novels for adults (marketed at YA, but that's not how she intended them.) Lucy's Key West series (just such a NICE world to live in.)

Weirdly, my comfort watches are disaster movies. Just last night I re-watched CONTAGION. For some reason, seeing the world fall apart always cheers me up. 

Jenn, if you loved CRASH LANDING ON YOU, I highly recommend DESCENDANTS OF THE SUN, which you can stream on Viki Rakuten for free, with ads, or on Amazon with a trial subscription to Kocowa. I was glued to the screen.

Red readers, how about you?