Scenes from a gentler time

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?

📺 Broadchurch, Season 1 got my full attention the moment David Tenant screamed Bloody Twitter. The show deserves an A+ for drama, a B- for the mystery, and an F for its medical chops. Fortunately, medicine didn’t come into play until very late, when drama and mystery were already at full steam.

📺 The Night Of (2016) we somehow missed when it first came out nine years ago (!?) but it was well worth revisiting. These kind of competent dramas with a deeper message than just whodunnit have become rare — was Mare of Easttown the last one? — particularly ones that feel like they were set in an actual place and not a softly-focused, sterilized backdrop of Netflixland.

The complete package is high enough quality to compensate for a few annoying stereotypes. Cutting to a street scene full of Southeast Asian pedestrians milling about? Queue vaguely ethnic music with a techno beat. Our innocent protagonist is sent to a penitentiary like a lamb for slaughter? Queue the wise black inmate to provide advice and protection… but is he himself in fact a wolf?

That whole prison story was a needless diversion, a sped-up Walter White to Heisenberg transformation which detracted from (to me) the more important message about the criminal justice system and all human systems in general. It says that competence in a profession is indistinguishable from obsession, is driven by annoyance not love, and is powerless against the greatest force of human civilization — institutional inertia. Application to medicine comes immediately to mind, a case of missed diagnosis standing in for wrongfully charging someone with murder. Now that would be a show to watch.

📺 Untamed (2025) had wonderful scenery (Yosemite!) and above-average acting, but the thinnest of cores. My 13-year-old could have written more convincing dialogue and made the charters' motivations more believable. A missed opportunity for greatness.

📺 Dept. Q, Season 1 (2025) was as good as a Netflix show gets. Which is to say, not exactly to the level of Slow Horses (Apple TV+) and certainly not Mare of Easttown (HBO), but with a cast that good I had to give it a pass for the occasional plot hole and choppy pacing.

📺 The Residence (2025) had great acting, a gorgeous set and a satisfying plot so of course Netflix decided to cancel it after just one season. The show was not a good fit for such a trashy distribution channel, so I hope that Cordelia Cupp and friends find a new home on HBO or Apple TV+.

📺 The Perfect Couple (2024) was perfectly shot — Netflix production values seem to have improved — and also too muddled. The White Lotus meets The Afterparty, sure, but did they really need to add Big Little Lies, Knives Out and who knows what else to the mix?

📺 Moonflower Murders (2024) had three and a half murder mysteries in a single series, each of them flawless. Part of me wishes it had the production values of HBO — Leslie Manville’s acting certainly deserves it — but then isn’t part of the charm seeing all those British B-listers hamming it up?

Happy Twin Peaks Day, everyone! To go with your morning coffee and cherry pie, here is an interview with the Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino on how David Lynch’s masterpiece influenced her own show.

📺 Ars Technica’s list of best television in 2024 goes on and on (and on, and on). This is why I barely watched anything this year, and most of what I did see were Modern Family reruns.