Breeders (Sky One)
Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (Netflix)
Tales From the Loop (Amazon Prime Video)
Brews Brothers (Netflix)
Paul and Ally are arguing, as a substitute for grieving. Ally has lost her ever-wayward father in, suddenly, a more permanent way – charming roué Michael (Michael McKean) having been walloped by a car the week before – and Ally thinks it is, somehow, her fault. And so Daisy Haggard is being gently chided by Martin Freeman as Paul: “You might as well say 9/11 was your fault. Even though we both know you had virtually nothing to do with it.”
That throwaway “virtually” is what has raised this first series of Breeders beyond comedy and towards something rare. In that one word, delivered with Freeman’s usual deadpan finesse, we are gifted an insight into a loving couple striving, with a shared wit and worldview, against filthy circumstance. Two against nature, indeed, whether it’s school or bumptious parents or heart-scream tragedy or, as it often is, their own bloody children, too-tender Luke and too-bubbly Ava. Writers Simon Blackwell, Chris Addison and Freeman himself have given us not only a couple we can honestly believe in but also a drama for modern times; not sure, in fact, whether it should even qualify as “comedy”, though “dramedy” sounds like being force-fed a sour-bourbon medicine. Yet dramatic indeed: I can still feel in my bones that crump that vaulted Michael high over an anonymous suburban street. At the time of writing there are, astonishingly, no plans for a follow-up series: remedy, or even (if you must) dramedy, that omission prontissimo, if you will.
Similarly, there are no apparent plans for furtherance of Alma’s Not Normal, the one-off pilot of which landed rather triumphantly midweek. It’s a very different kind of comedy – set in Bolton/Bury and featuring three generations of variously damaged women rather than successful, middle-class Londoners – but contains just as much heart and truly sharp writing. As it might, coming from Sophie Willan, the first recipient of the Caroline Aherne writing bursary, who also stars as ever-hopeful, ever-hopeless Alma. Much was made of this being “only” a pilot, yet I wholly suspect it’ll be commissioned for an entire series – not because of the sainted Aherne link, but because it’s truly quality.
Siobhan Finneran is a revelation as Alma’s mother, an ex-punk morphed and morphined into a recovering addict, false toothed and snotty, roots growing out the colour of an unhealthily bruised sky. There are great observations of the way people truly speak, the obsession with brand awareness of those who have little or nothing (“It’s not a trampoline, it’s a Fit Bounce Pro”), and some wise and lovely touches. When Alma’s phonescreen rings up as “mum”, we see Finneran is also programmed in as “NOT AN EMERGENCY CONTACT”. Mum was “also obsessed with ornamental pixies. Before heroin. Had she stayed with the pixies… ” Lovely, at once gentle yet scabrous and unafraid surely – once it garners that well-deserved commission – to tackle many long-neglected thorns.
I’m coming stupidly late as ever to the phenomenon that has globally swept us, or at least swept social media: that of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, the seven-part Netflix doc on US big-animal parks and, specifically, the war between two batshit owners.
The first few episodes felled my jaw to dislocation levels, as it did jaws all over. Where to start? The antagonists, Joe Exotic and the “big cat rescuer” Carole Baskin, who bought animals just to keep them roiling and broiling in cages, each as bad as the other, though only one is going to end (spoiler alert) his life in jail? The cult of the parks, employees fed past-sell-by Walmart meat along with the animals and returning eagerly to have another limb removed? The sex-pest cult, with gay, gun-toting, mulleted Joe marrying two straight, damaged, young weirdos? The well-timed, dodgy death of Carole’s first husband; her even dodgier love of ersatz tigerprint? The eternal gulls of social media? By halfway I was looking for some hint of a crazed director seeking to keep us all glued to our screens these difficult times with cartoon baddery: Tintin Quarantino?
But it fast grew stale as mad bat guano. Enthralling in an aghast kind of way, like watching an accident in slow-mo – but not even that interesting an accident - a collision between two old milk floats, say, where you’re just left with much broken glass and a rancid pungency. I suspect some whose worldview is that Trump is behind All Evil might have stayed with it to the end, to revel fully in all the shit-kicker madness, the parade of demeaned (often limb-shorn) grotesques. I stayed with it, because that’s my job, but felt by the last there was little to garner and might as well have spent the time ironing my hair. The one high emotion I was left with was that, in the end, the very end, despite a decade’s wrangling, both cage-based and literal and by wet-lipped lawyers and figurative, the animals were not one spit better off.
And, as if America didn’t have enough of a global PR problem at the moment, were I head of the Oklahoma Tourist Board, I’d be walking even now into a starving, thin-ribbed tiger’s cage, wrapped in a Maccy D bun and slathered in catsup.
Tales From the Loop is also quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. Yet in a good way. A very, very good way. A grace-slow, megaweird, tragic and scary and utterly contemplative way. Based visually on the art meisterwerk by Sweden’s Simon Stålenhag, it’s been transplanted from canvas to screen and from Scandinavia to midwest America and actually benefits from both transitions. To say it’s a science fiction series utterly belies its drip-slow gifts. No whooshy rockets or whizzbang alienettes; just a steady, low-booming, ethereal sense of unease, unsteadiness, crossed somehow with memories, none of which any of us have, of Soviet-era satellite braincamps where young scientists were bred and raised as something thrummed underground.
Stålenhag’s art might best be described as haughty steampunk. And kind, or strange, or unhelpful, or somnolent, Stakhanovite robots litter the cold landscape, influencing all lives in the tiny community of Mercer. One girl finds a flask that makes time stand still. Two friends swap bodies inside an oil drum. It is perhaps the most beautiful, slow-boned, elegiac oddity I’ve ever seen.
On the very (very) other hand, there’s Brews Brothers. It rips the foam nicely out of the snobberies of “craft” beer. Especially in the very specific environs of Van Nuys, an apparently derided LA suburb: should you ever want to insult someone in Van Nuys about the quality of their snob beer you’ll have all the lines foaming at your fingertips. It features one or two performances, and some actors, and is dumb, slapsticky and ill-conceived, not least in that there’s no one to rail either for or against. Especially for. It’s on Netflix, but essentially it’s for the plus-400 reaches of any Freeview remote.
