Game of Thrones (Sky/NowTV)
I Know Who You Are (BBC4) | iPlayer
Ozark (Netflix)
Is Love Racist? The Dating Game (C4) | All4
As taglines go it doesn’t quite have the cachet of “On every street in every city, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody”, or even “An epic of epic epicness”. No, “Winter is coming”, had it been the sole sell, shouldn’t cut it. Winter’s always coming. Somewhere.
Also, at the close of last season, we got Battle of the Bastards, the most splendidly ichor-soaked beardfest ever committed to screen. This season we opened with spud-faced professional strumster and keen amateur miscastee Ed Sheeran, proving that he can, in fact, do wrong, and will continue so to do every time he’s encouraged to “act”.
So, a disappointment? Oh, I think not. Because the place to which winter is coming (motto of the House Stark), is of course Westeros, and it’s promised (according to the maesters) to be the fiercest for 1,000 years, and the programme to which it’s coming is Game of Thrones. Basically the biggest TV programme ever, but now in its final throes: this is the first of two short last seasons, and the showrunners are wholly loosed from all the precise imaginariums George RR Martin ever vouchsafed to book form. Free to run wild to the ultimate, constrained only by the levels of glee, cliffhangerdom, betrayal, dragonglass, mask magic, vomitus, faeces, gore and glory they feel they can reasonably stuff behind our eyeballs each week.
And this opener did a thoroughgoing Ronseal job of setting up for what lies ahead: endgame for Snow and Daenerys and Cersei and Tyrion, black-cloaked armadas to the right of them, ice zombies to the north, dank monks scrabbling for ancient truths in the nethers. A kingdom, perhaps more than one, to be won or lost. Essentially, the last days of ancient Rome combined with enough snake-tongued pass-agg diplomacy to turn any cherished truth to ash in the mouth. Like Brexit but with dragons. It’s easy to forget, with the crazed-mosaic delights of the plotting, the sheer sumptuousness of the filming: one can get inured, blase even, but we should wallow in every landscape, every beat of leathery wing: GoT is a jewel, and the reason it has superseded its own medium is that it is both rare and well done.
Both The Loch and Fearless, despite fierce early misgivings, ended alarmingly well. In the Dark continues alarmingly badly. I was immensely taken, however, by two overseas offerings, hugely differing in tone, equally mesmeric.
I Know Who You Are – the original Spanish, Sé quién eres, is plosively richer – is a wholly superior take on a hoary premise, the amnesiac thriller, and settles happily into BBC4’s 10-part Scandi noir slot but with more fricative subtitling. High-profile defence lawyer Juan Elias (Francesc Garrido) – sexy only in that way some older Spanish men can attain, from the intelligent eyes – stumbles, bloodied, from a car, his niece missing. There follows a psychological and police thriller, yes, but it’s so much more.
It’s in Elias’s reaction to his family – if he has lost his memory, and it’s ever debatable, then he’s meeting them entirely afresh – that the fascination lies. What might you do, having to rely on your children to teach you about the man you had been? What if you actually grew in turn to like them, trust them – daughter Julieta is particularly beguiling – but found that your wife… well, not so much. In fact, you actively dislike the woman you’ve married: shrewish, unyielding, graceless, and it can’t help that Blanca Portillo, while a stylish actress, is the most homely female, by a long chalky face, in a clutch of lawyers who seemingly double as lingerie models.
It’s grownup, captivating, singularly Spanish in its complex ordering of family, honour and money, and any plot that can pivot wholly, as did this in the second episode, around the whispered question: “Where do we plant the garlic?”, warrants sticky attention.
Family is at the heart, too, of a flawed but potentially rich and wry new biggie from Netflix in the shape of Ozark. Jason Bateman, best known here perhaps as Michael Bluth in Arrested Development, and Laura Linney, best known here perhaps as the woman I should have married, excel as a warring Everycouple, with Everykids, who suddenly have to up family sticks from Chicago to Lake of the Ozarks, southern Missouri’s “redneck Riviera”, to escape the Mexican drug lords for whom Bateman’s Marty Bird has been laundering money for a decade.
It’s bound to suffer from comparisons to Breaking Bad, even to Fargo, and of course the vicissitudes of a family life on the lam have never been better explored than in The Sopranos, but I’m reckoning it will hold its own and then some. There’s the quality of the acting, for one, and early indications are that the Ozark yokels will be, intriguingly, more than a match for Chicago’s wiles, which makes this on another level a simple survival thriller. Also, at times, deeply witty. Take the asides, almost unheard through foreground clutter, of daughter Charlotte asking dad Bateman for 10 bucks for charity: a classmate has psoriasis. “It’s a disease, Dad. Like cancer.” “It’s itchy skin, honey.” Stymied, Charlotte exits with a mutter: “No, it’s fine, let her face fall off…”
Back home, Emma Dabiri fronted a Channel 4 show of provocative titling, Is Love Racist? The Dating Game, clickbait for those who wake each morning wondering how to take offence, and half-baked analysis. Ostensibly an exploration into how the rise of dating apps and sites, by allowing preferential “filter” searches, might encourage white people only to date white people, Dabri concluded the opening segment with: “Love, it would appear, is available at the touch of a button.”
No. Sexual contact might be available at the touch of a phone button. Porny pants-down self-gratification is available at the touch of a button. Love has never been so available, and never will. With such sloppy categorisation, the rest of the programme looked doomed, and so it transpired.
There was some stuff with secret glasses recording eye movement, a bikini parade, the usual vox pops showing the usual unsettling prejudices. There was little denying that there is a preponderance in white people, vaguely, wanting to go out with other white people, when given a preference. I don’t yet know whether that’s subconscious stereotyping or simply a numbers game – there are, after all, more white people in Britain than any other colour – and, undoubtedly, we should open ourselves to every experience ever and then some – as long as we are actually attracted. But this wasn’t enough for Emma: she had to find bigotry. “While I’m not saying our singles are making racist choices,” she equivocated at one stage… but what, then, was she saying? This remains head-scratchingly unclear.
