And another TV show
Oct. 27th, 2018 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI should have posted this last night, but I hadn’t got my thoughts in order.
Berlin Station 1.1
On a very basic level, watching this show means watching Richard Armitage’s character traversing Berlin (he cycles once!) I have no problem with that. There is lots and lots of old-school spycraft, it’s very stylish, and the ridiculously speeded-up titles with the hardly subtle song aren’t typical of the whole thing.
I’m curious as to why Armitage is basically doing a more adult, less ‘splodey Spooks in Berlin with an American accent, career-wise, but I’m not complaining. His character is sent there to hunt down ‘Thomas Shaw’, a post-Snowden figure who is leaking CIA secrets to the press. The show acknowledges some of the, er, PR problems of this work these days. Daniel Miller is an army brat, with a slightly angsty background (less tragedy-stricken than Lucas North), a link with Berlina, and he seems smart.
So, he’s transferred to the Berlin station, innocuously on the face of it, but with this secret mission of spying on spies. The station is staffed by good actors, I was relieved Shaw wasn’t Michelle Forbes’ Valerie because I liked her, professional, standing up for her staff. Rhys Ifans played Hector, almost as if he was in a different show, although he was just hitting some of the show’s themes more extremely. I found him a bit too softly spoken at times. Through Hector particularly, the idea of anything goes Berlin was pushed (an echo of the Weimar era?) and although it’s set in the modern day, with server farms and USB sticks and phones, it’s got a strong whiff of Cold War spying about it, not just because some characters were nostalgic for those days. A believable amount of German was spoken, although the focus is on the American staff of the Berlin station, who seem like competent adults, give or take.
There are 10 episodes, and apparently two others series. More 4 have put it in what I like to think of as their ‘Hello, Ladies’ slot – but I hadn’t really heard of the show before, which wasn’t propitious, although I happened to be wondering the other day what Armitage was doing now. Still, it left me wanting to go back to rewatch the flashforward opening now that we’ve met most of these characters.
Panama looked sunkissed. (Maybe it was ‘Panama.’)
This might be an interesting companion piece to The Little Drummer Girl.
Berlin Station 1.1
On a very basic level, watching this show means watching Richard Armitage’s character traversing Berlin (he cycles once!) I have no problem with that. There is lots and lots of old-school spycraft, it’s very stylish, and the ridiculously speeded-up titles with the hardly subtle song aren’t typical of the whole thing.
I’m curious as to why Armitage is basically doing a more adult, less ‘splodey Spooks in Berlin with an American accent, career-wise, but I’m not complaining. His character is sent there to hunt down ‘Thomas Shaw’, a post-Snowden figure who is leaking CIA secrets to the press. The show acknowledges some of the, er, PR problems of this work these days. Daniel Miller is an army brat, with a slightly angsty background (less tragedy-stricken than Lucas North), a link with Berlina, and he seems smart.
So, he’s transferred to the Berlin station, innocuously on the face of it, but with this secret mission of spying on spies. The station is staffed by good actors, I was relieved Shaw wasn’t Michelle Forbes’ Valerie because I liked her, professional, standing up for her staff. Rhys Ifans played Hector, almost as if he was in a different show, although he was just hitting some of the show’s themes more extremely. I found him a bit too softly spoken at times. Through Hector particularly, the idea of anything goes Berlin was pushed (an echo of the Weimar era?) and although it’s set in the modern day, with server farms and USB sticks and phones, it’s got a strong whiff of Cold War spying about it, not just because some characters were nostalgic for those days. A believable amount of German was spoken, although the focus is on the American staff of the Berlin station, who seem like competent adults, give or take.
There are 10 episodes, and apparently two others series. More 4 have put it in what I like to think of as their ‘Hello, Ladies’ slot – but I hadn’t really heard of the show before, which wasn’t propitious, although I happened to be wondering the other day what Armitage was doing now. Still, it left me wanting to go back to rewatch the flashforward opening now that we’ve met most of these characters.
Panama looked sunkissed. (Maybe it was ‘Panama.’)
This might be an interesting companion piece to The Little Drummer Girl.
