“Tuca & Bertie” are well worth your time
It has got one of the most addictive opening titles of a show in ages.
Hello,
Hope you had a good three day weekend.
Here’s a few cracking things to tide you over the four day week.
Tuca & Bertie (Netflix) - There comes a show once in a while where you can sense the energy and passion that goes into it. This is one of them. It looks like BoJack Horseman (the animation is anthropomorphic; they are animals with human features). The vibe can feel quirky, like Broad City, but this new sitcom doesn’t feel like it owes anything to either of those two. At its heart, Tuca & Bertie is about friendship; how long-standing friendships feel pressure from both relationships and work. Also, what it feels like to be not reaching the expectations you had for yourself and how anxiety distorts your own thinking. The animation is silly and ridiculous and the opening titles are some of the best from any new show I’ve seen this year. Like all Netflix sitcoms that can be wrapped up in a few hours. Try not to binge it all in one sitting!
Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic / HBO - Tuesday 9pm) - There’s two different types of horror in this mini-series of the 1986 nuclear disaster: the horror of the explosion and its aftermath, and the horror in just how little everyone knew about radiation and contamination. Episodes are once a week. Worth a look.
Won’t You be my Neighbor (iTunes) - This is a biographical film, but it’s about someone on television so this counts, alright? Fred Rogers may not be well known in the UK, but in the US he is considered to be an institution; a children’s television presenter broadcasting for decades for pre-schoolers on PBS. What is so fascinating about him is that how he understood, decades ago, that children’s television needs to have the same care and attention spent on it, as television made for adults. Also, how important it is that kids are not shut out when something terrible has happened on the news (they always find out anyway), but how they should reassured that people are helping, and that the reason why it is news in the first place is because it is rare.
EasyJet: Inside the Cockpit (ITV Hub) - This documentary isn’t the PR guff from EasyJet that you might expect, especially when every channel does a pointless “oh what a lovely airline” doc roughly every six months. It is instead a really rather interesting insight into the people who fly between countries for a living. There’s the usual stuff about logistics and flight plans, but there’s a scene where they can’t see the runway when they are about to land due to poor visibility, and another where a plane gets lost on the runway trying to find its parking bay. My parents, who are air traffic controllers, would bloody love this (yes, that’s you Mum and Dad reading this). If you see it, pop it on.
And a reader suggestion… Ambulance (BBC iPlayer) - “You only get to see what happens during the shift for the paramedics and the phone crew as they see it. There is no back story, talking heads, or follow up interviews like you get with 24 hours in A&E, for example. It feels much more genuine. Of course, it does also highlight how horrendously overstretched our health and social care sectors are!” - Louise, email.
If you have got a show that you want to share, then respond to this with your suggestion and I’ll try to include it next week.
And if you watched Line of Duty… I spent ages trying to work out what Ted Hastings “Tedism” is the said the most. It resulted in this ridiculous supercut video and a lot of graphs. You can read it in the Radio Times.
Next week is a Eurovision special. Yep, that’s right, the contest has come back around again. The newsletter will be a guide of all of the entries you really should be keeping an eye out for. Glitter (and alcohol) at the ready.
Have a great week.
Scotty x