What I Watched on TV This Summer
by Chris Bullivant
September 2023
An injured and opioid-high Chris Bullivant reviews Silo, Foundation, Mary Poppins, Invasion, Annie, The Batman, Wonder Woman 1984, and Batman.
A three-month holiday with our toddler slowed down further after I rode home on my e-bike one midsummer evening and had to avoid a truck that didn’t stop at the STOP sign. This is quite typical of drivers in Charlottesville, Virginia, who don’t drive well, though on this occasion it left my humerus with multiple fractures, requiring surgery with plates and screws, and exposure to two rounds of opioids and a slew of medical bills. The unfortunate episode trashed plans for seasonal visits to wineries, a beach, the state capital, leaving our small family a little more dependent than usual on the TV this summer. Here’s the highlight reel.
SILO (Apple TV)
This did not appeal on our first scan through the menu. The preview showed a population that lives in an underground concrete silo, but they don’t know why. The tension? To find out why. The artificiality of the construct, a problem we know to be a problem, because the writer has created it, felt claustrophobically nonsensical. The first two minutes of viewing seemed to confirm this. But the show fast arrested attention with a device long absent from any offering on streaming TV: characters you care about.
Exceptional casting, costuming, and set establish an immersion into a believable world and follow no more than a handful of people in a braid of relational developments, overcoming obstacles, set to a convincing narrative arc. No more so than when the new Sheriff, Juliette Nicholls, played by Rebecca Ferguson, emerges mid-season as the protagonist. She is that even rarer object in current television: a woman. Most female characters in television today are male stand-ins: they “lead” (which, in most shows, means to dominate their will over another, usually by pulling rank), they fight, usually while wearing olive green tank tops, and if they have a boyfriend, he is frequently more worried about his hair than she is hers. Yes, Sheriff Nicholls is physically strong—she has a “boy’s” interest in engineering, and can physically dominate her male subordinate—but she is vulnerable enough to be loved by a man, loves a man in a way that transforms him, and has a complex relationship with her father (daddy issues). Unusually, she isn’t controlling, manipulative, nor domineering.
Silo is by far the most original and enjoyable show on streaming TV at the moment.
FOUNDATION (Apple TV)
It must be hard to be a white female actress these days. The only one in this show, Laura Birn, is a robot. All other birthing persons are dual-heritage, and seemingly picked up from north London’s drama schools. Whether Isaac Asimov imagined his worlds to look universally like a north London borough is beyond me. I’d have to read the novelas to know, which is not what TV is about.
In Foundation, the fate of the galaxy rests upon the two drama school recruits, which is a pity. Gael Dornick (Lou Llobel) and Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) show exceptionally limited range in their acting. Lou Llobel’s character is restricted to crying or looking worried, and is too prone to speak in a Hermione Grainger accent to assert authority as occasional narrator. Leah Harvey struggles to land the region of American accent she’s emulating, though at least she has screen presence.
However, these minor observations are demolished by the grandeur of the epic, which once it has metered out its worlds and central narrative tensions, manages to accomplish that magic composition by Season 2 that any sci-fi epic seeks to pull off: a majestic, multi-layered storyline developing in tension toward catastrophe. The usually magnetic Jared Harris is a little wooden, of mixed gravity, sometimes convincing, otherwise jarring, but I suspect that’s more the fault of the character than the acting: an anachronistic, mid-century fantasy of the White Male Mathematical Genius who can create a grand, godless system to fix “society”’s problems. When he bashes Tellum Bond (Rachel House) to death with a metal implement and sweatily admits, “I never liked her,” there we see the magnetic Harris: complete, comprehensive, deep, one of his generation’s stand-out actors.
MARY POPPINS (Amazon Prime)
Three-and-a-half is maybe too early to introduce our daughter to the floating nanny, but she has been a hit. Turns out it’s very moving to watch a film you saw repeatedly as a child with one of your own, to whom it is new. And Mary Poppins is that rare gift: a film that can be watched repeatedly as an adult, and so together as a family. It remains simply beautiful: sets, songs, pace, the works.
A couple of things I note now as an adult. Strangely, I hadn’t appreciated that the film was set in the 1910s. Mary Poppins has such a strong 1960s aesthetic, that I think I had somehow thought it more contemporary. Like most popular culture, it is preoccupied with the elite and the espousal of fashionable views, taking a standard anti-capitalist sentiment. This is odd. I don’t understand why there is a failure to advise the young Michael Banks to invest his tuppence in the Bank in order to earn interest, from which he could regularly buy breadcrumbs from the bag lady at St Paul’s Cathedral. Not only would a run on the bank have been avoided, but the bag lady could have been set up, with regular visits by a patron who had foregone the immediate gratification of charity to have benefitted from ongoing gifts.
Perhaps I am being too Emma Raducanu about it, who recently espoused greater financial literacy to empower Disney Princesses. However, I suspect the point was to live in the moment, and to that end, the toppling of the bank’s hierarchy seems to have, as ever with such films, not left the wealthy elite family in financial ruin, but somehow enabled them to further prosper. Regardless, this is a wholesome, beautiful film, conjured of a strange patchwork of incidents and songs that have no real reason for congealing into a plausible plot but do. Perhaps because that’s how a child constructs stories.
The other patchwork of stories are to be found in Wikipedia entries. Julie Andrews had her daughter soon before filming started, and nursed on set. Andrews later had surgery in New York for her vocal chords, which were damaged, never letting her sing in quite the same way again. Matthew Garber, who plays Michael Banks, died at age twenty-one of the hepatitis he’d contracted in India. David Tomlinson arrived on set to play jovial would-be patriarch George Banks, but had experienced unspeakable tragedy when his wife committed murder-suicide just three months after their wedding by jumping out of a hotel window in New York with her two sons from a previous marriage. Karen Dotrice, who plays Jane Banks, has since said she wouldn’t do the film again if given the chance, thinking children should have a childhood, and is reputed to have given up on her own career when asked as a teenager to be topless on screen.
Mary Poppins was filmed entirely in Burbank, California. So successful is the depiction of Cherry Tree Lane, next to a quintessentially London park, that it is a surprise, as an adult, to realise that I too as a child had essentially jumped through one of Bert’s chalk drawings and found myself in a fictional set. But it does make sense of one strange inaccuracy. The robin that lands on the magical nanny’s hand is an American robin: large, grey, with a blush red chest, not the small brown bright red chested bird we know in England.
INVASION (Apple TV)
I’m not sure why the insistence on opioids to manage post-surgery pain, especially given that my insurance provider seemed very reluctant to re-issue me with more after three days use. Anyway, during my one week of opioid use to mask the discomfort of having three screws and a plate drilled into my arm through a surgical incision, I came across Invasion.
Invasion is an ambitious project that aims to weave stories that are set in Japan, US-occupied Afghanistan, comprehensive-school-social-housing London, and somewhere in middle-America, following a Muslim family. It’s only in episode 6 that the characters discover what we as the viewer have known since before pressing “play”: that Planet Earth has undergone an alien invasion. But no sooner do they know, than they defeat the invasion. Only to realise they haven’t.
Perhaps it was the narcotics, but the show felt tediously slow. It’s clearest message emerging in its presentation of the hierarchies of love: miserable heterosexual marriages at the bottom; transgressive extra-marital affairs—whether between the male and female doctor, or the bromantic relationship between the two soldiers—middle-tier; the purity of lesbian love overcoming all the odds (the patriarchy is highly supportive of the relationship), which in Invasion, plays a pivotal role in defeating the alien.
Annie (1982) (Amazon Prime)
Annie entertained my younger sister for hours during long summers, so I told my wife that perhaps now was as good a time as any to introduce our three-year-old to concepts of abandonment, peril, and billionaire rescue.
The songs are better than I remember. Miss Hannigan—first class throughout—has more screen time than I recall, and as a nod to parents, is presented in a sympathetic light in her plight of romantic solitude while “caring” for scores of girls.
The film is shorter than I remember, and has an unusually high number of sightings of underwear—both women and girls—in dance scenes which make me feel uncomfortable. Daddy Warbucks is goaded by FDR and his dutiful wife to (despite being a Republican) back some Big Government ideas.
Controversially for the period it is set in, we do not know if Daddy Warbucks has married his secretary when he kisses her in the 4th of July celebration finale, but we are glad that Miss Hannigan’s attempt to thwart her brother from murdering Annie was redemptive enough to spare her from jail and land her a spot in the festivities astride an elephant.
THE BATMAN
Cederic Diggory from Harry Potter stars as Batman, with Tyler Durden of Fight Club seemingly providing the white male narrative about how miserable everything is—though, this time, without a reference to IKEA furniture. (Presumably, because IKEA furniture has become so expensive of late.)
Insufferably dull. I don’t know why they keep making these films, over and over. Especially when they’re not contributing anything new. In The Batman, a woman wears a pink bob wig and this is reminiscent of something else, and the use of duct tape on murder victims seems novel, but we just can’t make it past 30 minutes. Apparently, 2025 sees the sequel.
WONDER WOMAN 1984
My claim to fame is that the shopping mall featured in this film lies on the parking lot opposite my boss’s office in Springfield, Virginia. To my mind, IRL, the mall languishes on a cliff edge of financial viability. Perhaps the failing shopping malls of America are the equivalent of stately homes in England; huge estates unable to make enough revenue as from a previous age. Like Highclere (Downton Abbey), this mall in Springfield perhaps needs Hollywood money to keep things afloat?
Wonder Woman 1984 is a notorious victim of Covid. It’s bright, energetic, high-budget opening collapses one third of the way through, when scenes slow down from epic to intimate, with only two people on set, or background extras unnaturally grouped in pairs, maintaining six feet of distance from each other.
BATMAN (1989)
I am out of my sling and have begun physiotherapy. Having exhausted the handful of shows available on Apple TV and drained Amazon Prime of most content, we resort to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger. I was fourteen when Batman was released. It was presented as huge, paradigm-breaking and recklessly innovative in its reinvention of the much loved 1960s TV franchise.
It turns out that this Batman is endlessly entertaining. Truly mould-breaking, and in many respects a high point of 1990s cinema. The film gives us believable, likeable characters, drama, suspense, story, no incel, emo crap, and curious cinematography. The absence of CGI and Danny Elfman’s compelling soundtrack driving the love story to its conclusion wrap up a feast.
So groundbreaking was Tim Burton’s film, so shattering, that it has spawned endless remakes—of both the DC and Marvel franchises. Yet Batman makes The Batman seem truly redundant. Thirty years of Hollywood reheats have taken us from four courses with petits fours to the leftovers of a TV dinner.
The health insurer is sending me daily letters letting me know how much my billing is going to be. A note to my local readers: if you see a STOP sign, stop.
