Broadchurch

I'm embarrassed to say that I had never seen Jodie Whittaker in anything, so I sat down to watch this in order to see what I could expect from her and Mister Chinball.

First thoughts. It made me think of the Prisoner, in that the story is set in a surreal village apparently inhabited entirely by past and future Doctor Who actors. (Funny story, I mentioned to Jen who Jodie Whittaker was and that she would be playing the next Doctor. I didn't say anything about David Tennant and apparently, all through the first episode, my wife was thinking, "Wow, that guy really looks like David Tennant! But it must be a coincidence. Josh would have certainly mentioned it if he was.")

It's pretty brutal so far. Our daughter is the same age as the victim in the show, so it seems really personal. It's compelling, but there is no way we're going to binge watch this one. We're going to need something with a bit of levity between episodes.

 Wow! What a great show! Olivia Colman...Wow! I understand why people wanted her to be the Doctor. Really like what Chinball did with it. I hope he brings this aesthetic to Doctor Who. I’ll confess that I don’t like him as a writer. The Power of Three was not to my taste, but Cyberwoman was so bad that I told my friends, “Episodes like this are the reason I’m embarrassed to tell people that I watch science fiction.”But being a writer and being the showrunner involve an entirely different set of skills, so I am cautiously optimistic to see what he brings.

I felt smart for figuring out the killer ahead of time.




Spoiler








I noticed that one of the Netflix thumbnails for the series as a whole had all the families clustered together. Tennant and Colman were in the foreground and I got to wondering why her husband wasn't there. If the pattern held, he would have been off to the back and the side, but he wasn't. I figured that this must have been done for a reason, so I watched the rest of the show with the suspicion that he was the killer. I even wrote it down and then dramatically revealed it when they caught him.
On the fence about series two. I enjoyed the first one so much that I don't want to taint it with a second series that won't be as good.

And on a similar note...Gracepoint. What is it about my country that drives us to create subpar localized remakes of great British television? It looks like they kept so much of the original and the changes they made seem entirely arbitrary. David Tennant reprises his role, but with a different name? How bizarre.