The OA

Title: The OA
Outlet: Netflix
Net: A show built on a mystery, centered on a character you want to understand.

As I said in the post which contains The List, I realized, as I was discussing "TV" shows with people, I had begun to forget to recommend "The OA."  And that's too bad!

The problem with trying to get people to watch "The OA" is that telling them almost anything about the plot spoils something which gets revealed in such an entertaining way, often in such a profound way, that it seems unfair to do that to a friend.

Here's kinda what I mean.

When Sherry and I started the first episode of "The OA" the ONLY thing we knew about it was that it had been recommended to us by people who we trust - people who know the kind of thing we enjoy watching.  Whoever it was (please take credit if you were among the people who recommended it; I simply can't recall; I have this feeling it was Lucas and Amelia, but maybe not...) also told us to watch it without knowing anything.  And we did.

Each episode unwraps more and more of the mystery -- while, of course, adding new mysteries which need unwrapping -- without ever (ever!) seeming like a typical "red herring driven" or "you know this is not the answer because there's still 20 minutes left in the episode" mystery.  This is not some "whodunit?"  It's a "what's going on?!?"

Did you ever watch "Lost?" If you did, and you were drawn in as so much of the viewing public was, the "hook" of that show was the surprise endings that might have sorta/kinda answered some small part of a mystery, while at the same time shocking you with a NEW mystery you couldn't wait to see unfold next week.  Well, at its best, "Lost" was good at that.  "The OA" is at least that good.

Now I know at least one person who was not hooked after watching an episode or two, so I must accept that this show is not for everyone.  But I think if you just start watching episode one on a Friday night, and you give it your full attention, you will finish the season by Monday.  At least for us, it was binge-worthy on the order of "Stranger Things."

And I still haven't told you what it's about.  Maybe, someday, I'll add some spoilers to this.  But not now.  I will not spoil the thrill you can get if you walk in with just a recommendation.

It's good.  Start it.  Pay attention.  

The Chilling Adentures of Sabrina

Title: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Outlet: Netflix
Net: Not for everyone, but if you enjoy creative horror and can handle gore, and blatant Satanic mythology, you will find creative ideas and a very likeable hero.

Introduction: Sabrina Spellman is a young half-witch living in Greendale. She attends a normal high school with her mortal friends, but lives with her witch aunties, Zelda and Hilda, in their house, which is also the town mortuary.  As the series begins, she is approaching her sixteenth birthday, which naturally (or supernaturally, I suppose) occurs on Hallowe'en when a blood moon will appear.  On that birthday, she will be expected to sign her name in the book of the Dark Lord, and leave her mortal world behind.

None of what I've written so far is a spoiler.  You learn all of this within the first act of the first episode, and presumably you've started watching this show because of its premise.

Here are some other things you might know, or you might not.  They helped me decide to give this series a try.

Sabrina, the character, is from the "Archie" comic universe.  A very wholesome universe in the comics.  She was far more interesting a character than most of those found in Archie's hometown of Riverdale.  And, from my recollection, she was sweet and good-hearted.

Sabrina has had at least one other TV adaptation. I won't go look it up to see if there were more because the one I remember, which influenced me to try this one, starred Melissa Joan Hart.  It was a sitcom, and was, like the comics, sweet and wholesome.  (Hart was the perfect match for this, having come from Clarissa Explains It All, a Nickelodeon show which was one of the best "children's shows" which existed while my kids were growing up -- but I digress.)

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I was pretty darn sure that this new interpretation of the world of Sabrina was not going to be wholesome.  I've heard of the WB show Riverdale, and what I've heard makes it clear that it does not have a typical "Archie" flavor.  I have not seen it, at all, but I've been told.  So, I expected the new "Sabrina" to push the envelope.

Boy, does it!

Caveat:  At the point when I am writing this, I have only seen the first 5 episodes of the ten-episode first season.  If I decide to revise this review after seeing the full season, I will add to the bottom of this review.  Right now, at this moment, having finished 5 episodes, I wanted to capture my feelings.  I think it's important.  Here's why.

I almost stopped watching this series three times before episode five finished.  But now I am hooked.

As I said above, the Archie-verse, in the comics, is wholesome.  Even Sabrina, in the comics, though she's a witch, never deals with the evil side which is part and parcel of witchcraft in lore, legend and culture.  I knew this Netflix-produced show would be able to break through and incorporate some traditional horror.  I just didn't know how deeply they'd wade into that material.

They don't wade.  They dive!

The Witch Coven of Greendale serve the Dark Lord, but they don't just leave him with that name which has also meant Voldemort and other fictional enemies.  No.  They name him: Satan.  Well, OK, then.  This show is going to just flat out jump into Judeo Christian mythology.  (The real world Church of Satan is already angry at the show.  Google it if you want to find out why.  At this point, I don't know, nor do I care.  At this point.  Maybe in the future.)

OK, so bringing Satan into the mythology is going well past wholesome.  Would that stop me from watching the show?  No.  So, what else made me pause?

The overt grotesqueries involved in the witch world.  Like what?  Well, see, on her birthday, Sabrina is going to participate in a ceremony.  Auntie Zelda matter-of-factly states that blood is needed for the Dark Baptism, and human blood is best, so isn't it a good thing a fresh body has come in to their mortuary just a couple days ahead of time?  Yuck!  I've only mentioned this one thing, but there are many, many more.  And they almost made me stop watching after Episode 1.

Sabrina is played by actress Kiernan Shipka.  I've never seen her before, but she is very pretty, very young-looking (playing 16 at age 18, I think) and plays Sabrina as a kind, sweet girl (most of the time.) Yet she also seems completely accustomed to the unique environment in which she is being raised.  And she shows glimpses of being a bit more than your typical wholesome heroine, even in Episode 1.  So I gave the show a break, but I came back.

As I said, I almost gave up on the show more than once.  Another aspect which pushed me towards dropping the show was the gore.  Some horror productions imply gore, some have bits of gore, and some embrace it.  At the beginning, I thought this series was going to imply it, then it moved to bits, and by the third episode or so, it was embracing gore.  Here's this sweet, pretty teen-aged heroine, and she's in scenes with guts and ... well, gore.  So, if you cannot handle gore, you will not get through this show.  I'm sure WB (the network home of "Riverdale") decided to create this on Netflix rather than on their network for many reasons, and the gore was certainly among them.

So if I'm so disturbed by those aspects of "Sabrina" why am I still going on?

Episode 5, and "Sleepy Hollow."  Let me deal with those in reverse order.

A few years back, there was a network TV show called "Sleepy Hollow."  Very few people I know watched the show, but I really liked it.  It was a "horror" show loosely based on the mythology of the Washington Irving story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," mixed with the concept that the supernatural world was very much a part of the world during the American Revolution.  Ichabod Crane (the "protagonist" of Irving's story) pulled a Rip Van Winkle -- slept for a couple hundred years, and woke up in modern day New England, where he ended up partnering with a very capabile police detective, and soon they were fighting supernatural evil in and around Sleepy Hollow in the 21st century.

Being a network (Fox) TV show, it could not go very far in its gore, sex, religiosity and so on, but each week the story arcs advanced, and each week history and the supernatural were cleverly blended to build a mythos and give our heroes quests and enemies.  It was great fun.  I don't know where you can stream it, but if it sounds fun to you, I bet it will be.

Anyway, the first season of "Sleepy Hollow" dealt, primarily, with a story arc which arose from the premise of the show: Ichabod Crane had faced the Headless Horseman during the Revolutionary War, and now the Horseman was back.  But, the show also found a way to tell tangential horror stories.  These stories were primarily one-off episodes.  You could watch them without having seen the full story so far and enjoy them for their clever ideas.  Want a story about a Banshee?  A Will-o-the-Wisp?  There you go - you have one.  Now, for the series faithful, the one-off episodes would drop in a bit of information to advance the big story plot, but these single story episodes were well done.

That's Episode 5 of Sabrina.   If you have reached the end of Episode 4, as I had, and you think "I'm not sure I can go on" try episode 5.

It's still gory.  You have to accept that.  And by this point in the series, "wholesome" is out the window (except, not really -- it's still there, as long as you can separate the heroic from the Satanic.) But the story -- the story -- is great fun.

Anyway, I'm going to keep watching this series through the end of its first 10-episode season.  I'm not exactly sure what they are trying to accomplish in this first main story, but it certainly has something to do with our hero growing up a bit and dealing with the consequences of sticking to her principles -- a common theme, to be sure, told in an uncommon way.

This show is not for everyone.  But for now, I think it's for me.

Addendum: I figured out one more thing that bothers me about this show.  Auntie Zelda (and a couple other characters) are as pious in their Satanism as the most stereotypical Evangelicals are pious in their Christianity.  It bothers me to hear "Praise Satan" every time something happens that Zelda likes, just as it would bother me to hear "Praise God" if the character were Christian.  I wonder if that's one of the points the writers are making?

------

This post is part of The List.

Shows I've Watched - Anchor List

This is the list of "TV" shows I want to talk about in the blog, and remember for the future.  Need more explanation?  See the Explanatory Post.

The List

• The OA (Netflix) - the show I realized I was forgetting about when talking about great shows I had seen.
• The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix)
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime)
• Sense8 (Netflix) 
• Jessica Jones (Netflix)
• The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)
• Godless (Netflix)
• Stranger Things (Netflix)
• Orange is the New Black (Netflix)
• Longmire (now Netflix)
• Game of Thrones (HBO)
• The Crown (Netflix)
• Downton Abbey (BBC/PBS available on Amazon Prime)
• Altered Carbon (Netflix)
• Breaking Bad (AMC available on Netflix)
• House of Cards (Netflix)
• Salvation (CBS available on Amazon Prime)
• Penny Dreadful (Showtime available on Netflix)
• Mr. Robot (Amazon Prime)
• Black Mirror (Netflix)
• This Is Us (NBC) - because way too many people don't watch "network TV" anymore, and they are going to be sorry they are missing this!

That's The List as of now.  I am quite confident I have forgotten at least one show that should be on The List.  I am also certain I will watch shows in the future which should get added to The List.  I hope to remember to do that.  But for now, The List is full enough I can start writing "Reviews" of them.  When a Review is written, I plan to come back to this post and put the link to the Review post.

One more thing: I KNOW that there are some shows which would belong on The List if YOU wrote it.  Many people have seen "13 Reasons Why" and "The Man in the High Castle" and "Making A Murderer" but I have not.  So those shows are not on my list.  The only shows on The List which I have not watched fairly completely (so far) are Game of Thrones and Mr. Robot.  GoT is a special case. Mr. Robot is a show I had forgotten I needed to get back to watching until I started putting The List together!

So, you are welcome to comment on this post and recommend something I should see.  If I HAVE seen it, I will be grateful for the reminder.  If I have NOT seen it, well, maybe I'll start another List Of Shows I Should Try Sometime.

Anchor Post Exposition - Shows I've Watched in this Golden Age

 I'm not the first to say it, but I certainly believe it -- we are in a "Golden Age" for what are typically called "TV" shows.

There are so many outlets for "TV" shows these days, and so many of those outlets are investing heavily in creating their own new content, that the number of shows is almost unbelievable, if you are old enough to remember a time before HBO started creating its own content -- outside the boundaries of the "Big 3 (or 4 or 5 if you counted Fox and whatever other then-lesser networks were around -- UPN, I'm talking about you) plus PBS."

But I did not start this post to talk about the past.  Everyone who enjoys watching "TV" these days knows that some (most?) of the very best television is created outside the broadcast networks.  With streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and the like competing with networks and the film industry for our leisure time, many stories are being told which never could have, under the old Network options.

So, like most of you, I have watched some of them.  We can't, any of us, watch them all.  But I've watched quite a few.  On this most recent business trip, it occurred to me that I was beginning to forget that I had even watched some of them.  I don't want to forget!  So, what should I do?

When I first started this blog, one of the staples topics was Micro-Reviews.  I wrote micro-reviews primarily for the purpose of remembering.  If I wrote a micro-review, I was more likely to remember more about the film than if I did not.  And yes, I enjoyed knowing that a few other people would read my reviews and might enjoy them.  But the instigating goal was helping me remember.

So, since I am now starting to "forget" the shows I've watched, I decided I may as well take some time, while on a trip, to record my thoughts about various series I have seen.

This entry will be the Anchor.  As I write this post the first time, I will list the "shows" I'm talking about, and then over time I hope to write "reviews" about them.

And, because I think most people who will read this in the future (including myself) will not want to scroll down through this overly long introduction to get to my list, I will create a post which is the Shows I've Watched - Anchor List.

If you've read this far, thanks.  I hope the list and the reviews I plan to write are worth your time.  But if you find they are not, just remember -- you don't have to read them!  We each only have so much leisure time in our lives, and if reading my blog is not worth your time, go find something else to do!  There are many options.  Like the shows in my list, for example!

The West Wing - Re-Impressed

I may have mentioned before the break, but I have started watching The West Wing again.  In case you didn't know, it's one of the many TV shows you can stream on Netflix.

One of the reasons I stopped blogging for a while is because this show, and Battlestar Galactica, are too engaging.  You see, while I sit home alone (or, before Sherry was in school, while I sat home with her) watching TV, I could compose the first drafts of many of my blog entries.  Most TV does not take up my full attention, so it's quite easy to start a topic and just keep rolling as the TV show entertains part of my mind.  Typically, blog entries which are written in this manner require some editing, but they are still mostly-written, and that's progress.

The West Wing, however, is too engaging, as I said.  I remember loving this show when it first aired, of course, so I expected to like watching it again.  What I had failed to factor into my blogging schedule, however, was how important it was to pay close attention as the stories unfold.  No, wait -- "unfold" is not the word.  Aaron Sorkin's writing does not "unfold" - it flows like a river swollen from a good spring rain.  The dialog is so fast-paced, but so wonderful, that I feel a need to immerse myself in it.

I am reminded once again of why I waited with such anticipation between episodes.  And, since I am streaming it, all by myself, I typically don't force myself to wait.  I move from the end of one to the beginning of the next with as brief a break as possible.  This has meant very little time for any sort of serious brain work, once the show starts streaming.

I suspect over the next several weeks, I will have more than one post dedicated to aspects of this remarkable show, and what I appreciate so much about it.  But for now, let me just say that one of the causes of my month-plus absence from Snippets and Wisps was this wonderful show.

I'm not sorry.  At all.