Contrast in binging results

While we were off during the holidays, we decided to binge a couple series because the time and opportunity were both there. The first one was Clarkson's Farm. Now, full disclosure: I largely detest "reality" TV because most of them are simply setups to create drama out of nothing. Presenting people in real situations will almost never be interesting enough to retain an audience unless you're an actual documentarian with an actual story. For this stuff, something always has to be manufactured. This was never more evident than when I had the misfortune to be sick a few years back and, even worse, decided to watch a couple of the Storage Wars-type shows (which may have included the actual Storage Wars. They were all so pedestrian that I don't remember.) Somehow, no matter where the nominal leads of the show went, there was always a "villain/huge rival" person that would be the primary opposition in bidding on abandoned storage units. It was obviously a setup to create situations that would have normally been Man from Mundania from the very outset. Your "reality" TV was clearly scripted. Even when there's not an obvious writer, it's usually quite evident that the producers are selecting "random" contestants by their personalities that will doubtlessly conflict, thus generating the aforementioned "drama." Perhaps it's because of Jeremy Clarkson's showmanship and experience (I have never seen Grand Tour or Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?), but Clarkson's Farm never seemed to require that. The people involved range from perfectly mundane (most of them) to rather unusual (Gerry, the wall-repairer and nominal "head of security") but Clarkson does such a good job of playing off of them that you don't feel like you're being spoon-fed anything. So, not only was it often hilarious, usually involving Jeremy's acerbic relationship with his primary contractor and assistant, Kaleb, but it was also incredibly educational. We learned more about modern farming in a few hours of watching this show than we probably could have in a week's worth of straight documentaries. It also did a great job of making rather pointed statements about climate change and Tory government incompetence without hitting you over the head with them. You lived the experience just like Jeremy does. Now, clearly, Clarkson is in a much more advantageous position than your typical farmer and his poor business decisions would probably be a death knell for the average farm if he weren't already a millionaire and wasn't being paid handsomely by Amazon to show his wild ideas either taking fruit or not (mostly not), so it's not like this is precisely "reality" TV, either. But he does spend a lot of time muttering with his land agent, Charlie, about the cost of things and how the farm- and farming, in general -just isn't sustainable in England. He also acknowledges his situation regularly (i.e. he probably couldn't do this if there weren't a film crew following him around.) We burned through the 24 available episodes with 8 more incoming in May.

After we finished that, we poked around for something else on Amazon and came across Goliath, a legal drama helmed by Billy Bob Thornton. Billy plays Billy McBride (convenient), a genius lawyer who apparently founded a legal firm that became high-powered enough in the span of ~20 years to be deeply in bed with major defense contractors. But Billy lost his taste for the big show and drank himself to near-oblivion, such that he now lives in a motel somewhere near the beach in California. He gets recruited to be the front man by another lawyer wanting to do a quick settle-and-cashout on a wrongful death case against one of the former firm's major clients. This, of course, morphs into a vast conspiracy that provides the apparent reasoning for making this into a TV series, rather than a one-off film. In addition to BBT, the cast is relatively star-studded (William Hurt, Maria Bello, Molly Parker) but the writing is... not, primarily because the entire basis of the series is kind of half-assed to begin with. We made it through 3.5 episodes, with the last .5 being under duress because I was already pointing out that a) no one in the series other than Billy is actually an interesting character and he is mostly because he's BBT; b) nothing in the plot or the action even graces the concept of what legal work is like; and c) that plot is completely paint-by-numbers. In all three episodes, there was a setup for a crisis, the crisis, the furthering of that crisis, and then its immaculate resolution. Said resolution was always ascribed to Billy's panache, encyclopedic knowledge of the law, and the use of every shortcut by which to execute the exercise of that knowledge. This is compounded by the fact that every character in this story already knows this about Billy and predicts that he'll do exactly as he does, at which point he does exactly that. He never makes a mistake because the plot doesn't allow room for mistakes. That might require another 10 minutes of screen time and that would disrupt the pattern that's been established. It's like how you could watch episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and know exactly where they'd hit the plot points (problem, heightened problem, crisis, resolution) at each commercial break. Just as an example of the detachment of this series, despite having apparently drunk himself to seeming ruin, Billy lives in the most nicely-appointed "cheap motel" rooms (two of them) that you'll ever see because I guess we can't have a genuinely burdensome living situation because that might require actual writing about a human character and would detract from the "cool" legal maneuvers that Billy is required to do in each episode that also largely take place off-camera...? It's like watching Deus Ex Machina, the Series. Do not bother.