Food for the Soul – Streaming on Vacation 2024
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
As the end of hot summer days approaches, it is the perfect time to binge a little on some shows, perhaps during a lazy weekend by the water. Lolling about on a hot afternoon does not mean we have to give up on intellectual prowess, however, so I looked up some action and history tales that are more sophisticated than the average cop chase story and which offer insights into different cultures and historical times.
SHŌGUN (2024-)
Some of us might remember the 1980 TV mini-series adaptation of James Clavell’s novel Shōgun, starring Richard Chamberlain. The 2024 show currently streaming is based on the same novel, set in the early 17th century as an adventure of an English ship pilot who gets shipwrecked in Japan. However, the new version deviates from the much gentler older version in both key plot points and the realism of production design, costumes, and anthropological accuracy.
In 1600, Japan was closed off to Westerners with the exception of some Portuguese missionaries who were allowed to set up missions and monopolize trade between Japan and the West. This new edition, the fictional but rich-in-historical-details adventure of an outsider in a rigid, culturally complex society, stars Cosmo Jarvis as the English pilot John Blackthorne and Hiroyuki Sanada as the titular Shōgun—an overlord who has to outwit his mortal enemies in a succession battle. Blackthorne, a man who brings maritime and military skills from a different society, helps the Shōgun to weave his intricate plots in the ruthless fight for power and survival.
The series, which has topped the streaming charts, has just concluded its first season, with two more in the works.
TOKYO VICE (2022-2024)
A picture of modern Japan is presented in the show that is loosely based on a memoir by Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. Adelstein was a young Midwesterner who came to Tokyo in the 1990s—a time when Japan’s rise to economic power both fascinated and frightened America—while Japanese society experienced meteoric economic growth and accompanying corruption and greed. Starring Ansel Elgort as a young journalist who learns the language so well that he scores employment at a main Tokyo newspaper (the actor shines in his own mastery of the language as well), the show revolves around police corruption and the power of yakuza (the Japanese mafia). The pedigree of this show is enhanced by the involvement of Michael Mann (creator of Miami Vice), who directed the pilot and designed the show’s structure, as well as the casting of Ken Watanabe (Inception, The Last Samurai) as the seasoned police chief.
In the wake of recent restructurings at the parent company, HBO canceled the show after two seasons, but after audience protests, a third season is being shopped around to other networks.
3 BODY PROBLEM (2024-)
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin started out as a novella in a Chinese magazine, two years later becoming a novel and part of a complex sci-fi trilogy. Since its translation into English in 2014, the novel has won numerous literary awards. Liu’s complex saga of a clash between earthlings and an alien civilization has spawned a Chinese TV show, a few movies, and now a Netflix adaptation by David Benioff and D.B Weiss, the celebrated if controversial showrunners of Game of Thrones.
The Netflix adaptation has “globalized” the original material by adding Western characters and subplots, but the original idea remains the same—something is making the most eminent world scientists commit suicide, and Earth is experiencing disturbing astronomical phenomena. A weathered detective (played by Benedict Wong of Avengers fame) and five international scientists are trying to solve the mystery, soon realizing that the planet is being watched and manipulated by some distant civilization. Their race to solve the mystery is a race to save humankind.
One of the most original concepts in this tale is the paradox of the butterfly effect, amplified here to a planetary dimension. Here, an act of evil against one family results in the potential destruction of all of mankind. Because that act of brutality is part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the book and the show have also contemporary political implications.
FRANKLIN (2024)
In 1778, the young American Republic had powerful enemies and few allies. Seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin traveled to Paris to seek French help in combating England, the common enemy of both France and America.
The limited series of eight episodes attempts to capture this mission of an elderly intellectual, recreating details of everyday life in prerevolutionary France through elaborate set designs and costumes, and filming the entire show on locations in France.
Michael Douglas creates the character of Franklin as a wily, experienced statesman who uses different methods and people to fend off spies and informers and to cajole allies into helping America forge an alliance with France.
THE GENTLEMEN (2024-)
In 2019, Guy Ritchie—the director of Sherlock Holmes movies with Richard Downey Jr. as well as classic English crime movies like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels—made the action movie The Gentlemen, an adventure caper about marijuana trade in London. The idea proved so full of narrative opportunities that Ritchie has developed it into a TV show under the same title as a satire on British lords maintaining their lifestyle by making their historic estates available to crime lords. Theo James stars as an English aristocrat who inherits from his father the title, a huge mansion, the leadership of a dysfunctional family and. . . the chokehold on the estate by a crime family who is “renting” the place for massive marijuana production.
This immensely entertaining spinoff of the original movie contains numerous references to the Godfather movies as well as to some of Ritchie’s previous movies, and various winks to the contemporary absurdities of marijuana being legal in some places of the world and a major illegal substance in others. The casting and performances are stellar.
SLOW HORSES (2022-)
Last but not least, the new season of my favorite spy show Slow Horses is coming out in early September. As far as British shows go, it does not get any better than this, so if you have missed Gary Oldman being the sloppiest and yet smartest spy ever imagined, it’s time to check out the previous three seasons.