tv meme day 2
Jun. 5th, 2010 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marrow_skyMissed a day! This is going great.
Day 2 - A show that you wish more people were watching.
And this isn't actually a show that is entirely obscure, but really, I've delved more into obscure anime, and had a hard time thinking up obscure tv shows that I liked, I mean I do have a lot that I think is obscure, but is probably not, and so far no one I know watches it so I'm going to say more people should watch Green Wing and no one reads this journal anyway so I can say I think the Holocaust was exaggerated and no one will care.
(I don't think the Holocaust was exaggerated and I understand why anyone would be offended by that last sentence, and I apologise deeply.)
The first thing I think when I think about Green Wing is that... yeah. It's odd. It's got a very funny cast who all know what they're doing and do it really well - and that's to be totally insane while keeping within the guidelines of the script, so sort of Commedia dell'arte. And among them is Tamsin Greig (from Black Books), Julian Rhind-Tutt (from everything), and Mark Heap (from Spaced). It's a show with flaws, I'll grant it that, but it made me laugh hysterically so many times that it's pretty easy to forget, and all the characters are diverse and play off each other extremely well so who cares? Plus, they have a smashing soundtrack too, which is two parts strange and one part wildly bizarre which I love because it goes so well with the show.
The humour was borderline off the wall, but I feel it was more lampshading the popular tropes of daytime soaps, except for several scenes in Sue's office when the humour does become highly surreal.
It's cancelled now (like many of my favourite shows and I know the thing said a show you wish more people were watching but all the shows that are currently going that I watch have great ratings) but it was pretty popular in its time on the UK air, as a bizarre Frankenstein experiment between a sitcom and a daytime soap, and they loved to play with the daytime soap part like crazy. Every wild plotline was taken and exploited (although I don't think there was an evil twin plot - maybe they would have gotten to that later, they did have an amnesia plot though!) and the whole thing became hilarious. I'm not sure why it got cancelled - not entirely sure if it was a ratings drop or something, but whatever the reason, it's gone now. There's a new show they're making called Campus hailing much of a similar style and a couple of the same writers and they've commissioned that for a series, so maybe it'll last longer than its predecessor.
I don't have any pretty pictures this time. I don't have the show on my harddrive and I can't find good screencaps to manipulate online. Oh well.
Green Wing takes place in a hospital, but I daresay if they didn't wear scrubs or medical coats and one of the frequently used sets wasn't inside of a surgery room - you would barely notice. Medical technobabble doesn't come up as far as I remember; they generally avoid it, so it's more of a character based show than a situational show, unlike Scrubs which takes (took, sigh) its medical information very seriously.
The show's main character is Caroline Todd, who is a new surgical registrar at the hospital and is damn attractive for very odd reasons. She's indecisive and constantly embarrassed and she has a weird walk and the worst luck in the world but I can't say that there isn't something drawing about her, and pretty much half the male characters from this show would agree. Guy Secretan, an anaesthesiologist and a womaniser tries to bag her pretty much almost immediately but she manages to avoid it until he ends up actually falling in love with her, as does Mac, who doesn't have a first name (his name comes from Dr. MacCartney), who doesn't like her for the first half of episode one, but eventually warms up throughout the episodes and falls in love with her himself.
Other characters are: Martin Dear, a very nervous doctor-in-perpetual-training/house officer, who also falls in love with Caroline, but is almost entirely unrequited (this means entirely unrequited). Alan Stratham, a very, very stuttering and extremely outright strange consultant radiologist who has an utterly transparent affair with Joanna Clore, who is best summarised as a forty-something year old bitch who is inexplicably the head of human resources. Alan is constantly tormented by Boyce, a good-looking bisexual house officer who spends half his time utterly ruining Alan's day or hitting on him.
And then there's Sue. Who's insane. That's all the summary Sue needs. She is. Insane. Also she and Caroline seem to hit it off really well until Caroline shows an interest in Mac (who shows interest back) and then Sue goes totally batshit revenge against her because she is utterly, completely obsessed with Mac. I wouldn't say she's a stalker though, because that would be generous. She's also pretty hot, and honestly it's hard not to love her severely. She's ... eccentric and evil and crazy and she probably hates you and whatever question you've got for her, but say, who doesn't love a tall bisexual (well, sort of, she might just be Mac-sexual) Scottish woman who is excruciatingly charming but is probably holding a knife to your sexual organs as we speak?
To say it was a perfect show and had no flaws would be stretching it a lot - the camera work was occasionally ... terrible, the writing sometimes dragged and got caught in a few of its own traps, and sometimes I couldn't see why Guy was able to be such a womaniser, I mean, yes, he can be charming, but he wasn't exactly the most suave and he certainly wasn't... cool. It's a terrible way to describe it, but I don't know how else to - I love Guy as a character, but I felt like his sexuality was more of an informed attribute, not anything that actually showed.
And speaking of Guy, he was actually one of the main problems I had with the Green Wing finale special, because he became less of a jerk who was in love, to a jerk who was just a jerk, but in love on the side. It did come through in the end, but it bothered me a lot.
Caroline does get into a bit of a quandary about whether to choose Guy or Mac because she loves them both (and she is heinously indecisive), but it's obvious that it's going to be Mac, with his flowing sandy hair and his casual cool guy persona and compassion that is genuine, though when Guy falls in love with Caroline he suddenly gets a crash course on compassion though it doesn't extend far beyond him and Caroline. It is obvious. I'm not sure if they were trying to make it one way or the other or not, but it was obvious what it was going to be and it wasn't going to be Guy. But you can't help but like Guy anyway - his hopeless cluelessness about his feelings is kind of adorable. And Caroline and Mac are done pretty well... considering what happens.
Besides that, this show is just great, unashamed, unabashed fun. Some of the circumstances that they get into are painful to watch because of the mortifying embarrassment you can't look away from, even if it's to watch a train-wreck, and it all rounds back to being absolutely hilarious. Sue and her office basically turn into some weird haven of Monty Pythonish surrealism, in fact, the long arms from the "Where Are The Fish" bit in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life basically make a cameo in one of them. Same also goes for Alan and his extremely weird sexual... er... quirks, for lack of better word, and the ways Boyce goes out and out to humiliate him.
Some people say that it should only have been thirty minutes - I would agree... but I don't. The cast is way too large and since the show is trying to be two shows at the same time (a soap and a comedy) between all the ridiculous drama and the jokes it would be hard to distinguish as a thirty minute show. They do drop Angela, and that's good, since she was totally useless anyway and one-dimensional, but it still wouldn't have worked. And I can't say I had a problem with it.
Essentially Green Wing fits into a certain niche of British comedies in my head along with Spaced and Black Books, through the surrealism and the cast that's mostly constant between all of them. Green Wing was obviously the better funded affair, but the money was mostly put to good use, even if it's mostly in the background. It's a show you watch for the characters, but damn they are good characters.
I kind of wish that the show did more with the Guy/Sue relationship though. Maybe they would have, if they hadn't been cancelled.
Day 2 - A show that you wish more people were watching.
And this isn't actually a show that is entirely obscure, but really, I've delved more into obscure anime, and had a hard time thinking up obscure tv shows that I liked, I mean I do have a lot that I think is obscure, but is probably not, and so far no one I know watches it so I'm going to say more people should watch Green Wing and no one reads this journal anyway so I can say I think the Holocaust was exaggerated and no one will care.
(I don't think the Holocaust was exaggerated and I understand why anyone would be offended by that last sentence, and I apologise deeply.)
The first thing I think when I think about Green Wing is that... yeah. It's odd. It's got a very funny cast who all know what they're doing and do it really well - and that's to be totally insane while keeping within the guidelines of the script, so sort of Commedia dell'arte. And among them is Tamsin Greig (from Black Books), Julian Rhind-Tutt (from everything), and Mark Heap (from Spaced). It's a show with flaws, I'll grant it that, but it made me laugh hysterically so many times that it's pretty easy to forget, and all the characters are diverse and play off each other extremely well so who cares? Plus, they have a smashing soundtrack too, which is two parts strange and one part wildly bizarre which I love because it goes so well with the show.
The humour was borderline off the wall, but I feel it was more lampshading the popular tropes of daytime soaps, except for several scenes in Sue's office when the humour does become highly surreal.
It's cancelled now (like many of my favourite shows and I know the thing said a show you wish more people were watching but all the shows that are currently going that I watch have great ratings) but it was pretty popular in its time on the UK air, as a bizarre Frankenstein experiment between a sitcom and a daytime soap, and they loved to play with the daytime soap part like crazy. Every wild plotline was taken and exploited (although I don't think there was an evil twin plot - maybe they would have gotten to that later, they did have an amnesia plot though!) and the whole thing became hilarious. I'm not sure why it got cancelled - not entirely sure if it was a ratings drop or something, but whatever the reason, it's gone now. There's a new show they're making called Campus hailing much of a similar style and a couple of the same writers and they've commissioned that for a series, so maybe it'll last longer than its predecessor.
I don't have any pretty pictures this time. I don't have the show on my harddrive and I can't find good screencaps to manipulate online. Oh well.
Green Wing takes place in a hospital, but I daresay if they didn't wear scrubs or medical coats and one of the frequently used sets wasn't inside of a surgery room - you would barely notice. Medical technobabble doesn't come up as far as I remember; they generally avoid it, so it's more of a character based show than a situational show, unlike Scrubs which takes (took, sigh) its medical information very seriously.
The show's main character is Caroline Todd, who is a new surgical registrar at the hospital and is damn attractive for very odd reasons. She's indecisive and constantly embarrassed and she has a weird walk and the worst luck in the world but I can't say that there isn't something drawing about her, and pretty much half the male characters from this show would agree. Guy Secretan, an anaesthesiologist and a womaniser tries to bag her pretty much almost immediately but she manages to avoid it until he ends up actually falling in love with her, as does Mac, who doesn't have a first name (his name comes from Dr. MacCartney), who doesn't like her for the first half of episode one, but eventually warms up throughout the episodes and falls in love with her himself.
Other characters are: Martin Dear, a very nervous doctor-in-perpetual-training/house officer, who also falls in love with Caroline, but is almost entirely unrequited (this means entirely unrequited). Alan Stratham, a very, very stuttering and extremely outright strange consultant radiologist who has an utterly transparent affair with Joanna Clore, who is best summarised as a forty-something year old bitch who is inexplicably the head of human resources. Alan is constantly tormented by Boyce, a good-looking bisexual house officer who spends half his time utterly ruining Alan's day or hitting on him.
And then there's Sue. Who's insane. That's all the summary Sue needs. She is. Insane. Also she and Caroline seem to hit it off really well until Caroline shows an interest in Mac (who shows interest back) and then Sue goes totally batshit revenge against her because she is utterly, completely obsessed with Mac. I wouldn't say she's a stalker though, because that would be generous. She's also pretty hot, and honestly it's hard not to love her severely. She's ... eccentric and evil and crazy and she probably hates you and whatever question you've got for her, but say, who doesn't love a tall bisexual (well, sort of, she might just be Mac-sexual) Scottish woman who is excruciatingly charming but is probably holding a knife to your sexual organs as we speak?
To say it was a perfect show and had no flaws would be stretching it a lot - the camera work was occasionally ... terrible, the writing sometimes dragged and got caught in a few of its own traps, and sometimes I couldn't see why Guy was able to be such a womaniser, I mean, yes, he can be charming, but he wasn't exactly the most suave and he certainly wasn't... cool. It's a terrible way to describe it, but I don't know how else to - I love Guy as a character, but I felt like his sexuality was more of an informed attribute, not anything that actually showed.
And speaking of Guy, he was actually one of the main problems I had with the Green Wing finale special, because he became less of a jerk who was in love, to a jerk who was just a jerk, but in love on the side. It did come through in the end, but it bothered me a lot.
Caroline does get into a bit of a quandary about whether to choose Guy or Mac because she loves them both (and she is heinously indecisive), but it's obvious that it's going to be Mac, with his flowing sandy hair and his casual cool guy persona and compassion that is genuine, though when Guy falls in love with Caroline he suddenly gets a crash course on compassion though it doesn't extend far beyond him and Caroline. It is obvious. I'm not sure if they were trying to make it one way or the other or not, but it was obvious what it was going to be and it wasn't going to be Guy. But you can't help but like Guy anyway - his hopeless cluelessness about his feelings is kind of adorable. And Caroline and Mac are done pretty well... considering what happens.
Besides that, this show is just great, unashamed, unabashed fun. Some of the circumstances that they get into are painful to watch because of the mortifying embarrassment you can't look away from, even if it's to watch a train-wreck, and it all rounds back to being absolutely hilarious. Sue and her office basically turn into some weird haven of Monty Pythonish surrealism, in fact, the long arms from the "Where Are The Fish" bit in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life basically make a cameo in one of them. Same also goes for Alan and his extremely weird sexual... er... quirks, for lack of better word, and the ways Boyce goes out and out to humiliate him.
Some people say that it should only have been thirty minutes - I would agree... but I don't. The cast is way too large and since the show is trying to be two shows at the same time (a soap and a comedy) between all the ridiculous drama and the jokes it would be hard to distinguish as a thirty minute show. They do drop Angela, and that's good, since she was totally useless anyway and one-dimensional, but it still wouldn't have worked. And I can't say I had a problem with it.
Essentially Green Wing fits into a certain niche of British comedies in my head along with Spaced and Black Books, through the surrealism and the cast that's mostly constant between all of them. Green Wing was obviously the better funded affair, but the money was mostly put to good use, even if it's mostly in the background. It's a show you watch for the characters, but damn they are good characters.
I kind of wish that the show did more with the Guy/Sue relationship though. Maybe they would have, if they hadn't been cancelled.