I just watched The Irrational where there is a death during a womens hockey game, and the DA has as his suspect the woman who hit her- who comes of a very wealthy family, and the DA has the prof as a consultant. Quickly a lawyer and a fixer show up, the fixer being his ex-girlfriend ex-MI6. The Prof goes to investigate, and asks the exact same questions the detectives would have been asking and more or less does the same stuff. His special skills arent really in play, altho he talks about “an experiment” which we briefly see moments of.
BUT he talks to the suspect without her lawyer present. Twice, maybe more. No, no, NO. He is working for The People, and she has a lawyer and he knows it. That is very unethical. And she didnt commit the murder, but she agrees to plead to assault- a violent felony. Now, that was hockey, if every hockey player who meant to hurt another player was convicted of a felony, there wouldnt be many players in prison and few on teams. But in any case- her lawyer will get that plea overruled- by pointing out that the Prof talked to the suspect without the benefit of attorney. “The Judge “professor-were you consulting with the DA? (yes) did you know she had a lawyer (yes), did you speak to her when her lawyer was not present?” (yes)- case dismissed.” People confess to crimes all the time because the feel guilty, and the Prof knows that or should. The Prof would be lucky if he didnt end up with charges.
Also the little trap they set for the perp? Wouldnt stand up in court. “They offered me $2.5 million, free, I accepted it, who wouldnt?”
I have watch 4 episodes of Season 1. It’s uh, different. I’m a little depressed by the apathy of the police. A dead body is called in and none of the detectives wants to take the case. They need a task force to take down a big time Drug dealer. But the bureaucracy within the police dept resists pursuing it.
Looking deeper, I recognize many of the characters that work in offices. The old guy that’s marking time to retirement. The useless guy that can’t do the work, the guy that takes 2 hour lunch breaks etc.
I’ll keep watching. Season 1 features cops. Season 2 is a different profession.
I never saw the show when it originally aired because it was on HBO.
We tried watching the Mayor of Kingstown and gave up after a few episodes. It was kind of confusing. What is Mike McLusky’s (Jeremy Renner) actual job? Who pays him? The city? There were way too many characters introduced right away.
Now that Ludwig has officially ended on the BBC, I now can HIGHLY recommend you seek it out if you like cosy mysteries. Find it using any means possible! Though I suppose legal ones would give it a ratings boost.
Kaos (2024, Netflix) My wife and I made it two episodes but I think we are done. After two hours we still don’t care about any of the characters or what’s happening. I appreciate that Jeff Goldblum toned down his regular schtick and it’s clear production money was thrown at this project, I feel they just didn’t have a fresh angle.
When deciding not continue this we drew parallels with The Fall of the House of Usher, another modern take on an ancient IP, which was so much better from beginning to end in every way.
I had really liked the first season of The Irrational, but hated the first episode of the second, and was not impressed by the second episode either. I’m about at the point where I may stop watching it.
Just started watching Fisk on Netflix. I saw “quirky” in the description and that’s my sweet spot. I like the humor.
I watched a couple of seasons of Suits and really enjoyed it for a while but it wore on me after a couple of seasons. It morphed from the humorous misadventures of a poser lawyer to high-stakes back-stabbery and corporate drama. It was still well done, just not what I signed up for.
My wife and are watching High Potential and Elsbeth, which are really kind of the same show (along with Monk). They are all about quirky smart people who solve crimes for the police but are not police. One crime committed and solved per episode. All have a long-running backstory going on.
We’re also watching Tracker, but it’s getting pretty formulaic and I’m not sure how many of these I can keep going with.
Two things I noticed about Suits that turned me off it. One is that all the twists and turns relied on law jargon gobbledygook that was incomprehensible to me. And the other was that every single scene was maximum 90 seconds long. Once I noticed that I only kept it around because I liked half the characters.
That’s what kept me on it as long as a I was. I liked (some of) the characters.
OTOH I gave up on House of Cards (remember House of Cards?) because I didn’t care about or even like any of the characters. I despised most of them. It just constantly left me with negative emotions.
At least it can be said that in the era of Prestige Streaming, House of Cards (Richard III) and Succession (King Lear), Shakespeare still had pull in the writers’ room.
Kaos was just decent enough for us to stick with it all the way through. I think it gets more interesting towards the end when it becomes a bit clearer what is going on, but I know what you mean, it was merely ‘ok’. I agree that House of Usher was a lot better. That troupe of writers/directors/actors that seems to do a lot of horror-type stuff are involved (they also did Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass which I also enjoyed, as well as Haunting of Bly Manor which I’ve not seen). HHH and MM were both good too.
I liked the middle episodes of Kaos better than the middle episodes of House of Usher; Kaos had a plot that made me wonder what would happen next, but in House of Usher you basically knew which character would die at the beginning of an episode (there wasn’t really any mystery, just spookiness).
All the seasons feature the cops, mostly the same crew. They just focus on investigating different parts of the city each season - the traditional drug dealer culture of “The Game”, then working class guys in the ports. Then schools, and politics, and then traditional media trying to keep up with the times. It really does build an image of the whole city over the course of 5 seasons, and shows that the same problems crop up in every major institution, that they’re all in decline, and usually for the same reasons. Apathy, corruption, cost-cutting, and inertia.
Sure, but for me seeing how these well known stories were not only linked, but how they would be converted to be thematic for our modern society was well worth the price of admission (The Masque of the Red Death episode!) I feel the same about Sherlock, I know the stories by heart and the writers still often surprise me.
But you two are giving me pause, I may take up the Kaos mantle again though by myself this time.