We watched ep.1 of ‘The Miniature Wife’ on Peacock last night-- a new show that has been heavily advertised. Speaking of Matthew Macfadyen of Succession, of which both actor and show have recently been mentioned here, he plays the husband to Elizabeth Banks, the titular tiny wife.
I expected something kind of light and funny, ‘turn off your brain’ sitcom-style entertainment-- ‘Honey, I Shrunk You’, more or less. The ads made it seem like a light comedy. What we got was not exactly that. For one, the episodes are 40-45 minutes long, which is the typical length of hour-long TV dramas (after commercials are added). Ep.1 barely featured her in her shrunken form-- just as a framing device of her already shrunk at the beginning, then a “Two Weeks Earlier” title card, then (not funny) bickering between her and her husband for most of the first episode, until we get back to her getting small at the end of ep.1.
There are elements of comedy, and maybe it’ll get more into ‘Honey, I Shrunk You’ zany shenanigans now that she’s shrunk, but it seems like it’s going to have more drama than I expected. Not necessarily bad, just not what I went in expecting.
I guess I live in a different world than you. If someone asked me about the cursing level of the show, I would tell them nothing about it stands out. I can’t remember ever noting anything about the cursing in that show. It certainly doesn’t seem unusually high.
Whenever I put an Army uniform on all my punctuation, adverbs, adjectives and half the nouns and verbs were replaced with variations of the word fuck. And I didn’t stand out.
I finished the doc I mentioned up thread, Trust Me: The False Prophet. I really enjoyed and recommend it to anyone that likes these types of long form docs. And, especially if you liked Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey. As I said in my previous post, this doc is essentially a follow up to that one.
Perhaps it’s the context….I spent my entire working career at Fortune 500 companies and I can count the F-bombs I heard in business meetings on one hand.
I’ve always avoided swearing at work or among strangers, but my social interactions with people I know contain the same level of profanity used among the close knit group in Shrinking.
The amount swearing on Apple TV’s The Imperfect Women shocks me with the frequency of dropping the f-bomb. If it was a college fraternity or a navy ship, I’d understand. But these are upper-crust socialite women who just happen to swear like frat-boys and sailors. It’s jarring because they do it constantly, in private and in large social settings. Seems like lazy, sloppy writing more than anything else.
Succession is inspired by the Murdoch and Fox News was an infamously vulgar workplace during the Ailes years with vulgarity and overt sexual assault being fairly common.
I knew a couple of guys that came back from a tour or two in the military where “fuck” and “motherfuck” were the only adjectives, adverbs, etc that were used. “That mf car uses too much MF gas, it gets F expensive to do the MF fill-ups all the MF time”
Dead Loch was amazing, I loved both seasons. For those that don’t know, the writers/creators are the Kate’s from The Katering Show and Get Krack!in, which have the same style humor and are also hilarious watches.
For similar dark offbeat comedy, we just finished The Decameron on Netflix, with some amazing comedic performances. The Black Plague couldn’t be merrier!
Ah, the good old days when I had one vocabulary for work and another for home. I only remember one slip-up when I was trying to secure a load on top of the car and thought the kids’ windows were closed. I think “fucking piece of shit” was the culprit. I glanced down and my son was studiously staring straight ahead, eyes very wide.
Yeah, I think this is a genuine generation gap. Older Americans (as opposed to say Australians) are either more genteel and less vulgar generally depending on class or are primed to code-shift into or out of it for specific interactions (i.e. “locker-room talk”). Younger people IME of any gender are far, far more casual about swearing and simply don’t bother code-shifting much anymore.
Whether you consider that an unfortunate coarsening of society or not, it seems to be a pretty significant shift. I don’t swear to excess, but personally I’m pretty okay with it as a GenX who was raised in a household that did say ‘fuck!’ when you stubbed a toe .
ETA: Pretty similar to the rise of tattoos as a normative part of general culture, instead of being mostly limited to sailors, bikers and cartoon thugs.
I just watched the first episode. I warmed up to Joanna faster than I thought I would. I’ve never heard of her before this, but she reminds me a lot of Diane Wiest.
Nowadays, I seldom go to bed before 03:00, and I sleep only three or four hours a night. I’m so sick of wasting time watching commercial-laden TV, I now depend mostly on the Internet to get my favorite shows when they’re not on PBS. The current crop includes Midsomer Murders, George Gently, and Doc Martin.
Joanna Page is best known in the UK for sitcom Gavin and Stacey (she’s Stacey…not Gavin), but if you’re from the US you’re more likely to have seen her in Love Actually as Martin Freeman’s love interest (she plays the other nude scene double).
I saw that when I looked her up. I’ve never seen Love Actually and reading her IMDB page was the first time I’d heard of Gavin and Stacey. I did see that she was on Would I Lie To You in 2010 (and I think I may have seen her in clips of that) so I figured she had already made a name for herself by then. Also, how enthusiastically the audience responds when Greg introduces each person can be a giveaway to how well known they are.
