Anyone watching this on Masterpiece? Another WWII drama, but with some interesting viewpoints, especially on the Polish side of things. Well acted, with people speaking their native languages. The only jarring not for me is the casting of Helen Hunt as an American correspondent in Berlin. Wow, she really seems one-dimensional as an actor; I’m not sure what I saw in her in earlier films. And she’s either not aging well or has had cosmetic surgery done that was a mistake. Sean Bean is the other Big Star in this, and he does a good job of not being Ned Stark. This is not your usual war pic. It’s focused more on the lives of people in a terrible time, rather than on battles. You can wait for episodes each week or stream it on PBS Passport.
Watched it, liked it. I like Hunt as the reporter, I think she plays the role well.
Are we doing spoilers? In case we are:
[Spoiler]I literally yelled WTF! at the decision of the Polish girl (Kasia?) at the train station. Not what she did with her little brother, which made perfect sense, but what she did herself. My guess is that she’s going to be reunited with her older brother in the next episode or maybe two when he works his way home, she’ll learn what happened to her father, her brother’s going to join the resistance/home army/whatever they called it to avenge his father, and he’ll urge her to leave Poland. I predict he’s going to yell “Idiot!” or “Stupid!” or the like when she tells him she had the chance to board the train and chose not to take it.
My only other prediction is the black singer in Paris will end up volunteering for the French Army, especially after his patriotic speech to the American doctor, so we have a POV character inside the French Army during the Phony War and the invasion. Possibly the doctor joins too, like the Americans who joined the French military in WWI before the US was in the war.[/Spoiler]
We finished watching season one, which ended in a bit of a cliffhanger. The show runner is apparently wanting to do six seasons. The character of Harry is fairly annoying. He mopes his way through nearly every scene. It’s become a joke in my house: “I’m going to mope out to the garage and wash the car.” But it’s a good series for all that.
I also thought Hunt phoned it in. Love the vintage look of the show.
I’ll watch more of it.
And Bean looks really good. But my guy kept telling me it wasn’t Helen Hunt & I could see his point. That GORGEOUS woman from As Good as it Gets? Nope
I lasted until about 10 minutes into episode 2. Too many anachronisms for a history nerd like me, and veering way too far into soap opera territory. I wanted to like it, but I just ended up annoyed by it.
Also, does anyone actually believe you could just put a kid on a train in Poland in 1939, and he could get into the UK, and that they’d just let him go live with his new in-laws? With no apparent passport or papers? Given that non-wealthy people in the 30s usually didn’t have passports because international travel wasn’t common?
I find that exceedingly unlikely and very soap-operatic.
Oh yes, the slip-ups. Unlikely that Harry’s mother wouldn’t have found herself under pressure to take in evacuees already, or even to find her huge house requisitioned for some military/government purpose or to house an evacuated school, and that she would have had enough petrol to drive hither and yon on trivial personal business without being challenged. Impossible that Paris would be lit up like a Christmas tree, but it seems to be common in modern dramas about the war that producers/directors just don’t know or care about the blackout. Whereas for a long time after the war, it impossible to have a drama that didn’t have an ARP warden shouting “Put that light out!” in at least one scene.
On the other hand, it doesn’t strike me as impossible that someone travelling on a diplomatic passport would have been allowed to transit from Poland through Sweden with a child refugee, or that the UK immigration officials would have turned a blind eye on their arrival.
The producer of this series seems geographically challenged. How do two armed Polish guys get from a forest in Poland to one in Belgium or northern France?
That bothered me too. It"s hardly deep forest all the way across Germany, and especially in the early days of the war it must have been difficult for a couple of young male civilians to travel all the way without having ID checked somewhere. Later on escaped POWs were able to get quite long distances and into Switzerland or Spain, but usually with forged ID of some sort, and/or help from local resistance escape lines.
And I can’t remember if these characters were supposed to be still carrying weapons all the way, which must have been a complete impossibility, even for the most resourceful Pole.