Beyond Selidor

We try to watch a good mix of genres, and January's completed TV shows definitely manage this — it's possibly a bit heavy with mystery shows, but they're all so wildly different in tone that they might as well be different genres.



We started the latest season of Vienna Blood in 2022, but completed it in the new year, so it counts as a January show. As I've said before, this is my third-favourite of three existing shows that pair up a Freudian psychologist with a police detective to solve mysteries. I like it well enough, but I like the other two versions better. This show is an adaptation of books set in 1900s Vienna, our psychologist comes from a well-off Jewish family, and we get a picture postcard look at both the glittering and the grimy parts of the city in this time period. Enjoyment of this show will hinge on how much you enjoy the odd couple pair of characters at its heart (the psychologist and the detective), and whether you can pretend that Freud was always 100 per cent correct about human psychology.

We then alternated between episodes of the next three shows:

Black Sands, a crime drama set in a small town in Iceland in which a police detective returns to her hometown from Reykjavik in a cloud of scandal, and is immediately swept up in investigating a series of murders and attacks on tourists. The town itself is located next to a volcanic black sand beach which is a magnet for tourists, but the murders themselves soon appear to be tied to the detective's painful and complicated family history. It's all very grim Scandi noir, and I found the motive for the murders particularly irritating (although it was satisfying to have worked out — and stated that I had worked out — the identity of the killer three episodes into the eight-episode series and then just sit back and wait for the show to tell my why they were the killer). I did find it hilariously realistic that every character complained how bad tourists were at driving in Iceland — when I was in Iceland, literally every Icelander I met seemed to make a similar complaint!

The Dropout, a dramatisation of the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her scam healthcare startup, Theranos. This was really well cast — not just Amanda Seyfried in the lead role, but the supporting characters too — and engagingly told, but I feel I would have preferred to watch this material as a documentary. It gestured at the peculiarly toxicity of American startup culture — that nexus of self-help, bootstraps capitalism and cult that leads to anyone who calls themselves an entrepreneur being treated with a pseudo-religious awe — but I felt it pulled its punches somewhat and tried to half-heartedly offer excuses for why Holmes and her company did the things they did.

Wednesday, the Tim Burton reimagining of the classic character(s) for Netflix, which I enjoyed immesely. I have to hold my hands up here and say that this the only Addams Family media I have ever watched, and I've seen some grumbling from people for whom earlier versions hold a very dear place in their hearts, so bear this in mind when it comes to my enjoyment of the show. The series saw the titular character winding up at a boarding school for supernatural teenagers in a weird New England town, against a backdrop of a series of grisly murders — for which an unknown supernatural monster is assumed to be responsible. The tone was very much to my liking — it's basically what I had hoped The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to be — and even the inevitable melodramatic teen love triangles caused me to sigh indulgently rather than roll my eyes.

In addition to those three shows — which really were the bulk of our viewing in January — Matthias and I finished off the latest season of Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries, which is a 1960s spinoff of the 1920s Miss Fisher series. The spinoff hews very closely to the original — our Ms Fisher is the niece of Phrynne from the original series, she also works as a private detective, and she also has a more socially conservative love interest within the police, with whom she has a will they, won't they relationship. The show is deeply, deeply silly — this time around I felt they were specifically trying to find more and more ludicrous settings (flight attendant school, a dog breeders' show, a pigeon racing club) in which to stage and solve a murder. It's the sort of thing Matthias and I keep on hand to watch as light relief if we've just come out of another show or a film with a more intense, sad, or stressful tone — a bit of froth to calm the mood. I do enjoy the 1960s Australiana, though.


Have you watched any of these shows? If so, what did you think? What else have you been watching this month?