![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hestia8OH MY GOD this thing was maddening. The premise was awesome – black jazz band in 30s London get caught up in shenanigans – but the execution was muddled and frustrating as hell and sloooooooow like a snail. Also most of the characters needed a smack at one point or another.
So Louis Lester (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has a black jazz band and they’re scraping by, and a music journalist (Matthew Goode) takes an interest and befriends Louis and encourages them. They then get a couple of singers, Jessie and Carla (Angel Coulby and Wunmi Mosaku), who are the best, and they get a residence at the Imperial Hotel. They get a lot of attention from Matthew Goode’s paper, and some bored aristos, and then because this is a pre WW2 drama and this kind of thing is inevitable now, they get royal fans too. So it’s all going rather well and everyone’s quite posh and slightly annoying but Angel and Wunmi are, like I said, the best (and awesome singers). And people are flirting and falling in love and they go to nice places with nice scenery and blah blah blah.
Unfortunately, Jessie gets attacked while the rest of the band are playing at an RAF dinner, and Louis finds her when he comes back early, and from then on it all gets a bit conspiracy drama done really fucking slowly.
It’s just – it’s well-made, alright, it looks really good, even the jazz bits aren’t that bad, and I am really not a fan of jazz music – it’s just so dull. And there’s way too much focus on the wrong characters (sometimes the right ones, it’s just that you don’t find this out until the end), and it’s clumsy, and there’s waaaaaay too many things left out for the story to be satisfying (one lady has been a recluse for 15 years since her sons died, and apparently all it takes is two meetings with journo boy and one song from the band and she’s rejoining the world), and everything just seems a bit too neat. Everyone’s at every meeting and if they have no reason to be there, someone will call them. Whhhhhy?
Part of the problem I had was with Louis himself. He’s so naïve in a weirdly unrealistic way. There’s remaining calm under pressure and then there’s apparently not knowing the kind of world you live in. Also I would have liked more of the band to have had some lines – it really was just him, Jessie and Carla.
I just watched the last episode and there was a heck of a lot of nothing going on while Louis was supposedly ‘on the run’, but this was mostly shown by a few brief moments of him being in a car and then standing around in a variety of locations. The final location – the club where he’d first met journo boy – was a bloody stupid idea as well.
I was a bit disappointed at how Sarah’s story petered out – it seemed inevitable that her father’s Russian heritage would be used against them at some point, but it was odd how she then disappeared from the story while Pamela became more active and important. What happened there?
Things I did like in the last episode: everyone asking Pamela what she was doing there and Pamela getting fed up of it and then turning out to be quite brilliant under pressure, Eric turning out actually to be super useful, they didn’t leave the story of what happened to Louis hanging (THANK GOODNESS), and Carla got a happy ending of sorts, which is good (I adore Wunmi Mosaku and want her to be in everything). Oh, and Julian stopped angsting about being a terrible person/whining about every single fucking thing in his life and shot himself. That was good.
I've not even covered half the characters here but part of the problem with the show is that now that it's over I can't really be bothered. Shame.
So Louis Lester (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has a black jazz band and they’re scraping by, and a music journalist (Matthew Goode) takes an interest and befriends Louis and encourages them. They then get a couple of singers, Jessie and Carla (Angel Coulby and Wunmi Mosaku), who are the best, and they get a residence at the Imperial Hotel. They get a lot of attention from Matthew Goode’s paper, and some bored aristos, and then because this is a pre WW2 drama and this kind of thing is inevitable now, they get royal fans too. So it’s all going rather well and everyone’s quite posh and slightly annoying but Angel and Wunmi are, like I said, the best (and awesome singers). And people are flirting and falling in love and they go to nice places with nice scenery and blah blah blah.
Unfortunately, Jessie gets attacked while the rest of the band are playing at an RAF dinner, and Louis finds her when he comes back early, and from then on it all gets a bit conspiracy drama done really fucking slowly.
It’s just – it’s well-made, alright, it looks really good, even the jazz bits aren’t that bad, and I am really not a fan of jazz music – it’s just so dull. And there’s way too much focus on the wrong characters (sometimes the right ones, it’s just that you don’t find this out until the end), and it’s clumsy, and there’s waaaaaay too many things left out for the story to be satisfying (one lady has been a recluse for 15 years since her sons died, and apparently all it takes is two meetings with journo boy and one song from the band and she’s rejoining the world), and everything just seems a bit too neat. Everyone’s at every meeting and if they have no reason to be there, someone will call them. Whhhhhy?
Part of the problem I had was with Louis himself. He’s so naïve in a weirdly unrealistic way. There’s remaining calm under pressure and then there’s apparently not knowing the kind of world you live in. Also I would have liked more of the band to have had some lines – it really was just him, Jessie and Carla.
I just watched the last episode and there was a heck of a lot of nothing going on while Louis was supposedly ‘on the run’, but this was mostly shown by a few brief moments of him being in a car and then standing around in a variety of locations. The final location – the club where he’d first met journo boy – was a bloody stupid idea as well.
I was a bit disappointed at how Sarah’s story petered out – it seemed inevitable that her father’s Russian heritage would be used against them at some point, but it was odd how she then disappeared from the story while Pamela became more active and important. What happened there?
Things I did like in the last episode: everyone asking Pamela what she was doing there and Pamela getting fed up of it and then turning out to be quite brilliant under pressure, Eric turning out actually to be super useful, they didn’t leave the story of what happened to Louis hanging (THANK GOODNESS), and Carla got a happy ending of sorts, which is good (I adore Wunmi Mosaku and want her to be in everything). Oh, and Julian stopped angsting about being a terrible person/whining about every single fucking thing in his life and shot himself. That was good.
I've not even covered half the characters here but part of the problem with the show is that now that it's over I can't really be bothered. Shame.
no subject
2013-03-03 08:42 (UTC)most of the characters needed a smack at one point or another. Heh, yes.
Jessie and Carla (Angel Coulby and Wunmi Mosaku), who are the best, Absolutely. I loved their relationship and their singing.
and from then on it all gets a bit conspiracy drama done really fucking slowly. This is a really good point. I was never sure how to take all the hints of conspiracy, because the writer didn't seem to be particularly convinced either.
And there’s way too much focus on the wrong characters
So true - I also felt that there was not enough focus on the more interesting female characters. Sometimes, the story came alive with certain characters interacting and then we went back to the less interestiring main current.
Everyone’s at every meeting and if they have no reason to be there, someone will call them. Whhhhhy? THIS. This strained so much of my credulity.
I wasn't surprised by how Sarah faded and Pamela stepped up and became more important, because I always felt that Stanley was the more dynamic character than Louis and that the writer was pouring more of himself into him, even, so Pamela had to play a bigger role (there was also her relationship with Julian). Sarah/Louis wasn't going to be the endgame.
no subject
2013-03-03 22:17 (UTC)There was one bit where Sarah actually turned up at a meeting (not even once the Music Express had moved offices) and said 'Mr Masterson told me to come' and I just ended up shouting 'WHY?' at the television, hahaha.
That's a good point. I just found it a bit odd given how Pamela had spent three or four episodes being the blonde society ditz and then suddenly was a BAMF in the last episode. I just felt she could have done with a bit more groundwork (then again, so could all the women really).
I did think the plot was a bit unfair towards Sarah as she ended up in such an impossible situation, although if the characters had been a bit more sensible up until then (not going back to the same places, not all making sure everyone was informed about everything) it wouldn't have mattered so much because she wouldn't have been able to tell them anything. Ho hum.
I honestly could write a whole other entry on the show but I'm sort of annoyed at how much time I've spent on it already, hahaha.
no subject
2013-03-05 21:13 (UTC)It's a bit like 'literary' writers dabbling in a genre, but not fully commiting to it. It's just not satisfying as a genre fan. Poliakoff wasn't really that interested in the mystery, but it was so important to what was going on that he should have.