Here We Go Again

I started watching Servant of the People on Netflix out of curiosity. I continued watching it because it's actually good and really entertaining.

In some respects, it's nothing groundbreaking. A lot of the jokes and style will be familiar to anyone who's seen things like Yes, Minister and The West Wing. It's political comedy and there's definitely overlap. But those comparisons are good ones, because overall, Servant of the People is political comedy done really well, and with serious points to make beneath the laughs.

Zelenskyy is great in it. He's clearly committed, and he has a fabulous face for deadpan humour. This is a man who's good at what he does. Some of the comedy is really clever, witty dialogue, and some of it edges towards farce - there's a bit of everything in there. A few bits here and there didn't quite come off for me, but comedy is never going to be 100%.

And it's crazy. Because Zelenskyy and his team spent three years writing a comedy about just how hard it would be for a political outsider to try and reform the system, how entrenched the problems were, and how everyone who'd been milking the country would be acting against them in every possible way. And then after that, they said, 'Fuck it, shall we try it anyway?' And they tried it, knowing exactly how shitty it would be.

The truly sad thing is that there's a pathos to watching it now which was never intended and shouldn't be there. Because while you're watching it, there's always the awareness that this brilliant, funny man and his team set out to fix a country against impossible odds, and ended up hiding underground watching it be bombarded into an even more horrific mess, because of the ego of one evil maniac.

I'm frustrated too, because season one of Servant of the People ends on something of a cliffhanger (though not the cliffhanger you're thinking it might be). I really want to watch the rest of it, but Netflix only has season one. The Pirate Bay has seasons two and three for download, but there are no English subs available anywhere ::cries::

So, dammit, everyone, go and watch Servant of the People so that Netflix will buy the rest of it!

I bought this book years ago, after watching Ang Lee's beautiful film. I wanted to read it to see how the book compared to the film, and then I somehow forgot it? I found it while I was sorting through books for things to go to the charity shop and realised that I'd never actually read it, but somehow it got shelved with the books that I had.

So very belatedly, I read Life of Pi, and the answer to my question is that it compares exactly with the film. Ang Lee changed nothing, he shot the source extremely faithfully. And since I saw the film first, that was detrimental to the book. Because Ang Lee's visuals were absolutely stunning. Had I read the book first, I think it would have impacted me more, but the cinematography of the film added so much to the book while the script took nothing away, that this is one of the rare cases that I think the film is actually superior to the novel.

We watched the last of this series tonight. It evolved well, starting off very much as an anthology series, and then the last few episodes formed an arc that dragged in threads from many of the earlier stories.

There were some nice moments towards the end - clearly the authors of the series hold the same attitude to the 'Steve Rogers goes back to the past' conclusion to the MCU arc that the fans did, which is amusing.

Like any anthology series, there were a couple of episodes that were definitely weaker than the rest, but overall it was solid. Some episodes were just plain silly, others were very much a downer, and it's good that the writers were left to choose the tone they wanted. Enjoyed watching it, won't bother to watch again.