[Right Before the Break] An Encouragement of Film and TV [The Selected TV Series Edition]
Hello!! End of the year already. I played in this concert the other day (the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology piano club) and it left me pretty worn out, though it was enormous fun. Only now is the loneliness of having retired really sinking in.
So, with sixteen years of watching overseas series behind me, I thought I’d write about the ones out of everything I’ve seen that I most want people to watch!!
Plenty of people think overseas series are too long! But that length is exactly what gives them depth (characters who grow, the sheer number of threads planted early on). It’s something films and Japanese dramas struggle to produce, so I’d love people to try one, even just the once.
The film edition is here
Contents
Suspense and mystery
So what’s the difference between suspense and mystery? Suspense is where the culprit is known from the start. Mystery is where it comes out at the end.
Monk
The synopsis goes
Adrian Monk, a detective at San Francisco Police Department headquarters, loses his wife Trudy when somebody kills her with a car bomb. Unable to bring the killer in, Monk finds his obsessive-compulsive disorder growing worse, takes leave from the force and shuts himself away at home for three years. He later hires a nurse, Sharona Fleming, as his assistant and works as a consultant for the police department, fighting crime and his many phobias while aiming to get his job back and solve Trudy’s case.
That’s the setup.
One of the shows that got me into overseas suspense in the first place. Watched it in primary school and thought, ah, this is SO good — that was where it started. For a comparison, this one is the overseas Furuhata Ninzaburo. Both of them were built on Columbo anyway, mind lol
Just as the synopsis says, Monk (voiced in the Japanese dub by Takuzo Kadono) is a slightly unusual man. A germaphobe, afraid of heights, that sort of thing. But that innate gift of his makes his powers of observation the best in the world! Any case, however difficult, gets solved with almost no effort at all!
What makes it worth recommending is the trouble that odd man causes, and the fact that it’s suspense — the viewer already knows who did it, so the manoeuvring is fun to watch. A show that works for adults and children alike, I think.
NCIS
The synopsis is here
A crime investigation drama set at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which handles cases involving officers and enlisted personnel of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It also carries a great deal of parody, playing off other films and series as well as real cases.
In a ratings survey of satellite pay-TV channels carried out in June 2008, it took the number one spot among every American series airing on satellite channels in Japan.
This one is currently up to season 15 on satellite over here lol And the amazing part isn’t only the season count — it’s that even though it’s still on the air in the States, Japan is already running it with subtitles, that’s how popular it is here too lol
What makes it worth recommending is forensic science and the veteran investigative skill of the lead, Gibbs, closing in on the culprit, plus a lot of topical material (bin Laden, issues in the Islamic world and so on) that gives it a social dimension. No need to worry, though. It isn’t all stiff and impenetrable. Gibbs’s team fire off jokes constantly, and there is a huge amount to laugh at! Hard-boiled Gintama, is the feeling. Recommended for anyone who likes cop shows~~
Sci-fi
Doctor Who
What the show is
The one thing that stays consistent as the basic story is that an alien called the Doctor, the protagonist, travels freely through time and space with companions from Earth, and rushes to stop the unreasonable invasions and the temporal paradoxes he runs into on Earth and on other planets along the way.
“The Doctor” is an assumed name and his real one has never been revealed (in some episodes it is explained that his real name cannot be pronounced in any Earth language). The background to it is gradually coming to light as the episodes pile up.
Synopsis
The Doctor originally belonged to a species called the Time Lords, who live on a planet called Gallifrey. Time Lords look exactly like humans but have two hearts, and if the body takes severe damage they can regenerate into a different body at least twelve times, making them an extremely long-lived species. They also hold a civilisation advanced enough to reach any place and any era in the universe by means of a time machine called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space). That said, they feared other species learning about their advanced technology, so as a rule they held to a policy of non-interference in events happening across the universe. The Doctor rebelled against that bureaucratic state of affairs, stole a TARDIS that was under repair, ran off, and went on to pile up adventure after adventure.
The most popular series in Britain. Made by the BBC, Britain’s answer to NHK! It’s been on the air since 1963, and the new series relaunched in 2005, so there’s still time to get on board!
Just as the synopsis says, it unfolds a grand adventure across all sorts of eras and places, and out in space as well! The lead is an alien man, and his dry British sarcasm is the best part of it lol The introduction video here should get the appeal across, I think!
Supernatural
Synopsis
2 November 1983, Lawrence, Kansas. The Winchester family should have reached morning without incident that night as well. Mary Winchester wakes up and heads for the nursery where Sam, her son of six months, is sleeping, and there, standing over the sleeping Sam, is the figure of a man who looks like his father John. Satisfied with what she sees, Mary leaves the room. On her way out, though, she catches sight of her husband in another room, in front of the television. So the one standing over Sam just now was… Mary hurries back to Sam……
John hears his wife scream and rushes into the nursery. She isn’t there — only Sam, lying on the bed with an innocent smile. As he goes to lift Sam up, a black liquid drips down from above. Realising it is blood, John looks up in shock. His wife is pinned to the ceiling, bleeding from the stomach. Then flames burst out of nowhere and the room turns into a sea of fire in an instant.
John hands Sam to his other son, Sam’s older brother Dean. The three of them just manage to escape the burning house. John is left in grief at losing his wife. And once they learn that what killed Mary was something supernatural, they become “hunters” who hunt demons and monsters.
Twenty-two years later, John suddenly disappears on Dean, so Dean turns up to pull his younger brother Sam — who had come to doubt a life of hunting evil spirits and monsters and left it for university — back into “the hunt.”
As the synopsis lays out, this one is a monster-and-evil-spirit show that closes its case within a single episode. Recommended for anyone who likes action, I’d say. And the two leads are seriously appealing. In the image below, Dean the older brother is on the right and Sam the younger brother is on the left. Dean has quite the eye for women, chats them up on sight, plays pranks on his brother, plenty of childishness there — but when things get desperate he’s the one to lean on, so there’s a real switch in him. Sam, meanwhile, is the stiff, serious one. He’s fed up with his brother, but underneath it he worries about him enormously.
What’s remarkable about this show is that anything goes. One angel’s power throws them into a parallel world in which Supernatural is a TV drama, there’s an episode that repeats the same day over and over, and so on — all of it is fun.
A show with a human drama side to it, and demons and angels and anything else on top. If shonen manga is your thing, this one absolutely.
Comedy
The Big Bang Theory
Over to the earlier post
Full House
There might not be a single person in their twenties or older who doesn’t know Full House? And the sequel is up on Netflix — did everyone know that? The uncles turn up as well, and it carries on in exactly that same atmosphere, so it’s great fun!
Everything else
House
The setting is Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, a fictional hospital in Princeton, New Jersey.
The protagonist, Dr Gregory House, head of the hospital’s diagnostic medicine department, is a genius doctor well known within the profession, but his character is the worst imaginable. He believes anything is permissible so long as it identifies the cause of a disease — unconventional if one is being kind, utterly out of order if one is not.
Most episodes open with a patient falling ill somewhere. The patient comes to Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, but early on House, who hates examining patients, refuses to see them himself and busies himself with something else entirely. Eventually the standard treatment fails, the symptoms turn interesting, and House — while pretending to have no interest in the patient — begins working out the cause.
House starts by bringing in his team and listing as many causes as the symptoms suggest on a whiteboard. He steers the discussion deliberately, going back and forth with his subordinates and sifting their ideas (as a rule he rejects every opinion they offer while throwing in vicious jokes), and finally sets out the most plausible view and directs them to a treatment. The treatment improves the patient’s symptoms for a while (sometimes not even that), and then a different symptom appears, the patient ends up worse than before, and House and the team are left stumped.
House and the team go round again, repeating the same cycle of debate and action over what the cause might be in light of the new symptoms and how to uncover it. Along the way House orders his staff to break into the patient’s house, and on the strength of his own doctrine that people lie, he says and does things that trample on the patient’s rights, infuriating the patient and the people around them.
In the closing stretch, a clinic shift Cuddy has forced on him, a conversation with his best friend Wilson, or an offhand remark from one of his team gives him the trigger, and he realises the true cause. He then directs the team to the correct treatment, learns that it has worked, and finishes satisfied.
Apart from a few two-part episodes, it is a self-contained drama and that week’s case ends within that week. From the second half of season 1 onwards, though, storylines spanning several episodes often run in parallel alongside the illness that is the theme of the week, which gives the story more body. There are also episodes where the cause is identified but the disease is incurable, or the identification comes too late, or the patient dies because of treatment for the wrong illness.
As all of the above makes clear, it is built around reasoning out an illness nobody can identify and solving it, so the structure is a medical show that’s really a mystery drama. That is exactly the point worth recommending. On top of that, medical practice in America is enormously different from Japan, which makes it feel fresh.
The biggest point of all is that House himself is a proper piece of work. He mocks people, he sets them up, and the way he treats his patients is pretty appalling. But he will never allow anyone to die, and the way he goes after a disease no matter the circumstances is so cool!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpSOHQuv75U
Planning to write about the shows above again in future posts on favourite episodes and the like!
