![]() What muddy waters, what early days… despite a couple of fierce disagreements, this was a surprisingly uplifting experiment, and they all seemed to enjoy themselves, even fall a little bit in love. Not least the fact that this outsider realised they, the insiders, were at least as confused when it comes to gender fluidity as me. There was much good in Genderquake, a kind of Big Brother gone right (relatively few screaming drama divas) for a nice enough selection of bi, trans, cis and non-binary youngsters in a big house together for a week. And to watch Carrie stumbling out after months of being denied her meds in a Russian jail, and Saul’s eyes widening in the dark on a chill Estonian border at the extent of her descent from sanity, is to experience a frisson of horror like few others.Ĭhannel 4 deserves credit for wading into the piranha-infested waters of the gender/trans debate with two successive nights of Genderquake, even if the station hardly covered itself with glory in the subsequent debate. If you only watch one series watch this one just finished, not least for credible explorations of a White House mired in paranoia and Russian post-truth meddling. I am conscious that some have simply stopped watching this, but I’d humbly suggest for quite misguided reasons: the plots might be borderline ludicrous, the spy shenanigans still laughably unlikely, but, post-Trump, who can be at all sure? Cast and production still take it seriously, believe in it, and this comes across with every minute’s viewing. Homeland ended its best series yet, and there was another shocker, also happening to a sort-of-cop, also female. And, yes, there is a stock haunted house straight out of Scooby-Doo, but you also get to see a lot of Belgium that you never normally see, and Belgians that you never see, and never know when anyone’s lying to you. It’s proper spooky, too, not (thankfully) Woman in White bad-spooky but modernly unsettling: I physically jumped a couple of times. ![]() Tabula Rasa, hot off of Netflix, is a disarmingly good psychological chiller about an amnesiac witness, which has echoes of those fine 50s films about a blind/damaged/amnesiac women disbelieved by all around her. To Belgium, then, for our next helping of Walter Presents. How we’ll bloody miss her and her olive Porsche 911S and her sad eyes. Yet our eyes constantly, when they’re not drawn to that astonishing bridge, are drawn to policewoman Saga (or, as Jeremy Clarkson wittily called one Millionaire contestant last week, “a policeman woman” the wit dwindled a little with constant repetition). There are many little diversions – a journalist with a dodgy identical twin a couple of teen pickpockets an abusive father Henrik’s support group a deported immigrant – but no scene or character ever feels jerry-built with gaffer tape, even (perhaps especially) the most cochineal of red herrings. One of the supreme strengths of The Bridge is the quality of acting throughout. ![]() But it’s not all about Saga, though she will go through many emotional catharses this series, tragically the last ever: Henrik, teamed with a regressively non-PC cop Jonas – we’ve learned throughout the whole series that Danes generally regard Swedes as hideously PC as we’ve learned that they pronounce “Saga” differently – is off investigating the first, particularly horrid, example of what’s bound to become a grim little series of murders. Actor Sofia Helin, on the news that her conviction has been quashed, gives a quiet masterclass in repressed relief: a shuddered sigh in silhouette, tight eyes, trembling mouth. Saga, it will come as no surprise, survives. And for someone who has lived her life by unceasing truth-telling, to the extent that she dobbed in lovely partner Martin, there’s a savage irony in her being wrongly imprisoned. Somebody else decides everything.” For someone so used to control, this is indeed an appalling wrench but, worse, she’s no longer in the police, a status of sorts on which she had built her entire identity. Almost wailing to her partner Henrik (formerly in the police sense, now in the progressive-Scandi-jail bed sense too), after he tries to mention her routines: “But they’re not my routines. So it was a shocker to see her banged up in chokey, falsely convicted of her mother’s murder at the close of the last series, having lost everything. ![]() The Bridge’s Saga Norén – brusque, frigid of spirit, relentless and heroically on the Asperger’s spectrum, yet whose bitterly rare smile, her even rarer attempt at a joke, can make one feel seven long months of winter have finally ended – has inchwormed her way into our psyches over the past six years. I felt this week as heart-sorry for a beautiful, blond, Porsche-driving policewoman as I hope I am ever likely to feel. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (ITV) | ITV Hub
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