Other Doctor Lives / Joel Fry-days: W1A: Series 3, Episode 3 (2017)

Despite the presence of Joel Fry, not my favorite. This one leans pretty heavily into the “everybody at the table talks a lot without actually saying anything,” although it does still have some entertaining parts.

The BBC is going full steam ahead with their Less is More initiative, looking for places to reduce/combine programming. When it’s pointed out that the BBC has six different orchestras/bands, the executives float the idea of downsizing them, with the BBC Big Swing Band under particular consideration. Siobhan and her team have been asked to look at Jack’s reworking of On Your Bike, now called Cycle Shorts, to potentially use as a trailer for BBC Me. After an upgrade, Syncopatico’s autocaptioning software is spitting out some unfortunate errors.

There are times when the drivel in the executive meetings gets into a good groove and it’s a fun skewering of corporate nonsense. Other times, it starts to feel like that scene from Extras where all the characters on Andy’s sitcom are just sitting around saying their catchphrases at each other in turn—only here, the catchphrases are things like, “Yes, no, brilliant,” “The fact is…”, and “So that’s all good then.” That’s kind of what this episode is like for me. The characters are batting words across the table, each trying to avoid having to say a fully formed, coherent thought.

As such, when they start getting press about the rumors that the BBC Big Swing Band is getting axed, at that point, nobody knows whether or not it’s actually happening. One thing that does come through loud and clear? Anna is anti- all things Lucy. There’s a nasty moment during a meeting where Lucy is trying to get Simon to clarify something, and she softens it by saying, “I mean, I might be being stupid…” Instantly, Anna snaps off one of her go-to catch phrases: “Yes, exactly.” And the whole mess with the Big Swing Band kicks off when Lucy points out that her grandparents are avid listeners, which causes Anna to not not think they’re ripe for the chopping block.

As someone who used to interpret in a public school where teachers would turn on the god-awful auto-transcriptions on YouTube videos, the captioning subplot is a lot more successful for me. An engineer touts the upgrade’s 93% success rate, but it trips up the most on proper names, a la “President Tramp” building his wall along the border of “Max Sicko.” As one exec notes, proper names are arguably “the most important 7%” of the news, so this is a major problem. By the way, back in the pilot, there was a sight gag about Syncopatico’s atrocious captioning software, so I appreciate seeing it brought up here as an actual story.

Here are my picks for David Tennant’s best narration today:

• I like this description of what Jack has turned On Your Bike into with Cycle Shorts – “In many ways, it’s a perfect example of exactly the sort of selfie-centered content that will lie at the heart of the new channel and that may well be the model for how television will work in a world where no one watches it anymore.”
• The narrator explains that a famous musician has weighed in on the Big Swing Band rumors on Twitter, “...and worse still, a lot of people with opinions have already liked that.”

Our character of the week is Michael Chung, played by Will Sharpe. He’s a young Fun Media employee who’s been brought to London from the New York office. Michael has been painted as a whiz kid when it comes to marketing—in the season premiere, BBC Me was his brainchild. Whenever we see him, he stands silently while Siobhan’s team riffs on their ideas. But when someone asks him for his input, he lets loose with a robotic-sounding monologue, leaving the other characters aghast at his brilliance.

Adding another character into the scenes at Fun has meant less Karl. Although he never has that many lines, a good amount of humor with Siobhan’s team often comes from Karl’s offbeat responses. Here, as in episode 1, the usual pitch session is truncated to build up to Michael’s clincher. Karl/Joel Fry only gets a couple good moments here. My favorite comes when Coco is contemplating how to create a theme event for the BBC Me launch centered around Cycle Shorts:

COCO: “Yeah, so like, maybe you have it somewhere you can only get to by bike.” 

KARL: “Yeah.” 

BARNEY: “Okay, like where?” 

COCO: “I dunno. Maybe more like…” 

KARL: “Yeah, France.”

And both Barney and Coco turn to him with the most dumbfounded look. I’m the number-one Karl defender out here, but I’ve never claimed that he doesn’t say some truly wild things, and that’s part of why I love him!

Y tu Luna también: Pan y circo: Season 1, Episode 5 – “My Body is Mine: Termination of Pregnancy” (2020)

Much like the episode on gender violence, this is another where Diego Luna wisely takes more of a back seat, setting the stage for the dinner conversation but mainly listening to other voices at the table.

The chef for today’s episode lives and works in Puebla, an ultra-conservative area of Mexico. In conducting short interviews with passersby ahead of the dinner, Luna encounters opinions like, “I’m all for it, as long as it’s because of rape,” and claims that women treat abortion as trivially as, “I’m just taking an Alka-Seltzer.” And naturally, the conversation throughout the country is entangled with questions of religion and morality—at one point, we see a clip from a speech where Pope Francis says abortion is “like hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

Highlights from the conversation:

• One of the guests is the Secretary of State – It’s rare for a government official to come on the show and not immediately earn the suspicion of the other guests. But while the secretary gets some pushback here for her stance on decriminalization over legalization, she’s not really positioned in opposition to the others.
• In response to the decriminalization vs. legalization question, the president of the National Institute for Women says, “I think what is dramatic is that we are still talking about this in terms of crime instead of rights.”
• A theological advisor for a pro-choice Catholic group emphasizes throughout the night that the Church shouldn’t dictate legislation – “In Mexico, the legislative discussion now is not whether abortion is a sin or not. That is a matter for the churches, and they will have to convince their parishioners, the pastors, and the bishops what is a sin or not.”
• But a senator points out the trouble with that statement, which is that the Church doesn’t stick to that – “This has really been the great debate and the great contradiction that they wanted to address from the point of view of religion instead of law and justice.”
• A feminist advocate and social psychologist pushes back on Luna framing the abortion debate as “unpopular” – “In the cities where it’s decriminalized, people lose their fear, people change their opinions when they respond.”
• Meanwhile, an actress and activist argues that the tide on abortion hasn’t changed across the board, pointing to childhood friends from her rural hometown – “They tell me that I get to be naughty and they can’t, because in the provinces, they’d kill them if they got a divorce or had an abortion.”

As I said, Luna spends much of the discussion sitting back and listening. That means that his largest contributions come from his voiceover near the start of the episode. He observes the double standard in Mexico, saying, “While we are sitting here, there are women in prison for having terminated their pregnancies. But if we open that door, we can find hundreds of thousands of men who have abandoned their children and who are walking around freely.” He also stresses that the episode isn’t about debating abortion, that everyone on the show begins from a standpoint that people should have the right to abortion: he says, “This table is about listening to women, understanding their arguments, and, ideally, raising the awareness of those out there who think differently.”

Y tu Luna también: Pan y circo: Season 1, Episode 4 – “The Future is Now: Climate Change” (2020)

This is a good episode. It’s evident from some of Diego Luna’s interviews and original work that the environment is an important issue for him. The episode brings together a nice varied group of folks to discuss it, along with a meal that raises this sort of consciousness too.

The dinner party is held outside for this episode, in an area rich in chinampas—islands built atop freshwater using the same soil from the nutrient-rich waterbed. In lieu of the usual interspersed clips of Luna in the kitchen with the chef, we see him accompany her through the chinampas harvesting her fresh ingredients. She also talks to Luna about the importance of responsibly sourcing ingredients for her restaurant.

Here are some highlights from the dinner discussion:

• One guest is a former astronaut – He tells the group about watching the sunrise from orbit and seeing the Earth’s atmosphere, saying, “And it scared me because it looked so thin, so delicate. That’s the moment I became an environmentalist.”
• An environmental scientist came armed with both biology and political savvy – She says, “It’s hard for governments to make radical structural decisions. People are working within a relatively short span of time, and so no one wants to make a long-term decision. And the environment is not a short-term issue. You can take action in the short term, but you need to have a long-term vision.”
• A Green Party politician, meanwhile, has her own take on the government’s inaction – “We’re not clear on what we appreciate, treasure, value, and we’re teaching this generation after generation. This is why we see the same patterns repeated in positions of power. We’re good at complaining but bad at taking action. If you don’t like something, then you have to change it.”
• An indigenous leader from Peru regales the table with the story of how her people fought back against a company trying to exploit their land.
• A singer and activist sums up the state of affairs between Earth and humanity – “This beautiful, generous garden, we wasted it by being assholes.”
• There’s another musician/activist in the group as well – She emphasizes hope in the power of change, saying, “Right now, we still can. And it’s up to us.”

Like I said, this is an issue that’s dear to Luna, and that’s reflected in the episode. His opening voiceover is both unflinching and urgent, stating, “The mathematics of disaster are brutally clear. If we fail to change, the world will be lethally wounded.” And during the dinner, he opens up about some of his own self-examination and his desire to do more to preserve the environment. He admits, “Two of the things I love most in life are traveling and eating,” and he looks at how his habits regarding both contribute to climate change.

For all the seriousness, though, he brings some lightness to the episode too. When the chef is describing one of the dishes and mentions the fresh aramanth leaves she harvested with Luna, he says, “It’s my only contribution to the dish. In fact, I didn’t even pick them myself. I just carried the basket.” That made me smile!