Three recs, anticipation edition
A batshit amnesia thriller, a crypto exposé, a feminist mythological retelling
I learned about my new favorite TV show this week. It hasn’t come out yet – fortunately, it’s out soon, so I won’t have to wait long – but I almost lost my mind when I heard about it. It actually sounds like someone went into my brain (or at least did a very thorough study of my habits and interests) and created a story designed to appeal to me.
They didn’t even have to try this hard to get my attention. The creator/writer/director has yet to do a show I haven’t loved – and has been an incredible screenwriter for decades – so I would have checked out his new project even if he hadn’t tailored it to me.
Jokes aside, though, my anticipation and expectations are through the roof for something that I literally didn’t even know existed a week ago. I’m rearranging my entire hierarchy of TV for the year based on it. I’m reevaluating the film/TV projects I can develop and pitch as a result. I’m already excited for a possible (if unlikely, as I think it’s a limited series) second season.
This show literally hasn’t even come out yet! How can it possibly live up to my expectations?
Look, maybe it will be everything I want it to be. But it’s far more likely that it will be an enjoyable experience, good storytelling, but not quite what I imagine. Maybe it will get a bit too bogged down in its own twists and turns, or the story and characters will take themselves too seriously, or it won’t go interesting enough places. Or it could just be boring.
So many networks and streamers seem to have gotten out of the anticipation game in recent years, dropping new series (in particular) with little preamble or fanfare. I heard a couple years ago that Apple refused to do advance press for their shows because they don’t do it for their tech products. Netflix often doesn’t even share release dates, and sometimes just drops shows on the service that no one outside the company or project even knew existed.
If your goal is to surprise and delight, maybe this is a good idea. It’s up to the rest of us as viewers to try a show out and tell people if we like it.
It also seems like a good idea if you’re worried that anticipation will hurt a show. That is, if you know it’s going to let people down. A mediocre series could be a pleasant surprise if you didn’t know it was coming.
But I like anticipation. At least, the good kind. Right now, I am preemptively experiencing the best possible version of this upcoming show. I’m getting to feel the emotional journey I want to go on. It may not be the one the creator wants me to go on, but my current experience has almost nothing to do with the intentions of the people who actually created the series.
This is of course helpful for my own work. If I can feel the emotional experience I aspire to, then I also know the experience I want to create for readers and viewers of my stories. (Or, at last, one of the experiences.) But even for the vast majority of people who aren’t creating their own work, anticipation still helps us imagine what is possible. Our experiences of stories don’t have to be bounded by what is on the screen or the page.
When I was about 26, I reread Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series for the first time since high school. They were (and probably still are, though I haven’t reread them in a while) some of my favorite books, and I was excited to return to that world. But I was struck by how much of what I remembered wasn’t on the page. My experience of the story, as a child, had been to infuse the world and characters with so much more than the author had written. My imagination had created an even bigger and richer experience.
Yes, it requires a great writer to create a canvas for that kind of experience. But it’s also one of the reasons that screen adaptations of books often don’t quite land – because we are seeing someone else’s experience of the book, rather than our own. (Incidentally, I sometimes think that mediocre books make better screen adaptations, because there’s more room to build and create, but that’s another conversation.)
Which brings me back to this series I’m so excited about. Whatever it actually is won’t be the version I’m imagining. At this point, they’re two distinct things: the real one, and the one in my head. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that the version I’m experiencing in anticipation is just as much a part of the joy of reading and watching stories as the actual reading and watching.
Okay, you want to know what this mysterious show is? Fine, but you can’t complain when I still rec it in a month and a half (fingers crossed!). It’s called Monsieur Spade, and it’s about Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s iconic detective, set in the south of France 20 years after the events of The Maltese Falcon. It’s part noir detective story and part political thriller involving stuff going on in France in the 1960s, including the Algerian war for independence. And it’s written and directed by Scott Frank, also of Godless and The Queen’s Gambit. See what I mean?!
Now, on to the recs…
Rec 1
The Tourist, S2 (TV)
Season one of this batshit BBC thriller starring the eminently watchable Jamie Dornan was one of my absolute favorite watches of 2023. I genuinely wasn’t sure at first if it was going to come back for a second season, since so many shows these days have to hedge their bets and thus the endings feel kinda final. Fortunately for all of us, this one quickly got brought back for round two (just released in the UK!), and they’ve set it up much more confidently for round three.
For a primer on the six-episode first season, here’s my original rec. But, real fast: Irishman Dornan wakes up in the visually stunning Australian outback after a car accident, having completely lost his memory. And someone’s trying to kill him.
S2 takes S1’s hilarious dark humor, often-ridiculous violence, weirdness, and edge-of-your-seat thriller twists on the road: to Ireland. Accompanied by the determined Aussie aspiring detective (played by the equally charismatic and delightful Danielle Macdonald) who helped him figure out (sort of) who he was first season, Dornan is going home to, um, figure out who he is. Again. If that’s possible for someone that an absurdly large number of people regularly want to kill.
Which is all to say, Ireland may be Australia’s visual opposite, but turns out to be just as dangerous and ridiculous. Best of all, S2 still has the heart that makes these characters so lovable and their journey so compelling. More hijinks and plot twists ensue, and I honestly could happily watch another few 6-ep seasons of this.
Where: BBC (UK); Netflix (US – releasing in Feb, so queue it up now!)
Rec 2
Number Go Up (book)
I assume we can all agree that Michael Lewis’ relatively fawning book about disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried was not the hard-hitting look at crypto that we as a world deserved. Fortunately for us, veteran finance reporter Zeke Faux (apparently pronounced “fox”) has done that exposé. And, to my delight, he doesn’t spare Lewis the shade.
Faux, by his own admission, set out to find and expose the scam in crypto. He’d covered all kinds of Ponzi schemes and financial con-artists over the years, and everything he read and heard about crypto suggested it was yet another scam designed to part credulous normal people from their money. Except, everyone from industry experts to governments seemed to be buying into it – was there something he was missing?
Spoiler alert: no. As the world discovered with SBF and FTX’s fall in late 2022, crypto was/is essentially unregulated gambling, amounting to little more than a Ponzi scheme. As the book’s title indicates, the whole idea behind it is: “number go up.”
Still, Faux started his investigation approximately two years before this collapse, which means that the book charts much of crypto’s rise and peak. He tracks down the people at the top of and behind many of the companies behind crypto, trying to get to the root of the unregulated currency. He reports out the claims that crypto can replace government currencies and lift people out of poverty, meeting people to the Philippines and Ecuador who were once poster-children for it. He discovers how the biggest beneficiaries of crypto have, in fact, been organized crime groups. Most of all, he finds out how the financial fad follows almost directly in the footsteps of other scams and crimes over the last century or two. It’s not the wonkiest crypto book – Faux clearly knows his stuff, but he’s written this to be both entertaining and accessible – even if the content is sometimes depressingly predictable.
And yes, of course, he talks to SBF. Several times. Including in the midst of his melt-down. He even watches Lewis interview SBF. See, I told you there’d be shade.
Where: I listened to the audiobook from the library, which I recommend. If you want to buy a paper copy, though, order from your non-Amazon bookseller of choice (here’s the Bookshop US link, and here’s the Bookshop UK link).*
Rec 3
Circe (book)
This came out in 2018, I read it in 2020, and it’s still one of the books I think about and recommend the most. I sort of assume many of you have already read it, but, for those who haven’t, here’s my whole-hearted recommendation.
Madeline Miller’s lyrical retelling of the story of Circe, the witch/sorceress who “imprisoned” Odysseus on her island, seems to have kicked off the latest wave of retelling mythological women’s stories through a modern-ish, feminist lens. However, few (if any?) other writers of these have Miller’s pedigree as a reader of Greek and Latin, with a masters in Classics. As such, Circe (and Miller’s debut, the also-incredible Song of Achilles) isn’t just a retelling of a part of The Odyssey – it’s also grounded in other ancient literature about Circe.
But this isn’t what makes the book so incredible. Yes, it’s grounded in the chaotic drama of Greek mythology, for those of us who enjoy that. And don’t worry, Odysseus gets plenty of what’s coming to him – if you, like me and my high school classmates – found him a bit arrogant and infuriating. But it’s also magical work of literature in its own right. It’s about a woman who doesn’t fit in the world around her, whose emotions and desires cause her to transgress, making her both a victim and an attacker. She fights against the mythical senses of fate and destiny, craving agency and control over her own life.
This is one of those stories that sucks you in and doesn’t let you go. I know I’m not the only reader with whom it’s stayed for years, haunting me in the best way.
Where: Get it for free from your local library, or buy it from your non-Amazon bookseller of choice. (here’s the Bookshop US link, and here’s the Bookshop UK link).*
*(In the name of full transparency, I’ve included affiliate links to Bookshop.org – if you’re going to order from them anyway, please use my link so I can make a little extra cash! If you want to see/order any/all of my book recs, I’ve made lists on Bookshop, too: US version, UK version.)
That’s all for this week! What are you reading/watching/listening to that I should be aware of? Drop me a line (or comment) to let me know if you check out any of my recs and what you think.
Please spread the word and I’ll see you in a couple weeks. Oh yeah, and happy new year!
xo
Kate
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