Category: streaming

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Muscles and Mayhem

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It’s the summer here and the Formula One and the MotoGP are in their summer breaks, and some of the other linear series that we watch are on their breaks too. So we’ve been hitting the new documentaries on Netflix pretty heavily – because they’ve dropped a couple of really interesting ones in the last few weeks.

I’m dating myself a little when I say that the British version of Gladiators was Saturday night TV viewing for me and my sister. We were firmly on the side of the Gladiators and had our favourites that we wanted to win (Cobra, Jet, Scorpio) and games that we preferred and complained when new ones were introduced from the US version of the show and we saw our favourites (the Wall, Atlaspheres, Hang Tough) less. And in the summer we would sometimes get cross over episodes with the American show – where US winners and Gladiators would compete against their UK equivalents. But that was the only knowledge I had of the US show: big hair and red white and blue costumes showing up very occasionally and games being imported. This Netflix documentary is the story of how the US show came to be and what happened to the Gladiators who were part of it.

As you can probably tell from the trailer there is sex, steroids, injuries, egos and the whole shebang that you might expect from a show that catapulted a group of roided up body builders to instant stardom, but there are a couple of incredible twists to it too that I’m not going to give away here, but if you watch it you’ll know when you get to them! We watched all five episodes back to back across one Saturday night, that’s how much we enjoyed it. Given that Him Indoors and I both watched the UK series (and he may have watched the US one as well on late night TV) I don’t think that we’re in the best position to be able to judge how well it will work for people who haven’t seen any of the TV shows, but if you like behind the scenes or oral history type documentaries about cultural moments it’s definitely worth giving this a go.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Shiny Happy People

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My interest in the weirder side of American religion and cults is well known on this blog – see my posts on things like Educated, Unfinished: Short Creek, LulaRich and so much more – so the fact that I’m writing about the new Amazon Prime documentary about the Duggar family and the IBLP should probably come as no surprise to you.

In case you haven’t come across the Duggar family (lucky you?), parents Michelle and Jim Bob believe in having as many children as you can and featured in a string of documentaries and later a TLC docu-series starting with 14 kids and counting, where the number in the title increased as more kids were born and eventually also started to feature the eldest kids marriages. This initial series was cancelled after allegations emerged that their eldest son Josh (all the kids have J names) had molested girls (including some of his sisters) when he was a teenager. But TLC then commissioned Counting On – focusing on the elder daughters as they married and had kids. This ran for a number of seasons until Joshua was arrested and charged with possession of child sexual abuse images. He has now been convicted and is serving a jail lengthy jail sentence. Across four episodes, Shiny Happy People examines all of this and puts it into context of the “church” that they belong to – Bill Goatherd’s Institute of Basic Life Principles – and where it all sits in the right wing American Christian fundamentalist ecosystem.

I was not a viewer of the …And Counting series, but was aware of the series because of the press coverage of it and watched the first episode Counting On to see how on earth they were going to deal with the elephant in the room (spoiler: they did not deal with it) and continued watching in horrified fascination at a world where people got engaged after a handful of dates, were saving their first kiss for the altar and not allowed to be alone with their future spouse until they were married. And that’s before you get into the fact that the Duggar daughters – in their late teens when they married – had spent their childhoods bringing up their younger siblings, and were giving birth on sofas at home with no professional medical help. Horrifying. But no matter how bad you think that sounds, it’s all a lot worse when you’ve watched the documentary and have the rest of the context. It’s bad.

The documentary came out on Friday last week, and I had watched all four episodes before formula one qualifying started on Saturday afternoon. To be honest I could have finished it on Friday night, but it was nearly midnight by the time we finished part three and I was worried I’d have nightmares if we carried on. I was expecting it to take me longer to watch, because traditionally Him Indoors isn’t interested in this sort of documentary – but he came in as I was watching part one and got caught up in the horror of watch he was seeing and wanted to keep watching. He wasn’t fully aware of everything that had gone on and what the family actually believed and so his face as it all unrolled was an absolute picture. There was also quite a lot of ranting.

I’m not going to say this is a fun watch. It’s not. It has child abuse, child sex abuse and possibly the most horrifying public spanking demonstration you will ever see. I definitely came away feeling icky with myself for ever having watched the TV show – even though I was watching because I thought their lives were insane and ridiculous. But the documentary is incredibly interesting and illustrative of a lot of things that you might have seem bubbling along in American culture and wondered what was going on. I recommend it – but pay attention to the warnings at the start of each episode and expect to be horrified by what you see.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Keep Sweet

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I only got two thirds of the way through the first episode of Keep Sweet the first time I tried to watch it – despite thinking I was prepared for how grim that would be given that I’ve read Under The Banner of Heaven and Educated and listened to the whole series of Unfinished: Short Creek. It took nearly nine months for me to come back to it – because if there’s one thing that the second half of 2022 and the start of 2023 has been for me it is a test of my resilience. But I did come back to it, and now I have some thoughts to share.

So Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey is a documentary series about the Fundamentalist Mormon Church, focusing on the rise (and fall) of their leader Warren Jeffs. Now given that I’ve already mentioned several other things based around this group, it may seem odd to describe them as secretive. But they are – and the only reason we know what we do is because of people who have started to speak out after leaving the religion and the court records around the trial of Warren Jeffs.

The FLDS are a polygamist group and there is a lot more to unpack about them than you can fit in one four part documentary series. If you already know a bit about them, you’ll notice that there are some bits missing from this, or that the reality isn’t quite as neat as the documentary makes it seem. But I liked that uses the women who were affected to tell the story and explain what it was like to grow up in a cult, why they believed what they did and how they escaped or broke free. As I mentioned at the start of the post, the first episode is quite grim, but if you can cope with that, it gets easier – or at least you know what you’re dealing with. If you are interested in religion in America, cults or the like, this is probably going to be at least slightly of interest to you if you haven’t already watched it.

That first weekend I started watching it was actually the weekend that it was released, so you you might now have to search for it on Netflix because as we know the algorithm prioritises the new. And there is always something new on Netflix – the latest being a documentary about the Waco Siege, which I will probably also watch at some point.

And before I go – if this is of interest to you as well as the posts I referenced at the top about Educated and Short Creek, I’ve also written about Murder Among the Mormons, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and slightly tangentially Bad Bets and The Cult of We.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

not a book, streaming, tv

Not a Book: Our Flag Means Death

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It’s Sunday again and time for me to talk about something that isn’t a book again, and today it’s Our Flag Means Death – which is a comedy series about pirates very loosely based on a real life pirate.

It’s the early Eighteenth Century, and Stede Bonnet is tired of his comfortable life as a husband and father on Barbados and buys a ship and runs off to be a pirate. Except that he’s a really, really bad pirate. Like terrible. He has no aptitude for killing and his ship is outfitted for luxury rather than anything else. When we meet him at the beginning of the series, his crew are so fed up of him that they’re considering mutiny, but decide that he’ll manage to get himself killed soon enough. Except he doesn’t and soon he and his crew come across the notorious pirate Blackbeard, and they make a deal – Blackbeard will help Stede become a better pirate and Stede will teach Blackbeard how to become an aristocrat. Except it’s not as simple as that. Oh and it’s a romantic comedy.

If you’re struggling to get your head around all this, and I’ll admit I’m not doing a very good job of explaining it (luckily the first series came out in the US a year ago, so I’m hoping some of you will already have watched this and have thoughts to share), but you’ve probably spotted Taika Waititi in the trailer, and he’s also an executive producer. So the easy way to describe this is to say think of the same sort of humour as What We Do in the Shadows, but with pirates in the 1700s (and not a mockumentary). The episodes are only 25 minutes long, they’re very easy to binge and if it works for you (and it really works for me!) it will leave you with a big smile on your face.

If you’re in the UK, the first series is available on the BBC iPlayer to watch now. If you’re elsewhere in the world, you’ll need to look for it on a streaming service – probably whatever HBO Max is called in your territory. Series two has finished filming but there’s no news yet on a release date for it.

Have a great Sunday everyone.