Given that I’ve already written posts about two series about home renovations and made a romance about a home renovation a book of the week, it should not be a surprise to you that I love a show about renovating houses – particularly American houses where it seems like it’s much easier to rip things up and reconfigure than it is here in the UK. And with autumn being all cosy and making me want to nest, this is the perfect time of year to be watching them!
Home Town is probably my current favourite of the HGTV series – and I’ve watched a lot, including several on my various long-haul flights over the last six months. Home Town is set in Laurel, Mississppi and features Ben and Erin Napier, a husband and wife duo (as do so many HGTV series) who restore historic homes. In the majority of episodes, Ben and Erin show their renovatees (is that a word?) a couple of housing choices, and present them with a painting of how the exterior would look after it’s been renovated and then once the hosue has been bought, they renovate it without the new purchasers seeing what is being done (or at least that’s what they say!) until the big reveal at the end,when they’re also presented with that painting from the start – now framed and with The *family name* house written underneath it. Coz every show has to have a thing right.
Ben is a carpenter and woodworker and Erin is a designer and artist. The series started in 2016 and having recently watched some of the earlier series you can see how both of them have got better at renovating things and also how prices in Laurel have gone up as more houses have been done up over the last eight seasons. I find Ben and Erin charming and I love that her decorating style isn’t black and white with shades of grey like some (Christina on the Coast I’m looking at you) but is all about colour and pattern. I also really like their commitment to improving their small town – which seems really genuine and backed up by the fact that they own and run businesses in the town. It’s all very low stakes, and low conflict and just perfect for watching while you’re doing the ironing!
Home Town is on HGTV and Discovery+ in the UK. Have a great Sunday
It’s probably stating the obvious, but it’s a long way from the UK to Kuala Lumpur, so on the way there and back I had plenty of opportunity to sample the inflight entertainment and although I did take full advantage of the fact that they had a number of my old favourite movies that I used to lull me to sleep (namely Sean Connery James Bond movies but also my beloved Pillow Talk and The Philadelphia Story), I do still have a recommendation to give you today from my viewing.
Swan Song is a feature length documentary (although if you are in Canada there was an extended four part series version) about the National Ballet of Canada’s staging of a new production of Swan Lake, under the directorship of their outgoing artistic director, retired ballerina Karen Kain. Originally due to premiere in 2020, the production was delayed by Covid, so it also shows an artform trying to regroup after the lockdowns and closures that threatened the survival of so many arts organisations. As well as Karen Kain, the documentary follows the company’s principal ballerina Jurgita Dronina and several members of the corps de ballet.
A lot of the issues that commonly come up when you’re talking about ballet are in this too – including the reckoning with racism and the fact that all the ballet “ideals” are built around white dancers, and the ever present spectre of eating disorders and body image issues. But it’s also got lots of beautiful dancing as well as a close up view of the effort it takes to mount a production like this, as well as how hard it is to be a member of the corps – which is something that often gets overlooked.
Regular readers will know that although I’m about as graceful as, well, something very ungraceful* I absolutely adored ballet books when I was a child – and in fact have all the Sadlers Wells and Drina books on my shelves to this day** and I really like documentaries that take you behind the scenes of ballet. The BBC has had a couple of really good ones – including Men at the Barre (sadly currently unavailable to watch on iPlayer) where we discovered that Vadim Muntagirov is known as Vadream by the ballerinas because he’s such a dream to work with – and so this was total catnip for me.
Although I’ve seen Swan Lake a few times and watched a whole load of documentaries about it, I wasn’t massively familiar with the National Ballet of Canada, so there was lots of interesting new stuff for me here. I wouldn’t count myself as a massive ballet fan though – so I don’t know how this would land for someone who is, but I think it would be interesting to the casual theatre or dance fan too. Him Indoors is usually my gauge of things like this for the non-fan – and I think there’s some stuff that he would have been interested in, but most of the backstage-y stuff isn’t for him, so it’s probably one that I would put on when he was out of the room and see what happened when he came back in, rather than one that I would put on to watch with him!
If you’re not going on a plane in the near future and want to watch this, it’s available to purchase now on the various streaming platforms. And just before I go it would be remiss of me to have a post about ballet this weekend and not mention the sudden death of Michaela Mabinty DePrince at just 29. Her journey from war-torn Sierra Leone to the highest level of ballet was remarkable, and she was a dedicated humanitarian as well as a beautify dancer. I’m still in a bit of shock about it to be honest.
See you tomorrow.
*I suggested Peter Crouch, but Him Indoors insists that Crouch is infact graceful. I was aiming for something that has too many legs and flails a lot. Answers on a postcard/in the comments
Another week, another streaming pick and I do apologise for the fact that they’re all over the different services. I’m as cross about it as you are – which is nearly as cross as I am about the fact that I now have to sit through ads mid show on some of said services. Hey ho.
Ever thought “what I really need right now is an alternative history Tudor dramedy with a bit of magic”? No? Me neither. And yet we binged My Lady Jane across three nights and it’s a real hoot and a half. As you’ll know if you’ve watched the trailer (or maybe just by the fact that I said it’s Tudor and she’s called Jane) this is about Lady Jane Grey, who due to the machinations of those around her had an incredibly short reign after the death of Edward VI and was then executed by Queen Mary after she took the throne back. But this is an alternative history, and so there is swearing, a distinctly un-Tudor voice over and a plot that gets more and more bonkers as you go on.
It’s also got a cracking cast. I hadn’t come across any of the younger leads before but it’s got Anna Chancellor as Jane’s scheming mother, Rob Brydon having an absolute ball as Lord Dudley and Dominic Cooper as Lord Seymour. It’s utterly utterly bonkers and incredibly watchable. The ending is left open for a second series, but Amazon have already announced that there won’t be one, much to the consternation of the fans who have started a petition to try and change their mind. Watch this space, and in the meantime, have the official playlist.
This is a bit of a preview, but the fourth series of Only Murders in the Building starts on Tuesday and I am very excited. Here’s the trailer – but don’t watch it if you’re not up to date with the series or you’ll get some spoilers. Instead, go and read my earlier post about the show!
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed the first three series and I can’t wait to see how they build out the world in this latest one. As usual, we already know who the victim is, because we saw it happen at the end of series three. Selena Gomes, Steve Martin and Martin short are back as Mabel, Charles and Oliver, and it looks like Meryl Streep is too, given that she was at the premiere the other night (holding hands with Short – which has got all that speculation going again) and although it seems like Jesse Williams is not (another Mabel love interest bites the dust) there are a whole load of A-listers who are due to appear including Molly Shannon, Eva Longoria and Eugene Levy. I would say I can’t wait, but I will wait until the whole series is available because I do like to be able to go straight on to the next episode and not have to wait another week. Also I’ll wait because it’s on Disney + here in the UK and I don’t currently have a subscription to that so I’ll need to finish out some other things on the other services before I swap it in!
Back to the streaming services this Sunday and a documentary that I actually watched basically as soon as it came out – but which has taken a few weeks to actually get posted because of things that were slightly more pressing on a time front. But actually it’s been really interesting to watch the conversations about this series over the last few weeks as well.
America’s Sweethearts is a seven part documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It follows them across the course of one season – with auditions to join the team, the training camp that follows and then the actual football season. It picks out a couple of the women in particular to highlight – Victoria and to a lesser degree Madeleine, veterans whose mothers were also on the squad; Caroline, newly retired and trying to adjust to the post-DCC world and her sister Anna-Kate who is auditioning for the team herself this year; Kelcey, a senior veteran on the team in her final season and Reese, a rookie candidate looking to make the team for the first time. Using those women it explores the impact of being on the team – physically and mentally, the sisterhood of the women who have been a part of it, and the squad’s place in the multi-billion dollar brand that is the Dallas Cowboys.
This is not the first series about the team – there were previously 14 seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team produced by the CMT channel. Both series were authorised by the organisation itself, the people running the team are the same – DCC director Kelli Finglass, chief choreographer Judy Trammell – both former DCC themselves – and their boss Charlotte Jones Anderson, daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Even some of the cheerleaders on the squad are the same – the CMT show finished with the 2021 season and some of those women were still cheering last seaons – but the actual shows are very different.
Making the Team was very much a reality tv series in many ways – each season followed a similar structure: you started with the preliminary auditions and semi finals, it moved on to finals weekend where the re-auditioning veterans join the new hopefuls, then you move to training camp where across the next episodes the girls will learn the “signature dance” complete with kickline ending in the infamous jump splits, get make overs, be fitted for their uniforms, have their publicity photos taken and watch the rookie hopefuls get cut one by one to make a team of around 36. Some years you’ll also get to see auditions for the team’s show group – who get to do extra dance performances beyond the football games – or watch the veterans trip to a holiday resort to shoot the squad’s swimsuit calendar. The main focus of the show is on the fresh rookies – some will be completely new, others might be returners who were cut in previous years – and get a few glimpses of the cheerleaders you’ve followed in recent seasons.
And as you’ve probably guessed by comparing my descriptions of the two shows, they are quite different beasts. And not just because Netflix has paid for the music rights so you can finally be told that the “Signature dance” is actually known as Thunderstruck – because that’s the song that it is danced to*. The team behind America’s Sweethearts are using the structure of the season as a way of examining the idea of the squad as a whole.
And the appeal of the series goes way beyond the viewers of the old CMT series (something which the series’s subreddit is yet to come to terms with). What do I mean by that? well Him Indoors hated MTT with a burning passion – my sister and I watched it when he was out of the room – but he said he wanted to take a look at this series and see what it was like – and ended up watching the whole thing. A colleague at work who is a sports and documentary fan but not someone I would have expected to have watched it, had already watched it when I went to recommend it to him and described it as the best documentary series he’s watched this year.
I could write paragraphs more about the show – but this post is already massively long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and hope that this is enough to get you to take a look at the series, no matter what your views on cheerleaders or American sport!
Have a great Sunday everyone.
*and for long-time viewers of MTT who (like me) have never made it to a Cowboys game, this does have a pretty much complete performance of Thunderstruck for you to enjoy and see how it all the various parts fit together. And yes, Kelli does also explain her Yes, No, Maybe scoring system for auditions. You’re welcome.
As if there wasn’t already enough sport on TV at the moment, what with the Euros reaching the start of the last round of group games tonight, the grass court tennis season being well underway and the build up to the Olympics, I’ve got a football documentary for you today.
99 is Amazon Prime’s documentary about the 10 days that saw Manchester United win the treble in the summer of 1999, which I refuse to believe can be 25 years ago, because I remember it, and how did I get this old?! Anyway this takes you through the process that got them to that remarkable treble as well as those key days, with interviews with all the key figures involved as well as loads of archive from the time.
Looking back at this distance, it’s clear that no matter whether you support Man U or not (and I’m definitely in the not camp) this was a remarkable achievement – and they did it with a large number of players that had come through the club’s academy set-up. Clubs have done the same thing since – but they’ve done it after large injections of money from various sources and without the home-grown talent.
If you’ve seen the Beckham documentary series, this (unsurprisingly) has a lot of the same talking heads (and some of the same producers too) but obviously the focus is very different. But if you enjoy one, you’ll probably enjoy the other, from sporting point of view anyway.
After being pleasantly surprised by the range of viewing options on the flights to and from Manila, I was hopeful about my options for the (much shorter) flights to and from Lagos. Sadly we were with a different airline and the options were… much less good. However there was a ray of sunlight – and that was that Abbott Elementary was on there so I was finally able to watch the first series of a show I’ve been hearing about for a while. And now you get to hear about it. Obviously this comes with the proviso that I’ve only seen the first season and it’s now made it to the end of season three (and is renewed for a fourth) but hey, I liked it and I’m writing about it.
This is a mockumentary about the teachers at an under-funded and predominantly black school in Philadelphia. It’s created and written by one of its stars – Quinta Brunson, who plays optimistic second grade teacher Janine Teagues. There are six other main characters in the show – including Eva, a new and unqualified school principal; Gregory, one of the candidates she beat to the job who is now working as a substitute teacher; Barbara, a no nonsense kindergarten teacher with decades of experience – played by the absolute legend that is Sheryl Lee Ralph aka the original Deena in Dreamgirls on Broadway and Lauryn Hill’s mum in Sister Act 2!
The first series has 13 episode and follows the trials and tribulations of one school year. It didn’t take me long to get really invested in all the characters and the school – but it’s really funny – although at times it’s a little bit too cringe for me, but that’s not too unusual with comedies. It’s also very easy to watch episode after episode back to back without getting fed up or finding a formula – I was actually annoyed when I ran out of time to watch more on the flight out, and made a point of finishing the series off on the way home before I went to sleep on the night flight home! The second series has 22 episodes (stupid American TV season lengths) which is a bit more of a commitment, but next time I get an offer for Disney+ I’ll be checking it out. I was going to say checking it out to see if they keep the quality going – but given that the second season won three Golden Globes, including Best Actress for Quinta Brunson, I think it did!
As I mentioned above, if oyu’re not on an airplane, Abbott Elementary is on Disney+ in the UK and on ABC and whereever ABC content gets streamed in the US. If you liked Parks and Recreation and haven’t checked this out yet, you really should.
Back to a streaming show this week – but not a new one. In fact Deadloch came out on Amazon Prime last summer and I don’t quite know how I missed it until recently. But these things happen, and I have rectified that mistake now!
Deadloch is a black comedy crime series, centred on the fictional town of Deadloch on Tasmania. As the series starts, the body of a local man is found in the beach, shaking the idyllic town just as the town’s Winter Festival is due to begin. Local police officer Dulcie wants to lead the investigation, but she’s forced to work with Eddie, a detective from Darwin who is not happy that she’s been sent to Deadloch. Dulcie used to be a detective on the mainland before demoting herself and moving to Deadloch at her wife’s request and it is safe to say that her style and Eddie’s are radically different. They are helped in their work by Abby, who is enthusiastic but lacks confidence, and Sven who usually gets given the least important stuff to do. As the bodies start to mount up, can they work out who is killing the men of Deachloch?
The working title for this was apparently Funny Broadchurch if that helps you figure out what the vibe of this is. And there are plenty of jokes – although perhaps unexpectedly it gets really quite dark (and less funny) towards the end of the series. I don’t watch shows like Broadchurch because they’re too grim for me and the last part of this was in fact too grim for me! But I did really enjoy watching the rest of it, and I know my tolerance level is low for grim so others may be fine with it. I have no idea how you would do a second series of this, but I would definitely watch it.
I mean that’s pretty much the message. The new season dropped on Friday and so thats what we settled down to watch on Friday night after work. You all know how much I’ve enjoyed the previous series but they had lots of on track action to work with so I was very interested to see what they did with the 2023 season which, spoiler alert, was not the most exciting on the actual racing front. If you want to watch, it’s on Netflix but if you haven’t watched before go back and start with maybe season two (not all the teams did season one) and go from there.
It feels like I’m doing a documentary recommendation every other week at the moment (ED: you are) and this one is another football-related one after Beckham the other weekend, but hey the Wagatha Christie scandal transcended football (and wasn’t really about football in the first place) so I’m going with it!
In case you missed the original scandal, back in 2019 Colleen Rooney (the wife of former England captain Wayne) posted to her Instagram that she had been investigating the leak of stories from her private Instagram account to The Sune and had come to the conclusion that the culprit was “………Rebekah Vardy’s account”. Rebakah Vardy, wife of Leicester City striker Jamie, sued Rooney for defamation and the whole thing culminated in a High Court trial in the summer of 2022 and the whole case has spawned a string of podcasts, documentaries, dramas and even a West End show. This latest documentary, from Disney + tells Colleen’s side of the story across three parts.
There are elements here that have parallels to the Beckham’s story – Wayne has also been the subject of tabloid exposes and Colleen has been the focus of tabloid attention since she was still at school. But aside from that, this is quite a different beast. Colleen talks the viewer through her life with Wayne, the stories that started appearing in the Sun, the sting that she set up to try and prove who the source of the stories was and then the aftermath of her post. WHile the court case is estimated to have cost around £3m, it’s not life or death stuff and that makes it really good escapist viewing. I’ve already listened to a podcast about the case (the BBC’s It’s… Wagatha Christie) and the Channel 4 drama – as well as following the court case as it went on and I still found a few bits here that I didn’t already know. But even though I did already know most of it, it’s well packaged and it’s the first time we’ve really heard directly from Colleen and Wayne as well as their lawyers. I’m not saying go out and get a Disney + subscription just for this, but if you already have one, it’s a worth looking this up – or adding it to your list for the next time you do have access to Disney +.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 