Dear Culture Diary
Some odds and ends and recommendations from Dame Sophie
Hello, Dearest Darlings of Dames Nation!
Dame Margaret is leading a secular literary pilgrimage, Dame Karen is convalescing, and I am here with an old-fashioned culture consumption diary entry for you all. Here are some highlights of what I’ve been reading and writing and watching and listening to for the last couple of months (when I haven’t been listening to Cowboy Carter or The Tortured Poets Department – wow, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift really don’t want any of us to have access to anything approaching a degree of calm. It’s just been red alerts, all hands on deck, all spring with those two!).
Reading!
I first encountered Michel Ganem’s TV Scholar on Instagram last year and he’s become a must-read for me. I love his thoughtfully captioned screen-grab roundups of all of the shows he watches, and his newsletter is one that I read the second it hits my inbox.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book, and it’s impossible for me to overstate how much I love, admire, and recommend his work. There’s no one as breathtakingly daring in their prose as he is — weaving together seemingly disparate threads of personal, sports, musical, and historical stuff to create a unique tapestry – or as affecting. Nearly every sentence is dazzling, while also being warmly inviting. Come pull up a seat, they say, plumping up a cushion on their best chair. You’ll sit for a spell and look up from the page just a moment later to find that actually, 30 minutes have passed and your entire understanding of what it’s possible for words to do has expanded, along with your heart. Hanif has been (rightly!) lauded throughout his career as a poet, music writer, and culture critic, and I think we’re witnessing a new apex of excellence from him. I hope he’ll get comfy and stay here for quite a while, until he builds the next apex. There are a handful of dates left on his tour, and if you can attend one of his readings, go.
Watching and Writing!
Because I’m mostly a TV writer these days, and have been fortunate with my assignments, I’ve liked and can heartily recommend most of what I’ve been writing about. Strap in, this is going to be the biggest section – and please do let me know if you’ve watched some of these shows or have one to recommend in turn!
Attention, fans of Dad TV! Manhunt—about the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth in April 1865—is a corker with just seven episodes, all now available on Apple TV+. For Primetimer, I reviewed it and interviewed Anthony Boyle, who plays Booth and who is having quite a year as a Historical Man of Note, as he played Masters of the Air narrator Harry Crosby this winter, and has been cast as IRA leader Brendan Hughes in a forthcoming adaptation of Say Nothing. (Longtime Dames Nationals may recall that title as one of my favorite books of the last decade. I am beside myself with high hopes for this one.)
If you’re one of my fellow PBS MASTERPIECE pals, I recapped Nolly, a 3-part biographical miniseries from Russell T. Davies and starring Helena Bonham Carter, about Noele Gordon (her name refers to her having been a Christmas Day baby; everyone called her Nolly). I wish I’d known about Nolly sooner, what an extraordinary life she led! She was the first woman to be broadcast on TV in full-color, in 1938, and left London after the war to attend NYU, earning a degree in TV production in her time there. She then proceeded to establish norms we all recognize as classic breakfast and midday TV chat shows, and eventually starred for 18 years in Crossroads, a thrice-weekly soap opera about a family-run motel in Manchester.
Nolly was an institution, and the series introduces her at a very low point in her life in career – her mother has passed away, as has her longtime ex-lover, and the cherry on this sundae of woe is the loss of her job on Crossroads. What’s this legend and LGBTQ icon, whose life has been all about work, going to do. The series assumes background knowledge most American viewers won’t have, so here’s a handy primer.
I’m also recapping Elsbeth (for Vulture, so mind your clicks if you need to conserve those), which is blessing us all with a very funny, colorful, surprisingly warm weekly procedural. It elevates Carrie Preston’s character, Elsbeth Tascioni, from recurring to main character in The Good Wife-iverse, co-stars Wendell Pierce and Carra Peterson, and is loosely organized around a long-term covert investigation Elsbeth is running on behalf of the Department of Justice. If you love Columbo, are hankering for a second season of Poker Face, and/or loved The Good Wife, this may be just the case-of-the-week how-dunit treat for you. Early episodes are streaming on Paramount+ (airing live weekly on CBS) and has just been renewed for a second season. Yay!
Honorable Mentions:
Palm Royale is a wild ride! Its fifth episode pulls off a 15-minute, rumba-based set piece, and I loved learning & writing about all of the behind-the-scenes details about it from showrunner Abe Sylvia and choreographer Brooke Lipton, from how they adjusted choreography on the fly to suit the performers’ energy and availability, to how many background dancers they hired (about 200!). Lamé and chiffon whirling! Showgirls shimmying everywhere you look! Pops of color and gestural flourishes filling every frame! (Apple TV+)
Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office is a really solid entry in the time-honored British tradition of Righteous Little Guys Taking On A Malicious, Unfair Bureaucracy/Ruling Class. It’s packed to the rafters with Hey, It’s That Guy!s, and features Alex Jennings as an MP who tells someone to her face that “what you’ve done is quite wrong”, a new world record for the mildest searingly scathing thing anyone has ever said. (PBS MASTERPIECE)
Mary & George: I love a batshit prestige show, and this one does not disappoint. It’s a sexy period piece about how Mary and George Villiers grabbed and wielded power & influence in the court of King James VI of Scotland & I of England. The limited series takes itself very seriously, but the actors keep their performances sufficiently loose that it never gets too far up its own tush. Oh, and those actors? Are mostly Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitizine. Special commendations for Samuel Blenkin, who plays Prince Charles as the one sincere person in the entire court, and for the use of Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi in the credits! It’s got nothing to do with the series, which makes its inclusion even better. (Starz)
Listening!
After reading Alex Sujong Laughlin’s recent Defector piece on the evils of listening to podcasts via Spotify, I took Dame Margaret’s advice and downloaded Pocket Casts. I’m steadily subscribing to my shows there and un-subscribing to them in Spotify to reduce the temptation to backslide. I can’t claim to be listening to anything likely to be super-new news to you – I’ve been binge-listening to the Rolling Stone’s Music Now and 500 Best Songs of All Time, along with the second season of Choosing Sides: F1; Hit Parade (of course – the most recent episode is essential for anyone with a soft spot for boy bands); and two indispensable TV podcasts, Extra Hot Great and TV’s Top 5.
A couple more cheeky links to things I’ve been working on, because they’re about exceptionally good music: First, a Q&A with Danielle Ponder, who I wrote about for our March Recommend-DAMES-tions issue for paid subscribers. Ponder’s theme song for Manhunt was my introduction to her work, and wow wow wowwwwww is all I can say. LOL, that’s a huge lie, here’s some more:
If Danielle’s voice — here intimate, there cathedral-filling — melodicism, and lyrics are your jam, I recommend listening to this live set she and her band recorded for KEXP, and this interview with Demi Harvey. If you’re really hooked, I hope I can further entice you with “Roll The Credits”, which sounds like it belongs on a Portishead or Tricky album. Her debut album, Some Of US Are Brave, is available for streaming on all the platforms, and for purchase via her website. If you have the opportunity to see her play live, run, do not walk, to get your tickets.
The other Q&A is with Palestinian-Chilean singer-songwriter Elyanna, who just released her second album, Woledto (it means I Am Born in Arabic). Almost exactly a year ago, she made history by becoming the first Arab artist to perform in Arabic at Coachella. She’s only 22, but is such a complete artist already – her sonic and visual aesthetics are fully realized to a degree that’s almost spooky. Some of my favorites are Ganeni (“Drive Me Crazy”), Al Kawn Janni Maak (A translation of “La Vie En Rose” she co-wrote with her mother), and Sad in Pali. Give her a listen, and if you’re in LA, she’s playing at the Wiltern Theatre next week!