Go ahead - fascinate me!

Nanny (1990s TV series)
An interwar-into-WW2 TV series following a single main character, Barbara, as she qualifies as a nanny and takes a series of jobs. This was fairly gentle TV to watch, following Barbara from one family and household to another and dealing with a wide variety of family issues ranging from bullying to bereavement and the complicated halfway between upstairs and downstairs nature of her position. Lots of period childcare details, lots of closeup looks at the social setups and status of families who employ nannies. Barbara sometimes stays with a family for only one episode, sometimes for an entire season of the show, which does mean that sometimes you get really involved in the details of particular characters' lives but then never see them again. And as well as her work there's her love life, her need to conceal the fact that she is a divorcee from many of her employers, her relationship with her elderly father, her eventual marriage and subsequent marital difficulties. Plus the outbreak of WW2 and all the social upheaval that involves and Barbara eventually moving on from nannying to a different kind of childcare career. There were some episodes that I wasn't so fond of (the one with the little girl with significant learning disabilities was almost unwatchable for me) but overall it was a very sweet show that deserves a bit more love. Might be a good one for anyone who likes both Call the Midwife and Upstairs Downstairs.


Berlin Station, season 1
A contemporary spy drama based around the American CIA station in Berlin, where a mysterious whistleblower keeps leaking their more unethical behaviour to the press. This was good in many ways, with lots of great Berlin scenery to entertain, but also more than a bit uphill and impenetrable as far as the plot went, and had an awful lot of identical middle-aged white guy spies, all of whom also had substance abuse problems, marital troubles, career troubles or all of the above, so I couldn't reliably tell them apart for the first half of the story. There was a lot of very confusing action and office politicking, and I spent most of the first half with only a vague idea of what plot might be happening. The main investigator character was pretty boring, but the (bi) antihero was a whole lot of fun and he managed to make the investigator a bit more engaging, so I persisted with it and I'm glad I did, because the plot did finally more or less come together, there were two deeply fraught queer romances, and at the end it got hugely iddy and decided to whump the character I particularly wanted whumped, ie the antihero: he was captured, drugged, questioned, forced to relive his worst memories, shot, went on the run with his erstwhile interrogator while shot... the storytellers were going for a bingo card there and I had zero problem with any of this. And if you're going to have a deeply melodramatic showdown scene, Teufelsberg is a pretty damn good site for it. I kind of want to rewatch it now to see if the plot makes more sense the second time around now, though I suspect only parts of it will; a lot was added as window dressing without the writers really caring what happened in it. I don't know why so many spy dramas feel they need to be completely impenetrable but I suspect the influence of Le Carre. It's not that their plots are inherently more complex than others, but you definitely get the sense that the storytellers feel it's important to tell them in the most obscure way possible. Still, I'd like to watch more of it but the other two seasons seem to be harder to get hold of here.


The House of Eliott, season 1-2
A TV series I've been meaning to get around to for ages but hesitated because all I knew about it was that it was about fashion and set in the 1920s. But I have finally got around to it. It started really strongly: our two heroines are Beatrice and Evangeline Eliott, two vaguely upper-class young women whose ultra-controlling father has just died leaving them with no friends, no education and no money, and a distant cousin who wants to be just as overbearing a guardian as their father was. Their one talent is dressmaking, and they try to find ways to use that talent to gain their independence and build lives for themselves. Most of the early episodes as they work their way through this situation were really good, their gradually growing circle of friends, their false starts and mistakes, but gradually the story became less centred on Bea and Evie overcoming adversity together and became more reliant on melodramatic miscommunications, characters making every conceivable bad romantic decision, and people instantly shouting at each other or storming off just as the other was about to tell them some plot-critical piece of information so that things immediately go wrong for lack of the information (this happened multiple times in rapid succession). But I was sufficiently fond of the characters and the nicely done 1920s setting and background that it's fun to watch despite the soapiness, and every so often the intelligent storytelling of the earlier episodes comes back. And of course the costumes are gorgeous. And there are even some period aeroplanes!