Maintaining a consistently high level of quality is hard. When I was growing up in the nineties most American TV series were airing 26 episodes per year. Try to imagine that now. Of course back then a handful of networks dominated the (if you can believe it) airwaves. Now, anyone with a smartphone and a YouTube account can have their own show.

But one super-heavyweight that always, always, always delivered was the BBC. Their shows tend to be what we in the US would call mini-series. Six episodes of a show is typically all you get for an entire year but it delivers as much quality in those six episodes as in most series twice or three times as long.

Last month I raved about Peaky Blinders seasons 1 and 2, which I had ample time to binge owing to the death of socialization due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With no end in sight, I continued gorging myself, knowing that all too soon this outstanding, standout among standouts would be consumed and I’d be re-watching it from the beginning just for something to do.

But it wouldn’t be a waste of time if I did. Seasons 3 and 4 deliver the same caliber of acting, production value (I should just leave production value out when I’m talking about the BBC, it would be strange if it weren’t the industry benchmark), writing, pacing, directing and overall immersive quality.

Tommy Shelby and his family continue their bloody, bitter struggles to maintain control over the Bermingham underworld in a desperate attempt to somehow, eventually, go legitimate. Cillian Murphy continues to shine as the series lead, but let me take a moment to praise Helen McCory who plays Polly Gray, Tommy Shelby’s aunt and the treasurer of Shelby Company Ltd.

No actor or actress in this series ever looks, feels or sounds like they’re acting. Nothing ever feels contrived or forced and while Cillian Murphy serves as the lynchpin of the story arch it’s Helen McCory that ties everything together around him. Where Tommy is dead inside with only ambition and the fearlessness of a man who has been to hell itself (the trenches of World War One in France), his aunt Polly has a much more complex and fleshed out and dynamic character. Tommy does have an arc; specifically, one that seems to always loop back to how he started out no matter how hard he tries to change it. But the character of Polly is a different person every season while still managing to be the same recognizable entity. Her trials and travails across the shows seasons are the roadmap of where the characters have been. And while she too always manages to come back to more or less her original self, she’s the only one with enough surviving emotions to come off as truly alive.

So go watch seasons 3 and 4 of Peaky Blinders if you haven’t already. Moving on.

Norsemen Season 3:

Norsemen season 3 is actually season zero, which is to say a prequel season that sets the stage for the first two seasons. This is excellent because it means we get an entire season with actor Henrik Mested as chieftain Olav, who dies in the second episode of the first season. And since a few other characters got killed off along the way, we get to see more of them also.

I was wondering if they could actually find a way to make this dark comedy even darker and oh dear God did they ever. It’s almost as if they were daring themselves to go there…and then then went there and decided, ‘Actually, we could go quite a lot farther…’

Honestly, the only other thing I’ve seen recently that was this funny was What We Do in the Shadows.

Imagine The Office (which I hated) set in ancient Viking times, with a hard R rating and you’ve got a sense of what Norsemen is like. Except, unlike The Office, which was only occasionally funny, Norsemen is always funny because it takes The Office style awkwardness and juxtaposes it against an iron age backdrop where people are allowed to say naughty words and spill a lot of blood. 

I don’t know how to explain this properly to someone who actually thought The Office (which I hated) was enjoyable, because such a person is clearly a space alien with a brain that doesn’t function like that of a human. But in the spirit of education I’m going to try; Awkwardness is painful to watch, and therefore not funny, unless you’ve found a way to make the awkwardness itself absurd. The awkwardness in The Office wasn’t absurd, it was plausible. So much so as to be physically cringe inducing, and therefore the show was mostly just painful.

Norsemen doesn’t have that problem. But when you’re filming a show in Norway where they aren’t as prudish about blood, swearing and skin, you have a lot more options to work with. All hail the streaming age for liberating us from the tyranny of the FCC. We may be stuck indoors all day but at least there’s something good to watch.