Killjoys, Season 5
created by Michelle Lovretta (CTV, 2019)
A rare instance of a series recovering from a bad stumble and righting itself late in the piece. The final season of Killjoys is focussed and coherent, resetting with purpose to stage a ten-episode, fun and fitting sprint for the finish line.
Sherlock: The Final Problem
by Steven Moffat & Mark Gatiss; dir. Benjamin Caron (BBC, 2017)
A cheerless conclusion to a series already skirting morbidly close to the edge. The scripting remains clever, but at too-distant remove both from Conan Doyle’s stories and from the humour and energy of the first three series. Sherlock himself is greatly reduced.
Sylvie & Jenna
by Ashley Herring Blake
“This is our Rainbow: 16 Stories of Her, Him, Them, and Us” ed. Katherine Locke & Nicole Melleby (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)
More direct than Blake’s conceptual trilogy of queer MG novels, this tweenage short story achieves a remarkable degree of character empathy and worldbuilding within its thirty-three pages. A positive take on finding gender identity, and being secure enough to acknowledge past demons.
Synchronic
dir. Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (2019)
In addition to its main speculative premise (drug-fuelled time travel, history proving the grimmest of backdrops to the protagonists’ modern-day life situations), the story plays cleverly with narrative time, picking up interrupted scenes as memories. Morose as all get-out but gloriously non-Hollywood.
Big Art / Small Art
by Tristan Manco (Thames & Hudson, 2014)
A hefty hardcover book showcasing off-the-wall constructions by modern artists working in either very large or very small media. Some of the latter pieces are a bit gimmicky, and Manco’s introductions add little value. Still, a beautifully photographed reminder of human creativity.
Holidays
by William McInnes (Hachette, 2014)
audiobook read by William McInnes (Hachette, 2015)
McInnes reminisces about holidaying mishaps from his childhood and adult life (and those of people he has known). With the growing wisdom of experience, he draws wider, often subtle, gentle and empathic conclusions about Australian culture, family and what makes us happy.
Sherlock: The Lying Detective
by Steven Moffat; dir. Nick Hurran (BBC, 2017)
At once a small story (Toby Jones proving disturbingly effective as the Jimmy Savile-esque villain) and a larger, lurching, exceedingly dark character piece where the moment-to-moment excellence serves only partially to cloak the too-fast unravelling and resetting of Watson and Sherlock’s relationship.
The Hour, Series 2
by Abi Morgan (BBC, 2012)
An intelligent drama that builds across six episodes but then doesn’t quite deliver (despite compelling characters and top-notch acting). Perhaps the historical realism, centred around news journalism in the late 1950s, precludes a truly satisfying denouement. Peter Capaldi is a welcome addition.
Sherlock: The Six Thatchers
by Mark Gatiss; dir. Rachel Talalay (BBC, 2017)
The beginning of the end, as Gatiss and Company run out of easily adaptable source material and instead take Sherlock in new, more darkly improbable directions. The Six Thatchers works in the little moments but is overly frenetic, fast-compressing major character arcs.
Blondie: Against the Odds
by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti; ill. Montos (Z2 Comics, 2023)
A trippy graphic-novel biopic one-sixth showcasing the squalor of 1970s New York and then the early lives of Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (ignoring the other band members), and five-sixths devoted to imaginative if highly tenuous explorations of fourteen famous Blondie songs.