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The Chair Company
With a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you with any degree of accuracy what Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company is actually about. In terms of straight plot, it’s the story of a man who is drawn into a conspiracy after a chair breaks when he sits on it. But beyond that, it’s honestly anyone’s guess.
So much of it defies logical explanation. Why does that one guy only listen to recordings of men screaming at each other? Why was there a vampire in it, and why did it lure people in by inventing a brand new shape? Why did the show’s big antagonist end up having a baby’s head? None of these questions will ever be answered properly, because The Chair Company would clearly prefer to splash around in its Lynchian weirdness. This is by far the most baffling television show I have ever loved, and I say that as someone who has watched Lost all the way through four times. Stuart Heritage
Industry
The finance jargon of Industry is impenetrable to the likes of poor me. I could not tell you a single financial transaction that took place on the trading floors. When I naively recapped the first season for another outlet, I apologised more than once for having “no idea what Harper does”. Even when they’re not talking shop, I need the subtitles on for this verbose lot.
Does it make me feel like an idiot? Yes. But maybe that’s the point: this is an exclusive world in which only the wicked and wealthy whose first language is money get to play. Even co-creator Konrad Kay, who worked in the City, admitted that a term like “DV01” is “financial gibberish” that he doesn’t fully know the meaning of. His partner Mickey Down called it “technobabble” and said they have tried to dumb it down. Ha! Tell that to the guy who in the new season says: “There’s no need to be so sesquipedalian”.
And yet I am addicted to this show. I have learned to gauge the “vibe” of a business scene – trouble ahoy, big win celebration, burn-this-place-down disaster, etc – while waiting for the frequent payoffs from what I’m really here for: sex, drugs and fights. I’m a bit like a kid saying I’ve finished a book with a grin on my face, after flicking straight to the picture pages.
Still, when I get to an episode where, say, all hell breaks loose at the Muck manor Marie Antoinette party, for a devilish moment it all makes sense. Hollie Richardson
Twin Peaks
I’m not sure anyone, even David Lynch himself, could coherently explain what was going on Twin Peaks, a show where characters getting trapped for eternity in doorknobs and David Bowie’s reincarnation as a giant kettle apparently seemed par for the course. While I managed to just about cling on to the coattails of the plot of its more conventional (though still pretty damned unconventional) early 90s seasons, my grip had entirely loosened by the time of the far loopier mid 2010s revival.
Not that that was a turn-off. The befuddlement you felt was much of the fun in watching Lynch and Mark Frost’s misshapen murder mystery, as a succession of wonderful, impossible images and ideas flew at you from out of the screen. And even if I wasn’t exactly able to summarise its plot, at a purer and more primal level I definitely understood and was moved by the show. After all, at its centre is a simple and affecting story: a dogged detective embarks on a decades-long quest to get justice for a murdered teenager. It just so happened that on this conventional hero’s journey, there was the occasional pulsating brain tree or backwards-talking little person thrown in to keep viewers on their toes. Gwilym Mumford
House of the Dragon
I’ll admit it: I found the first season of Game of Thrones hard going. Largely because trying to decipher the various family connections between the 7,000 characters felt like a GCSE history lesson with added bum-flashing. But at least they got one thing right: they didn’t give everyone nigh-on identical names, and create entire families whose offspring are indistinguishable from one another.
Not so House of the Dragon, where the future of the seven kingdoms seems to rest on whether the next ruler comes from the brunette family or the one whose hairdresser has a job lot of ice-blond dye they’re trying to shift. Maybe some of them are related to the mad king? Or was Paddy Considine the mad king? Or has the mad king not happened yet? Oh God, the amount of questions each scene throws up: why does every family come up with one preposterous name, then slightly change the letters for the rest of their gigantic haul of sprogs? Are we really expected to also remember an entire lineup of dragons with no distinguishing characteristics apart from “likes fire”?
Thank God, then, for young Jace Velaryon, the only one with a vaguely normal name – presumably named for his mum Rhaenyra’s love of Jason Donovan’s verse on that 1988 classic, Especially for You. Although why they shorten “Jason” when they’re perfectly capable of pronouncing words like “Rhaenyra” is beyond me. Oh wait, just Googled: he’s called Jacaerys. This bloody show. Alexi Duggins
Lost
I was fully invested in Lost. I once watched so many hours of season one back-to-back that I left my friend’s house square-eyed and paranoid that the Others were out to get me. When that episode ended with the reveal of the Hatch – well, TV had never felt so thrilling had it? And, of course, I will never forget the code 4 8 15 16 23 42, which had to be pressed every 108 minutes to save the world.
So many of us lapped up Lost from the start right through to the divisive purgatory ending, in which it was revealed that they were absolutely not all dead the whole time. (“You’re real. Everything that’s happened to you is real.”) Yet from the get-go, the plane crash saga was a baffling and ludicrous ride you just had to embrace.
The black smoke monster. The Dharma Initiative. The polar bears, for pity’s sake. The fact that the island cured people of their ailments. The temples and assorted other key buildings that they didn’t find for years! The humongous Egyptian foot statue. The giant frozen wheel at the centre of the island that meant it time travelled, and at one point disappeared? None of it hung together, but I loved letting it all wash over me anyway. Even the polar bears. Kate Abbott
The Morning Show
Why is Reese Witherspoon in space? Why is Julianna Margulies so evil? Why does a TV executive live in a palace fit for a billionaire despot? Why are so many company employees being outed and having photos leaked? Who is acquiring what now?
These are just some of the many questions that go through my head when watching The Morning Show, which started as a sharp post-#MeToo drama about the systemic cover-up of sexual misconduct by powerful men, and swiftly devolved into rot of the glossiest and most fabulous kind. At this point, it’s all surface – smouldering surface in which Jennifer Aniston’s character gets off with Jon Hamm’s definitely very wicked Elon Musk type – and I’m not complaining.
You could say that in itself is a trenchant comment on how hard news fails to compete with sexier content these days. But it’s best not to overthink it and just let the comically overreaching storylines about AI and Iran’s nuclear programme wash over you like luxury bath oils. Laura Snapes
The Rehearsal
Nathan Fielder’s show Nathan for You saw the Canadian deploy absurdist business advice – poo-flavoured froyo, a fake Starbucks justified via parody law – as cringe comedy meets late-capitalism critique. When his follow-up The Rehearsal was announced for HBO, with a blank cheque to deliver something truly bananas, I was ecstatic. Its premise sounds almost reasonable: many people avoid difficult conversations or scenarios. What if you could “rehearse” them on elaborate sets with trained actors?
But the actors don’t know what they’re signing up to before surrendering to the “Fielder Method” – essentially stalking a real person before adopting their persona on television without their knowledge. In the heartbreaking season one finale, a six-year-old actor “playing” Fielder’s son begins to believe Fielder is actually his father.
Fielder is disarmingly honest about making it up as he goes along and his show’s potential to literally ruin people’s lives. While a voiceover helps orient viewers, the subterfuge, metanarrative and straight hijinks remain baffling. Where does Fielder get these ideas and what is he really hoping to achieve?
Season two uses a more structured approach: Fielder sincerely attempts to reduce plane crashes by staging pre-flight mediations between pilots, until the finale throws you for such a significant loop that you’ll find yourself thinking: “What did I just watch?” and “How can I enjoy a ‘normal’ show now?” Sasha Mistlin
Scandi noirs
The Killing. Borgen. The Bridge. It really was a small screen mini golden age and most of us couldn’t get enough. A big part of the appeal of these moody Scandi-epics was their exoticism. The language was a tantalising riddle: subtitles were obviously essential but it was fun to land upon the occasional familiarity of a recurring phrase and luxuriate in the singular tone and texture of the dialogue. Then there was the aesthetic mood – all snow crunching under sturdy boots, delightful knitwear and urgent conversations animated by billowing clouds of ice crystals.
There was a lot to think about beyond the plotting nuances which, in my case, often came a distant second (or even third or fourth) to enjoying the general vibe. What’s actually going on here? Hmmm. Good question. Oh well, I’m sure Sarah Lund will sort it out for us … Phil Harrison
English (US) ·