As the world opens back up again, many things that have been on pause are beginning again, and I'm finally going to be able to fly home next month. On June 6th we'll be holding a belated funeral/unveiling/shiva for my father. I've never been much for the rituals of my people, but I really could have used some of them last year. We'll do the best we can in June.
Secretive
One of the weird things about the work I do is that there's often an elevated level of secretiveness. Sometimes there are explicit NDAs, other times it's more of a culture of "if you don't say anything, you can't get in trouble." Which, honestly, makes it even harder for me to explain what it is I'm doing for work at any given moment. The level of secrecy often increases in direct proportion to how excited I am to be working on the thing, which makes it all the more frustrating. One of my current projects fits this bill, and even typing this much about it feels like tempting fate. It's usually safer to talk about these things after they're out or after the plugs been pulled. So let me just say that I am currently working on three different things at the moment, and I'm hoping to be able to talk about at least one pretty soon.
On the flip side, one of the big projects I've been working on for the past couple of years recently died. Getting the project was a really big milestone for me, and even though it seems to have stalled out, I have no regrets.
Bedrag
You didn't think the Danish TV binge has stopped, did you? Nej! For the past several weeks, everything's been coming up Bedrag aka Follow The Money.
For the first few episodes I was a bit underwhelmed. Some of the characters start off seeming a bit stock. But around episode 3 or 4, it suddenly finds another gear, and characters begin to pop. The cast is excellent, filled with some Dansk heavyweights like Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Thomas Bo Larsen, David Dencik, and Sonja Richter, a stellar lead performance by Natalie Madueño, and a really engaging supporting role played by Thomas Hwan as Alf, the cop who knows how the financial crimes work, but doesn't quite know how street does.
Every so often, you’re lucky enough to watch a star being born. A performer gets a role and grows into it, so the show gives them more to do, and they're even better. So the show just keeps heaping more and more onto that performer's shoulders, and they just get better and better with every episode. In other words, fuck yeah Esben Smed!
His character has a trope-y beginning: he's an ex-car thief trying to go straight to take care of his wife and son. He's got a dopey best friend who keeps getting him into trouble, and they get involved in something way over their heads. The dynamic is very Nick and Ziggy Sobotka from Season 2 of The Wire (His character's name is actually Nicky, and I'm convinced that's not a coincidence.) But when said trouble arrives, Nicky's way out of it ends up leading him into becoming the apprentice to a high-powered fixer. He gets deeper and deeper to this world and discovers he's actually well suited for. But as great tragedies do, the more Nicky tries to keep things under control, the more he is forced to make drastic and terrible choices, and the greater the price he must pay.
(I want to spare a second for his dopey friend, Bimse, who also starts as an obvious type, but who reveals surpassing levels of depth, loyalty and a moral center. A fabulous turn from Lucas Hansen, who’s other biggest credit is Human Centipede II. We don't have a dog, but if we got one right now there's a high likelihood it would be named Bimse.)
The first two seasons of Bedrag end with a bang, especially Nicky's story. And that would have been a great way to end the series. Except they did a third season. And holy hell, what a season it is. It’s almost a completely different show, with a different look, a much higher budget, and style for days.
In season three, most of the previous cast is gone, and Esben Smed and Thomas Hwan are elevated to the lead roles. Nicky has become a fastidious criminal, trying to pretend he's dead inside, only to discover that he can still feel. Alf has gotten a healthy dose of street smarts and some serious PTSD as he tries to lead a special task force to track down laundered drug money. The season is almost like a mini-version of Michael Mann's Heat, as Nicky and Alf end up facing off against each other. Smed's performance is otherworldly. He's become an actor who is captivating just walking across a street. And Hwan, who was stolid in his role as a second fiddle in previous seasons, gets an incredibly juicy part and he absolutely tears into it.
Throughout this run of Danish TV, we've seen a lot of shows we've loved, and I've gushed about many of them in this newsletter. But Bedrag is the first one that as soon as it was over, I wanted to watch again from the beginning. And it’s just a matter of time before Esben Smed blows up.
Now we're on to Arvingerne aka The Legacy and holy cow it's great in a totally different way. But I'll save that for next time.
Links
I love Dracula. I love Bram Stoker's Dracula. Not the Coppola movie, which was decidedly NOT Bram Stoker's. I mean the original book, in all of its goofy, Victorian, epistolary, overdone weirdness. So I devoured this article about how a pandemic made Dracula more relevant than ever.
And speaking of vampires, are you a Nosferatu or a YESferatu?
Also musically: Listen to the Spine-Chilling Debut EP from LŪN, the Secret Electronic Alias of Lights
I wrote before about one of the models I used when writing Novel Advice was the Ask Polly column written by Heather Havrilesky. There have been a couple of memorable ones in recent weeks:
Ask Polly: Everyone Always Leaves Me
Ask Polly: My Man Friends Make Me Sad
There goes Robin Sloan again, making me think about the perils of deadly cleverness.
Apparently, today is the eight year anniversary of the day we launched our weird little interactive web series Welcome To Sanditon. We had a lot of fun making that thing. But I'm still waiting for that juice shop to open.
If you've never read a book by the marvelous Sarah Kuhn, well you have a whole lot of treats awaiting you. Sarah just launched her latest, From Little Tokyo With Love and you should buy copies for everyone you know.
‘Til next time,
Jay