General Impressions of Acorn TV

I ran across a harmless little 3-part TV series about a murder (manslaughter?) called Alibi.

Michael Kitchen, Sophie Okonedo (never heard of her), ad Phyllis Logan (Lovejoy, Downton Abbey) give good performances in almost a Neil Simon-sh Three’s-Company compounding of errors in an attempt to hide responsibility for a death.

The series proceeds plausibly. Greg Brentwood (Kitchen) throws an expensive 19-year-anniversary party for his wife (Logan). One of the caterers (Marcey Burgess, played by Okonedo) notices that another fellow — Brentwood’s business partner — seems a little too friendly with Brentwood’s wife behind the scenes.

She laters returns to the house looking for her purse that she had accidentally left behind. She stumbles upon Brentwood in a compromising situation — dragging the body of his dead business partner across the floor of his study.

This is a decidedly dark comedy and somewhat bereft of laugh-out-loud dark comedy moments, although Kitchen does have one brilliant scene in this regard. But mostly they weave a plot that makes sense. The catering girl gets involved in helping Greg Brentwood cover up the death of his business partner which Brentwood claims was purely accidental.

She comes to believe him and a generally plausible tangling of circumstances ensues. Toward the end, it all resolves itself a little too quickly and doesn’t (to my mind) make as much sense at that which has come before. But lovers of Agatha Christie style mysteries should find this series entertaining.

Granted, you need to kick forward suspension of disbelief here and there. Some found it implausible that the caterer would get involved with Brentwood. But I think they handled this well. A bit of tongue is planted firmly in the cheek as this moves along. It’s not supposed to be taken too literally. So the humorless will always pose their objections.

Marcy’s motivations are clear enough in total: She’s bored with her life and her job. She’s intelligent but has no outlet for it. But she applies her fascinating brain 100% to the issue at hand in trying to help Brentwood out of his difficulties. One needn’t think any deeper than this about it. And, come on, people do silly and stupid things all the time.

Plus, the delight of the early part of this series is the deftness with which Kitchen sells the character to her as harmless. He’s good in this.

I finished the first season (four episodes) of "Mr. Palfrey of Westminster." If you sign up for Acorn TV — of just do the free trial — you'll want to watch this. I thought for the kind of show it is, they do a good job with some interesting stories. They never lag.

For crime drama fans, here’s a good one on Acorn TV: Injustice.

It stars James Purefoy (Mark Antony, Rome) and Dervla Kirwan (Assumpta Fitzgerald, Ballykissangel). Charlie Creed plays the abrasive, if not slightly psychotic, DI Mark Wenborn.

Three different stories converge, or at least run in parallel. William Travers (Purefoy) haws been approached by an old school friend he had been estranged from for steeling his girlfriend (who later became his wife). Nathaniel Parker (The Inspector Lynley Mysteries) plays oil executive Martin Newall whose one-night-stand is found dead in their hotel room after he goes out for some snacks. He needs a good lawyer.

This is a one-season series presented in five episodes. There are some Agatha-Christie-like excesses in the plot, but overall this one stays interesting. It is a superb idea to break this up into basically three storylines instead of just piling more and more detail and plot twists onto one. This makes it much more enjoyable to stay with…and much easier to stay with.

There are plenty of auxiliary issues: DI Mark Wenborn is cruel to his wife. He’s cruel to his new black partner as well. He’s cruel to everyone. Meanwhile, Jane Travers (Kirwan) makes regular visits to a yute correctional facilitating where she’s working to broaden the intellectual scope of the inmates. The cynical correctional officer there just think she’s wasting her time.

William Travers himself has a lot going on. Both he and his wife moved from London after troubling events that slowly get described as the series goes on. Will Travers crack again? Is there more to him than meets the eye?

All in all I give this crime drama high marks for doing something a little different — even despite some of the Agatha-Christie-like plot excesses here and there. Overall, it was just fun and it was filled with interesting characters.

Another miniseries to check out on Acorn TV is Tales of the City.

If a certain general said that ideology should not be a prerequisite for defending one’s country, neither should ideology be a factor in terms of enjoying a movie.

I doubt this series shares a single value that I have. But it’s an honest, if idealized, look at a group of people living in San Francisco in the 1970s.

Flakes and queers abound. But that’s apparently even how a rose-colored novel by Armistead Maupin, upon which this is based, saw it.You’ll love the punch-line at the end. But I won’t give anything away.

Laura Linney Plays Mary Ann Singleton, a young Cleveland girls who takes a vacation to San Francisco and decides to say. The synospsis includes:



Linney is excellent playing the innocent girl looking for a little excitement but who isn’t deep-down weirdo like everyone around her. She resists being pulled completely into San Francisco flake-dom but does begin to indulge here and there. (And, of course, liberalism — like the cult it is — tries its best to pull her into the hive.)

Chloe Webb is excellent as Mona Ramsey. She’s effervescent but probably doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together. She’s a wonderful stereotype of the scatterbrained post-hippie-era flower child.

And of course you get gay gay gay. And gay again. The only joy to this is that Marcus D’Amico plays a queer you can’t help liking and not all homosexuals all the time are shown to be particularly commendable. If you watch this, you will come away with the idea that — quite apart from the sexual orientation, per se — this is a horrible lifestyle. I doubt this is intended (although it certainly could be).

There’s an interesting peripheral cast of characters, not particularly including Olympia Dukakis who I’ve never really liked. But her unlikability (at least to me) suits her in this role as the somewhat mysterious Anna Madrigal, landlord of the apartment house that ties this cast of characters together.

There’s some poking of fun at all these characters. My favorite line (slight spoiler, but regarding a completely non-essential character) is when the guy at the crisis center help line hangs himself. Mary Ann finds him. The police question her. She says she found him like that, hanging from the rafters. He hung himself with macramé — which she explains to the officer is a type of art or a craft. She’s not sure which. But she mentions to a friend that at least he went out via natural means.

Pot is everywhere. The beauty of a series like this is the anthropological value of it. Pot is a drug, yes. But clearly it is used as a sacrament for the liberal lifestyle. Affectations abound in this series which leads me to believe that the author, Maupin, meant to take at least a semi-honest look at San Francisco flakiness in the 70s. Lots of fruits and nuts, to be sure.

But as with any movie or series worth watching, this does have character and a plot that keep it interesting.

Yes, I caught a glimpse while searching for the IMDB page for this series that there was at least one other. But I don't think I"m going to go there. That was enough 70s San Francisco for me. But, goodness gracious, I would definitely watch a modern series that deals realistically with this weird, wild, and human-feces-strewn place. They've got lots of material. But if your aim is only to praise Liberal Utopia, you can't really present much but a fawning hagiographic type of series which is what drains most liberal cinema of any interest except for those who need their vacuous conceits to be ratified.

That was a long sentence but I think I made it. And there is enough honesty that leaks through (intended or not) in "Tales of the City" that it makes it watchable. It doesn't feel like a pure indoctrination piece.

Not that I didn’t enjoy what I saw in the first series. But any more would just be punishment.  But they do have the 2019 series on Netflix apparently. Dare I? I mean, at this point it must be so politically correct it might be worth a laugh.

Starting in the early 1980s, I would sometimes stop over in San Francisco on my trips between Asia and DFW, or elsewhere in the USA. It was a nice place to visit.

The airport is outside of the city and on the drive to the Fisherman's Wharf area, where I preferred to stay, one passed through different neighborhoods. Most of these looked reasonably well kept until the late 1980s, at which time they started going downhill pretty quickly. They got steadily worse through the 1990s. Sometime in the early 1990s was the first time I ran into the more aggressive homeless person with a shopping cart.

I avoid the city these days and have only been there, in the last few years, as a way of getting to northern California. Once you get across the Golden Gate Bridge you are in another world.