With the third season of the Good Place finished (the fourth is not on Netflix in Pakistan), and Watchmen pending the return of my hosts from their trip to Karachi, I watched an episode of Dracula. This was…. ok. Some quite funny bits, particularly around a nun (“trapped in a loveless marriage”). But as with all the work of the makers (Moffat and Gatiss) it was a little self-indulgent. The nun was the best character but over-used, there were points where one wondered why people behaved as they did, Dracula had a disturbingly Essex accent, and worst of all, each episode is the length of a film: an hour and a half. Doubt I’ll watch the remaining two episodes. Already I’ve watched more TV in the past couple of months than I have otherwise done in years.
The third season of the Good Place was definitely a step down: far too many episodes spent on pointless one-episode sitcom style quests, and the US-centricity of it was very visible with scenes set in Australia and Hungary. Well, it’s always visible, but in the first two seasons felt less like a poke in the eye.
It would have been daring of them to have taken the show to Chidi’s putative homeland, Senegal, but I suppose that would be too much to expect, and even more to expect it might be thoughtfully done.