Unnatural forces
I’ll never resign myself to the cavalier attitude the TV stations in this country take towards their viewers. I’m talking about the kind of thing that makes it acceptable for a faceless Prime announcer to say, over the closing credits of a recent episode of the excellent Huff (midway through its second season, its first on Prime), that the show would be taking “a short break” for a couple of weeks, as though Hank Azaria had decided to take an impromptu holiday. The reason for this unexplained break was Easter and the fact Prime had decided it wanted to screen the really rather good two-part Tsunami—The Aftermath in its Sunday night slot instead. It’s not as though it was a tsunami anniversary, so why the rush? Why not find it another slot? There will be no third season of Huff, but simply allowing the second season to run its course would clearly be too much of a reward to the loyal. And the networks wonder why these shows unaccountably lose viewers — how many will really bother or remember to get back into the show again, three weeks later? So at least Tsunami was worth watching, and although marred by dramatic clichés (a consular official played by Hugh Bonneville wasted so much effort being impossibly inept that he might just as easily have done what was being asked of him), at least it didn’t have a standard Hollywood happy ending. The tsunami didn’t, after all, and so the Carters never did find their lost baby, Martha. And not even the mighty Tim Roth could make Nature and Big Business behave themselves. There might be a moral there, somewhere.
posted by Chris Bell at 3:28 PM
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