So a detective and a minister walk into a bar: Review of PBS show Grantchester

 

I don't generally enjoy mysteries in any form, whether book, television, or movie, and my taste is a bit too lowbrow for most PBS shows.  So I can't comment  about where Grantchester, a PBS mystery series available on Amazon Prime, falls in the pantheon.  I can say that it is weird, in a way I suspect but don't know that most PBS mystery shows are, and engaging enough that I watched the whole series and actually paid for the most recent season.

 SPOILERS AHEAD

 

 

The first few seasons follow the adventures of Sidney, an Anglican minister is a small town outside of Cambridge, England, and Geordie, a police detective stationed nearby, in the 1950s.  Sidney is an alcoholic suffering from PTSD as a result of the one battle he fought during World War II.  He pines for a woman, Amanda, who pines for him, but, alas, they are star-crossed lovers.  Amanda is married, and then divorced, and -- despite the entire Church of England having been founded because King Henry VIII wanted to get divorced and remarried -- Anglican ministers are forbidden from marrying divorcees.  So Sidney mopes a lot and drinks a lot.  At one point he tries to quit his job (which he seems to spend very little time at), but his housekeeper, Sylvia, and his curate (assistant minister), Leonard, convince him that his tiny little church cannot possibly survive without him.

Geordie, the detective, is an asshole.  He also suffers from PTSD from the war, and also drinks a lot.  He's married with four kids, and is a terrible husband and father.  When his infant son has a potentially fatal fever, he stays away from the house because dealing with the possibility of his son's death is just too hard for him.  Aw, poor man.  So he leaves his wife alone with their dying son.  

Sidney and Geordie team up to drink and to solve murders -- because, like in all TV shows about cops, in this world police solve murders by actual detective work instead of waiting for a witness or informant to tell them whodunit.  And what a lot of murders there are.  It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale around here.  If Sidney and Geordie were not already suffering from PTSD, they surely would be after they realize that every time they go to a nightclub, party, river, or lecture, someone ends up dead.  At some point you would think that someone would realize that they are the common denominator in all these deaths. 

Sidney gets written off the show after the fourth season, in a way that is an insult to his entire character  arc.  Luckily it turns out that his little church can survive just fine without him.  Along comes Will to replace him, another whiny minister who is somehow allowed to ride along on all of Geordie's investigations. Will is different from Sidney because he rides a motorbike and has a family of origin. Also, he likes rock and roll instead of jazz.  And he's hotter.  The bodies continue to pile up.  Leonard, the curate, and Sylvia, the housekeeper and best thing about the show, get some more character development.   

The show is overall very, very silly but also kind of delightful.  And now that I've watched an entire PBS series (thus far), I can stick my nose a little higher in the air. 

Meditation on Mommy blogs, and thoughts on The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

 

 

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is a memoir that takes itself seriously by a writer who takes herself seriously.  Nelson writes extensively about philosophers and lectures she has attended and given.  This is not the type of book a blog devoted to smut about naked sex slaves (which I write) and Regency romances (which I read) would typically address.

But it's my blog and I get to do what I want.

To the extent that The Argonauts is about anything concrete in terms of plot, it's about Nelson's relationship with her husband, Harry, a transgender man (or, more accurately, a nonbinary person who was born a biological woman and transitioned to a biological male) who started taking testosterone around the same time that Nelson started to take hormones to assist with getting pregnant.  The love story between Nelson and Harry, although not very detailed, is very sweet.  It begins with a Seinfeld-like scene where, for an uncomfortably long time after they start dating, Nelson is not sure what pronouns to use to refer to Harry.  (He/him, she eventually learns.)  In due course they get married, Nelson becomes a stepmother to Harry's son, and Nelson and Harry have a child together.  The book mentions all this, but devotes much more time to Deep Thoughts (which I do not mean snidely).

Nevertheless, many times as I was reading the book I rolled my eyes and thought, "This is a Mommy blog."  Nelson writes about how pregnancy changed her body, about how giving birth was really, really hard, about how special it is to be a mother of a newborn.  All in beautiful prose, but still . . .

Which leads to the question, why do I roll my eyes at mommy blogs?  I myself am a mommy -- well, now that my kids are older a mom (picture this being said with an eye roll by my teen).  I am the category of mommy who was pregnant and who gave birth and thought it was really special to be with my newborn.  

And yet, I have no desire to read about anyone else's experiences with this.  Maybe because it is all so common.  I can compare and contrast Nelson's pregnancy and childbirth experience to my own, but I don't find doing so particularly interesting.  Even though Nelson writes very nice prose, she doesn't have anything new to say about these things.

Does it matter?  I love reading memoirs, but isn't it also true that one person's early years as the child of an alcoholic are pretty much like another person's?  Certainly Regency romances have only a handful of interchangeable plots and stock characters, and I read them all the time.  

I think, in the end, it's part of the human condition that the bond between a mother and her infant is intensely personal and intensely interesting to the mother who is by necessity all-consumed by the bond -- but it is also so universal that reading about the experience is like looking at Facebook pictures of a blizzard.  It snowed!  Yeah, I know, I can look out my window and see that.  

Is this opinion sexist?  Probably, yes.  But the good news is, you don't have to read my naked sex slave smut if you're not interested, and I don't have to read about your childbirth experience if I'm not interested.  To each her own.