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Putham Pudhu Kaalai Vidiyaadhaa (TV Series)
I loved the anthology of short films in Putham Pudhu Kaalai (2020). So, when Amazon Prime Video released its sequel as a mini-series titled Putham Pudhu Kaalai Vidiyaadhaa (புத்தம் புது காலை விடியாதா) I eagerly consumed it. Though it was not as good as the first one, two of the episodes in the mini-series were good. Out of the five episodes, I felt the best was the first one. Titled Mugakavasa Mutham, it was about Police constables Murugan and Kuyuli who find the time to fall in love, during their patrolling assignment during the intensive lockdown in Chennai during the early days of the pandemic. Just like a flower growing out…
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Decoupled (TV Series)
Decoupled on Netflix is not your typical “Indian” show. It tries to follow the American comedy-drama shows template of featuring light-touch humour, with a bit of British style satirical comedy thrown in. I enjoy this mixture, as a result, I liked the show and I will give it a Raw, but it may not appeal to you. Also remember, the characters freely utter a lot of profanity and openly discuss sex, a rarity for Indian living rooms – I didn’t find the occurrences out-of-place in the episodes, and I was able to smile at most of them. The show is based on a one-line story of a rich couple with…
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Call My Agent! (TV Series)
As audiences, we are captivated by the dazzle and glitter of the silver screen and its stars. We hardly think about the hard-working people behind the screen who start from the first task of connecting a director with the vision to the correct actor for the role. And today’s stars don’t bloom suddenly, they are identified years before and then nurtured, trained and tolerated. These are the tasks that talent agents do. Call My Agent! (Dix pour cent), the French TV Series follows four such Talent agents – Mathias, Andréa, Gabriel, and Arlette. The comedy-drama covers the competition along with the mistrust that exists between them, the challenges in their…
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Foundation (TV series)
I like popular science fiction movies and TV shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and books like Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. This week I binge-watched the ten episodes of Season 1 of the Foundation (TV series) adopted loosely from the famous sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. I hadn’t read the books, so the show was my first exposure to that universe. Reading the Wikipedia entries the TV series seems to have retained the core ideas from the books but has made significant changes to suit modern times and interests. Many years ago I had read and enjoyed Isaac Asimov‘s two popular short pieces…
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Squid Game (TV Series)
Squid Game, the South Korean TV Series has been one of the most widely watched shows worldwide, earning more than a billion dollars for Netflix. The nine-episode series is a fictitious tale about hundreds of players, most of them debt-ridden and desperate being invited to play survival games with lucrative rewards and bloody consequences. The series by Hwang Dong-hyuk can serve as a great study for film-making students on how to write a gripping screenplay – it has a hero(es) who we can identify with, identifiable bad guys, hundreds of characters we care little about providing the ambience, a dysfunctional society that we all suffer from, clear win or lose…
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Pretty Smart (TV series)
Pretty Smart is yet another one of those serialized American TV shows that attempts to fill the void left by Friends. It is about four roommates and the sister of one of them sharing a house, their minor wins and loses, and about finding love. Though the stories had nothing imaginative, I found the episodes to be fun to watch with the characters being cheerful – a welcome break for the pandemic year. Available on Netflix it gets my Ripe for that reason. There are four friends living in a house in Malibu, each from a different background: Claire is a happy-go-lucky character who enjoys her job as a waitress…
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Brave New World (TV series)
Brave New World (2020) is an SCI-FI that was released on peacock in the USA and on Netflix for countries including India. It is based on Aldous Huxley‘s classic book of the same name, which came in 1932. Even with a story that was intriguing, visuals that were stunning, a convincing performance from the lead pair, the show doesn’t get you engaged as it proceeds mostly on expected lines. I like the genre so I completed the nine-episode series in two days, but most may not find it interesting enough and so the show gets a ‘Raw’ rating. The story is about New London, a world on earth where the…
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Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. (TV Series 2021-)
As a teenager, in the early 1990s, there were two TV shows on the then new private entertainment channel (Star Plus) in India that I watched with great interest and absolutely loved: One was the Wonder Years (1988-1993) which was a coming-of-age family comedy [Available on Disney+Hotstar] starring Fred Savage as the young boy Kevin Arnold; and the other was Doggie Howser, M.D. (1989-1993) starring Neil Patrick Harris playing the namesake as a 14-year Doctor and a child prodigy. Growing up watching them, these two are classics to me, and I felt sceptical when I read both are being remade this year. The former is produced by ABC, and I am…
