So my task now is how to turn my anxieties about aging into a useful media-related column.
I’ve written before about the mental health benefits of listening to music and watching less news. I’ve also written about abandoning a morning cable “news” habit in 2020, my wife and I having grown tired of partisan rants and deciding that the hosts weren’t just “preaching to the choir,” they were yelling at us. Ever since, we have returned to our roots as English majors and writing teachers, beginning our days with Wordle and Spelling Bee.
But recently, starting in January, we decided to do something different in the evening as well. My wife was in an informal book club with our son, rereading Dostosevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and in an online club trying to decipher Joyce’s “Ulysses” (good luck with that!). In her less classy moods, our shared go-to genres in books and TV have been detective series, favoring bingeable British shows (“Sherlock Holmes,” “Morse,” “Lewis”) and darker Scandinavian noir (“The Bridge,” “Bordertown,” “Trapped”). We decided recently, for mental health reasons, not to end evenings on edge, knowing it would take several more murderous episodes before our detectives would get the creepy serial-killer.
So we started looking for comfort TV. After rewatching nine seasons of Inspector Lewis, we went back to “Agatha Christie’s Poirot,” revisiting the fussy Belgian, Hercule Poirot, who knows he’s the greatest detective in the world but is annoyed that everyone thinks he’s French. Produced from 1989-2013, “Poirot” has 70 episodes.
One perk of the show: While viewers are usually not as intuitive as Poirot, we are always smarter than his dim but good-hearted sidekick, Captain Hastings.
Next up, Christie’s various “Miss Marple” TV series, which include 44 episodes, played by three different actresses. The first iteration aired on PBS between 1984-1992 (starring Joan Hickson, our favorite) and the second ran between 2004-2013. It’s a pleasure to watch Miss Marple outsmart Scotland Yard’s male detectives, especially the well-named Inspector Slack. The usual setting is Miss Marple’s hometown, St. Mary Mead, seemingly the murder capital of small villages across all of Great Britain.
Among the detective shows, we had comic relief digressions — six seasons of FX’s vampire sitcom “What We Do in the Shadows” (2019-2025). Let me say, this series is not for everyone. The show follows four eccentric vampires (and their human “familiar,” a kind of vampire servant) living on Staten Island. Their mission is to conquer the human race in the U.S., but so far they have only managed to live for decades undiscovered in their neighborhood, even though the front yard is full of graves. The main cast includes Nandor the Relentless (former warrior), Laszlo Cravenworth (science hobbyist), Nadja (seductress, married to Lazslo), Colin Robinson (an “energy vampire”), and Guillermo (the familiar who longs to be a vampire).
The show’s theme song is titled, “You’re Dead,” and there are a lot of cool bat transformations.
A second comic relief show is “Upstart Crow,” a British sitcom about Shakespeare. The title of the show comes from a snide remark theater critic, Robert Greene (the villain in the show), makes about the bard’s humble origins. The show has two key conceits.
First, Will is accused of stealing famous quotes and play ideas from other sources (which he actually did), but also credited with writing all the works of Chris Marlowe, his best pal. Second, his capable secretary Kate desperately wants to act during an era when acting for women is a crime, apparently because men are so much better at playing women.
In “Upstart Crow,” Shakespeare is played by British comedian and Cambridge-trained historian David Mitchell, who some might know from his current role in the smart BBC detective series “Ludwig.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mitchell wrote “Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens.”
We discovered that Mitchell also costars in a BBC gameshow called “Would I Lie to You?” That fare, with 15 seasons available through Britbox, features two team captains, Mitchell, and comedian Lee Mack, plus host Rob Brydon. Every week the captains have two partners, often actors, writers, teachers, musicians, “TV presenters” and other comics.
The teams try to guess whether various stories each tell are true or false. But the best bits are often the comic rivalry between captains.
Here’s a taste:
Lee: “You don’t hate me, do you David?”
David: “Noooo. Even though on television you’ve said you’d like my marriage to fall apart, I still find you an adequate colleague.”
Although the host keeps score, no one really cares. The show is improv comedy, showing off storytelling and impersonation skills. While we don’t get all the British inside jokes and references, this show consistently makes us laugh.
If you want to release some tension at the end of a tough news day, these series will do the job. But I’m running out of shows, so if you have your own TV programs, movies or books that you’d like to recommend, please email me. I might be able to squeeze another column out of this.
Richard Campbell (campber@miamioh.edu) is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. He is the board secretary for the Oxford Free Press.
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