Television

LOG is the name of ungraded digital video footage. It’s flat, lifeless, and dark, but that’s fine because you can tweak, tune, and adjust in a way that was never possible with film, fiddling with exposure, contrast, saturation, and so forth. In those days, everything had to look as good as possible on the film. But, with the ability to grade in post, fix visual effects in post, and change backgrounds and designs in post, directors started getting lazy. And eventually, some convinced themselves that ugliness is a distinct stylist choice. It’s not laziness; it’s an aesthetic. I say all this as, in another era — an era with more care — Dope Thief could have been a great show.

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for elegant people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location — only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading "One week earlier." After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking folks arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where they were welcomed by the resolutely smiling staff and a nervous manager, before gazing round and marveling at the beauty of it all.

Who did you cheer for in the Super Bowl last night? The asteroid? Evan McMullin? (OK, let’s not go too crazy.) Rarely has a third-party option looked so good. This was one of the least appealing Super Bowl match-ups in NFL history—and it’s the second time these two teams have met in a championship game in just three years. In one corner, football’s new dynasty, the Kansas City Chiefs, like the New England Patriots of yesteryear except everyone has a make-up artist on retainer. The Chiefs might play on the wind-swept plains but they’ve imported Hollywood into the NFL like never before.

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise.

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón announced that his next project would be a seven-part adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel Disclaimer, it was met with a mixture of excitement and surprise. Excitement, because anything that Cuarón involves himself with tends to be an event; surprise, because after a series of high-profile recent projects that have included everything from a near-experimental sci-fi blockbuster (Gravity) to a black-and-white Mexican drama he shot himself (Roma), it seemed almost mundane, rather as if Stanley Kubrick, at the peak of his success, had decided to make a movie out of a Harold Robbins potboiler.

Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the twenty-first century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but sex has dropped off a cliff since the year 2000. We used to love what they used to call a steamy blockbuster. I came of age in an era where the “erotic thriller” — 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct — were the box office draws, in which big stars lost their drawers. Comedies like A Fish Called Wanda, Green Card or When Harry Met Sally relied on frisson and fizz for a large part of their appeal.

It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.

It’s been an unusually good year on TV, and the Emmy nominations reflect a quality of both breadth and depth. The likes of Shogun, Slow Horses, Ripley and, of course, Baby Reindeer don’t come along very often, but for them all to be competing against one another is going to give Emmy voters quite the headache. Obviously it’s all but impossible to compare many of these shows; the genre-bending black comic horrors of Baby Reindeer simply aren’t more or less deserving than the elegant noirish depravity of Ripley, both of which are up for Best Limited Series, but the nature of awards is that one has to be accounted the winner, and Richard Gadd’s none-more-hyped show is likely to walk away with several awards, and deservedly so.