A binge watch I recommended to my bro.

Even before the corona virus Claudia and I loved to sink ourselves into engrossing television series. This habit predates Netflix by decades. Our habit has gotten more severe. HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime and others have come into bloom with binge-worthy series. Over the last few months of blog silence I’ve been tempted to give a shout-out to one or another of the storylines we particularly enjoyed. On occasion I suggest good ones to members of my family. Tonight when I finished “A Very English Scandal,” I sent my brother a text message encouraging him and his wife to take a peek at it. He responded by saying he’d just finished “the Queen’s Gambit” and rated it an A+. We finished our evening in Duluth watching the first episode of my brother’s recommendation. I’ll be watching the second episode for sure.

But it is the English Scandal that prompted me to return to my blog. At its conclusion I told Claudia that I was very glad that homosexuality had come almost fully out of the closet. Donald Trump is doing his best to put it back in the closet to make Christians who love the sinner but still hate the sin happy. Liar. I also remember him thanking the evangelicals at the 2016 convention for going easy on gays. I am very pleased that Pope Francis has just blessed civil unions for gays. That ought to give our new Republican (and Catholic) Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, something to mull over while she decides just how Republican to be.

After the first episode where Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe takes up with his “Bunnies” I decided not to check out Wikipedia to see what really happened. I had some modest recall of the news. A trial involving Thorpe took place not long after I was married in 1974. I was pretty sure I remembered the dog Rinka. I just checked Wikipedia and the basic story line did indeed take place. Many liberties and much speculation was added to the base story and the timeline was played with for dramatic effect. It was, however, a murder story. That it led to homicidal actions is the tragedy of a past we have largely moved on from.

Don’t take that serious last sentence as a sign that the story is a downer. Its not. The very funny Stephen Frears embelishments are funny as hell. “English” funnyL long time heart throb, Hugh Grant, is marvelous as the leader of the Liberal Party caught between Parliament and his peccadillos. Ben Wishsaw as the target is terrific. We just saw him put a bullet in a man’s head in the fourth season of Fargo. That’s one of the fun things about all our binge watching. We love it when some thespian turns out to have been in a series we enjoyed. Such was the case with Tatiana Maslany who was stellar in Orphan Black and in the new Perry Mason whose title character Perry (Maththew Rhys) has also been pretty binge-worthy himself, shedding his natural Scottish burr for a flawless American accent in “The Americans” where he plays a Russian spy.

Our world is a better place because the Evangelical Christians have lost the battle to keep making gay people’s lives crappy. Someday they will give up on their crusade to put gays back into the closet. If they don’t stop their children will leave their congregations in adulthood. They might anyway. Their blasphemous worship of Donald Trump will never be forgotten or easily lived down.

About the author