What Susan and I are Watching in 2024

by James Wallace Harris, 6/14/24

For over a year now, Susan and I have developed a routine of watching television together every night at nine o’clock. After forty-seven years of marriage, it’s become extremely hard for us to find television shows we both enjoy. When we were younger and more romantic, we’d watch what the other liked even if we didn’t enjoy the show ourselves. But as we’ve gotten older and set in our ways, we both know what we like, and it’s seldom the same kind of TV series or movie. We now find it a challenge to pick a television we want to watch together. But when we do find one, it’s fun and bonding. We’ve recommended these shows to our friends, and we’ve gotten many positive reviews back. They are all recommended.

We just finished A Gentleman in Moscow based on the novel of the same name by Amor Towles. We subscribed to Paramount+ to see it because so many of my friends told me about loving the novel. It’s a wonderful story about a Russian aristocrat, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, surviving the communist revolution. The party would have executed him but thinks he wrote a revolutionary poem, so they condemn him to live in a luxury hotel for the rest of his life. If he leaves, he will be shot. The story covers the decades Rostov lives at the Hotel Metropol. The story started rather slowly but quickly became enchanting. I bought the novel but haven’t started listening to it yet.

Currently we start the evening with an episode of Why Women Kill on Paramount+. We love this show, which is a quirky light-hearted story about murder. It was created by Marc Cherry who also created Desperate Housewives. Normally, neither one of us likes watching TV involving gratuitous violence, but this one is an exception. Both of us look forward to seeing a new episode each night and we’re both going to be depressed when we finish all twenty episodes.

After Why Women Kill, we watch two episodes of Leave it to Beaver. We’re currently in season four. Beaver ran six seasons for a total of 234 episodes, and is available for free on many streaming services, but we watch it on Peacock+. We’re willing to pay $11.99/month to keep from having commercials interrupt our fun. I’m surprised by how much Susan, and I like this show, even though it’s incredibly old, and rather simplistic. And we don’t watch it for nostalgia, since neither one of us were fans of the show growing up.

It’s amazing how creative the writers are producing story after story set within a limited setting and story structure. I remember seeing some episodes when I was a kid back in the 1950s, and my memories left me believing Leave it to Beaver was all about the kids Beaver and Wally, but we’ve discovered it’s just as much about Ward and June, the parents.

I recently read an interview with Jerry Mathers who said the show intentionally avoided going for big laughs. If any scene turned out too funny, they cut it. They didn’t want the show to be about jokes. I’ve been looking at a few episodes of Make Room for Daddy (later renamed The Danny Thomas Show) that ran concurrent with Beaver, and thought it was often spoiled by setting up scenes around an all to obvious joke.

Leave it to Beaver is about parenting in the 1950s. It’s fascinating to see how much our culture has changed since then.

Before Why Women Kill and Leave it to Beaver, we watched Franklin and Manhunt on Apple TV+ and We We the Lucky Ones on Hulu. Susan and I have a lot of luck with TV series based on history. But I have issues with fictionalizing real events. These shows were quite compelling and enjoyable, but they made up stuff that didn’t happen. Manhunt is about the hunt for Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Unfortunately, it makes us believe Edwin Stanton did things he never did. I should read the book it was based on.

We Were the Lucky Ones is also based on a novel by Georgia Hunter inspired by the true story of her Jewish family surviving Hitler’s occupation of Poland during WWII. The Kurc family was immensely lucky, but they endured years of horrible suffering before they could say that. Again, I want to read the book.

I have read a couple of biographies of Benjamin Franklin but did not know all the details revealed in Franklin on Apple TV+. The miniseries is about the eight years Franklin spent in France trying to convince the French to support the American Revolution. Again, I’ll have to read a book to find out if the show played fair and square with history.

We also caught up on several PBS Masterpiece shows, including MaryLand, Ridley Road and Mr. Bates vs The Post Office. All of these were excellent.

Maryland is about two sisters, Becca and Rosaline learning their mother, Mary, has died on the Isle of Man. When they go to identify her body, the police tell the women things about their mother they can’t believe. The two then discover their mother had a secret life on the Isle of Man that they and their father did not know about. The story was wonderful and is about what family members don’t tell each other. The Isle of Man was a beautiful location.

Ridley Road was about a fascist movement in England during the early 1960s, and how a Jewish family infiltrated the group. It was based on real events, but like most historical fiction, I’m not sure things happened the way they are portrayed. Again, I’d like to study these events in a book.

Finally, Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office was amazing. It’s based on a true story, about how the upper management of the British post office covered up problems with their computer system by prosecuted hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters for theft. PBS also is showing a documentary that covers the same events, and many of the scenes in the miniseries were directly taken from film clips from the news. You wouldn’t think this story would be interesting, but it was. The first episode was slow, but after that got to be a delightful story about real people. The scenic landscapes made me want to live in England.

Another show we absolutely loved was Lessons in Chemistry, on Apple TV+, but that was at the end of 2023. I loved the show so much I read the novel, which was even better than the miniseries.

JWH