What Susan and I Are Watching

by James Wallace Harris, 6/16/23

Unless I have someone to watch TV with, I end up watching YouTube videos, and maybe an old movie once a month. So I’m grateful when Susan is willing to watch TV with me. As we’ve gotten older our taste in television has diverged significantly, so it’s hard to find shows we’ll both watch. Currently, we’re watching Call the Midwife (Netflix), The Big Door Prize (AppleTV), and Platonic (AppleTV). And, about once a month, we have three friends over to binge-watch four episodes of Ted Lasso (AppleTV).

Susan and I seem to share a love for British TV, or at least a certain type of British TV. Last year we started our 9 pm TV watching with Downton Abbey, then went to Upstairs, Downstairs (old and new), All Creatures Great and Small (old and new), and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We’re continuing with Call the Midwife. Most of the British PBS shows have a certain feel to them. Especially since Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small are TV shows based on memoirs about English life in the mid-20th century. And Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs have a definite historical feel. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was about mid-20th century American life. So we might like shows with a sense of history.

While my sister was here for a week, she got us hooked on Platonic, and that caused us to try The Big Door Prize.

It’s interesting to contrast the two British TV shows, Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small, set in the past, with the two American shows, Platonic and The Big Door Prize, set in the present. The British shows are heartwarming and focus on people who help other people, while the American shows are focused on people who are focused on themselves. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in the mid-20th century but is very different from those other shows. I’m not using it in the comparisons below.

The British shows are about people who work long hours at very hard jobs and do a lot of sacrificing for others, while the American shows are about frivolous life after work where the characters spend a lot of time in self-doubt, worrying about their relationships, while trying to find something meaningful in their lives.

The British shows, focus on the grittier aspects of life, while the American shows lean towards the fantastic and fanciful. In The Big Door Prize, a small-town community wakes up to discover a magical machine in their local grocery that tells them their potential. While Platonic is about a man and woman rekindling their friendship after many years. In both shows, the setup leads to quirky characters dealing with quirky new situations. Is it me, or does that suggest Americans are bored?

By the way, Susan and I both enjoy Platonic and The Big Door Prize, but we’re not wild about either. While I fill idle hours with YouTube videos, Susan fills her time sewing and watching old favorite sitcoms (M.A.S.H., Andy Griffith, Friends) and feel-good dramas (The Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy). The shows we loved most while watching together have been the British shows that originally appeared on PBS and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

We’re only in the 4th season of Call the Midwife, and it currently has twelve in total, so we’ll have plenty of TV for several weeks. But after that, we’ll be searching for something new to watch. We’re open to suggestions — but consider our track record. I’m not sure how many TV shows exist about hard-working self-sacrificing people based on memoirs.

I think Susan and I are burned out on television so it’s very hard to find something new to watch. Neither one of us care about mysteries, thrillers, or police procedurals. And I’m tired of my old favorite themes of Westerns and science fiction. We both loved Downton Abbey and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel but shows like those are rare.

JWH