Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
I don’t know what it’s like in your neighborhood, but where I am the weather is very insistent on being a Tennessee kind of winter — very cold, very gray, very damp. “You know, I think I might be kind of depressed,” I wonder as I wake from my second nap of the weekday and think aloud if it’s too late to order four (more) boxes of Samoas. Even the dog doesn’t seem that jazzed about walks lately. (It’s almost as if it’s February.) Sadly, I can’t make our rock tilt back toward the fireball any faster. I’m not a groundhog. Luckily, you and I live in a time and place where we can utilize the magical powers of distraction.
’Tis the season for TV comfort food — I mean, just go for it. Seen that SpongeBob a thousand times? Aim for 1,001. Want to secretly binge on horrifically mediocre faves? I won’t tell. But may I offer one suggestion? This winter, try watching something for the colors. Storytelling is almost always my priority; my brain jumps trains of thought so easily that it doesn’t take much for derailment, so anything capable of holding my attention for, oh, about eight minutes straight is what I’ll almost always run to. But the second word in “television” is “vision” (I can wait while you grab a pen and write that down), and I know that it does actually matter how something looks.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything explicitly for the fancy quality, which is why I’m fine to run the same old DVDs over and over again. (It’s always why it’s funny to me when someone watches Tenet on an iPod.) But sometimes February means I can’t actually get up from the sofa to find a DVD, and that means I’ll stream something I own. Like, ah, good ol’ Pride & Prejudice. Anyone with a passing interest in costume drama knows serial adapter Andrew Davies did fans of the genre a service with the ’95 work for the BBC. But I’d never seen the high-def version and, oh my, it’s like night and day.
The monotonous drizzle must be affecting me psychologically, because I’ve never been more capable of pulling such nuance out of on-screen neutrals. Mauve, taupe, light and dusty pinks — where am I, a crazy acid party or the Netherfield Ball?! What was once costuming and set design — top of the line, of course — never really caught my attention before. To be fair, I give everything made before about 2000 a pass: No one making TV prior to then had any idea their work would someday be computerized to look more real than real, and then inscrutably compared to shows made for digital cameras. But like, goddamn, the P&P gang really did go above and beyond on every front.
One of my new favorite parts of watching Pride & Prejudice is the orange-and-green gowns of the Bingley sisters, A+ bitches of literary history. You could always tell their nouveau-riche tastes equalled more sumptuous fabrics than those of the Bennet family — that has to translate to a TV set likely built in the ’80s or early 1990s. The fancy-schancy hi-def frocks are even better. Better than better? How much of this story takes place outside — the landscapes look so fresh and breathable, spring had sprung and was captured on film and then digitized for my viewing pleasure a generation later.
While roped into the streaming services, I figured I might as well hop down my saved list and do some early spring cleaning — there were some very over-ambitious Criterion-level adds when I first signed up for HBO Max that don’t need to clutter my screen anymore, all due respect. But thanks in part to my need for costumes, I started Gentleman Jack, a jaunty little 1830s romance about diarist and lesbian Anne Lister. 1830s? Lesbian?! Whaaa? Yes, she lived boldly and even dressed in a somewhat masculine style — stylish black, a slim-profiled jacket and long, barely A-lined skirt, if the show is to be believed.
Which was smart, lesbian or not, because England in the 1830s was among the worst eras of women’s fashion in history. You know those big, dumb, enormous mutton-chop sleeves? Try to visualize them even bigger — they’re really that bad. And hey, you know what every face needs? Like six bouncy ringlets on either side, rest of the hair slicked back. Atrocious stuff. But the fabrics? Yes, my friends, the fabrics are that good. And here are costumes meant to swarm the screen and the eye — so much bolder than Pride & Prejudice, the difference between delicate floral prints and repeating, lacy patterns in white-on-cream, versus Gentleman Jack’s plaids and bold, rich colors. But that’s just what I like. Throw on a lovingly filmed nature documentary. Find the movie with the most colorful makeup, and try to copy the look along while you watch. It’s still cold outside.
