Riget
Danish series from the 90's, written and directed by professional edgelord Lars von Trier.
Riget has often been described as the Danish answer to Twin Peaks, which is on one hand understandable. Both are shows that juggle comedy, melodrama and surreal mystery. On the other, the execution couldn't be any more different.
Riget has the basic setup of a hospital drama/workplace comedy. There's an old lady among the patients who acts as a spirit medium, a pompous Swedish doctor who brings up his disdain for having to work in Denmark at every opportunity, a pregnant lady, a student trying to seduce an older nurse, the doctors have their own fraternal order that meets in the basement... the sort of thing you'd expect from this kind of premise. The actual plot or the closest it has to one, revolves around a haunting which it seems only sporadically interested in.
You know, Twin Peaks has had plenty of goofy stuff but it's foundation was a genuine sympathy for its characters and a genuine interest in its metaphysics and mysteries. Riget, on the other hand, feels mostly like a big joke. Not the worst one, mind, when it's funny it can be very funny but it seems to have outright contempt for building and maintaining actual intrigue or developing its characters into more than just one note jokes. The arrogant foreigner, the sleazy student, the nosy old lady, the put upon boss, the mad scientist who compromises his own health and safety for an experiment... you wait for these characters to open up and show some depth or have some development but they barely do.
See, I enjoy dark comedy. Watching a bunch of mostly pretty nasty people screw each other and sometimes themselves over in a Danish hospital is a perfectly fine premise as far as I'm concerned. And like I said, there are plenty of genuinely funny bits. But the actual mystery was uninspired, poorly put together and, at least by the second season, way too big a part of the show. The whole thing just feels loose, poorly thought out and lazily put together. Less a series and more a collection of ideas. Rather than proper plots and character arcs it has suggestions of them that never properly develop, just kinda wiggle around, getting nowhere.
This really feels less like "Twin Peaks at a hospital" and more like "Scrubs with ghosts." Which isn't the worst thing ever, although some bits really overstay their welcome and some set ups and punchlines are extremely contrived. The whole setup of the first seasons finale (a government delegation is visiting the hospital, so everyone better be at their best behaviour!) is just sitcom writing at its corniest, honestly and it's all the way downhill from there.
Them there's the weird hand camera look and sepia filter of the whole thing which, honestly, I don't get what it's going for. Like, not the hand camera thing, I actually kinda liked the way some of those labyrinthine corridors and basement catacombs looked, shot in that low resolution style but I really don't get why the entire thing looks like it was shot through a glass of apple juice.
It's not the worst thing ever and has its share of amusing scenes but quite frankly, there's probably a reason why less people are even aware of this then they are of its direct parody, the british comedy Garth Marengi's Darkplace. I know von Trier made a followup season a couple years ago called Exodus, that is weirdly hard to find. And if I ever do find it I might give it a watch. But I honestly wasn't very impressed with this show.
Now I have no love for the videogame but if you ask me the whole tone of the show is nowhere near as grim (Ellie and Dina definitely bring an early naughts "Roadtrip!" vibe) and no one moment carries as much impact as I remember. But is it a bad thing that the show is not as relentlessly miserable as the game? You decide.
I haven't seen either season of this show, because it looks to me like a watered down version of a series of games that I only really like for reasons mostly unrelated to its writing.
But honestly, when it comes to the presentation of LoU 2, I think its trashy over the top 90's straight to video action movie affectation is its saving grace and what made it overall much more tolerable to me than the honestly kind of cloying sentimentality of the first game. The grizzled old survivor who lost his own daughter in the zombie apocalypse gradually opening up to a child he's supposed to escort... Both the content and the presentation of Last of Us 1 were as far as I'm concerned unforgivable cliches that at this point you just can't get me to care about anymore. I'm over that stuff and I particularly don't think that's the kind of story video games should be telling.
Last of Us 2 is basically the definition of a dumbed done sequel that doubles down on violence and action but I think that actually works out in its favour. Two grim muscle bound meatheads carrying out a vendetta across post apocalyptic Seattle because they blame each other for the death of their respective daddies. It's dumb action movie shlock, complemented by some really fine action gameplay, that takes itself painfully seriously which, in turn, honestly makes it funnier. There was this part during Ellie's section of the story where you're chasing a woman through the corridors of a hospital, red alarm lights blinking, with a bloodied axe in her hand like a slasher villain and... I dunno, I vibe with this sort of thing much more than with all that cornball shit in the first game.
Mind, there's still some of that forced sentimentality in the second game, mostly during the flashback sections with Joel that scream "Brought back by popular demand". But overall I could actually get into it. I dunno, those are just not games whose writing I can ne arsed to care about much, there's nothing about their premise, setting or characters I find intriguing because it's all just a copy of a copy of a copy. At that point I take shlock over something that's desperately trying to pluck on my heart strings.
Fist and not miss anything. Those are Still at the time when these shows were on Netflix, and before everything was falling apart between them and Disney.
