The Wine Show: Oenological Entertainment

Ever wanted to know more about wine but had no idea where to begin? Or ever thought that wine is a topic far beyond your reach and your wallet? Well ITV presents The Wine Show, a comforting twelve-part series hosted by the charming duo of Matthew Goode and Matthew Rhys. They enjoy a good bottle of wine, but are far from experts, so they serve as the audience surrogates as they talk to experts who present them with reds, whites, and everything in between.

The two Matthews are based in a villa in Tuscany, and every week, they meet up with Joe Fattorini, a British wine expert who introduces them to wines from different parts of the world. Each episode follows a very structured format. First, Joe meets the boys with a couple of bottles of wine, says they came from some exotic locale, and then we watch a 10-minute video about his journey or the journey of fellow wine expert, Amelia Singer. Next up, is the gadget portion, when Joe talks about various gizmos that ordinary people and serious oenophiles can use to enhance their wine experience - this ranges from corkscrews to extravagant machines that pump oxygen into your wine for a hefty price tag. Then we visit a chef who has been tasked with selecting their favorite wine and creating a dish to go with it. This is the part of the show when you tend to stop wishing you had a glass of wine and wish you had eaten something instead. Then, Joe presents the Matthews with a task, and we get a delightful video where the two saunter off to some region of Italy to find a bottle of wine that meets Joe's exacting description. And finally, we wrap up with another video about some other type of wine, featuring either Joe or Amelia, drinking yet more delicious wine and reveling in the non-stop novelty of it all.

The Wine Show is a soothing and predictable program that is guaranteed to teach you something about how to appreciate a good bottle of wine. It offers a perfect balance between the enthusiastic novice Matthews, and the enthusiastic professionals, Joe and Amelia. Both camps are simply bubbling over with anticipatory delight when a bottle is uncorked, and the short videos are quite eye-opening about the global reach of a drink that is often considered to be the province of the stuffy elite. There are some remarkable stories about viniculture in the Middle East, and tales of the booming wine market in Shanghai and the difference between Western and Eastern palates that plays a huge role in wine preferences and descriptions.

You'll also learn that Matthew Rhys cannot stand sweet wine, while Matthew Goode is never more charming than when he is talking about a "glass of giggles." You will fall in love with Italy, wine, and everything else under the Tuscan sun because this is a show about people who are passionate about what they do and eager to showcase the hard work they have put into creating a perfect, delicious drink. Like a glass of champagne, The Wine Show is an effervescent delight that is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

Stranger Things: A Masterful Feat of Storytelling

The best thing you could do today is sit on the couch and binge watch the eight-episode season of Stranger Things on Netflix. A cross between The Goonies and Super 8, it encapsulates everything that is splendiferous about our current golden age of television. If it doesn't end up winning every award under the sun, who cares, because something like this doesn't need any awards for us to know that it is an instant classic.

Set in 1983 in a small town in Indiana, the show begins with Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers. We meet Will (Noah Schnapp) and his friends, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), four middle school boys who like to play 10-hour campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons in Mike's basement. Will bikes home one night after a long campaign and is all alone as his brother and mom are out (you know it's the 80s since the kids can bike around at night and the parents aren't fussing over their whereabouts 24/7). Unfortunately, there's something in the house, and it takes Will. Figuring out what "it" is and where Will has gone is the point of the next seven episodes. 

When Will doesn't show up to school the next day, his friends team up in classic 80's fashion to find him. These child actors are a brilliant bunch who are destined for greatness. Even more destined for greatness, however, is Millie Bobby Brown, who plays a mysterious girl known as Eleven. She shows up out of nowhere the day after Will's disappearance, seems to have strange powers, and unraveling her backstory proves to be the key to unraveling Will's whereabouts. In addition to the preteens, we have the full-on teenager, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Mike's beautiful and perfect sister, who is having a classic moment of rebellion as she dates the hot guy (the perfectly named Steve Harrington, played by the perfectly coiffed Joe Keery). For reasons I won't divulge, she gets enmeshed in the spooky drama and teams up with Will's older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), to figure out what happened. 

As for the adults, we have Winona Ryder playing Will's mother, delivering one of the most pitch-perfect performances I've seen in ages. Everyone thinks she's crazy and you are with her every step of the way as you wait for someone to finally take her seriously. David Harbour plays Chief Jim Hopper, the local police chief who doesn't seem like much but gradually becomes the hero of the piece, untangling the giant conspiracy hanging over his town and vowing to find Will no matter what it takes. There are various other characters but delving into their stories and fates is too spoilery, so I shall leave you to discover them for yourself. However, every performance is a delight and this is certainly one of the best casts I've seen on television. 

It's not just the casting; Stranger Things is impeccable in every regard. The story is doled out in bewitching morsels that make it impossible not to hit play on the next episode. Every episode ends with a doozy of a cliffhanger and there is not a single moment that feels wasted or extraneous to the plot. The show's creators, The Duffer Brothers, have put a great deal of thought into keeping you engaged but never spilling all their secrets at once, ensuring that every episode is a treat that leaves you wanting more. Things unfold so naturally and brilliantly that you must marvel at the expertise that has gone into crafting this tale. It is that rare thing, a TV show that is paced perfectly, not too long but not too short, guaranteed to scare you and satisfy you over the course of the eight best hours of your life.

The show is also shot beautifully, fully capturing the look of the 80s, but invoking an eerie other worldliness that reminds you not to get too comfortable. The music choices and synth background score are a perfect accompaniment and the production design and visual effects are jawdroppingly magnificent. The big reveals are not remotely disappointing, and the show fully delivers on all of its storytelling promises. It's impossible to describe the emotions evoked by this show - it feels familiar, almost predictable, and yet it twists in unexpected, terrifying ways that leave you pining for more. Lately, many of the films and TV shows I've seen have felt like they tried to be grandiose and original but ended up bloated and rote. But Stranger Things is an intoxicating breath of fresh air and I cannot recommend it enough. 

No Such Thing as the News: Current Events with a QI Twist

When I learned that the QI Elves had put together a weekly show where they would discuss interesting facts about current events, I knew I would have to watch. However, after watching one episode of No Such Thing as the News, I knew I could never stop watching.

The show consists of 4 Elves: James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptasynski, and Dan Schrieber. For those not in the know, they are four of the genius researchers who provide all the background material that Stephen Fry and his comedian pals juggle with on QI (a show you should be watching in its entirety, if you haven't already). As a result, they are skilled at delving into unlikely tangents and asking questions that turn the dullest news story into the most interesting thing you've ever heard. In every episode, global headline news and local council matters are given equal weight and what is often astonishing is how Mongolian postcodes can prove to have far more interesting global implications than Euro 2016.

The four panelists are charismatic and intelligent people, who clearly are as comfortable discussing global politics and economic theory as they are with making extremely bad puns and satirizing every single piece of news they lay their hands on. Anna Ptasynski is particularly adept at making her fellow panelists dissolve into tears of laughter, while Dan Schrieber is a deft host, leading them through various news stories and Twitter comments and ensuring they extract enough interesting information from every news item before they move on to more bizarre brilliance.

The most important fact about No Such Thing as the News is that it is freely available on YouTube for your global viewing pleasure. This show has extremely low production values (with one Twitter user declaring that "it looks like a hostage video"), and the only way they can convince the BBC to let them keep making more is to rack up the viewing numbers on those videos. I would watch every Sunday at the gym and nearly fall off my treadmill laughing. So while I exhort you to watch this show immediately and bump up their viewing figures so they can create many more seasons, I am definitely worried that I am going to injure myself when Season 2 is released. Oh well, it'll be worth it. 

Upstart Crow: Shakespearean Sitcom

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the BBC produced a slew of programming to honor the Bard. Thankfully, they also allowed Ben Elton to write a sitcom to satirize the Bard. For six episodes, I giggled my way through Upstart Crow, a gloriously irreverent and surprisingly thoughtful homage to the man responsible for some of the most well-known stories in the English language.

Set in 1592, the show follows a bumbling Will Shakespeare (a perfectly cast David Mitchell), who is trying to establish himself as go-to playwright. We see him at his London lodgings, where he is attended by an illiterate manservant, Bottom (Rob Rouse), and the hyper-literate daughter of his landlord, Kate (Gemma Whelan, in a startlingly different role from her usual swashbuckling on Game of Thrones). Kate desperately wants to become an actress, and one of the series' throughlines is the silliness of that ambition in a time when only men can frolic on the stage. We also get to see Will's home life when he travels to his humble abode in Stratford, where his wife, Anne (Liza Tarbuck), lives with his parents and children. No matter his location, everyone thinks Will is far too verbose, says things with twenty words when three would suffice, and are constantly needling him about his unlikely plots and boring verses.

Will's colleagues include the acting troupe tasked with putting on his plays, his fellow playwright, Kit Marlowe (Tim Downie), who keeps stealing Shakespeare's work (a nod to the ever-present argument about Shakespeare authorship), and Robert Greene (Mark Heap), the Master of the Revels who hates Shakespeare's work and calls him an "upstart crow," thereby lending the series its title. The theme of each episode is one of Shakespeare's works, and Ben Elton cleverly crafts some impossible tale of how Will is embroiled in a fiasco that could ultimately serve as the inspiration for one of his plays. While the first episode's Romeo and Juliet theme is not too much of a stretch, the fifth episode's homage to Macbeth is insanely innovative and reveals how much Elton must love the original works to create such a brilliant parody.

Upstart Crow humanizes Shakespeare and gives us more reasons to love his work. It both mocks and celebrates his language, reminding us that Shakespeare could be both flowery and ribald, exalted and earthy. The dialogue in each episode is a fascinating blend of the 16th and 21st centuries, and the references to various plays and television shows are sprinkled in so liberally that it will take repeated viewing to catch them all. This is a series that will appeal to Shakespeare afficionados or create afficionados out of novices. It follows an extremely traditional sitcom format, and yet there is nothing traditional about the wit and verve that has gone into crafting each complicated storyline. It feels like required high school viewing, a reminder to English literature students that underneath the dense vocabulary and blank verse, there are brilliant characters, complex (often silly) plots, and a real man, who was trying to make a life for himself by spinning stories.

The Durrells: Captivating Corfu

I know summer has officially arrived, because my DVR has nothing to record anymore. In these times of televisual scarcity, I naturally turn to the UK to give me comfort, so what follows is a series of blog posts about some rather wonderful British TV shows that debuted this year and will keep you entertained till American TV makes its triumphant return in autumn.

One of my favorite books as a child was Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. The book tells the semi-autobiographical story of the Durrell family, composed of widowed matriarch, Louisa Durrell, and her four children who are all getting sick of each other in the rainy English climate in 1935. So Mrs. Durrell comes up with the only possible solution: "Let's move to Corfu." And just like that, all the family members pick up their lives, move to a country they've never visited before, and proceed to have a grand series of adventures. This book was followed by two others, collectively known as the Corfu Trilogy, and earlier this year, ITV gave us Season 1 of The Durrells, a sun-drenched series based on those books.

Keeley Hawes stars as the hapless Louisa, a woman who loves her children very much but is also quite sick of them. As we are introduced to each family member and their particular passions, we can see how it might be a trial to deal with them, both individually and collectively. There's Larry (Josh O'Connor), the aspiring novelist who continuously posits his theory that his mother's crankiness is due to her lack of a love life. There's Leslie (Callum Woodhouse), the gun-mad loon who doesn't quite understand why it might be unsettling to shoot large guns when people are trying to sleep. Margo (Daisy Waterstone) is the ditzy sister, who is trying (and failing) to attract a boyfriend and can't find any sympathy from her callous brothers. And finally, there's Gerry (Milo Parker), who will grow up to become a celebrated naturalist and the author of these books about his eccentric family. But for now, he's a quiet young boy who is obsessed with animals, and therefore causes mass hysteria by unexpectedly bringing home creatures that terrify his family.

In addition to the family members, we get to meet Spiro (Alexis Georgoulis), the Greek taxi driver who takes charge of the Durrells from the day they land on Corfu and becomes their fast friend, while dispensing all manner of wanted and unwanted advice. There's also Dr. Theo Stephanides (Yorgos Karamihos), a polymath naturalist who becomes Gerry's mentor and teaches him how to cultivate his love for the animal kingdom. All together, they are an extremely motley crew that somehow manage to make it work. Over six episodes we get treated to their various oddities, and the series builds up to a grand finale that is sure to satisfy.

The Durrells is a fun series, but it certainly feels a bit more realistic than the books. The Corfu Trilogy is only semi-autobiographical; Gerald Durrell firmly focused on silliness and never allowed any hint of the real struggles his family may have faced during that time. The show, however, contains some somber twists and turns that ground the whole premise in a more dramatic sensibility. I didn't enjoy that aspect so much, but when you have a period comedy-drama set in sunny Corfu, you can't be bothered to nitpick such details. Instead, you simply gaze at the ocean and the olive trees, heave a contented sigh, and settle in for a blissful six episodes with this crazy family and their menagerie.