Daddy Issues

The good news is that the two big streaming services' flagship shows both seem to have weathered their recent brushes with the Great Awokening. Stranger Things remains the gold standard for online drama, and the Drinker for one sums up its bounce-back from a tonally uneven Season 4 reasonably well. It still has too many characters and it's become less and less imaginative as it's gone along. But what there is is now pretty good, and it's as watchable as ever. And The Boys too has turned a corner, has ditched the anti-"Far-Right" nonsense of Season 2, and is once again at its most enjoyably fucked-up. And for what it's worth even The Umbrella Academy, albeit very much in third place, finally feels as if its sailing on an even keel.

Interestingly enough all three series have taken as their theme for the year the relationships between their protagonists and their father figures. Brenner in Stranger Things and Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy have both been resurrected and, to a certain extent, rehabilitated as "interesting", morally complex characters in their own right, and in The Boys the relationship between Homelander, his own son, and (spoiler alert!) his newly discovered biological father, has become the dramatic crux of the series. (One can predict that the struggle for the soul of the kid will be foundation for the plot of Season 4.)*

Let's face it, MBB was the standout find of ST. So having Papa take a moral stand against Eleven is surely a career-defining performance for Matthew Modine. Alas though that Eleven's abandoning her "Papa" after he tried to save her life feels like a simple, straightforward dramatic and moral failure! One can only presume there'll be an eventual reckoning between them in the show's fifth and final season.

More regrettably, what has bogged down all three series though has indeed been each's extraordinarily tedious "messy bitches" subplot. Winona Ryder is largely wasted in ST, as is Starlight in The Boys. But the standout collapse of a character into a racist sexist stereotype is Allison in UA. Whatever one may say of their treatment of straight white old guys, Hollywood's treatment of women of colour (or is it Silicon Valley?) still has a long way to go.

*Obviously though, this shift in interest hasn't pleased everyone...