Filmography
Jan. 29th, 2011 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyDoc Martin, Series 2 and 3
I'm going to sum up both of these together, as I did watch them pretty much back-to-back, and for much the same reasons.
There are several things I like about this series very much. I love the acerbic character of Martin, and the way it interacts with the people in the sleepy village. I think the writers have got a good feeling for when to retire characters, either by minimizing their appearance in the script, or having them leave the village entirely. For instance, the departure of Elaine the receptionist at the beginning of series 2 gives us Paul(ine) as a new receptionist, who's actually quite competent and far more likeable than Elaine ever was. There was only so long you could imagine Martin coping with a scatterbrain like Elaine, and the character would have got tired if she were continued, so they replaced her with someone who had a bit more potential for character depth at just the right moment. Equally, PC Mark Mylow got a great storyline in series 2, but recovering him from it would have been a real problem; after you've discovered your financee has been perpetrating identity fraud on you, it's going to be a bit of a downer from thereon in. Given Mark's already explored depressive tendencies, his slightly odd insistence that obviously he and Martin are great friends, and the whole... well, let's just say that dealing with the character sympathetically and interestingly would have been a real challenge, so they did the right thing in retiring him at the beginning of series three. Instead, we get the totally inappropriate for Portwenn PC John Penhale, who seems to believe he's living in a crime thriller, and also suffers from agoraphobia. Brilliant.
The old characters who get kept on, like Martin and Lousia and Martin's wonderful aunt Joan (and can I just say how much I adore Stephanie Cole?), all grow and develop and face up to things. I think that the sudden engagement at the end of series 3 was a wee bit pushing it, as the writers obviously could tell, and I'm quite glad things did not turn out as planned because - well. It's a fairly realistic drama for most of the time. I'm hoping series 4 will pick up a decent period after all of the mess has been tidied up, and sort of elide over it all tastefully, but I'm going to be curious to see how on earth that resolve that one.
But fundamentally, the strength of the series is in its characters, in the portraits of relationships, and in the dialogue. It's a gorgeous depiction of village life in Cornwall, and gets some very canny observations about human behaviour in general in there. And I am very glad to read, via Wikipedia, that they're planning a fifth series to be filmed this year.
I'm going to sum up both of these together, as I did watch them pretty much back-to-back, and for much the same reasons.
There are several things I like about this series very much. I love the acerbic character of Martin, and the way it interacts with the people in the sleepy village. I think the writers have got a good feeling for when to retire characters, either by minimizing their appearance in the script, or having them leave the village entirely. For instance, the departure of Elaine the receptionist at the beginning of series 2 gives us Paul(ine) as a new receptionist, who's actually quite competent and far more likeable than Elaine ever was. There was only so long you could imagine Martin coping with a scatterbrain like Elaine, and the character would have got tired if she were continued, so they replaced her with someone who had a bit more potential for character depth at just the right moment. Equally, PC Mark Mylow got a great storyline in series 2, but recovering him from it would have been a real problem; after you've discovered your financee has been perpetrating identity fraud on you, it's going to be a bit of a downer from thereon in. Given Mark's already explored depressive tendencies, his slightly odd insistence that obviously he and Martin are great friends, and the whole... well, let's just say that dealing with the character sympathetically and interestingly would have been a real challenge, so they did the right thing in retiring him at the beginning of series three. Instead, we get the totally inappropriate for Portwenn PC John Penhale, who seems to believe he's living in a crime thriller, and also suffers from agoraphobia. Brilliant.
The old characters who get kept on, like Martin and Lousia and Martin's wonderful aunt Joan (and can I just say how much I adore Stephanie Cole?), all grow and develop and face up to things. I think that the sudden engagement at the end of series 3 was a wee bit pushing it, as the writers obviously could tell, and I'm quite glad things did not turn out as planned because - well. It's a fairly realistic drama for most of the time. I'm hoping series 4 will pick up a decent period after all of the mess has been tidied up, and sort of elide over it all tastefully, but I'm going to be curious to see how on earth that resolve that one.
But fundamentally, the strength of the series is in its characters, in the portraits of relationships, and in the dialogue. It's a gorgeous depiction of village life in Cornwall, and gets some very canny observations about human behaviour in general in there. And I am very glad to read, via Wikipedia, that they're planning a fifth series to be filmed this year.
