Aparitions (TV, 2008)

STALE REVIEW.

By that, I mean that I did not watch this series just recently.  I actually watched it this last fall/winter when it was leaving Netflix, but I only finished watching it on the last night that it was available to stream so I didn't think it was fair to you guys to post about it just then.  But it's back now, and I really enjoyed it, so I'll hack out a blurb about it.  It's a television series about a Catholic priest/exorcist.  He's an older man with a white beard, and a badass to demons, but also a really gentle supportive man to humans.  I'm not particularly religious, but I found his character really likable, due in no small part to his comparatively liberal opinions (not casting people out because he doesn't agree with their beliefs/practices, just wants everyone to be happy and safe).  The powers that be in the Vatican don't like his attitude, and the demons in Hell don't like his success rate... and by the end, the story gets pretty big and heavy.  I tend to enjoy supernatural-type stories (video games such as Darksiders and Legacy of Kain; shows like Buffy, Angel and Supernatural; movies like City of Angels and The Deaths Of Ian Stone) so this is right up my alley.

Luther (2010, NR)

I know this is a television series rather than a movie, but I watched the whole thing over the weekend and I really liked it so I want to tell you about it.  What I like about television series is that they can develop characters far more thoroughly than a two-hour film can.  Either the BBC consistently creates fantastic television (which I tend to believe) or I've just been incredibly lucky with the series I've watched so far (Sherlock, Jekyll, Party Animals, Luther, Doctor Who: I strongly recommend them all).  One of the factors I like so much about these British shows is that the seasons/series tend to be roughly 6 episodes.  I like shorter runs because it makes it easier to watch the entire story and it's far less intimidating to start (for example, I really want to watch all of The X-Files, but in the back of my head I know it will take me a long long time to finish and so I keep putting it off).  Also, the shorter year's-worth of programming tends to allow more quality per episode compared to pumping out a new episode every week for months on end.  Sort of interesting is that American shows call a year's-worth a season and the collection of all seasons as a series compared to British shows calling the year's-worth a series (I'm not sure what they call the combined series; perhaps one of my UK readers could help me out with that)... you could note that the British shows tend to make one solid story arc across the entire series (also with a solid story per episode) whereas American shows tend to be more episodic and disconnected.

Idris Elba (The Losers, Prometheus) played the title character, the flawed but very clever DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) John Luther.  I would describe this show as a cross between CSI (Crime
Scene Investigation), Sherlock and The Shield.  It's a procedural crime drama with a new case each episode like CSI, it has the individual intelligence and character arc from Sherlock (specifically the currently-running BBC series), and it has some of the moral ambiguity of The Shield.