When I was a kid, the show Masterpiece Theater was enough to make me run screaming from the room, just a bunch of painfully slow and obscure old stuff. Now years later I'm sitting in my parents' house, they're in Hawaii, and I just watched the best movie I've seen in months watching that very show, Masterpiece Theater, still going strong after decades.
And the movie? Of all things, it was based on the history of the British royal family, which is usually also enough to make me run from the room, or at least it was when I was a kid. Now I'd be more likely to stay in the room attempting to calibrate my jokes and cultural criticisms according to the company. The subject is so absurdly intractable from my point of view. I mean, royal family? Are you kidding me? Mutual incomensurability. Personally, I could never get past the image of teenage girls who happen to be in the royal family forcibly subjected to a recitation of some painfully obscure and tortured lines from an Anglo-American versificator of visionless anxiety from St. Louis going as an ardent Anglican, a man seemingly more serious about the institution of the British monarchy than the royal teens themselves ever could be (apparently the case with T.S. Elliot reciting to the British Royal family).
And yet there it was, this awesome drama I just saw on PBS, a narrative based on the English royal family from like 1550 aired on Masterpiece Theater, broadcast in the middle of the damn day against soaps and things, and it was the best movie I've seen in many months. The series is Elizabeth, and it is executed with cinematographic quality I have rarely seen on television. I just watched this one quasi-feature-length installment that hinges on her romance with Robert Dudley, whom it would not be politic for her to marry, and the story was an amazing combination of the personal and intimate intertwined with the very public and historical. I recommend it.
