Tag: amazon prime

Gloriously macho: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan reviewed

It’s trash of course, but high-octane, watchable trash: John Krasinski and Wendell Pierce in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (Amazon Studios)
It’s trash of course, but high-octane, watchable trash: John Krasinski and Wendell Pierce in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (Amazon Studios)

For too long the leftie-dominated entertainment industry has been ignoring the truth about our world

This week’s guilty pleasure is Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime). It’s trash, of course, but very well done, high-octane, watchable trash. And if you want to feel better about your lowbrow tastes, make sure you read the finger-wagging critique by one Sonia Saraiya in Vanity Fair first.

‘Jack Ryan feels like a machine designed to turn us all into the sort of viewers who disappear smiling down jingoistic Fox News rabbit holes,’ she says, enticingly. And: ‘Both its protagonist and its plot are based on the foundational, unquestioned notion that American-military might — the best-funded killing infrastructure in human history — is helping to save the world.’ And: ‘Its other primary story objective is proving that Jack Ryan deserves his white male entitlement…’

Not so much a guilty pleasure after that little lecture, then; more a bounden and sacred duty.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Why is this Israeli drama such a hit with Palestinians? Because it tells the truth

Unlike most American drama series, Fauda isn’t there to make friends.

Fauda (image: Netflix)

‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told me the other day. Once this approach would have been both extremely limiting and insufferably pompous. In the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime, though, it makes a lot of sense.

There’s something about English-speaking TV — especially if it’s made in the US — that tends towards disappointment. Obviously there have been exceptions: The Sopranos; Band of Brothers; Breaking Bad; Game of Thrones. But too often, what’s missing is that shard of ice in the creative heart that drama needs if it’s to be truly exceptional.

American drama is a slobbering puppy dog. No matter how dark or weird its subject matter, there’s invariably a fatal moment where it suddenly rolls over onto its back and begs you to tickle its tummy. Its urge to show you how secretly lovable it is is more powerful than its desire to be great art.

Read the rest in the Spectator.