TV General Thread

[Five_X]

On the subject of Obama-era AMC dramas about nasty men ruining their lives and harming the people around them, I finished Mad Men yesterday! It's going down as one of the best shows I've watched, I really can't say enough good about it. Between it and DS9, I hope I get to enjoy at least a few more long-running shows of that caliber sometime (and also while they're airing), it's a great experience. I miss really good TV.

[Skull]

I was in the mood for some nautical adventure so I stuck on the TV drama "Longitude" starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon. Based on the book of the same name by American author Dava Sobel, it tells a parallel set of stories - John Harrison's forty year struggle to solve the titular Longitude Problem and win the prize money offered by the British Government in the 18th Century, but is also interspersed with Rupert Gould who is discharged from the military after suffering a mental breakdown in the trenches of WW1 and stumbles across Harrison's forgotten and damaged timepieces and so he spends his recovery trying to put them back together using his own mechanical knowledge.

Being a period drama, the one thing people have to nail for me is the setting and Longitude looks absolutely gorgeous. Apparently it was filmed around the same time as fellow naval drama "Hornblower" and so unsurprisingly a lot of the sets were recycled. They even occasionally do the thing where Harrison will leave a place in a horse 'n cart only to fade into Rupert arriving at the same building in his motorcar centuries later to emphasize the overlapping narrative. Both the book and subsequently the tv drama lean a little into artistic license in order to build drama such as using the urban myth that non-officers caught doing navigation work got executed as well as turning Nevil Maskelyne into a petty bureaucrat who is obsessed with stopping Harrison from succeeding after Harrison humiliated his Lunar Model, when in reality Maskelyne never submitted a method of his own and was only following the Board's instructions on rigorously testing Harrison's timepieces since sailors' lives hung on the balance. Both Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon preform wonderfully as the two main characters and it came as no surprise that Gambon in particular won an award for his portrayal of Harrison. The film also boasts a bevy of other talented British actors both (at the time) veterans and newcomers such as Bill Nighy as Lord Sandwich (yes, the guy the sandwich is named after), Brian Cox as Lord Morton and Andrew Scott as Vice-Admiral Campbell. Speaking of famous names, watching this drama really hammers home just what an age it was to be alive as you have appearances by many a famous figure such as Sir Edmond Halley (the guy the comet is named after), Sir Frank Watson Dyson and even Captain James Cook gets an off-screen mention as one of the people who preforms a trial with Harrison's timepieces.

I don't have much in the way of critiques, but one thing I will say is that I'm not sure how much of Rupert Gould's story added to the mix. It was well acted and everything but at the end of the day it did feel kinda...superfluous I guess? The other thing is the story feels very biased in favour of Harrison, to the point where you might think Astronomy is just flat-earth stuff if you had no other context given the way the astronomers are portrayed. The fact that Harrison and other timekeepers refer to themselves as scientists in front of the Board - implicitly implying that the astronomers aren't was really bizarre. To go back to the aforementioned Maskelyne, the drama depicts him as a wannabe rival of Harrison who knows nothing of real value, when in reality he is the man who created the British Nautical Almanac as well as being the one to preform the Schiehallion Experiment - a practical demonstration of Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravitation.

But over all, it was a wonderful drama that I would seriously recommend to anyone who enjoys a good period drama or is interested in the history of things nautical or navigation related.