Suits

For a long time Suits was that show Dave had on at night. Scheduled on the home of witty banter, I assumed it was a glossy American sitcom akin to Entourage. Last year the nation started to take note because its actress, Meghan Markle, was marrying our Prince, he wore a soldier beret, Prince Harry. Still, I didn't pay much attention to it until our friends told us to watch.

Initially, I was reluctant. We were told it was a legal-drama, not a sitcom. Having watched The Good Wife and its spin-off, The Good Fight, I didn’t know if I wanted to watch another courtroom procedural. Even though I’m a creature of habit in my daily life (bowl of muesli for breakfast, cheese roll for lunch, Wetherspoons approach to dinner: Monday is chilli night; Friday, burger in a bun) when it comes to culture, I like to vary my diet. I try and read different authors so I experience different styles, and try where possible to watch different genres so I don’t fall in with the lo-fi indie crowd that my personality is at risk of moping into.

I like to know where I am with my meals.

So I didn’t want to watch Suits. But I’m getting married soon, so I thought I should practise compromise. The Girl wanted to watch it, so I agreed. (That’s compromise, right?)

At first I wasn’t a fan. After the first few episodes, I compared it unfavourably with The Good Wife. I said it had shine, but it didn’t have soul. I claimed it had wit, but it lacked charm. It didn’t focus on women’s brains, but their butts. Now that I’ve watched the first season I think the case for the prosecution is unfounded; many of my arguments could be thrown out as prejudicial.

A lot of my opposition towards Suits is rooted in its Pilot episode. The précis for the show is this: Mike Ross is a gifted brainiac: he's Sherlock with social skills. Early on we see him taking a university paper; he’s in disguise, hidden by a baseball cap. The reason for this is that he sits exams on people’s behalf. A cerebral gigolo: he’s a brain for hire. Not only does he supply answers, his flatmate wants him to supply drugs. Mike is less sure about this, but money is a great persuader. On playing glorified delivery boy for his friend, he runs into trouble. To all extents and purposes, he’s been set up. His friend didn’t want to deliver the drugs himself because of the risk attached. The police are onto the crew and there’s a small chance that the hotel they’re delivering to might be watched. Fortunately, Mike has the street-smarts to go with the book-smarts: he senses something is wrong and runs for cover.

It's more Mad Men than Lad Men.

In fleeing the scene, Mike runs into the law. Or lawyers to be exact. A law firm who have booked a hotel suite for interviews. Harvey Specter, a hot-shot lawyer, is there to find his protégée. Unfortunately, all the Harvard graduates have the charisma of a legal textbook. Specter doesn’t just want theory; he wants confidence too. He hears the kid’s story, enjoys its tale, and only wishes he had the legal backstory to go with it. Although Mike admits he hasn’t go the sweatshirt, he’s Harvard material through and through. So the subterfuge begins: Mike Ross will work in a law firm despite having no legal qualifications to speak of. If the pair are rumbled, Specter will be disbarred, and Mike will be – well – he’d have to be barred to be disbarred; let’s just say his grandma will be disappointed with him. All in all then, Harvey’s got more to lose than Mike. Harvey though is a gambling man, so when it comes to risk he’s all in.

I think the concern I had about the show was that it would have a frat boy mentality. Mike and Harvey are incredibly bright, swapping barbs, ventriloquizing film scenes; whereas the women take a back seat. I’m not saying beautiful women can’t have deep characters; it’s just at first the camera seems to Vic Reeves them, sticking its tongue out, rubbing its knees, whenever one comes on screen. There’s Jessica, the head of the firm; Rachael, the paralegal, and Donna, Harvey’s secretary, who appear for decoration. For fans of The Good Fight, it’s a very different feel: there, women are front and centre, admired for their brains rather than their beauty; here, it feels the other way round. Over time though, this changes and you appreciate the writers are depicting strong, complex women where their looks don’t define them. In many ways it’s like Mad Men, showing a cross-section of women and the obstacles they face in a male-dominated world.

It's quite a disturbing GIF isn't it.

Another thing Suits has going for it is a love story. I wish I could say I made this next spot, but I didn’t. In the first episode, Mike Ross is shown around the office by paralegal, Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle). After watching the Pilot I turned to The Girl all smug and went, “I know why it’s called Suits. It’s wordplay, isn’t it? Suits is a derogatory term for corporate workers; it’s also what lawyers do: they administer legal suits.”

Unimpressed, she turned to me and went, “Have you thought about the names of the characters?”

I said, “No.”

She went, “Think about the surname of Mike and the first name of the Meghan Markle character.”

The penny dropped: “Ross and Rachel!”

“Exactly.”

It’s very much a Ross and Rachel relationship with the will-they, won’t-they turning into the on-off oscillation of love and heartache. Being a romantic I approve of this part of the show.

As I approach my concluding statement, I guess it falls on me to say, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you’ve heard arguments for the defence; you’ve heard arguments for the prosecution. Both arguments are compelling (after all, I wrote them). However, I think it’s clear to see that Suits is a legal-drama worth its salt. It’s fun, but wise. Smart, yet soulful. Beautiful and substantial. I rest my case.” (Swaggers back to table, knowing he’s nailed it.)

Suits is available on Netflix. (I’m available to defend and prosecute TV shows pro bono.)

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

‘Life is very long, when you’re lonely.’

(The Queen is Dead, The Smiths)

'All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?'

(Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles)

Whenever I teach An Inspector Calls at school, I show my students a trailer for Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, a documentary about a woman named Joyce Vincent. Vincent was a woman found dead in her flat three years after she died. The smell had grown so repulsive that her existence could no longer be denied. Throughout the film, her friends and former colleagues reminisce on a woman they describe as talented and beguiling (her family are conspicuous in their absence). Essentially, what Joyce’s life teaches us is people can fall between the cracks. If someone moves to a city for a job, they may not have family nearby; if they’re single, the closest contact they have is with colleagues. With agency work and short-term contracts, bonds are hard to forge. Vincent’s life is a warning to look after the young as well as our old. There are befriending services for the elderly, but nothing for young adults. It’s only in the last ten years when pensioners have felt able to ‘come out’ as lonely; for younger people it remains taboo.

The newspaper report on Joyce Vincent.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the 2017 Costa Book Winner by debut novelist Gail Honeyman. Honeyman began the book after turning forty; her jobs up until that point had been in the Civil Service and university administration- back office stuff as opposed to the creative work of fiction. On reading about how a young woman went from Friday at 5 to Monday at 9 without speaking to anyone, it got her thinking about loneliness. During her lunch breaks and free time, she wrote the book that was to become the subject of a bidding war – it's subsequent success has seen it ‘optioned’ by Reese Witherspoon, with the actress rumoured to play the lead.

Eleanor Oliphant is a woman that has a routine office job and a routine life.

From Monday to Friday, I come in at 8.30. I take an hour for lunch. I used to bring in my own sandwiches, but the food at home always went off before I could use it up, so now I get something from the high street. I always finish with a trip to Marks and Spencer on Friday, which rounds the week off nicely. 

From the opening pages, Honeyman constructs a character where order is the thing. Her arrival time is the same. Her lunchtime is the same. Her week’s end is the same. There’s subtle commentary here too on the travails of singledom: the food going off before it could be eaten. Many single people can empathise with this: supermarkets hardly have individuals in mind when it comes to their supersize packaging. However, everything 
seems fine here. There’s no problem with one’s life running to clockwork; it provides control in a chaotic world.

The first sign that everything may not be completely fine is the expository information on Eleanor’s job:

I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.

An unusual heroine has been established. The university education connotes bookish intelligence, but the blank, carefree description of her physical injuries implies a lack of emotional awareness. Why wouldn’t you postpone your interview if you’d been subjected to a heinous beating? Over the course of the novel, we’ll learn that the Classics degree is ironic: she can neither read the past, nor connect it to the modern day.

The blink-and-you-miss-it revelations into Eleanor’s past means the full scale of her trauma is postponed to later in the novel. Instead, earlier sections have a sitcom feel to them with Eleanor- socially naïve- visiting the doctors; (Reason? Back pain. Eleanor’s diagnosis? Breasts. ‘You see, I’ve weighed them, and they’re almost half a stone combined.’) the beauticians (misunderstanding her Hollywood, she complains, ‘I am interested in a normal adult man. He will enjoy sexual relations with a normal adult woman. Are you trying to imply he’s some sort of paedophile’) and ordering a pizza (‘The flaw with the pizza plan was the wine. They didn’t deliver it, the man on the phone said, and actually sounded quite amused I asked.’) 

Simply, Eleanor hasn’t been given the co-ordinates to navigate the world. After a few chapters it becomes clear that Eleanor isn’t suffering from a learning difficulty; it isn’t nature that’s made her awkward, but nurture. When a social services visitor comes round at the end of the first section, we discover there’s darkness behind the laughs. From hereon, Eleanor isn’t to be laughed at as ridiculous, but cheered on as resilient.

Eleanor’s upbringing is strange; consequently, her behaviour is too. When she falls for a musician at a gig, she fantasises over their life together. Her head-in-the-clouds obsession of him is one feature of the book. Counter to this is a down-on-the-ground moment that has a huge impact on the story. One day when a colleague Raymond walks out of work with her, they find an old man sprawled outside; with his head cracked and consciousness scrambled, they have to move fast. Raymond takes control whilst Eleanor panics about ringing 999. This intervention in someone else’s life will change her own.

By the end of the novel there will be more details about Eleanor’s past; what’s more interesting though is where she's heading. You see, Honeyman’s story is a call-to-arms, to embrace the Eleanor Rigby/Oliphant’s of this world with the attention they deserve; to bring them out of their cocoons into a butterfly world of soaring possibility. 

By looking at the lonely people, the affliction can be beaten, the disease cured. It's not ok in a civilised society to ostracise a colleague because they're different, to forget a child because they're quiet, to ridicule someone because they're on their own. In a population of plenty, it's important to remember loneliness is real and here.

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

They belong here with you and me, together in community.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is out now. 

The Good Fight

Take the interesting kids at school. They’re in an established group, a band of brothers, a coterie of girls, a mix of flavours. Their in-jokes have been in existence since the dawn of time. Explaining them is futile – you had to have been there. There’s a rhythm to the interaction too: an ability to see a friend in space, tee them up and deliver the joke emphatically into the net. Now, imagine the group disbands (a job opportunity comes up, a college placement opens up, a Yoko Ono enters the fray): what happens to that chemistry? Can it be transposed to a new group with different people? No, it can’t. You’re starting over. There’s a very real risk it’ll never be rediscovered. A chance that repartee rests in the rear-view mirror; rapport in the scrap book of history. 

  

For every Frasier, there is a Joey. Spin-offs aren’t a guaranteed success. Yes, the writing team and network producers may be the same, but the show isn’t. A character may work in a particular setting, interacting with regular characters; take them out of that world though and they appear lost, adrift. Many spin-offs don’t work because networks take for granted the good will of the audience. They think: ‘well, they all enjoyed the other show they were in, therefore they’ll enjoy this one.’ The mistake they make is that the audience enjoyed the group dynamic, the interplay and frictions – they weren’t interested in one character alone. Where Better Call Saul, Frasier and The Good Fight have succeeded is creating other characters that are as interesting as the surviving protagonists. Saul wouldn’t have worked without Chuck, nor would Frasier have survived without Niles. In spin-off, forget the old: the new characters are the thing.

My brother has the first season on DVD.

The Good Wife was the moniker title for Alicia Florrick, a wronged woman who stands by her husband following a public scandal. It tracked the attorney’s return to work and subsequent rise through the profession, superseding her husband and her own expectations in the process. It ran for seven years and is the Netflix box-set to go to if you’ve finished Breaking Bad. Worth noting, I also think it’s quite poetic that so many characters from David Simon’s superlative TV show The Wire pop up in the CBS drama, as both programmes are more than genre pieces: they examine politics, economics and social forces all whilst being thoroughly entertaining. Its successor is The Good Fight- the wife being dropped because Alicia is no longer a part of proceedings.

The original.

The show begins with Diane Lockhart ready to retire and set up home in Europe. She’s given her notice to the law firm that featured so heavily in The Good Wife. Unfortunately, just as she’s about to get the keys, her accountant calls and says the money simply isn’t there. Diane is one of Chicago’s best lawyers. She is to law what Capone is to crime. She’s the hot-shot with the enviable winning streak. It simply doesn’t make sense that she can't afford her autumn days. The reason she hasn’t got the money is because she invested in her friend’s get-richer scheme. A scheme that's defrauded million of pounds from hundreds of Americans. With her dreams in smoke, she goes back to the firm she helped make famous. They won’t bring her back into the fold on her terms though. History doesn’t count for much in the cutthroat world of criminal law. Despite growing the business, she can’t be made partner again; as a result, she walks.

What makes this show great is that it chooses not to focus on one character, like they did in The Good Wife. The spin-off isn’t the Diane Lockhart show. Her losing it and re-gathering it is an important focus of the series, but it isn’t the only one. Lucca Quinn, who was introduced towards the end of The Good Wife, is a tremendous heroine, every bit as interesting as Diane. On top of that is Maia Rindell, Diane’s goddaughter, whose father sold Lockhart the lie. The triumvirate are fantastic, representing the ladder of a law firm: from the fledgling Rindell to the aspiring Quinn to the established Lockhart. All three women come to work at the same firm, a growing company that specialise in police brutality cases. Lockhart’s heart bleeds liberalism; it’s a firm that matches her ideals. Ironically retirement's brought her a job she loves.

Quinn, Lockhart and Rindell.

The first season focuses on the investigation into Maia’s involvement with her father’s financial scheme, with other transitory stories running alongside. With this cleared up by the second season, the show enjoys a real political edge. Each episode title in this season reference how long Trump’s been in office- he is referenced regularly too. As a woman that had a picture alongside Hilary on her desk in The Good Wife, it’s fair to say that Diane is having something of an existential crisis. For her, the victories in court seem meaningless when the bigger fights are being lost in the Senate.

With strong women at its centre and diversity at its core, the show is anathema to creaky minded republicans. It’s fighting the good fight against Trump’s politics, and is entertaining to boot. What more could you ask for?  

The Good Fight Season 2 is available on More4. (You don't have to watch Season 1 to know what's going on.)