Choices - Hooten and the Lady and Hunters

Meh.

So, I talked a bit before about the fact that the current golden age of TV drama is actually a glut of product which not only allows, but requires that the viewer make choices. Or if I didn't then I meant to and just got distracted. It happens. Anyway, my latest choices not to watch are Hooten & the Lady and Hunters.

Hooten & the Lady is okay, but it's a show of another era. He's a lovable rogue, she's a posh academic; they fight crime, or at least retrieve antiquities. It's not the central dynamic I object to, not that she is comically inept in an actual fight, nor even the forced and unconvincing sexual tension. It just feels kind of weird to be watching a modern set show that is so... colonial. Our leads, a posh white Brit and a rough and tumble, mercenary Yank, travel to exotic locales, meet locals who mysteriously need a British Museum researcher and a raider of tombs to do what we will generously call archaeology for them, and retrieve priceless cultural artefacts in a quippy and irreverent fashion. Egypt in particular has a very established archaeological community and little need to bring in freewheeling, site-dynamiting dilettantes to do for them.

Yick.

On the other hand, at least it isn't Hunters, which tried to win me over to the side of its unlovable 'heroes' by introducing a heavy who puts women in cages, lures prostitutes into gratuitous threesomes in order to drill holes in their spines and makes out with his alien baby-mamma on the corpse, then murders his own child rather than allow it to be held by the humans. It's just plain nasty, and lacks the weighty substance needed to validate the unpleasantness. And, however vile the villain, our heroes are still jerks.

Sometimes you wonder why a series has been cancelled; not with Hunters. I might watch Hooten & the Lady if I found myself at a loose end; I'd have to be at my wits' end to go back to Hunters.