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.

Hooten and the Lady - 'The Amazon' and 'Rome'

I really hope these two don't sleep together.

The archaically titled Hooten & the Lady is an adventure show of the kind that aims to be known as rollicking, following the exploits of titular characters Ulysses Hooten (Michael Landes) and Lady Alex Spencer-Park (Ophelia Lovibond).

In 'The Amazon', usually library-bound curator Alex - an expert in the field of archaeology; like, all of it - somehow persuades the British Museum to fund a one-woman expedition into the heart of the Amazon to locate the lost final camp of a Victorian adventurer who disappeared while searching for the lost city of Zed, source of the El Dorado myth. Unfortunately, while negotiating for directions she is interrupted by the brash American treasure hunter Hooten, who inadvertently steals the local tribe's golden skull thingy, and because as we all know, primitive tribes love them some golden skulls and frontier justice, it's pyre o'clock before you can say knife. They escape, argue, find the camp and a map to the city, but kind of lose it again after Alex's embassy guide tries to off them and nick the treasure for himself.

This opening episode is dogged by the unpleasant feeling that white explorers might have had their day, and that having a tribe of Amazon natives with no English language or even subtitled dialogue threaten to kill and possibly eat our white leads over a misunderstanding is probably a lot not okay. It's a shame, because the basic pairing are quite likable, and reasonably evenly balanced, with Hooten's local smarts and tough guy swagger matched against Alex's booksmarts and confidence. It's also refreshing to see the bookish, unworldly female lead turn up in the jungle in trousers and boots; not a high heel in sight.

Alex's mum, played by Dr Jane Seymour, Medicine Quinn.

'Rome' is a much better experience, if only because the Italian Mob are a villain we can all get behind despising and white stereotypes are less uncomfortable than their non-white kin. Hooten ropes Alex into the quest for the last surviving Sibylline Book (which for a text from the 6th century BC looks hella modern and actually bookish) to help out a nun. The nuns are being coerced by the mob, who want to ransom the book back to the Vatican as a vital foundation of Rome's history, and I have to say it's nice to see the Vatican portrayed as concerned about cultural history rather than too busy hiding the secret bloodline of Christ.

We get a bit more range in the characters as well. Hooten has the diplomatic chops when it comes to the Mob, while Alex responds to the Mob boss's attempt to burn a page he doesn't like by setting his face on fire.

At this stage, I'm willing to stick with the series, although I suspect that the further it strays into 'exotica', the more uncomfortable it will get, and I'm likely to lose my patience with it if they overcook the will-they, won't-they of it all. Presumably her fiance is intended to turn out to be too dull for her, and since I can't for the life of me remember his face or indeed if we've seen his face, that's working, but I don't want to see her with Hooten either, any more than I want Robin to end up with Strike in the Cormoran Strike novels, however much of a toolbag her fiance was/husband is. Be your own windkeeper, Alex! You don't need no man to complete you!