Vicious is Back! Watch it right now!

So, remember when I told you to find and watch Vicious' Season 1 at all costs (well, don't download it illegally; showrunners et al. need to be rewarded for their good work)? Did you?

Great, because Season 2 is here and you can watch it online right now. Given past PBS practices, you have at most three weeks per episode before they disappear, and Episode 1 was on Monday (August 24, 2015), so get cracking!

"How was episode one," you ask? "Was it still full of the amazing goodness of Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Derek Jacobi being catty with each other?"

Yes. The whole gang of bitter septuagenarians is back, the mantel of urns of dog ashes is back, Iwan Rheon is still being sexually harassed, Ian McKellan's character is still excessively proud of being an extra on Downton Abbey, etc.

Also, in Episode 1, Derek Jacobi's character Stuart attempts to pretend to be straight; it's part of a complicated ruse that Iwan Rheon's Ash walks into right after declaring to his girlfriend that Freddie (McKellan) and Stuart are "the most authentic people I know." The "masculine" walk Stuart adopts, a gait worthy of Monty Python, is alone worth watching the whole episode for.

So, what are you waiting for! Watch it now! Be entertained!

Summer Update

As summer comes upon us, I've (gasp!) been spending my time doing things other than TV so there hasn't been too much to blog about. I do have some small updates on what I've watched already:

Vicious: Bought season 1 on DVD as a birthday gift for my wife. We've already spent some good time laughing at British people being nasty to each other. Good fun was had by all.

Grace & Frankie: Still enjoying the show that the Richmond Times-Dispatch calls "great for old people, but sadly old people are too befuddled by new-fangled technology to use this 'Netflix' malarkey."

Game of Thrones: Up to date. Still entertained.

As always, my primary issue is that the show isn't just about Peter Dinklage (it took me four seasons to stop saying, "oh, crap, Kit Harrington's in this, let's watch him fumble about knowing nothing at the Wall for twenty minutes today," and a constant call-out to the screen of my wife's and mine for the first three seasons was "nobody loves you, Theon Greyjoy," which was modified from its original use on Mad Men, "nobody loves you, Pete Campbell"; both versions work equally well).

Peter Dinklage is like Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey; there's really no excuse for the show not to just be that character being clever all the time. I would watch both a Dinklage scenes-only edit of Game of Thrones and a Smith-only edit of Downton Abbey. I'll just have to put those ideas on the pile along with a version of Arrow where I can just ignore the flashbacks; I do not care what happened on the Island or not the Island or whatever.

Vicious - You Missed It and You Should Be Sad

For about two months last winter, PBS had the ITV comedy Vicious, starring Magneto/Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen) and I, Claudius (Sir Derek Jacobi). If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should buy all six episodes of season one (plus the Christmas special) on DVD immediately.

This was amazing and you should start 

feeling bad for not having watched it.

The premise of Vicious is that Freddie (Gandalf) and Stuart (Claudius) have been a couple for nearly 45 years, although Stuart has been in the closet to his mother for that entire time. After four decades, Stuart and Freddie's relationship mostly consists of being verbally and wittily nasty to the other, with occasional petty jealousy or overweening vanity thrown in for spice. 

Basically, it's two dude Dowager Countesses in a never-ending cage match of Brit wits throwing shade. I know. It is as awesome as it sounds. 

Despite their being pretty horrible people, Freddie and Stuart have friends: the omnisexual Violet Crosby (Frances de la Tour), the grump Mason (Philip Voss),  the memory-challenged Penelope (Marcia Warren), and Ramsay Bolton:

"Strangely, none of my lines in this show involve the term 'flaying.'"

That's right, Iwan Rheon is Freddie and Stuart's young neighbor Ash, a combination of optimism and naivete. That's right; he's the innocent and gullible one. It's ironic, but frankly, Rheon plays it well enough that you forget what happened to Theon Greyjoy for a while.

For the sci-fi and fantasy record, Frances de la Tour was in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sir Derek was in Underworld Evolution and a bunch of Doctor Who, and Philip Voss was in original Doctor Who as well as a small role in Octopussy, the most incoherent James Bond film ever made. You could have a convention just with the six-person cast of this show.

So, you missed Vicious last year. And it's basically available nowhere I can find streaming. You are saying to yourself, "how did I miss this?" I don't know, but it is a tragedy. On the plus side, season two will be on PBS sometime this summer.