This Week's Combo Binge

When there's sickness in the house and nobody feels like doing much of anything, it's TV binge time.

It started with a bit of a Ryan Reynolds binge: We re-watched the two Deadpool flicks, then went back for three of Reynolds's films we hadn't seen: The Proposal (excellent if you like rom-coms -- oddly, I do and Tamara doesn't), Green Lantern (meh), and The Hitman's Bodyguard (great fun).

Then it hit me that it's been quite some time since we've revisited The X-Files, so we watched part of the first season (and will get back to it later) before deciding to check out:

It's pretty good. There's only one season so far, and we're more than halfway through it. I enjoy Michael Connelly's novels featuring Mickey Haller, and liked the 2011 film version starring Matthew McConaughey, and the Netflix series version measures up.

One way it measures up that I find interesting is in casting. I'm not, generally speaking, big on "reboots," and I always want to see if the new actor will do as well as the previous one.

For example, after two Jack Reacher films featuring Tom Cruise, could Alan Ritchson really pull off the character without everyone looking at him and wanting to see Cruise instead? He did.

Likewise, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo makes the character of Mickey Haller his own, and Neve Campbell as Maggie McPherson and Becki Newton as Lorna Taylor hold up their roles at least as well  as Marisa Tomei and Pell James did in the movie. The series also brings in the characters Cisco and Izzy, well-done by Angus Sampson and Jazz Raycole.

A full-length series season obviously has more time to fill than a 90-minute feature film, and the series works various angles -- the relationship between Haller, his daughter, and his two ex-wives; two addicts and their recovery struggles; the Cisco-Taylor romance; etc. -- well.

One of my complaints about the modern TV series, especially of the "police procedural" and related varieties, is that they tend to turn each episode into a video-game-level-like "track down this week's maguffin" quest, with a cliff-hanger chaser. The Lincoln Lawyer doesn't seem to give in to the temptation to get lazy like that.

It's not that there aren't any cliff-hangers or that there's no progression ethos in sight, but the writers seem to have realized that they had time to let us care about the characters instead of just about "we must find that file" or "the protagonist's pliers are poised over the red wire (episode ends)" stuff. So far, they're doing a damn good job IMO. While we've watched two or three episodes a day, we've done so because they're interesting, not just to get past the latest cliff-hanger. It's not really a "binge" in that respect. It's just a series that's interesting enough to hang with.