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Harjunpää (2022)
Missed Potential
Harjunpää (known as 'Helsinki Crimes' in the English-speaking world) is a cop show set in Helsinki, Finland that has some interesting lead characters but ends up being just another generic police versus criminals show. The second episode with the psychotic ambulance driver is particularly cringe. It seems the producers tried to make a "ripped from the headlines" story featuring an 'incel' ambulance driver/video game producer and how he turns his violent misogynist fantasies into murderous reality. But they seem to have forgotten that the hype over incels turned killers is a few years old now and always was blown out of proportion, not to mention that murderous incels was a North American thing only.
Crime dramas from the Nordic countries often have an overt feminist subtext and while this is, to an extent, a reflection of modern Western society it does sometimes go over-the-top and this episode really pushes the men = bad, women = good trope. Why is portraying young men who have never been in a relationship or have difficulties relating to women as deranged misogynist losers acceptable when it is no longer okay, for good reason, to denigrate women or ethnic minorities? In real life such men (and boys) tend to be unhappy, depressed and lonely.
Also, this episode is so unsubtle that it veers into the ridiculous. The video game is called 'Masculine Power' and the murderer name drops Elliot Rogers, the American incel spree killer, as if the series' producers think their audience is a bit stupid and needs everything spelled out for them.
The other episodes that I've watched so far are standard police dramas with stereotypical cops that are married to their work and have little time to be parents or romantic partners. The storyline involving the two killer teenagers in episode 3 is also a bit strange as we are given no compelling reason why they turned into murderers. They have neglectful parents and a dysfunctional home life but why does that drive them to kill for fun? Revealing at the end that one kids was the son of a police officer adds nothing to the story.
Like so many shows in this genre Harjunpää,/Helsinki Crimes tries too hard to be "realistic" but it ends up being a collection of Nordic cop show stereotypes with an unsubtle and embarrassingly obvious didactic component.
It's watchable and mildly entertaining if one doesn't expect too much...but that's about it.
Bad Banks (2018)
A Flawed But Valuable Show
Bad Banks is the story of Jana Lieman, an ambitious investment banker working in the dog-eat-dog world of high finance. The show starts off promisingly but quickly deteriorates. It's biggest flaw by far is the lack of sympathetic leading characters. Every single leading character, including Jana, is borderline sociopathic with no redeeming qualities. They are singlemindedly focused on their careers (i.e. making lots and lots of money). They break the law, they engage in deceit and violence, they throw people - including their own young children - under the bus. They are emotionally and spiritually empty people driven only by personal ambition.
The problem is not that the characters aren't perfect; there many shows and movies that revolve around seriously flawed individuals, but even a brutal gangster in a mob drama usually has some redeeming qualities that endear him to the audience. They can see that he's not all bad, that he is conflicted about his role and the actions he engages in. This crucial aspect is absent from Bad Banks. Jana starts off as a relatable character who loves her partner and their daughter but two or three episodes in it's clear that she is abandoning them physically and emotionally for her career.
Everybody she associates with, from her boss to her co-workers, are amoral sociopaths who puts making money literally above everything else in life. So when Jana cries in self-pity (she does this a lot) after throwing away a card her daughter made for her, or her boss has a brief moment of self-doubt, it's impossible to feel any sympathy for them. The character that comes closest to being "normal" is her "friend" (these people don't have real friends) and co-worker who is emotionally abused by her horrible parents at every turn and obviously suffers greatly. But she nonetheless has no problem when it comes to treating people as means to further her career. Then there is Jana's other "friend" and co-worker who regularly explodes with rage and beats people into a bloody pulp. His crying and moping when his wife leaves him and takes their kids with her is not nearly enough to redeem him. Every single main character is like this, completely self-centered and tone deaf to their own amorality and sociopathic tendencies.
The second problem is that it's not clear whether the producers of Bad Banks intended this. I get the sense that Jana, for example, is supposed to be relatable as a modern, career-oriented woman who is "making her own life" rather than being constrained by family obligations and motherhood. She says as much when she pushes her daughter and partner out of her life. There are many scenes of Jana crying and there is a whole episode dedicated to her returning home, only to find out that her partner is seeing another woman, where she sneaks into her daughters bedroom to say farewell to her before leaving her child forever. The "message" it sends is that, sure, Jana has flaws but look at how emotionally affected she is when she does morally and ethically reprehensible things, so she can't be _that_ bad of a person. The problem is that it's always about her. Other people in her life who aren't monomaniacally focused on a banking career are treated as disposable. Crying about it afterwards does not make it okay.
It is one thing to acknowledge that a woman has a right to her own life and career but to present abandoning one's child and engaging in gratuitously selfish and amoral behavior as an acceptable alternative to traditional gender roles - as Bad Banks' producers seem to be doing - is problematic, to say the least. If women's liberation from traditional gender constraints is to mimic the worst of men's behavior where does that leave society?
Not surprisingly Bad Banks' portrayal of late-capitalist society is, perhaps inadvertently, bleak. The fact that the series' producers don't seem to realize how thoroughly unpleasant their leading characters are suggests that the amoral dystopia that western society is becoming has already been internalized by significant numbers of people. This makes the show a valuable snapshot of social attitudes in early 21st century Germany (and the west generally). The acting is also quite good and this helps make the show watchable despite its many flaws and the hopelessly over-the-top finale to Season 2. It will be interesting to see how the characters evolve (devolve?) in Season 3.
Jinn (2019)
Another Show From Nowhere
I've noticed a trend with Netflix and Amazon shows produced in countries that aren't part of the west. Many of them are not true to the cultures they are supposedly embedded in. Whether it's a show from Russia or Jordan (like the this one) too often these programs portray people from all parts of the world as basically western clones with western values who live like people in the west do.
Jinn is such a show. It's filmed in Amman, Jordan and supposed to be a 'coming of age' drama with supernatural elements. But these kids are simply not believable as typical teenagers living in an Arab culture. Anyone who knows something about Jordanian and Muslim culture will immediately notice this. Is this show specifically designed for westerners? If so, it gives them a false picture of what life is like in that culture. What's the point of that? Do they think westerners can only enjoy shows that reflect their culture back to them? If so, that's not very flattering. Not to mention that misrepresenting a culture is incredibly insulting to the people who actually live that culture.
I've seen many shows from 'foreign' countries that have been obviously westernized but if it's otherwise a watchable series with an interesting story, that can sometimes redeem it. Well Jinn is not one of those, unfortunately. It's pretty terrible all around. The scenario is not believable, the acting is mediocre and the Arabic to English translation is beyond amateurish.
Don't waste your time with this one.
Hanna (2019)
A watchable spy thriller with a subversive political subtext
An ok show with decent character development (mostly in Season One) that builds up a good amount of cliff-hanging suspense with each episode. The basic story is about a teenage girl who was raised secretly by her father in a remote Polish forest and taught how to fight and use weapons and lethal force to defend herself from sinister CIA agents who chase her across Europe and North Africa and want to kidnap and/or kill her. On that level it's not very "deep" or profound but it is an enjoyable watch if you like these kind of shows (spy thrillers).
But there is another layer beneath the obvious one that makes Hanna more interesting than it would otherwise be. Unlike most American produced shows the bad guys here are a secret team of Stars and Stripes waving CIA agents. In shows like this the American military and spy agencies are usually portrayed as good guys who murder and destroy, supposedly in the name of peace and freedom, but this series pushes back against that propaganda. The CIA spies chasing Hanna run covert training camps in Romania and the UK that brainwash orphaned and involuntarily abandoned teenage girls to be assassins for the American government and they are NOT, asbb by is so often the case, glorified as freedom fighters or reluctant heroes who have to have to do unpleasant things.
Granted, the bad guys are supposed to be a rogue group of "nationalists" within the CIA, which leaves the door open for a "good" CIA, but the message that the American military and espionage apparatus is not always a force for good comes through clearly.
It goes even further...in one scene a Black CIA operative tries to convince a Black trainee girl that they have so much in common but the girl shuts her down and tells her they are nothing alike. In this woke age of contrived racial solidarity that pits different ethnic groups against each other, suggesting that a shared racial heritage doesn't necessarily bond people together is downright subversive!
So, on one level Hanna is an ok but unspectacular fast-paced spy thriller, but on a more subtle level it pushes back against the prevailing neoliberal "woke" propaganda that tends to infuse Amazon/Netflix and other shows. It's not by any stretch of the imagination "right wing" (or "left wing") or radical in any way, it just gently prods viewers to question some of the unquestionable received wisdom that so often gets reinforced by the entertainment industry.
In this militarist age of glorified 'humanitarian war' (sic) and media reinforced polarization and tension between people and identity groups it's refreshing to see a show that breaks, even subtly, with the usual formula of cheerleading these things. It remains to be seen if Season Three will uphold this particular subtext or if Hanna will turn into just another unremarkable show.