Anatomy of a Netflix Disaster

 

It looked very promising at first.  Usually the Top 10 Netflix shows in Indonesia are shows for children and teens or insipid romances, so when Anatomy of a Scandal popped up on the Indonesian Top 10, I was excited that there was something interesting on the list for a change.  Even better, one of my favorite actors, Rupert Friend, is the star of this limited series.

My excitement quickly turned to horror as I don't know if I've ever been as disappointed with a series as this one.  In Anatomy of a Scandal, a British MP (played by Friend) is outed for having an affair with one of his attractive, young female employees.  When he sits down to inform his beautiful, perfect wife that the press is about to out him, that's when we realize that this series is destined to be a disaster. 

 "Oh it was nothing, just sex, I still love you" the MP assures his wife.  

"How many times did you have sex?" his wife inquires.

"Oh maybe 20 or 30 times?"

"Where?"

"In the parliament elevators, hotels, the party conference, etc."

Yet, this perfect mother and wife decides to stand by her husband, despite her husband's increasingly disgraceful excuses for his behavior.  Why she didn't pack up the kids and escape this wretched person is a mystery that Anatomy of a Scandal doesn't well answer.

Then we start showing flashbacks to the couple's drunken party college days at Oxford, and other tiresome stuff. How a series can be both tawdry and tedious at the same time is really a difficult feat to pull off.

And the dialogue, how clumsy and clunky it is--much like this sentence.

Finally, what ended my viewing of AOAS was the final scene in the first episode. Rupert Friend's character is walking out to his car, parked outside of the parliament building, when he is approached by two detectives who inform him that he is also being accused of rape by the woman with whom he had the affair.  The episode concludes with Friend's character doubling over as if he were hit by a punch, followed by him flying backwards through the air as if Harry Potter had put some backwards flying spell on him.  I think what the director was attempting to do was show what a powerful blow this was to the MP, but this strange piece of surrealistic symbolism was so bizarre and out of place that the viewer doesn't know what to think.

I watched the first few seconds of Episode 2, just to see what happens after Rupert flies through the air, but the episode begins back at the family home, as if Flying Rupert had never happened.  That's when I stopped.

I was so perplexed that I thought perhaps that I, the white-bearded man, was just being an old grouch and I was missing something in that first episode--maybe AOAS is much better than I was giving it credit for. But the reviewers, some very young, with beards possessing no whiteness at all, had reached a similar consensus that AOAS was a miserable fiasco, from the start through all six episodes.  The flying scene seemed to mystify everyone, and even worse was how the entire issue of sexual misconduct was handled, most everyone agreed.

So...I'm sparing you from wasting your time on this Netflix disaster.  I ended up finishing the night reading a couple chapters of a book I had purchased in Phnom Penh (The History of Cambodia) and found it a far more entertaining and intriguing than listening to Rupert Friend's character enumerate his many whiny, disingenuous excuses for his disgraceful behavior or watching him inexplicably soar higher than Peter Pan. 

Rating:  * 1/2  (out of 5 possible stars *****)