potentialities

The 2011 BBC series Silk premiered tonight on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery, even though it is clearly not a mystery at all but a courtroom drama. I didn't think it was a particularly good courtroom drama, either, with a really rather regressive Woman in a Man's World premise that played out in the most paint-by-numbers possible way. Also, my dad didn't listen to Alan Cumming at the beginning, so I kept trying to hiss explanations of what the difference between a barrister and a solicitor is and why you would want to become Queen's Council in the first place. It is particularly difficult to explain what the purpose of a barrister is when the job description of the barristers on screen seems to be to turn up in courtrooms late with piles of binders of things they haven't read and bluff their way through hearings like lazy college students taking exams.

They're utterly unfilmable and thus unlikely to ever make it to Masterpiece Mystery, but I couldn't help drawing comparing and contrasting with the Hilary Tamar books, which are a.) more entertaining, b.) actually proper mysteries, with solutions and everything, c.) infinitely better depictions of women and, for that matter, men and narrators of coyly indeterminate gender, and d.) also illustrated by Edward Gorey, so I make that three points decisively in favor of Hilary and one tie. Alas for what is never to be.

Unrelated fun fact: apparently Sarah Caudwell was Olivia Wilde's half-aunt.