Earl Grey Books

For the last few months, one of my absolute favourite posts to put together every month is my Watching & Listening wrap-ups. In them, I talk about what movies, TV, podcasts etc. I’ve been consuming in that given month. It’s really nice to take a break from talking about books, but it does mean that I only get to talk about the things I’ve actually gotten to and not the things on my list. So today, we’re changing that and I’m sharing a couple of the shows I’d really like to watch in 2021.

Deutschland 86

I went through a stage a few years back where I only watched foreign-language shows and among them, Deutschland 83 was one of my absolute favourites. Deutschland 86 is the follow-on mini-series from that, obviously taking place three years later in 1986. There was a pretty big gap between the release of these two and in that time, most of those foreign-language shows I’d been watching finished or also took long breaks and so I turned back to watching mostly American shows. This one has now been out for three years and I still haven’t gotten around to it. I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy it, though maybe not as much as I did the first series but I feel like I need to be in the right frame of mind for it. Whatever that frame of mind is, I’m hoping I can actually get to this one before the year is out especially as the third series/season, Deutschland 89 came out last year and that one seems even more interesting to me than this one.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

I know—I’m probably one of the last people to see this. There’s a reason for it, I swear. When this was first airing I was a kid and this was my brother’s show. What does that mean? It means when it was on I wasn’t allowed to speak, let alone be in the same room. It worked both ways—I had Mary Kate and Ashley In Action, The Winx Club, Saddle Club and infinite others. Anyway, the point is that I never watched it when it was first out. I did start watching it a few years back and I do have to be honest and admit that I’m not great with animated shows either. I can get kind of distracted with animation and I end up looking at the art itself rather than paying attention to the actual story and then suddenly it’s been six episodes and I have no idea what’s happened. But 2021 is the year that I am going to get through this and then hopefully move onto Legend of Korra so that the friends that have been bugging me to watch it for over five years now will finally be happy with me.

Heroes

So this one is a little bit of a cheat. Heroes was a pre-teen obsession of mine—I started watching it probably about 2008 or so with a friend and we used to spend entire weekends just curled up on the couch trying to get through as many episodes as possible. We never actually got passed about the halfway point of season three and I’ve always meant to get back to it. So the plan for this year is to rewatch those first two and a half seasons and then finish off the last season and a half. Depending on how I feel after that, and also how long that takes me, I might be interested in trying Heroes Reborn which I believe is kind of like a mini-series sequel—honestly, I’m not entirely sure. Like I said, I loved this all those years ago so I’m hoping that at least the parts I’m rewatching stand up to my memories of that.

His Dark Materials

I’m running a little bit behind on this one, but I think I still have time to catch up right? I’d put off watching this series when it came out in 2019 because I wanted to reread the trilogy beforehand. Of course, then I didn’t reread the trilogy and I actually still haven’t. But I do plan on spending the rest of March getting to those three so I can start this series maybe towards the start of April. I’m not really sure how long it’ll take me to get through these episodes as I believe there are only the two seasons right now? I might even decide to start the Book of Dust series alongside watching this if I have the time. Now, I have heard kind of mixed things about this from different people but I’m still kind of hopeful and excited. It’s got to be better than the 2007 movie, right? This will probably be the first one that I get to off this list, so I guess I’ll be finding out soon!

The Mandalorian

See what I mean? So behind! I know that pretty much everyone else has been watching and freaking out over The Mandalorian since it came out in 2019 but as you can see, I’m slow and really great at procrastinating TV shows. I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of the Star Wars universe—I have seen all the movies, but I haven’t gone much further than that. This is definitely one that I was interested in as soon as it started to air, but I just kept putting it off and now there are two seasons of it and I haven’t even started. I truly no nothing about what this show is actually about—I don’t know when it’s set in terms of the short of Star Wars timeline but I also don’t really want to know ahead of time. I do really like Pedro Pascal as an actor so I’m interested to see him in this role and to see what this will add to the whole cinematic universe of the franchise.

The Game

I will admit that most of the reason I’m interested in this one is because I think Tom Hughes is extremely gorgeous and also a wonderful actor. This one has been on my list since I watched the first few episodes of Victoria and fell a little (okay, a lot) in love with Tom Hughes. I’ve seen a few clips of this one and it looks interesting so I hope the story will entertain me enough to watch through all six episodes. I think since it’s just a mini-series that it’ll be easy enough to make my way through in a short period of time too. I don’t really know too much about the plot other than that it takes place during the Cold War, that Tom Hughes seems to play a spy in MI5 and that it apparently ‘tells the story of invisible wars’ fought by them. I think the last thing that I watched that was kind of similar was actually another Tom Hughes project—a movie called Red Joan, I really liked that so I’m hoping I will feel similarly about this one.

And that’s it for today’s post. If you’re interested in seeing my thoughts about these shows as and when I watch them, make sure to check out my Watching & Listening posts from month to month!