Hello, my friend, welcome back to the world of Total Lockdown. :D
With a sudden spike of over 60 positive cases detected in Mizoram yesterday, there was an emergency meeting held late last night between various Ministers, CS, Department heads, ZMC heads and other NGO heads, and we're now back to four days of Total Lockdown in Aizawl.
None of us are strangers to a Total Lockdown by now, and many of us continued to minimize social interactions and avoided going out even after the lockdown in Mizoram was officially lifted months ago, but still, you can't ignore that eerie feeling of a mandatory lockdown.
Well, to help you cope through these four days of Total Lockdown in Aizawl, here are four Netflix (India) TV shows that I really recommend you watch.
Now before I start, let me tell you that these TV shows are not popular, at least among our Mizo community (or as we say in Mizo - "a common lo"). I'm basing this hypothesis based on what I have seen at various Mizo social groups and forums, and I haven't seen anybody talk about these particular shows yet, so if you have already seen them before, I apologize in advance.
They're not any of the shows that most of us Mizos have watched on Netflix, the popular ones, like Breaking Bad, Suits, Blacklist, Sherlock, Peaky Blinders, Money Heist, Narcos, Mindhunters etc. But they are all abso-freaking-lutely amazing and definitely worth binge-watching. And so, without further wasting your time (because you have to binge-watch them all), here are my four selected Netflix shows for this Lockdown period:
1. Line of Duty
Duration: 5 seasons, 6 episodes each.
IMDB rating: 8.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%
Line of Duty is a British show about an Anti-Corruption Unit within the police department, and how they tried to take down corrupt police officers. The beauty of this show is that unlike other police TV shows where the cops put on their hero capes and go guns blazing and shoot down all the bad guys, in this show, most of the action takes place inside the office, during interrogations. :)
Yeah, you're probably thinking that's boring, right? Wrong. It is bloody suspenseful. And the script has been written extremely well. You'll come across a lot of new abbreviations you're not familiar with, like DC, DS, DI, AFO, TFC, UCO, ETC. :P but it is written in such a way that you'll soon be familiar with what the abbreviations stand for. The show also has a lot of realistic police protocols, bureaucratic red-tapes and organization politics, something that most of us can relate to.
The actors and acting are superb, and you'll be sitting at the edge of your seat throughout the entire seasons. The only negative thing about this show is that the latest season (season 5) released last year, is not there on Netflix. Netflix apparently lost the license to stream the latest season, and so you'll find it on BBC One (BBC iPlayer), or from your trusted torrent site :D :P
2. Shetland
Duration: 5 seasons, 6 episodes each.
IMDB rating: 8.1
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
Shetland is a Scottish show about a Detective Inspector and his team who investigate crimes in a small group of islands called Shetland. The beauty of this show is that I can relate it so much with our Mizo community because it takes place within a small close-knitted society like ours where everybody knows each other types.
In the first season, each case went on for two episodes each, but from season 2 onwards, a case takes up an entire season. Apart from the well written dialogues and script, the scenery is just breathtakingly beautiful. It makes me so want to visit the place one day, maybe after this CoVid-19 pandemic is over.
You might want to watch it with subtitles on because it is a little bit difficult to catch some of the heavy Scottish accent. It is quite educational for me too to learn a lot of common Scottish words, like "cannae" instead of "cannot", or "da moarn" for "tomorrow", or even a complete sentence like "I dinnae ken were the wee fellow be" which means "I don't know where the little guy is" :D
3. Fauda
Duration: 3 seasons, 12 episodes each.
IMDB rating: 8.2
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
Fauda is an Israeli show about an elite branch of the IDF (Israel Defense Force) specializing in operating undercover among the Palestinians and their attempts to infiltrate Hamas and prevent attacks on Israel. Fauda means "Chaos" in Arabic, and the entire show is in Hebrew and Arabic.
To me, the show is as badass as "Narcos", so yeah, I was a bit surprised most of my friends here in Mizoram have never even heard of this show. It is definitely worth binge-watching, though you'll have to watch it with an open mind. The show has been heavily criticized by many Palestinians and Israelis alike, accusing it of being too soft on either sides. But then again, that is not surprising because of the ongoing conflict between the two states.
I think what I like the best about the show is how the main "action heroes" are all just normal ordinary people, you know, they're fat or old, they aren't good looking and they seem to be out of shape too. The kinda people you and I can relate to, lolz. So, do give this show a try, you won't regret it, it gives you a good glimpse into the current situation of that region.
4. Rake
Duration: 5 seasons, 8 episodes each.
IMDB rating: 8.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 68%
Rake is an Australian show about a corrupt criminal lawyer called Cleaver Greene. He is your typical badboy, always getting into trouble and delivering great humour punches. Cleaver is my new favourite antihero (though the show is a bit old and I only discovered it recently).
An antihero is the main character in a show who does things the opposite of what a conventional hero does, you know, being goody goody all the time and stuff. Some of my favourite antihero characters are Dr. Gregory House from "House", Dexter from "Dexter", Vic from "The Shield", Walter from "Breaking Bad", Jax from "Sons of Anarchy", Don Draper from "Mad Men", Michael Scofield from "Prison Break", Raymond Reddington from "Blacklist" and of course Tony freaking Soprano from "The Sopranos". Good to have Cleaver join this list.
What I like the best about this show is how most of the cases are quite controversial. Cleaver has to defend the mob, a cannibal, a bigamist, a far-right racist, a whistleblower, a sociopath and so on, and they are usually guilty of the crime they are accused of. And he also frequently ends up losing his case, making it very different from most of the legal TV shows out there where the main characters always win at the end of the episode.
Just a warning though, there are a few episodes with sex and nudity, so this is not a show to watch with your family, lolz. Other than that, it is all good. There is an American version of this show, which from the reviews, utterly flopped. Everybody talked about how it is of no match to the original Australian version.
And so, I'll end my post with this. I hope this post was helpful to you. I have covered a British show, a Scottish show, an Israeli show and an Australian show. I do have a few other great shows I would like to recommend to you but they are not on Netflix, so maybe I'll talk about those later.
Hope you spend your 4 days of lockdown enjoying these 4 shows. Until my next blog update then, cheers.
