Yes, but what have you been watching on TV?

It's been a while since I watched it, but the Swedish show 30 Degrees in February is possibly the best series I've ever seen on TV (it's available on Netflix). It's about various Swedes who go to Thailand (independently of each other) for various reasons. Most of the issues you might expect to be raised come up at one point or another, some more than others, but it's a drama rather than an essay. It's not, for instance, like Downton Abbey, where every time someone picks up a newspaper you know they will make some naive comment about historical events that we can laugh at. It's fairly realistic, in other words.

Most of the other things I might recommend are too obvious to be worth mentioning. I'll mention them anyway: Better Call Saul, Survivor, The Amazing Race, Into the Badlands (despite the appallingly humorless MK), The Handmaid's Tale, The Americans, Anthony Bourdain (the recent episode on Laos was especially good), Brockmire (the funniest TV show I've seen in ages), Gomorrah, etc. Less obvious, as far as I know, are El Marginal and Departures, both on Netflix. El Marginal is about Argentine gangsters and set mostly in a prison. If you like Gomorrah (Italian gangsters) and that kind of thing you should like this. Departures is a travel documentary featuring two twenty-something Canadians (three if you count the cameraman, who sometimes becomes visible). They are no intellectuals--if I had drunk so much that I threw up I would have edited it out of the show; not these guys--but the camerawork is good and they go to some cool places. In the last season, especially, they see people in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea whose way of life is surely not going to survive much longer, for good and bad. (Mostly for bad, I think, but then I'm not one of the women whose culture encourages them to collect scars from being whipped with sticks.)

And a new find: Samurai Gourmet (Netflix). It's sort of a cross between Iron Chef and Ikiru. A man who retires at 60 (is that the norm in Japan?) wonders what to do with himself and ends up enjoying a series of minor culinary adventures and personal growth with help from hallucinations of a samurai. Charming.