There’s some tripe on Netflix isn’t there?

At times I need to put something on tv that I need to do some mindless knitting to. If I’m reading a pattern and have to be careful with my stitches, I’ve learned I must never watch a foreign film with subtitles or risk losing the entire meaning of the show.

I’ve been knitting some basic socks (that doesn’t have me looking down at the stitches) and as such, I needed to watch something that I could binge on. I’m a fan of foreign films and series (or UK) so I stumbled upon one a Swedish series called Love and Anarchy.

It’s about Sophie, a married business woman with two kids who works for a publishing house and ends up having a relationship with Max, the much younger IT guy who spies her getting off in her office one night. He films her then threatens that he’ll release the video unless she does a dare of his choice. It ends up them demanding dares of each other unbeknownst to the people on the office who are the unsuspecting victims. In between these dares, there’s the stories of her marriage, her lefty father (to me he’s the only sane one in the series) who laments the state of the world and the stories of her co-workers who seem to be old fashioned or incompetent.

I should have just stopped watching but no, the sock had to be finished so I continued.

Theres some laughter in the series but on the whole, it’s hit and miss for me because I decided that I didn’t like the main characters at all. They’re obnoxious when they’re doing the dares so they can observe each other and give themselves a thrill.

Sofie doesn’t strike me as a feminist nor particularly smart (as she’s touted in the series) when she completes the dares that leave others – the people she’s leading and managing with questions or surprise at how she’s behaving. They’re all got this look on their faces like “WTF?”

Most of all having sex everywhere in the office or getting off alone while watching porn on the office computer – I mean, who does that? It smacks of ego or ignorance. It’s obvious the script writers haven’t worked in an office (before where there are cameras all around and IT knows what websites you’re going into).

The character is egotistical, she doesn’t know how to solve problems, take a view of what’s happening in her life. We seem that her marriage lacks intimacy, her father is mentally unstable. Instead she plays these silly dares to escape her problems (but here’s the thing, she’s not escaping them – she simply ignores them, pretends they’re not happening) but in the process make her out to be silly and stupid. If you’re going through big issues like this in your life, why would you put yourself in a position where you come across as an idiot, jeopardise your CEO position, hide WHY you’re acting stupidly then hurt the people around you?

It doesn’t make sense.

Every time the storyline changes to where a lesson can be learned or that there’s something that we can begin to like her because she’s evolving, it reverts to something like a sex scene (which I have fast forwarded because it’s cringe) or a stupid dare (because it’s silly). In the meantime, I’m knitting madly and sighing, “oh fucking grow up!” ?

What irks me is not the character. It’s the script writers and the producers who rather than explore the human traits of the big issues going on in each of the character’s lives, each of them vulnerable in some way, they revert to the titillation. It gets tedious.

The result is a series that is “off”. It ends up being forgotten because nothing really makes a mark for you.

Sure have a sex scene but don’t make it all about that. That’s the basest expression that comes out because the characters are flawed in some way but don’t keep coming back to it because in the end, the viewer gets the reactions to them as I’m getting.

Another thing that irked me more than the sex scenes in fact are the inane business propositions mentioned by Sofie in the board room.

She’s touted as a genius when it comes to creative business solutions but she doles up the same solutions we are seeing in our life. “Content is King; make small time authors self publish because it’ll save the publishing house money but they have to pay for this guidance (bullshit that happens in real life); using social media influencers, etc” So they’re the extent of her good ideas around the board table that everyone laps up like they’ve never heard it before. Meanwhile I’m rolling my eyes thinking if this is indicative of the lack of novel and creative ideas in publishing houses then we are doomed.

I think I’ve reached the stage of grumpy old woman haven’t I? I’m reading far too much in the storyline where I think the characters and situations could have been far more evolved than they are portrayed on the screen. Or the writers could have done a bit more research about the office environment rather than just do the basic things we are seeing nowadays which are standard practices (not even good ones at that) and touting that as great business.

And please no more gratuitous sex scenes. It’s getting tedious.