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neveralarchSo, The Thick of It wrapped up this week? I just watched the last episode, and I'm feeling, wow, super drained.
TToI is, I think, my forever show - basically every episode of it has made me happy that it exists. I'm not even sure if I can define what it is that I find so great about it. Partly, obviously, it's the politics, and also obvious is that every character is my exact type (especially but not exclusively Malcolm, who is most people's favorite - every single character has that blend of amorality and being terrible at things that I find so fascinating). The writers have such a good grasp of entropy and the way situations go spiraling out of control. And the way TToI crosses over into the real world is really interesting: @MTuckerNo10, the op-eds, the twitter arguments between the writers and Alastair Campbell. But there's just something about TToI that I'm in absolute love with, even though I try to recognize some of its problems, and even though I've never really had the fandom community that I had with Who.
A lot of Political Science people right about now got into politics while watching The West Wing, which I've never seen (I watched all of Sports Night and then burnt out on Sorkin). I started studying politics well before I started watching TToI, but it did solidify something in me, some fascination with spin and the public and how we can laugh at the government and distrust it and still, somehow, keep electing people. I can track down when I started watching TToI to this post, which just makes me think of sitting in my cold room in an overfull house of juniors and crying laughing, because it was so good. When I visited London I bought a bunch of postcards and the TToI book from an Oxfam, and that was it. God, I don't understand how I've only spent two years on this show, because waiting for series four felt like forever.
I've never really interacted with TToI fandom because there's this fandom thing where people get very attached to characters and TToI is a bad place for that - Hugh got totally ditched after series 1, Jamie and Julius were never seen in series 4 - and so the fandom wants something very different from what the show wants to give them. I'm not saying I'm like, special and immune (you should see me when I'm watching Who and Delgado is on screen, it's terrible), but I do get way more invested in writing style and plot and ideas than characters. And, man, TToI is so full of amazing writing and fascinating ideas - s4 episode 6 was one of the best hours of television that I've ever seen. Also I love ambiguous endings more than almost anything. So, I don't know, I see fandom saying that the end of the series fell a bit flat, and I see critics saying it was great, and I am firmly with the critics. This is why I never offer TToI for Yuletide, and then end up trawling around for prompts when I'm doing my absurd Yuletide Madness thing, because I don't really want the character study or the shipfic or the crossover (except for when I do... because I've written two of those), I just want more. More of this show.
And now there won't be any more.
Agh, I don't know. This post is all over the place. I just wanted a record of the end, since the beginning is already on this blog. Here, have a picture of Peter Capaldi with a Dalek.
TToI is, I think, my forever show - basically every episode of it has made me happy that it exists. I'm not even sure if I can define what it is that I find so great about it. Partly, obviously, it's the politics, and also obvious is that every character is my exact type (especially but not exclusively Malcolm, who is most people's favorite - every single character has that blend of amorality and being terrible at things that I find so fascinating). The writers have such a good grasp of entropy and the way situations go spiraling out of control. And the way TToI crosses over into the real world is really interesting: @MTuckerNo10, the op-eds, the twitter arguments between the writers and Alastair Campbell. But there's just something about TToI that I'm in absolute love with, even though I try to recognize some of its problems, and even though I've never really had the fandom community that I had with Who.
A lot of Political Science people right about now got into politics while watching The West Wing, which I've never seen (I watched all of Sports Night and then burnt out on Sorkin). I started studying politics well before I started watching TToI, but it did solidify something in me, some fascination with spin and the public and how we can laugh at the government and distrust it and still, somehow, keep electing people. I can track down when I started watching TToI to this post, which just makes me think of sitting in my cold room in an overfull house of juniors and crying laughing, because it was so good. When I visited London I bought a bunch of postcards and the TToI book from an Oxfam, and that was it. God, I don't understand how I've only spent two years on this show, because waiting for series four felt like forever.
I've never really interacted with TToI fandom because there's this fandom thing where people get very attached to characters and TToI is a bad place for that - Hugh got totally ditched after series 1, Jamie and Julius were never seen in series 4 - and so the fandom wants something very different from what the show wants to give them. I'm not saying I'm like, special and immune (you should see me when I'm watching Who and Delgado is on screen, it's terrible), but I do get way more invested in writing style and plot and ideas than characters. And, man, TToI is so full of amazing writing and fascinating ideas - s4 episode 6 was one of the best hours of television that I've ever seen. Also I love ambiguous endings more than almost anything. So, I don't know, I see fandom saying that the end of the series fell a bit flat, and I see critics saying it was great, and I am firmly with the critics. This is why I never offer TToI for Yuletide, and then end up trawling around for prompts when I'm doing my absurd Yuletide Madness thing, because I don't really want the character study or the shipfic or the crossover (except for when I do... because I've written two of those), I just want more. More of this show.
And now there won't be any more.
Agh, I don't know. This post is all over the place. I just wanted a record of the end, since the beginning is already on this blog. Here, have a picture of Peter Capaldi with a Dalek.
