I am, like most everybody, binging TV like it is my job. I blast through whole series in a matter of days, sometimes day, singular. I enjoy a good British police procedural or a whodunnit so I stumbled on The Stranger. The official description:
“A mysterious stranger tells a man a secret that has a devastating impact on his seemingly perfect life. This Stranger is a woman in her 20s with a baseball cap, and is learned to be correlated with more secrets as the series progresses. This secret affects the man’s wife who goes missing as a result.”
It was a fine show, nothing special. I wouldn’t recommend it but I wouldn’t not recommend it. There were only two things that really stuck with me. One, the lead character has really great tiles in their foyer. Every time the entryway came on screen I didn’t hear what was happening, they could have told who the stranger was and I would have missed it.
Two, odd opening sequence. It starts like your typical show of this nature: Drone footage of gloomy countryside, closeups on small items that will be important, etc.
But near the end it took an odd turn. A llama plays a small role in this show but when you’re watching the first episode you don’t know that so out of nowhere this creepy-as-hell 3D llama head shows up. The camera zooms in on its giant wet globular eye and a bonfire is reflected. Again, a bonfire plays a role in this show but you don’t know that. It gives the impression that an all-seeing, all-knowing llama who may or may not be a satanist / terminator is a critical part of this British countryside mystery thriller. I think I audibly said, “What’s this now?”
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is this trend to have very “real” looking models. Like, not unattainable beauty, but all manner of beauty. Sephora has been really good about showing this.
Gucci is also on this bandwagon which is great. The only problem is it seems like they’re going out of their way to make the photos as unattractive as possible. One of them came up on my Facebook feed and I was like, “Nope. Too much. Too close, too bright, all the ‘too’s.”
Either the models need to be appealing or the photography style needs to be appealing. You can’t have neither.
Update 12/21/2020: Gucci. Gucci, stop. Just stop.
