#Watching #Unseen (in australia, on netflix) Two seasons of six episodes each.
It took 30 minutes to win me over, but this show really hooked me in.
It has received mixed ratings, which is not a problem in itself… another equally important question, imo, is whether or not it’s entertaining — after all, if we only watched perfect shows, we would be running in marathons all the time, not sitting on a couch watching the tele.
The story begins in Cape Town, where the main character, Zenzi Mwale is a cleaner, searching for her missing husband. She is trapped by truly shit circumstances and, like too many people in the world, she has little income and is at the mercy of assholes. There’s nothing entertaining about constantly having to think <there but for the grace of god>, but after about 30 minutes the story soon moved beyond my own reality into something i can’t imagine happening to me. I didn’t feel so helpless about Zenzi, then, and cared about where the story would go next. I’m not going to share a trailer here, because i think it contains spoilers.
Cape Town and South Africa are not really <characters> in this story.
I remember when Sense8 first appeared, and there was a lot of opinion about whether it was rubbish or not. People from India were outraged by the stereotypes, and people from Kenya/ Africa were outraged by the representation of Africa, and so on and so on… and so on. (Okay, the australian was stereotyped too, but really, i think we deserved it…)
To some extent, problems with representation are a sign of *under*-representation — we see so little of some worlds that they become foreground instead of background. No one story can be all things to all people.
In the end, Sense8 had positives and negatives, and some people loved it and some people didn’t. I think Unseen is a bit like that — there is some hammy acting (not much, and it’s probably because of the writing), but on the whole it’s not meant to be a documentary about south africa (or zimbabwe) it’s just a story that’s reasonably well made.
This is not a story about a vulnerable person, it’s a david and goliath thriller with goodies and baddies, and Zenzi is a much stronger character than you might think at first glance. Gail Mabalane does a brilliant and convincing job as Zenzi.
There is some violence, but not a lot of gore — which is to say, the violence is of a sort we have become inured to, and it is there to drive the story, rather than a central feature of the show itself.
There wasn’t a lot about it that i found annoying — no excessively loud and intrusive soundtrack music, no gratuitous sexualised violence (taylor sheridan i’m complaining about you) no message that free markets make everyone free and similar BS, so it was different, and i really enjoyed it.