IN MY VIEW
Matthew Vice
E.TV and the SABC cranked out a few new local series in the first quarter of the year, and it looks like the trend is set to continue. Starting on Monday at 21:30 on e.tv is yet another new local series. It’s called Harvest, and information about it is pretty scarce, but there are three short trailers that you might have seen, one for each of the lead characters.
The sombre narration in the trailers as each woman details her devious plans might clue you in that this isn’t a laugh-aminute family-fun-time show, which is probably why it’s in the later half of the prime-time slots. It’s a crime drama series about three women, Celia (Masasa Mbangeni), Clementine (Vatiswa Ndara) and Tshepiso (Khanya Mkangisa), who take control of a dangerous marijuanas-muggling business after their husbands are murdered.
My keenly honed journalistic senses tell me that the title of the show alludes to the herbal crop in which the women trade. Presumably we’ll find out more about the murders, or maybe it will focus entirely on the three women competing to become queen of the underworld. The cast also includes Simphiwe Mini, Mutodi Neshehe, Muzi Mathebula and Kagiso Modupe.
While digging around for something a little different to feature, I happened upon Six Degrees of Everything (Sony MAX,
channel 128, Tuesday, 21:00), featuring the Fine Brothers. The brothers, Benny and Rafi, pictured above, are wildly successful internet personalities who rose to fame making videos for YouTube, most notably their React series. The Fine Brothers are not the only guys who made “reaction” videos and they probably weren’t the first either. Their career hit a bit of a bump when they tried to copyright the term “react”. Their subsequent loss of subscribers and other forms of protest forced them to abandon the idea quite quickly.
The Fine Brothers’ style was to gather a dozen or so viewers from a certain demographic such as kids, pensioners, students and so on, and make them watch a particular viral video to get them to comment on it. It’s wonderfully, delightfully . . . boring. I’ll never understand reaction videos, no matter who is making them.
Six Degrees of Everything, on the other hand, is more interesting. It’s based on the idea of six degrees of separation, which you’ll have to look up to get a full explanation because I haven’t got space here — but basically the theory is that everything in the world can be connected by no more than six steps. How exactly? Well, by concepts, or ideas, or relationships. If it sounds pretty nebulous, it is. It’s not hard to connect anything to anything in six steps if you’re allowed to make the connections as tenuous as you like.
For instance, ever wondered how to connect Albert Einstein to breast implants? How about cannibals and cannabis? Or girl scouts and Game of Thrones? The Fine Brothers spice up their 15-minute episodes with little YouTube-style comedy sketches for each step or “degree”, some of which might make you seriously consider maybe laughing. Just a little. On the inside.
I haven’t sneered at the History Channel in yonks, and wondered if it had gotten better. Nope. There
are still only two types of show on it: those that don’t concern history in any way, and those that concern history in seriously suspicious ways. Case in point: Search for the Lost Giants (History Channel, Channel
186, 18:35). Stonemason brothers Bill and Jim Viera persuaded people to follow them with cameras as they headed into the woods of Massachusetts to kick rocks in search of non-existent giant skeletons and comment on how ancient, crumbling stonework “couldn’t have been built” by normal-sized people. My forehead still hurts from the facepalm. Occasionally they’ll drag scientific gizmos into the field to try and add an air of rigour to the vapid proceedings. There are plenty of fascinating, real ancient things to find. You don’t need to make up imaginary ones.