On the couch... with Raymond Fogarty
Be wary of the name above the TV title. Things here may not be quite as they seem
You’ve probably met them at close of day, their vivid titles tempting you as you idly zap from channel to channel. ese are the TV shows that come trumpeting their potential on the coat-tails of the famous or fashionable or otherwise: as in ‘from the mind of Stephen King’ or ‘from the brain of Beelzebub’ or ‘from the rib of Adam’. Yes we’re talking new shows that come branded with the imprimatur of a currently white-hot talent or the stamp of genius, shows that follow the mantra that nothing succeeds like success or at least being associated with success.
Netflix’s latest, Nightflyers, is a sc-fi horror from the imagination of George RR Martin. Great, I’m thinking dragons in space. I’m also (for some reason) thinking of those ancient nautical maps where the cartographers ran out of facts and into fantasy, warning any seafarers venturing o the map with ‘Here be dragons!’ Well folks in the deep, dark, uncharted space of Nightflyers there be no dragons, no Whitewalkers either. However you do get a malevolent mind-reader, a creepy hologram captain and a chap who looks a bit like Stanley Kubrick wielding an axe.
George RR Martin is an exec producer on this zero gravity spin on the haunted house in space that was lmed entirely at Troy Studios, Limerick (and is in fact very loosely based on Martin’s 1980 novella of the same name). However I’m not sure how much else the great man had to do with it (too busy trying to catch up with writing Game of rones, I suspect) although he did get a private screening and reportedly gave it the thumbs up. Of course such endorsement is nothing new. In the long ago and far away, there was a TV series called Alfred Hitchcock Presents (for anyone born a er 1984, Hitchcock was the guy who made Psycho, the original one) which was topped and tailed by the famous director and full of psychos.
That was then. In another world, as yet unrealised and o all known charts, there are TV shows just waiting to be discovered. In this universe you may come across such series tagged ‘Mrs Brown Regurgitates’ (in which you think you’re watching the same show twice only to discover that not only is this true but you’re actually in the cast) or the putative mini-series billed as being ‘from the loins of Marty Morrissey’ in which we get the strange but true tale of a man from Clare who is universally loved but still travels everywhere with a life-size cardboard cut-out of himself, just in case. As ever, even in worlds not yet mapped, the viewer should always beware. Never judge a show by the name attached: it might be made of polystyrene and past glories.
Donal O’Donoghue