How come the most innovative things in music are created by outsiders?

I love, love, LOVE “Riot Women.” I was aware of it, wasn’t that excited about watching it, but searching for shows after finishing “Blue Lights” I was doing research and I found out “Riot Women” was a SALLY WAINWRIGHT show! Wainwright was the creator of “Happy Valley,” which was my number one streaming television recommendation until it left Netflix and they made a third, not as good, season. All of “Happy Valley” is now available on BritBox, as is “Riot Women,” which is getting press and advertising and…they don’t make shows this good in the U.S.

Old women form a punk band. That was the hype. That’s not that exciting. I figured it was another of these productions focusing on the music as opposed to the people, riding on the coattails of a sound in order to get fans to tune in. Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s no playing of music, no band rehearsals until the underpinning story has rolled out.

What we’ve got here is…

Joanna Scanlan as Beth Thornton. Beth is depressed, her husband left her and her kid keeps her at arm’s length and her brother is a money-grubber and she’s seen as an old crone at the school where she teaches, a job she’d like to retire from, but she can’t.

And then Lorraine Ashbourne as Jess Burchill calls her and asks her if she wants to join her band. It’s a lark, only one tune at a talent show at the kids’ school.

Now I watched an entire episode of “Riot Women” before realizing that Joanna Scanlan was the big boss, DI Vivienne Deering, in “No Offence,” another British cop show that is also on BritBox. But in “Riot Women” Scanlan’s hair is brown as opposed to blonde, and she’s meek as opposed to forcefully in control and… I’m sure if you’re British, you recognize Scanlan, she’s a star over there, but the degree to which she folds into the role…that is acting.

As for Ashbourne… She played the role of Daphne Sparrow, matriarch of the crime family in “Sherwood,” another BritBox series. In “Sherwood” Ashbourne is intense, at times evil, so I kept waiting for her to evidence the same characteristics in “Riot Women,” but she does not. In “Riot Women” she’s the grandmother, whose unappreciative daughter with three kids from two men is living in her house, a woman who owns a bar, pays the bills, keeps the whole thing together.

Now to illustrate the quality of the above-mentioned shows, on RottenTomatoes, “Happy Valley” has a rating of 98/94, “No Offence” doesn’t have enough views for a critics’ rating, but the audience rating is 77, and “Sherwood” has a 96/55…I always ignore low ratings from the hoi polloi, when it comes to the wisdom of the crowd…you just can’t trust it when it comes to visual entertainment. My point being that these are quality shows that I wholeheartedly recommend, slam dunks, you won’t be e-mailing me that watching was a waste of time, anything but.

So what we’ve got here in “Riot Women” is post-menopausal females, considered over the hill by men and so much of the public, but still able and vital at their core. And Jess rounds up the girls for a band, the only one with any real skills is Beth, who plays the piano and…

They set to arguing about what to play. WATERLOO! Isn’t that what self-respecting creatures of the last century should be singing, a safe, successful song from the past?

NO! It is suggested they need to play a song that is the essence of rock and roll, with an edge, with danger, and the group is set to guessing and…

In my mind, there’s one specific song that fits this equation.

There’s a suggestion of “Back in Black,” which stuns me. Most visual productions are out of touch, but these women know that song and that album, it’s bedrock if you’re of that age. And I’m thinking of the quintessential rock song, there really is one, and then the choice is revealed and I’m absolutely correct, SATISFACTION!

I CAN’T GET NO!

Seems great until one woman complains it’s from the viewpoint of a man and therefore undoable and if you haven’t had a squabble in a band, then you haven’t been in one.

And Jess is complaining about feeling invisible, and then she and itinerant Kitty write a number based on the hook YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER! That’s what Jess’s now gone husband always used to say to her.

And they create this song at the piano, and I’m sitting there waiting for some tripe, but it’s actually good, singable with the truth absent from most of today’s hit parade! They’re singing about what they know. And when it is performed for the group, the most uptight woman, the stick in the mud, starts to cry, because she can relate to it.

There’s much more in the show, but…

What starts out as a lark, doing one song at the talent show, morphs into creating a real band…and the joy of that is delineated, and being in a group and playing music lifts everybody’s experience and I daresay IT’S THE MOST ROCK AND ROLL EVENT OF THE YEAR!

Ah, the year is short… I’ll say 2025 too. Because most of today’s popular music is bland, or a cartoon, fake-edgy, you might be able to dance to it, but you can’t truly relate to it. But the song written in “Riot Women”? ABSOLUTELY! How come Sally Wainwright knows how to connect with the audience better than the major labels, the traditional music business? Because they don’t start from the same sheet of paper, for Wainwright there’s no issue of looking cool, being cool. Label execs are afraid of releasing something that hipsters decry. But if you’re outside the system…

“Riot Women” is “KPop Demon Hunters” for adults. Targeting women who grew up with Hole and still have anger and an edge, however deeply it might be buried.

Just one complaint… I started “Riot Women” not knowing that the wankers at BritBox were dripping it out week by week. The bottom line is in terms of enjoyment, of flow, of a peak experience, all at once is far superior. These outlets break up the season for some faux business reason, but if they dropped all the episodes at once people could go deep and talk about it and… Most people don’t have a BritBox account. I’m writing about two episodes, do you think they’re going to sign up for that? No. But the outlet wants to keep me subscribing for another month or two…

Life doesn’t have these kinds of breaks, why should our visual entertainment? Serials went out with Dickens. That’s not how they release novels today. Hell, it’s hard enough to get people’s attention, let them partake at the trough and eat as much as they want.

However, you can stream all of “Happy Valley” and “No Offence” and “Sherwood” on BritBox, but…

Despite the best PR efforts of BritBox, “Riot Women” will remain a niche show. But if it were on Netflix…

Remember, distribution is KING!

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There is an argument between a live-in couple that is so accurate, so true to life, that I literally jolted upright and stared straight into the screen, because I’d been there and done that, more than once.

Now if this were an American series on Netflix everybody would be talking about it.

Actually, I was evaluating this latest season of “Blue Lights” as I was watching it. Rather than seeing it as exotic, a BBC production set in Belfast, I tried to watch it as a native would…to see if the show was really better than all American productions or…

Now the truth is “Blue Lights” is not the best English show I’ve ever seen, not even the best in the cop genre, for that I’d probably go with “Line of Duty,” but just when you’re settling in, entering the third episode of six, it gets intense. That’s when you know you’ve got a good show, when you can’t divorce yourself from it, when you’re involved, when you care about the actors and what happens.

So a few of the actors are too good-looking to be street cops. Maybe that’s my American bias, where good looks are only second to wealth in terms of advantage, but Nathan Braniff as Tommy Foster…I’m straight and I can even see his appeal…he’s got a magic, a charisma based on his looks that the average person does not possess. And maybe it’s the perfect coif, but Siân Brooke as Grace Ellis…she seems like she should be at a society party, wielding great power as opposed to down on the street. As for the two other woman street cops, Katherine Devlin and Dearbháile McKinney…I think their good looks are on purpose, they’re both babes playing against type, they’re cops because they want to make a difference. And isn’t it the people who want to make a difference who are always in the line of fire, the ones those with wealth and power look down upon if for no other reason than their remuneration is low and they’re in the line of fire, like social workers, like cops…

Now this is not London, this is Belfast. And the actors are from Ireland, the accents will blow your mind, as well as the constant use of “wee”…you’ll probably want to leave the subtitles on. And having been to Belfast…it’s eerie. The war between the Catholics and the Protestants…there are certain places you just don’t go. It’s palpable, with walls and barbed wire and if you’ve never been there, you might not believe some of what happens in “Blue Lights,” but you should.

So, this season focuses on drugs and their dealers and runners. And that’s not a new topic, but it’s well-executed here, and not everything that happens is predictable. But a running theme is the personal danger the peelers are in, and the choices they make.

The peelers… Cops in Britain are called that after Sir Robert Peel, who started the modern police force. And there’s an inscription “NO PEEL” hammered into a door at Oxford’s Christ Church in 1829. It’s eerie, right there in Harry Potterville, as if it was etched the night before.

And everybody in Belfast hates the peelers. 9/11 flipped the script in the U.S. Firemen and policemen (and women) were now seen as heroes, and if you came of age in the sixties, this is confounding, for they were the enemy…as they still are in Belfast.

And it’s a constant war between the public and the peelers, and the peelers aren’t always in control…to a degree they’re barely hanging on.

So, with the intensity, the acting (with no LOOK AT ME! elements) and the script… “Blue Lights” is no American show. It’s a definite cut above. The fact that the media was consumed for months over the last iteration of “White Lotus”… That Hollywood production isn’t in the LEAGUE of “Blue Lights.”

But “Blue Lights” is on BritBox and it’s foreign, if even in English, so it’s too heavy a lift for most Americans. But irrelevant of press, truth shines through. “Adolescence” was the best TV series last year, it was recognized by the Golden Globes, however worthless that organization might be, but it still has not penetrated the national consciousness in America, and I don’t suppose it ever will, although it’s there for the watching.

Anyway…

Right before the argument between Stevie and Grace, Grace has a moment…

Grace has a scene, gives a speech, not a soliloquy, she’s directing it at a perp, but it’s lengthy with pauses and emotion and unlike Meryl Streep, you do not see her acting. It’s pretty amazing.

And what Grace reveals in that interlude…

Stevie is unaware of. That’s the basis of the fight.

Secrets in a relationship, you don’t want any. Because they undercut the bedrock of the connection. So, when Stevie finds out that Grace has withheld… He’s indignant, he can’t get past it… And then, Grace says this is exactly why she didn’t tell him, for fear of his reaction…and it ratchets up from there, to the point where the entire relationship hangs in the balance.

I mean if you don’t have fights in relationships, that just means one person is not speaking their truth. But after you’ve been together for a while, in excess of a year or two, there’s an underlying bond you count on, and if anything threatens that, it shakes you up, throws everything into question. You’re talking, maybe not with your voices raised, but there is an intensity, and it starts to dawn on you, this could be it, this could be the trigger for the end of the relationship.

And the following morning when Grace walks into the kitchen, not quite lovey-dovey, but open and not arguing… Stevie still isn’t over it. He throws her statements from the night before back at her. I’m getting anxious as I write this!

And that’s the essence of art. The little things. The truths that resonate. That’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we connect with. It’s not about professionalism, not about the look, but the essence, which is too often absent from American TV. I watched “The Pitt,” I am not in the medical field, but it was long and drawn out and not for one moment did I not think it was Noah Wyle. I mean this is the best you can do?

And then there’s Bruno Mars. The talk this week is about his stadium dates and how many tickets he sold. And I’ve got nothing against Bruno per se, however, I listened to the new single and it’s POP! There’s always been pop, but it was looked at askance by those creating art…those on FM as opposed to AM, the classic rockers as opposed to the popsters.

It started to change back in the MTV eighties…to the pre-Beatle Top 40. All hits all the time. Everybody was trying to make a pop hit, and now pop dominates and everybody says to respect it…but this is like respecting the tech billionaires because they are rich. What we’re looking for is honesty, truth, reality, not surface…like we get in this argument on “Blue Lights.”

And I used to find this honesty in music much more than other media. Music made more money than movies, despite getting no respect, music paid for the Warner cable system. Makes me crazy the people who still respect the movies…that’s not where the action is today, and it’s certainly not in music, it’s in streaming television.

And the public knows it.

Guitarist Alex Skolnick got his start with Testament, but has broadened his interest to jazz with the Alex Skolnick Trio and has played with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Metal Allegiance and…

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/alex-skolnick/id1316200737?i=1000745276889

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/2c7259dc-cd5f-4fbb-9dae-8375b21f5ae8/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-alex-skolnick