{"id":21122,"date":"2024-08-26T16:50:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T00:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=21122"},"modified":"2024-08-26T16:50:00","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T00:50:00","slug":"c-b-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2024\/08\/26\/c-b-strike\/","title":{"rendered":"C.B. Strike"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Trailer: https:\/\/rb.gy\/30b01c<\/p>\n<p>This series gets better and better.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never read a complete sentence of &#8220;Harry Potter.&#8221; And although I knew J.K. Rowling wrote genre books under a pseudonym, the reason I watched this series was because it had great RottenTomatoes ratings, 83\/93. And you know those exceed my threshold.<\/p>\n<p>Now &#8220;C.B. Strike,&#8221; or just &#8220;Strike&#8221; if you&#8217;re in the U.K., is not new. It premiered on Cinemax back in 2018, and I even get that channel, I might have heard the name, but I guess I&#8217;ve become suspicious of pay cable, and I refuse to watch anything week by week.<\/p>\n<p>But doing research I came across &#8220;C.B. Strike,&#8221; which is now on Max, and I&#8217;m glad I did.<\/p>\n<p>Cormoran Strike is the son of a famous musician and a supergroupie. He dropped out of Oxbridge to go to war, wherein he got half his leg blown off, and after returning and experiencing an up and down relationship with a pedigreed woman, he breaks free and dedicates all his energy to his P.I. business.<\/p>\n<p>As for Robin&#8230; She just takes a job working in Strike&#8217;s office as a temp, but she&#8217;s got a feel for it, and she wants to stick with it, even though the pay is sh*t.<\/p>\n<p>Now Robin is engaged to a putz playing the traditional game. He&#8217;s slick and monied, but controlling. And I guess this all comes down to whether you follow your dream or do what is expected of you or just follow the money. &#8220;C.B. Strike&#8221; is a great advertisement for following your passion.<\/p>\n<p>So there are multiple seasons of &#8220;C.B. Strike&#8221; and if you look them up online or see them in your Max app, they&#8217;re different.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s just stay with the Max app.<\/p>\n<p>The first season, shot in 2018, is seven episodes long and is three different stories, corresponding to three different J.K. Rowling\/Robert Galbraith books.<\/p>\n<p>And what you find in the first seven episodes is that the stories are wrapped up pretty quickly, faster than you&#8217;d want them to be. Cormoran will have a brain fart, and voila!, he figures it all out.<\/p>\n<p>But the second and third seasons, each made up of four episodes covering a single story each, are superior.<\/p>\n<p>This is one of the few series that gets better as it goes along.<\/p>\n<p>If you watch something with multiple seasons&#8230;if you like the first set of episodes, hang in there, oftentimes there&#8217;s a learning process and the producers self-correct the next time around.<\/p>\n<p>Really, the third season is excellent. It does have a bit too much explanation as opposed to action at the end, but you&#8217;re intrigued the whole time.<\/p>\n<p>Now the suspects in these cases change. But you don&#8217;t feel ripped-off by dead ends, and it&#8217;s not a complete twist who did it, you can understand it. But you&#8217;re guessing, and you enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p>But the best part of the series is the two leads, Tom Burke as Cormoran Blue Strike and Holliday Grainger as Robin Venetia Ellacott.<\/p>\n<p>Burke\/Strike almost never raises his voice. It&#8217;s not that he&#8217;s not intense, it&#8217;s not that he doesn&#8217;t care, but he speaks softly and it&#8217;s so affecting. We&#8217;re used to bombastic leads. With thousand watt personalities. That is not Burke\/Strike.<\/p>\n<p>As for Robin&#8230; Sure, she&#8217;s beautiful, but to a great degree she plays against type. She&#8217;s willing to get her hands dirty, to go for it.<\/p>\n<p>And of course there&#8217;s sexual tension. Will they or won&#8217;t they. I&#8217;ll let you watch the series and find out for yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Also, &#8220;C.B. Strike&#8221; is set in an autumn-like U.K. that generates a vibe in the viewer, that adds gravitas. And when you see the modern people against the old buildings&#8230; It shows how everybody is just passing through.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, &#8220;C.B. Strike&#8221; is entertainment. But truly, it&#8217;s a cut above. I don&#8217;t want to say it&#8217;s the best series I&#8217;ve ever seen, but like Cliff said, I&#8217;m down to seeds and stems.<\/p>\n<p>And if you&#8217;ve watched the greats, like &#8220;The Bureau,&#8221; never mind &#8220;Spiral,&#8221; &#8221; A French Village,&#8221; &#8220;Borgen&#8221; and &#8220;Happy Valley,&#8221; you should check out &#8220;C.B. Strike.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Once again, stick with it, it gets better.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the horrific Max app which qualifies as a beta under Silicon Valley standards. How can Zaslav make all that money while he runs the company into the ground? It&#8217;s offensive, but ain&#8217;t that America, and you and me have no power.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trailer: https:\/\/rb.gy\/30b01c This series gets better and better. I&#8217;ve never read a complete sentence of &#8220;Harry Potter.&#8221; And although I knew J.K. Rowling wrote genre books under a pseudonym, the reason I watched this series was because it had great RottenTomatoes ratings, 83\/93. And you know those exceed my threshold. Now &#8220;C.B. Strike,&#8221; or just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-5uG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21123,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21122\/revisions\/21123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}