TV Diary
No Escape
I hoped watching The Durrells In Corfu would offer an escape from the dark of winter, but instead, found a meditation on the male bumbler.
Last month, as the winter began, I was hoping to escape but there was nowhere to go: the surge of cases due to holiday travel had filled the hospitals across the country, and the weather was cold, which made socializing into cold walks with friends where we wore masks and yelled to each other from across the street. Indoors, I tracked the bad-faith contesting of the election by conservatives, the attempt to overturn the results in the courts and in state legislatures, and the botched vaccine roll-out by the Trump administration, all of it seeming to culminate in the assault on the Capitol Building. With 400,000 dead, it seemed just plain evil that the governmental priority of the now former ruling party was to overturn the election that sought to hold them accountable for such mistakes as lead to those deaths — including officials who had won their elections and yet, for the president’s sake, declared just his part of the vote fraudulent. The idea that Trump might steal the presidency back despite his resounding defeat — that he thought for one second we wanted more of his awfulness, or the rising death toll, or his daily antics online, or his destruction of our civil rights, the environment, the economy, all of that was a lot to handle without any of the other responsibilities we all had, which we all did have.
So the dark just seemed too hard as soon as it came. Every night felt a little too much like a hood being pulled over my head. After the sun had set, it felt like I had only gotten a diet portion, and so I found myself wanting to binge on sun — to look at least at pictures of the brightest sun I could find. And at first, The Durrells in Corfu, an adaptation of the naturalist Gerald Durrell’s trilogy memoir about his family, My Family and Other Animals, seemed perfect.
