Bonjour, readers! I am heading to France tomorrow to watch movies for two weeks. Thank you to all the VIP members here who have helped make that possible! (Wanna join them? Click here.) But I can’t just hop on an airplane and leave you all in the lurch, recommendations-wise. So, here are some notes on two new series premiering this week, both from France’s eternal sworn enemy, the UK. The first show is a pretty brutal sit, to be honest, so I am not exactly making the heartiest of recommendations. But there is still something there worth checking out, if you dare. 

Lord of the Flies (Netflix)

Blame My Girl, maybe, but someone losing or breaking or otherwise being deprived of their glasses absolutely guts me every time it happens in a movie or television show. All any character has to do is cry, with a note of frail panic, “My glasses!” and I pretty much lose it. And I really mean that: when one of the sort-of villain guys in the 1999 The Mummy does it, I instantly snap out of the movie’s silliness and into a sort of doleful pity for this most minor of accidents, ridiculous considering what else is going on in the scene. Even in real life, I’ll sometimes have an intrusive thought in which I imagine my partner’s glasses getting jostled off his face during a crush of people on the subway platform (or something) and have to shake it off lest it ruin my day.

Which makes watching the new adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies quite difficult indeed. (Though, it’s not the only reason.) There is Piggy, perhaps the most unfortunate of the host of unlucky English school boys stranded on a wild island after a plane crash, with his little round frames (his “specs,” as he calls them) and chubby cheeks and generally decent ideas about how to forge an egalitarian, ordered society. Anyone familiar with Golding’s novel knows what will eventually befall both those glasses and their wearer, and thus a dread slowly filled me as the four-episode series unfolded. When what I knew was going to happen finally did happen, I cried (like, kind of a lot) and considered just turning the show off, a half-hour from its conclusion. I’d had enough. Poor Piggy and his poor specs. 

Not making matters any easier is that Piggy is played by the preternaturally gifted young performer David McKenna, a sprightly, sharp lad who thoroughly embodies Golding’s portrait of polite, intellectual bureaucracy’s inability to withstand the onslaughts of id and primal need. It’s a devastating but also sweetly poignant performance, in a series that is overall rather unrelenting and unsparing in its grimness.