Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Come on, man.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Is Anyone Else Watching ‘Red Election’?

Is Anyone Else Watching ‘Red Election’?

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Is anyone else watching Red Election?  It’s  a 10-part series on Ovation, and it appears to be available on some streaming services.

From their Red Election page:

Set in London, in an alternate version of the present day, British Intelligence Agent, Beatrice, witnesses a deadly chemical attack on a Russian informant she was working with. Just before the informant’s untimely demise, he tries to warn her about an imminent terror attack on British soil. Beatrice is left with only clue, codename: REDBACK.

Meanwhile, another Secret Service Agent named Katrine discovers that her boyfriend, who works for a Bio-Chemical Corporation in Scotland, has gone missing. They don’t know it yet, but these two women’s paths are about to collide.

All this is happening against a backdrop of simmering international tensions, where the newly elected Prime Minister announces a referendum to decide the future of Scotland in the United Kingdom. Will order and the safety of the U.K. prevail?

I am halfway through the first episode, and I am finding it interesting, so I’m surprised that I haven’t heard anything about it here on Balloon Juice.

Is anyone else watching?

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

114Comments

  3. 3.

    Baud

    Amazon has a new show called Night Sky, which is a very low-key sci Fi story.  I enjoyed it but I kind of wish it were a one season series.

  4. 4.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    Don’t have the channel.

    I did finally watch the Elvis movie last night, followed by furious googling.

    Parker may as well have put a pistol to Presley’s head and pulled the trigger – the Vegas residency and Parker’s management surely to hell killed that man.

  7. 7.

    CaseyL

    It sounds interesting, but there are just too many streaming services.

    Had a funny thought: at some point, someone will start to offer “bundled streaming” where you pay one subscription price for more than one streaming service.  IOW, they will re-create cable subscription for the cord-cutting generation.  If they offer a bundling service where you get to pick the channels you want, that would be SWEET.

  10. 10.

    WaterGirl

    @sab: I have cable, too, and to me it doesn’t say “old”, it says I don’t want to see any fucking ads and I don’t want to worry about series being dropped from x streaming service.

    With Tivo I can record any show that’s on cable, I can watch it when I feel like it.

  13. 13.

    sab

    @WaterGirl: // My husband simply refuses to understand British accents. Apparently the Irish nuns in his parochial school got to him. I was fortunate enough to have had a junior year in northern England. I like English accents and I don’t understand why everyone says Geordie (Newcastle in the NE) accents are incomprehensible.

    I admit I did have to turn on the caps for early Outlander and for all of Belfast movie.

  16. 16.

    Jess

    Naw, I’m watching Minx (HBO) as an antidote to current reality. It’s great fun (but not family-friendly).

  18. 18.

    eclare

    @Baud:   I lived in London for six months with a Scottish landlord.  I have no idea what he ever said.  My response to every utterance was “the rent check is on the windowsill.”

  20. 20.

    trollhattan

    @sab: I usually need to turn on captioning for every UK accent other than posh BBC-newsreader English. “Derry Girls” as a handy example is simply impossible; important because so many great lines would otherwise whiz past my head, unappreciated. And don’t get me started on the Welsh.

  21. 21.

    arrieve

    The story sounds interesting, and I do still have cable, but the problem with that is that I find that these days I have to watch shows that are available all at once, rather than having episodes released or broadcast once a week. By the time the next episode is released I’ve usually forgotten about the show and never go back. (The Great British Baking Show is for some reason an exception.)

    On a slight tangent, about language misunderstandings, yesterday I sent a text to another teacher saying “What room are you in.” Only for some inexplicable reason the text went through as “Wow marihuana.” Fortunately I know her well and she just thought it was funny.

  22. 22.

    trollhattan

    @WaterGirl: You would hate our cable service, or should I say ISP because a year back they decided “cable isn’t our gig” rendering the DVR box a meaningless lump and porting us over to Directstream or whatever the remaining hulk of Direct TV is called.

    The tiny Roku box is nice for space-creating, but EVERY STREAMING SERVICE IS DIFFERENT–the options, the controls, the schedules, viewing on demand (or not), the ability to FF or RW (in most cases, fuggaboudit). Ads here, no ads there. It’s the wild west, I tell ya, and there’s going to be a lot of churn, then consolidation, and we’ll end up in a viewer’s hellscape with perhaps three choices.

  30. 30.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @CaseyL: They already have that. Disney+ has a bundle with Hulu and ESPN’s streaming service for a lower monthly fee than subscribing to each individually. You can also subscribe to other streaming services through Amazon Prime’s streaming service but I don’t think you get any kind of discount.

     

     

    @WaterGirl: I have YotubeTV which has all the basic cable channels and an unlimited DVR but is a streaming rather than cable company service. My cable company was price gouging me and this was a perfectly good replacement and has saved me literally thousands of dollars over the past few years compared to paying over $200 a month for cable.

  36. 36.

    WaterGirl

    @WereBear:

    Why I love streaming. Gives movies a place to go and find new audiences.

    There is that!  Now everything isn’t controlled by 3 networks with gatekeepers.  One of the best things about streaming and about the internet.

    How many talented people have followings now that no one would have ever known about?  (Answer: a lot!)

  37. 37.

    Shalimar

    @WaterGirl: I will look for it.  I take care of my mother, who has very early stage dementia.  Not bad at all yet, but she does not remember what she watches.  Whereas I can recite every line from every episode of Midsomer Murders from memory now.  New alternatives she will watch are always welcome.

  38. 38.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @CaseyL: Hulu isn’t free with Disney+ but you can bundle it and ESPN for like an extra $4 a month. So if you just have Disney+ you won’t find Hulu as a channel but if you upgrade to the bundle you’ll get Hulu for less than half the normal monthly fee for stand alone Hulu.

    I think there will be some consolidation or content sharing among streaming services eventually. I watched half the first season of Star Trek Discovery (which was really good) on YouTubeTV but so far I haven’t sprung for Paramount+ to catch the rest of it or Picard.

  39. 39.

    sab

    @Baud: And some are more horrible than others. The received as okay accent of the royals I hate. London accents are incomprehenisible. Northern accents ( various Yorkshires and points North) are pleasant.

    SW pronounce r like Americans ( they call it a SW burr).

    Scotland has a different vocabulary and insane rrs so hard to understand. The vocab is more of a barrier than the accents. Kind of like Aussies who pretend to speak English but it is not our English. But we are Americans so we don’t speak  “English” either, thank God.

  40. 40.

    zhena gogolia

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: I picked him out for stardom when he was on Bosom Buddies.

    I also determined in 1983 that Demi Moore and Meg Ryan, who were then laboring on General Hospital and As the World Turns, would become movie stars. I didn’t like them particularly, but I could see that they had “it.”

  44. 44.

    Betty Cracker

    @arrieve: LOL! I tried the dictation feature once, and what it produced was so incomprehensible I’ve never tried it again.

    @sab: I love English accents and am amazed there are so many in a relatively small country. Once when I was 12 and my sister was 11, a recently arrived English family moved into a house down the street from ours, and my sister made friends with one of the boys before I’d met any of them.

    He knocked on our door one day, which I opened, and he said, “I’ve come to call on Siss-say!” (Not her real name.) I laughed in his face, which was extremely rude, but it was so unexpected, that grubby kid with a posh accent! We later all became friends.

  46. 46.

    Betty Cracker

    “Red Election” sounds interesting, and now I wish I had that channel, but I’ve got too damn many streaming channels. I recently added Disney+ again just so I could see the Thor movie last weekend. I’m a sucker for Thor.

    I’ll be the contrarian and share that I absolutely hated the Elvis movie. Everything was so over the top. Sometimes that works (Thor, for example), but it didn’t for me in that movie.

  49. 49.

    Mike in NC

    Watching new sitcom “Sprung” on Amazon Prime, about a bunch of non-violent prison inmates who get released in 2020 due to Covid-19. They have to figure out how to get by without toilet paper.

  51. 51.

    LiminalOwl

    @sab: I’m actually a fan of the Geordie accent, mostly from listening to Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies.  Well, Border Ballads were among my formative musics, and Geordies sound to me like Scots-lite.

    @WaterGirl: Red Election does sound good, thank you for the recommendation.

  52. 52.

    FelonyGovt

    Red Election sounds really good. I need to see if I get Ovation. We have Acorn and BritBox, as well as Netflix, the Disney + package with Hulu, Amazon Prime and something called MhZ. (We watch a lot of TV)

  54. 54.

    WaterGirl

    @Shalimar: Your mom might really like Murdoch Mysteries.  Set in an earlier time, less nuance to have to pick up and each episode is an episode unto itself, so not much to have to know from a previous episode in order to understand what’s going on.  Some plot lines are continued of course, but from what you said I think Murdoch Mysteries might be a good match for her.

  56. 56.

    dr. luba

    @WaterGirl: That’s what I used to do, but when Comcast raised the monthly rate to $90 a few years back, while simultaneously dropping TCM, I cut the cord.  There wasn’t much left for me to watch, even with my TiVo.

    Most of my streaming services don’t have ads.

  58. 58.

    scav

    @Betty Cracker: We had an English-dialect friend introduce himself to a small girl.  “Hullo, I’m pea-TAH.” Long careful serious look.  “I’M going to call you PEE-dur.”

  60. 60.

    dr. luba

    @Baud: I’m pretty good at understanding all sorts of accents–working in medicine, traveling a lot, and growing up in an immigrant community will get you that.

    But northern England……that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.  I need subtitles for that.

  62. 62.

    sab

    @dr. luba: My junior year abroad “Kes” was the big thing. Yorkshire kid with strong accent (dialect more than accent) . BBC ran it with subtitles. I needed more subtitles for the BBC than I needed for his accent.

  65. 65.

    Major Major Major Major

    Honestly I am not a huge fan of political stories. I get enough of that in real life. Which does make the current paradigm of Everything Must Be Political extra annoying…

    @Baud: I enjoyed Night Sky but mostly because of Simmons and Spacek. It’s very slow.

  66. 66.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl:

    Demi Moore played Jackie Templeton on ‘General Hospital’
    In 1982, General Hospital cast a young ingenue named Demi Moore in the role of Jackie Templeton. Moore would play that role until 1984. And, in an interesting bit of history, the role of Jackie Templeton was reprised by Kim Delaney in 2020.

  68. 68.

    UncleEbeneezer

    We’ve been getting into Fall mode and discovered Nancy Drew on Netflix.  It is surprisingly good for a CW show.  Not nearly as campy as Riverdale and more compelling than Sabrina, both of which we tired of after a couple seasons.

  69. 69.

    Kelly

    @WaterGirl: Blackbird is a story about a convicted drug dealer eliciting evidence against a serial killer in a max security prison in return for a commutation. Jail house snitch is a risky position.

  70. 70.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia:

    the role of Jackie Templeton was reprised by Kim Delaney in 2020.

    Oh my god, does that mean that soap operas are still running and that General Hospital in particular is still running?  Not sure why, but I find that very surprising.

  71. 71.

    WaterGirl

    @UncleEbeneezer: ooh, I thought it was creepy and didn’t watch Nancy Drew for very long.

    I also thought the show kind of screwed with the Nancy Drew image, so i didn’t like that either.  The original Nancy Drew would not approve!

  72. 72.

    evodevo

    @Baud: It’s 274 on my DirecTV channel list…I’ve never seen it in TV Guide or other pubs…I found it by chance when it started running “Versailles” miniseries a few years ago, and found it to be a free alternative to ACORN etc. since we don’t stream.  Has a few interesting detective series and stuff like Red Election…you never know what is going to be on the schedule.  I just have to check every week to see what’s on…

  73. 73.

    Ripley

    It’s a great show imo, if a little slow as some spy/political shows can be. Beatrice’s father is great casting and acting.

    If you like this kind of serial drama, “Counterpart” with J.K. Simmons was really good – a little more scifi spy show than political, but similar pace and intrigue.

  74. 74.

    Scout211

    Ken Burns’ new series on PBS starts tonight. The U.S. and the Holocaust.

    The U.S. and the Holocaust is a three-part, six hour series that examines America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge. Through riveting firsthand testimony of witnesses and survivors who as children endured persecution, violence and flight as their families tried to escape Hitler, this series delves deeply into the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America. Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? This is a history to be reckoned with.

  75. 75.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl: I think a few of them are. I didn’t even notice that that said “2020.” I was thinking, hey, you don’t see Kim Delaney any more. I guess that’s why.

  76. 76.

    geg6

    @WaterGirl:

    Don’t know about ABC soaps, but I do know that CBS soaps, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, are still on because my older sisters still watch them.

  79. 79.

    geg6

    @Scout211:

    I definitely have that set to record.  Ken Burns can certainly be criticized (especially his Civil War series) but his docs are always beautifully made.  I even watched the country music one despite my complete and utter distaste for 99.9% of the genre.  It’s just so well done, I get mesmerized.

  80. 80.

    Shalimar

    @WaterGirl: Soap operas are still going.  I have seen an ad for Young and the Restless featuring Lauralee Bell recently.  Which is fascinating to me since I think she owns the show now.  Her parents started it in the ’70s and owned the production company, and they’re both dead.

    edit: I can’t even imagine what it must be like to do scene after scene with a fellow actor, who is also your boss’s boss.

  82. 82.

    CaseyL

    OK, so I planned to go to West Seattle today, to celebrate the West Seattle bridge re-opening, and visit some of my favorite shops there.

    I just needed to get two things done first:  get gas and have one of my tires re-inflated, as it’s showing the little bracketed exclamation point on my dashboard. (I’ve had a slow leak on that tire for quite some time, and would love to get the thing fixed some day when I won’t need the car.)

    The first step was easy.  Then I swung by Les Schwab – and they’re closed on Sundays.

    No problem!  I have a portable re-inflator; I’ll just use that and be on my merry way!

    Except the portable power station the compressor is part of is empty of charge.

    So: here I sit, watching the power station recharge, and hoping it doesn’t take too long (I don’t remember if the recharge is an hour or so, or overnight) (maybe I should look it up), so I can re-inflate my tire, and then be on my merry way.

    Not just “First World” problems; but early 21st Century First World problems.

  83. 83.

    Tony Jay

    Heh. Yes, we have many regional accents, and within all of them there are stronger and milder variants. 99% of the time we’re mutually comprehensible, with the accent just adding flavour, but as with any dialect, when someone really lays on the super-fast Geordie or Scots or Welsh or Brummie or Anglian or Mummerset or even full-bore Scouse (whether the Lennon or McCartney variant) and replaces every third word with local slang… “I’m sorry old bean, do you think you could run that by me again?”

    Funnily enough, when we lived in France and hung around with a mix of reprobates that included Americans from Texas, Montana, California and Illinois, and when we visited Seattle, I often had to act as translator for my better half, even though she’s got a (to me) perfectly comprehensible and very mild middle-class north Manchester accent.

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    Have rarely had cable TV. Broadcast and much later digital broadcast was sufficient. And there were some great foreign language UHF stations for Spanish TV novelas and Japanese and Korean historical dramas (all with English subtitles).

    Now I mainly have YouTube TV and stream to various devices more than I use the TV.

    British accents can be wild. On the first Prime Suspect series, one detective spoke with an absolutely incomprehensible Northern accent.

    I watch or listen to a number of British satirical shows and have learned that some accents are incomprehensible to other Brits. On the News Quiz one panelist spoke with a refined Scottish accent, but noted that this was nothing like the accent of most people in his home city in Scotland. I’ve heard that the accent in Glasgow is different from that in Edinburgh.

    A funny clip about a voice activated elevator in Scotland

    Even there are many different accents in Britain I continue to be amazed at the class based bigotry directed at some regional accents. News reader Steph McGovern got a lot of grief about not speaking BBC standard.

  85. 85.

    CaseyL

    Welp. The power station “may” take up to 72 hours to recharge. Looks like no West Seattle for me today!

  89. 89.

    Ken

    @Baud: The British have a lot of accents.

    And since the Doctor Who reboot, the Doctor’s regenerations have been running through all of them.

    I wonder what sort of complaints they’ll get if they ever cast an American actor in the role. “Aliens speak with a British accent, like the ancient Romans. It’s just science.”

  90. 90.

    Kristine

    @CaseyL:

    If they offer a bundling service where you get to pick the channels you want, that would be SWEET.

    If I could’ve customized my channels, I would probably still have cable. I realized I was watching the same 4-5 all the time and thought ‘why am I paying so much for this?”

  93. 93.

    Rand Careaga

    @Baud:

    Amazon has a new show called Night Sky, which is a very low-key sci Fi story.  I enjoyed it but I kind of wish it were a one season series.

    Well, you got your wish. Apple canceled the projected second season, abandoning the thing in mid-story arc.

  95. 95.

    JPL

    @WaterGirl:  I remember watching As the World Turn with my grandmother.   It was a lifeline to learning the English language for immigrants.    Judith Light who is a Broadway star started on One Life to Live. 

  96. 96.

    Ruckus

    @sab:

    I say we speak english with a small e, rather than English.

    The concepts are the same, or at least close but the delivery is just a bit different……

    I’ve worked with a few English folks and as noticed, there is a lot of difference in the sound between differing countries and areas of individual countries. Like this one for example. This has gotten less in the last 30-40 yrs but there are still differences.

  99. 99.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @geg6: I saw it too because Ken Burns, and watching it reconfirmed that the only country music I like is Bluegrass.

  100. 100.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @WaterGirl: That’s what I like about it.  It’s the grown-up (or at least older) version of Nancy Drew that is more fitting for this day and age.  And while it’s creepy it’s not over-the-top like Sabrina.

    PS- correction: it’s on HBOMax not Netflix (for anyone interested)

  101. 101.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Tony Jay: Because of the Beatles, I understand Scouse, and from watching movies forever I understand the “posh” accent.  On a tour of Greece run by an English company, there was one English couple who were quite educated but had held on to their lower-class accent (of what variety I’ve forgotten), and it took me several days to completely understand (get used to how they talked) what they were saying.  I realized (duh) that a lot of it was familiarity with the accent, and most of my movie watching was Laurence Olivier and Peter O’Toole-type accents.

    Of course closed caption has saved a lot of movies for me.  Trainspotting is the one that sticks out in my memory

    I understand that accents are great class deliminators for English, but as an American, I just find them all interesting.  With all the coverage of the Queen’s death, I’m again noticing how the American pronunciation of many words varies from the English posh accent.  For example, “princess” seems to be accented on the 2nd syllable instead of on the first, as I’m used to saying it.

    There are probably variations on the “posh” accent that I am too dull to pick up on. (And I know calling it a posh accent is NOT very posh ha ha).

  107. 107.

    Layer8Problem

    @CaseyL:,  @WaterGirl: Seconded or thirded for upvoting Counterpart.  J. K. Simmons in Berlin!  Picking out Babylon Berlin actors showing up in episodes!  Two seasons wasn’t enough, dammit.

  108. 108.

    Steeplejack

    @FelonyGovt:

    Big fan of MHz here. Lots of good European shows, along with some clunkers. Inspector Montalbano is the crown jewel, as I have said here ad nauseam.

  111. 111.

    Steeplejack

    Ovation is a mixed bag. As someone said, it’s sort of BBC-adjacent, especially during the day, but it also shows pretty good movies, often with no ads, especially on weekend nights. (I’m talking about it as it appears on my cable system.) Just last night I stayed up too late watching Hannibal, which I don’t think I had seen since it first came out in 2001. Started strong, faded toward the end. Really good cinematography used to distract from some flaws. Julianne Moore was surprisingly good in the thankless job of doing Clarice Starling after Jodie Foster.

    Then I stayed up way too late watching a couple of Batman anime movies on the Cartoon Network. Both pretty good. That appears to be a whole subgenre. I had seen one series on HBO Max, which is what got me interested last night.

  112. 112.

    Brachiator

    @Steeplejack:

    Big fan of MHz here. Lots of good European shows, along with some clunkers. Inspector Montalbano is the crown jewel, as I have said here ad nauseam.

    I found Montalbano late night on one of the PBS stations here in Southern California. Great show. But I got the impression that some scenes of violence and sensuality we’re edited where it was shown here. A quibble. Loved the city where it was set.

    Is there a Young Montalbano series? And is it any good? I like the supporting characters in the Young Inspector Morse series more than I like the young Morse.

  113. 113.

    Steeplejack

    @Brachiator:

    Warning: There is a Young Montalbano series, and it is abysmally bad. Horrendous.

    There was some needlessly fussy (in my mind) pixelation in Montalbano when I first watched it on MHz (when that was a channel on my Cox Cable system). That was back before 2010, I think. Dunno what the status is now. It didn’t materially affect the show, was just kind of weird. They even pixelated paintings on the wall and in one case a figurine on a desk. WTF.

    I’ll recap again for possibly interested people: Montalbano is set in modern-day Sicily and consists of 30-plus feature-length episodes from 1999 until a year or so ago. (It may still be in production, but there are big gaps between seasons.) The first one, “The Snack Thief,” is a little bland and not a great introduction to the series, but after that it really catches fire. Episodes 2-10 are excellent, 11-20 are solid, and after that it’s occasionally uneven, but still worth watching. That’s a huge body of excellent work.

  114. 114.

    Crotchety1

    @Anyway:

    I grew up in Northern England (S. Yorkshire); now 56 yrs on U.S. left coast.

    But even I find the “Vera” accents, glottal stops before every vowel, and anywhere else they can think of, thoroughly obnoxious.

    Rural Texan is more listenable!  –  Just sayin’

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