I finished watching The White Lotus yesterday. Two seasons. Thirteen episodes. First year on Maui, second on Sicily. Everyone that I know seems to have loved the series. But why? I don’t get it.

The primary location on each island is a resort, a Four Seasons in real life, and they are attractive to be sure, as are their surroundings. The acting is of good quality – I would say average for Cable or Netflix series. But the story line, and what has been explained as the satire, is weak. And the characters extremely uninteresting.

Take the second season. There are three generations of Italo-Californians, who come to see the town where the grandfather’s mother came from. There are two young power couples (the men were college roommates) whose neurotic relationships flounder and heal and flounder and heal. There’s the obnoxious wealthy woman, whose husband……..(well, anything I say here would be a spoiler) and her henpecked young female assistant who craves freedom from her boss. There are two young Italian women, at least one of whom is a hooker, and the other a would-be singer and entertainer. There are the hotel employees, who have their own narrative, and of course there are the gay mafia (“we don’t use that word on Sicily”) guys and their yacht and palazzo. How could you possibly put these people together and make it interesting?

I wouldn’t recommend it. But everyone else appears to.

Maybe it’s a matter of age. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste.

Edie and I watch TV series during the evening; I also watch them while I am on the stationery bike in the basement. And that means an hour or so a day, four or five days a week. That’s a lot of time.

Right now, I am in the middle of a South African series called Ludik – he’s a major furniture dealer in Pretoria, who has a sideline of shipping illegal diamonds across the south of Africa. I think it’s pretty good. It’s the second South African series I have watched. The other, which I liked as well, was not about smuggling diamonds, but about smuggling endangered wild animals. I don’t remember the name. It’s been a few years.

Moving backwards, here is pretty much all of the series I watched in the last half of last year (July through December). The first half of the year will follow sometime soon.

1. The Perfect Mom – French. A French woman married to a German living in Berlin discovers that her daughter, a student in Paris, has been arrested for murder, and goes back to her home town and her past to rescue her. Thumbs up.
2. Man on Pause – Turkish. A comedy about a Turkish man for whom everything turns out wrong. Even the simplest of things go awry. That makes him a schlmazl, right? (No, that’s not Turkish). Thumbs up.
3. Post Mortem: Nobody Dies in Skarnes – Norwegian. What do you do if your funeral parlor just needs more customers? Yep, you guessed it. A bit macabre. But Thumbs up.
4. 1899 – International/English. This one got a lot of attention. It started out weird, but it wound up so far beyond weird that I find it hard to recommend for anything but the acting and the imagination. It’s a little pretentious, too. After we watched the series, we watched an hour long “making of” program. That was better than the series itself.
5. Two Summers – French. Four couples (more or less) go to a Mediterranean island for a weekend 30 years after they all went away together as university students for a weekend. The first weekend was not very satisfactory, but compared to the second weekend……. Thumbs up, half way.
6. Deadwind – Finnish. Actually, this year we watched the third year; had watched the others already. Police detectives in Helsinki assigned to various cases don’t always like what they find. Thumbs up, half way.
7. The Stranger – Korean. More police detectives – one an investigator with a strange brain condition that takes away his ability to have any empathy, and the other a woman who has a hard time in a male denominated department. They eventually uncover the murderer. Thumbs up.
8. Emily the Criminal – American. A young woman with a load of student debt gets an offer she can’t refuse (but should have – perhaps). Stars Aubrey Plaza, who plays Harper on White Lotus. Thumbs up a tad.
9. From Scratch – American/Italian. A black Texan law student goes to Italy for a summer art program and comes back with an Italian boy friend and then husband. He’s a chef, and he dies at a young age of a rare cancer, leaving her to carry on. Thumbs up.
10. Capitani – Luxembourg. Two years, two story lines. A hard to handle police detective is efficient, but sometimes hard to understand. Thumbs up, half way.
11. Equinox – Danish. A woman is hell-bound to find out what happened to her sister who, along with a number of classmates, disappeared just before their high school graduation. She succeeds. Thumbs up, pretty much.
12. Beloscoaran – Mexico. Another detective series – this one off beat (wait a minute, they are all off beat). Thumbs up, half way.
13. The Devil in Ohio – American. A young girl escapes from a cult, but they don’t want to let her go. Thumbs up.
14. The Pursuit of Love – English (BBC). Based on the book by Nancy Mitford, two British cousins’ lives take very different directions. Thumbs up.
15. The Extraordinary Attorney Woo – Korean. A young autistic woman with a superior mind tries to make it big in the Seoul big firm law practice. Thumbs way up.
16. Quicksand – Swedish. A high school girl is accused, and tried, for murder. Thumbs up.
17. The Bonfire of Destiny – French. An explosion at a gift bazaar in turn of the 20th century Paris and what happened to all those involved. Thumbs up.
18. The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem – Israeli. A Sephardic family in Ottoman Jerusalem and their daughter. Thumbs up, pretty much.
19. Clark – Swedish. The story of the criminal for whom the Stockholm Syndrome was named. Thumbs up.
20. The Mire – Polish. Tracking down the murderer of two, long ago at a summer camp. Times change in Poland. Thumbs up.
21. Another Self – Turkish. Young women look for love and try to forget past loves. Thumbs down.
22. Borgen (Season 4) – Danish. The first female prime minister (and star of the first 3 seasons) returns to politics, this time as foreign minister. Greenland wants independence and a deal with China. Thumbs up.
23. Black Spot – French. Murders in a remote town in the South of France. Thumbs up.

I know that’s a lot to watch. And that doesn’t even cover those I started and then quit after the first or second episode. I don’t even have a full record of those.

From the descriptions above, you might think that I remember all these plots in great detail. On the contrary, they fade into each other at times. But I do remember the acting and some of the characters. And because these shows have taken place in so many locations, they help my still pandemic repressed wanderlust.

But am I in fact watching too much? Maybe so. I might need a Stop Watch.