“Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Deadwind.” "Halt and Catch Fire."

“Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Amazon Prime. Comedy. Going 12 Seasons. Created by Larry David, who stars as a fictionalized version of himself, a semi-retired TV writer in Los Angeles. Mr David is a natural, he is funny without trying to be funny at all. A nonsensical, seemingly trivial matter evolves into hilarious sequences. And that’d be 11 seasons, 11-episodes saga of wackadoo uncurbable enthusiasm. 

       My other favorite characters? Susie, wife of Larry’s manager/bestfriend Jeff. Susie reminds me of my dearly departed Aunt Nora, minus the language. And, of course, J. B. Smoove, who joined in Season 6, as Leon Black. He delivers the word better than Samuel L. Jackson, and funnier—as long as you don’t take “funny” as political. Uh huh. 📽👍🎥

“Deadwind.” Netflix. Finnish crime drama. Three Seasons. The Scandinavian cold exterior renders chilly unease to the proceedings, which is all fine viewing to me. Sofia Karppi is a widowed Finnish police detective in her 30s, with two children. She returns to police work in Helsinki while still grieving, kinda. You’d probably encounter sexual politics asides all over? After all this is law enforcement as 2020s know it. Nope.

       “Deadwind” doesn’t push the “correctness” quotient though Karppi, played by an almost-icy Pihla Viitala sans her eyes, is paired with a dude as cop pardner. Expect a U.S. equivalent of this show as did the Danish original of “The Killing” and the Danish/Swedish “The Bridge.” 📽👍🎥

"Halt and Catch Fire." Netflix. Tech world drama. Four seasons. Depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working or “catch fire,” being a humorous exaggeration.

       And so if you’re that kind of nerd who was already “socially-distanced” in your parents’ basement in those years, fiddling with the Commodore, Atari, BBC Micro, Mackintosh, Amstrad CPC whatever, no-shower for a week at least, this is your series. Somewhere you’d most likely try to discern where is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Martha Lane Fox, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds etcetera in all those often-hysterical characters that spice and spark “HCF.” 

       I expected Season 1 as a boring, talky exercise but I ended up clicking more, 1 episode at a time. Lee Pace as project runner Joe MacMillan is, as usual, overacting; Scoot McNairy as comp engineer Gordon Clark is, as usual, lookin’ harassed; Mackenzie Davis as prodigy Cameron Howe is, as usual, kickass mouth (as in Grace in “Terminator: Dark Fate”), and Kerry Bishe as Gordon’s wife, who seems better in computers than hubby, is nothing "as usual" stereotypical. And I love her! But I stopped midway in Season 3. I think I already saw enough. Good stuff but I wish they ended on Season 2. 📹📺📹