Jenni from the whats-on-the-box

As far as I'm concerned, hibernation season has officially begun. Sure, the weather's still not that cold, the days aren't that short and I still have one last holiday just around the corner, but there is a very definite autumnal feel in the air. And while I may not be happy about it (summer lovin' till I die), I am happy that it's a great excuse to spend my evenings in front of the TV with all the series and movies that Netflix, Amazon Prime, Now TV and the world wide web have to offer (yes we have an excessive amount of streaming services in our house). I'm not quite sad enough (or unemployed enough) to have had enough time to watch all these shows and films in the short time from getting back from holiday until now. This is a list of stuff I've seen recently, rather than like yesterday, but I thought I'd wait until I had a good list until I told you what I thought! Obviously, spoilers to come...

First up is Orange is the New Black. It's a two-edged sword with shows like this that get released all at once; great that you get to binge watch the whole season in one day but not so great that you then have to wait another year until the next one. It's just released its 6th season, with season 5 having taken place during a prison riot. Season 6 starts with the main people, both of the show and of the riot, being moved to a maximum security prison and being forced to decide whether to throw their friends under the bus to save themselves. I won't go in to what happens to each individual character because I don't want to totally spoil it, but as always, Nicky remained one of my favourites thanks to her witty comebacks and sarcastic humour. As the shows lead, I actually find Piper insufferable. She's whiny, boring and always trying to act the martyr. It's actually all the other characters who shine much brighter, with amazing acting from a host of all kinds of women. Although in summary, some people would say the show is about prison lesbians, it's really about women and their struggles. I mean, it is largely about prison lesbians too; Daya and Daddy were my favourite couple from the season! The emotions that the characters invoke is amazing and it covers such difficult and real issues that a lot of mainstream media shies away from. Racism, sexism, wealth, poverty, corrupt prison systems, immigration, homosexuality, violence, transgender issues... love. Graphic at times and emotionally raw always, the show really makes you think about the kind of world we live in. I also like that it doesn't offer the happy ending we all want; it gives the realistic one. A black woman already in prison realistically would be found guilty of murder (even though she was innocent), a white middle-class woman realistically would be selected for early release and a Latina woman realistically would be moved to an immigration detention centre to await probable deportation rather than be released to her husband as promised. The season finale was utterly heartbreaking and had me crying from start to finish, and I'm already counting down the days until season 7.

The Originals started off as a spin-off show from The Vampire Diaries but has become a very definite show in its own right. In fact, as TVD drew to a close, The Originals was my favourite of the two shows. But all great things must come to an end and season 5 was its last. The show centres on the OG vampire family who have lived for a thousand years; Niklaus, Elijah, Rebeka, Kol and Finn. Originally introduced in TVD series 2, by season 4 they were off in a show of their own. With Finn already dead and Kol never being one of the core siblings, The Originals follows Klaus, Elijah and Rebeka as they deal with the fact that werewolf Hayley has managed to get pregnant with Klaus' supernatural baby. Returning to the city they love the most, the four of them battle through the wolves, witches and vampires of New Orleans, with new enemies showing themselves every day. As the original vampires, they can't actually be killed so you'd think the show would lack any sense of danger. But the writers manage to keep things interesting with plenty of evil to get past, sometimes coming from within the family and sometimes coming from elsewhere. There's a strong supporting cast, another sibling who comes out of the wood works and the token human to tag along for the ride, and the show has always been rife with good, evil, love, hate, betrayal, loyalty and all things supernatural. From episode 1, I was rooting from Hayley and Elijah to end up together and with this being the last season, I was sure they'd be endgame. Well, the writers were never scared to kill off main characters (Camille, Davina, Aiden) but I never thought they'd go as far as they did in the final series. The series starts on another time jump so that Klaus' daughter, Hope, is now 16, and all the original siblings must stay as far away from each other as possible. While trying to undo the magic that keeps them apart, Hope really steps up into her role as a main character and they couldn't have found an actress who looked more like Hayley if they tried. In a move that actually really shocked me, in episode 6 they killed off Hayley! She was a main character from the very start and I was so shocked! Then they just kept going and going. They killed off Josh (who was always such a lovable character), which reunited him with his long-lost (dead) love Aiden. Then in the season finale, they killed off both Klaus and Elijah in a suicide pact that would save the rest of their family and free them from the thousand year eternal lives they had lived. So Elijah was also reunited with Hayley in the afterlife, which did kind of achieve the endgame I wanted but they didn't show it! Just one big finale kiss would've been enough but they didn't even give us that. They did give us Rebekah and Marcel though so that's atleast something. Although Klaus' death killed off the endgame that I had been rooting for for even longer; Klaus and Caroline. A romance which began in The Vampire Diaries season 3, those two from the very beginning had given off the air that they would end up together some day in the distant future. Luckily, they were supposed to have forever to figure it out. And while there was a hint at a klaus-and-caroline future in TVD finale, and Caroline had appeared in quite a few episodes in The Originals final season, it seems the writers were destined to break our hearts instead of giving us the ending we wanted. Although, it seems it was for entirely commercial reasons, as opposed to poetic ones. The same writers have announced a new show, The Legacies, which will follow Hope Mikaelson in her challenges as a teenage tribrid (witch, wolf and vampire). So for that show to work, there had to be a reason why the rest of her family were no longer in the picture and given their track record and sacred family loyalty, death was really the only explanation. So even though I didn't get the happy ending I was hoping for, I'll just assume that Klaus and Caroline reunite in the afterlife some day, in the same way as all the other characters did.

With a lot of my long-loved shows coming to an ultimate end, I wanted a new series to fill the void and decided on The Mindy Project. I'd actually watched the first season when it was first released, but never picked it back up for the next season. So I started this time from season 2 and I LOVED it. It follows Dr Mindy Lahiri on her journey through love, lust and life, and frames her life like a classic rom-com film that she is shown to adore. Obviously I love a good rom-com too and the show is like a never ending diary of Bridget Jones. Mindy is hilarious, her sarcastic comments are quick-witted and the situations she gets herself in are ridiculous. I don't often like female comedians because their idea of humour is to say 'I eat too many biscuits' (Sarah Millican, looking at you), but Mindy turns the self-deprecation on its head and is instead completely over confident, rebukes insults by insisting she's a 10/10 and weighs the same as a cloud, and never once hints that a woman sleeping around should be viewed differently to a man doing it. As the shows producer and star, Mindy is a modern feminist character that everyone should look up to; she's successful, she owns who she is and she gives the men in her life a run for their money. Obviously, like with all good rom-coms, there is someone she's meant to end up with and from episode one it's clear that's going to be her grumpy colleague and sparring partner, Danny. Predictably, they do get together in season 2 (after lots of toing and froing) and theirs was a relationship I loved. At first. They start as chalk and cheese; total opposites who are somehow perfect for each other and have the best chemistry. But as time goes on, it's clear that Danny is a misogynist, he puts his own needs above Mindy's, he prioritises his family over her, he thinks his religion, career and beliefs are more important than hers and he's completely unwilling to compromise. This is all highlighted when Danny and Mindy have a baby together and by mid-season 4, their time at playing happy families is up. Although again, this probably wasn't the way the writers would've gone. But the actor who plays Danny was getting more roles elsewhere and so I think they wrote him in a way that the viewers would start to hate him, to make it easier to completely write him out when him and Mindy broke up. The show was never quite as good after that. It still retained a lot of its original humour but the single-girl-escapades aren't quite as wild or funny when it's actually the single-mum-escapades. The show has great supporting characters though, even if their storylines can sometimes be a bit patchy with bits missed out. I especially loved Southern doctor Jody who joined in the later seasons and I was actually rooting for him and Mindy to get together but it wasn't meant to be. Instead, they had Mindy marry some totally random guy (the one you expected to leave after a few episodes). Of course that was a big fail and they divorced at the start of the final season, obviously to make way for a danny-and-mindy happy ending. Although Danny had mostly been out of the show since season 4, he did appear occasionally and by the time he came back at the end, I was back to wanting the two of them to work it out. In a season finale gesture, Danny proved what we all needed to know; that he fully supported Mindy and loved her for who she was. It was girly and frothy and the perfect thing to watch after a couple of heavier shows.

On to films and Netflix is completely delivering in the rom-com genre right now. As I've mentioned in a jenni from the book post, I love Jenny Han and I saw that Netflix were turning her book, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, into a film. It's actually part of trilogy (which you can learn more about in my next book blog post) but the first is undoubtedly the best and from the trailer, it looked like it did a great job. It didn't let me down; the film was amazing. It's about quiet-and-plays-it-safe Lara Jean who writes letters to guys she fancies but never sends them. Awkwardly, they get sent out and the most recent letter is for her sister's boyfriend. So she embarks on a fake romance with Peter, recipient of another letter, to avoid the whole thing. And of course, they then fall in love for real. It was perfectly cast and the chemistry between Peter and Lara-Jean was so genuine. It stuck to the book really well too and the hot tub kiss was truly iconic. 

Another Netflix original and this one centres on Elle, 'soccer' star who's been best friends with Lee since the day they were both born. They have a number of friendship rules though and one of them is that family is off limits, which is a shame as Elle desperately fancies Lee's older brother, Noah. When they run a charity kissing booth, Elle finds out her feelings aren't one-sided and finds herself torn between the guy she really likes and the best friend she doesn't want to lose. It's a film for the ages with cliché rom-com moments, funny situations like having to hide under the bed mid-make out and the chemistry between Elle and Noah is perfect. So perfect in fact that they're actually together in real life following the filming of the movie like a year ago! I was baffled though that Jacob Elordi (who plays Noah) wasn't actually the guy who played Jeremy in The Vampire Diaries. Him and Stephen R McQueen are the spitting image of eachother! It was also strange seeing Molly Ringwald in a teen rom-com without being the star of it; I'm used to her playing the heroine of Pretty in Pink and 16 Candles, not the mum! This film was cheesy and predictable but I loved it all the same.

Apparently Noah Centineo has somehow managed to be in 3 places at once, having starred in To All the Boys I've Loved Before, SPF 18 and Sierra Burgess is a Loser all at the same time. And he obviously likes to play the part of the perfect guy. Perfect as Peter in the former, he's also perfect as Jamey in the latter. A film that flips the catfish story on its head, Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a film about a social outcast with a below average score on the fanciable scale, who starts getting texts from a mystery guy. It turns out that Jamey thinks he's messaging Veronica, the most popular girl in school, and when Sierra starts to really like him, she works together with her enemy to keep the facade going. Obviously the whole thing becomes a mess as real feelings develop, unlikely friendships form and Sierra fakes a disability to keep her secret, but the ending is obviously a happy one. And obviously, with it being a high school rom-com, the big romantic gesture takes place on the night of the homecoming dance. It honestly feels like we're back in the prime era of 2004 with all the amazing chick flicks that are being delivered right now - keep them coming!