"Sherwood."

How one series is a reminder of the Bastard Machine ethos. More discussion than review, more celebration than explanation.

You’ll have to forgive me for once again being pleased-in-public about the elastic qualities of this enterprise.

As you probably know by now, I’ve long believed — even when I was the Chief TV Critic at the Hollywood Reporter and wrote columns about it, in an environment that didn’t actually want to hear what I was saying — that people just don’t watch television in a way that fits the unchanged review culture of the newspaper/magazine/online world.

They just don’t.

Even before Peak TV made it impossible even for career TV critics to watch every show out there, no matter if they stretched the week from 40 to 60 or more hours — the actual viewing public had already changed its patterns, mostly by the constraints and limitation of just living their lives, with jobs, friends, sometimes kids, and certainly other interests to attend to rather than watch television or movies from sun up to sun up again, in an effort to keep up.

They had bailed, and the Peak TV flood of content only made it easier. I said — and wrote — back then, that if the goal is to help guide readers to what’s good, rather than to keep up with what’s new (because of a lot of the content wasn’t worth the time), then we were doing it all wrong.

If you wanted to best serve the bulk of readers (and thus viewers) about TV series and movies they should watch, a big part of the approach should be about curation.

With an industry intent on talking about what’s new and what’s coming up, to the point where reviews often came out a week or sometimes longer before a series or film even appeared — allowing people to forget it before they’d even seen it — the idea of pointing out something that came out a month ago, or several months, or a year ago, well, forget it.

No one wanted to admit that people were overwhelmed, that they had missed not just one good series or film, but maybe dozens and dozens, or that international fare was worth the attention or that a show you could only find on a minor streamer was quite possibly the best thing they’d see that year.

This would normally be the point where I might write, “Which brings me to ‘Sherwood,’ the fantastic British series…” but not quite yet.

Because I was already compiling a year-end best of the year column and basking in the freedoms that the Bastard Machine substack affords. Not only do I not have to tell you that I didn’t watch everything (because you already know that), but I know that you didn’t watch everything and that our shared ethos here is that, hey, if we stumble on something great then it doesn’t matter what year it came out. It only matters that it’s great. It only matters that it’s “new to me/us” and that it’s entertaining or funny enough for what you might be needing; that it might be very good but flawed, intriguing but not Hall of Fame worthy, or even just something you should take mental note of and watch later.

I was conjuring the opening to that year-end piece and delighting in the fact that the year the series came out was irrelevant. If I watched it in 2024, that’s all that mattered.

To me, that’s glorious. That’s why I do this.

Simultaneously I started watching (with KB), “Sherwood,” the BritBox series that captivated the UK and critics alike (and yet, I never heard about it, certainly not in any sustained way). But here’s the perfect catch: I was watching the first season, which came out in the summer of 2022, and the second season had only recently finished in the summer/fall of 2024 (which was also critically acclaimed, with the only caveat that it couldn’t possibly have topped the original six-episode season, according to British critics).

Bouncing around BritBox one night, I saw a trailer for the show that looked great (it was for the second season) and that’s how I found out that there was already a first, that I was very late (although, as we say here, you’re not late, you’re finding it on your own timeline), and that I might have really missed something of value.

Because I watch these things as intended — in the order they were made — I gathered my partner to check it out and (dramatic pause) holy hell. We were all in after just one episode.

We just finished it last night (hence this oddly timed post) and it will certainly appear on my end of year, best-of list. Reminder, of course, I watched the 2022 season, because that’s how we roll here, sans judgement.

“Sherwood” has a ton of Brit actor firepower — David Morrissey, Lesley Manville, Joanne Froggatt, the ubiquitous and always brilliant Adeel Akhtar and many others you’ll recognize, some in very minor roles.

It was created and written by James Graham and is “inspired by” the real life murders in Nottinghamshire in 2004 (and the very real and divisive coal strike that took place there and in other nearby areas, a deeply divisive moment that ended up having serious and scandalous elements that add greatly to the drama).

Not lost on anyone from there — and referenced but kept cleverly at bay by “Sherwood” — is that, well, the Sherwood Forest if very real, there’s still a kind of sheriff of Nottingham and he’s very much in play here, all the while the remote nature of the town, with so little crime but so much gurgling resentment among its people, is a near-perfect place to have a murder. Or more.

Rather than go into more depth, my suggestion is that you carve out some time to find this series, which has more surprising twists in six episodes than some series put in 20. I’m a big proponent of BritBox being a high-value streaming option for the money but for those who don’t have it, may I suggest doing the trial run and gorging on “Sherwood” — and joining me in also devouring the second season. You could finish both, easily, before the trial period ends.

I will say this — I loved “Sherwood.” Some British reviews called the first season “flawless” and held that high standard somewhat against season two (which apparently will still land on a bunch of 2024 Best Of lists that are more current than my intentions), but we all know that “flawless” is impossible and you might have a concern or two. But truly, “Sherwood” S1 is exceptional, and I feel so happy to have found it right at the end of the year — the year being this one, not 2022 — and I’m delighted that all of us here believe in the ethos that it’s never too late to discover greatness.