I have revisited this series many times — as a critic, as a fan, as a visual studies teacher — and every single time I’m impressed. I dearly hope some of you are new to this so you can discover its brilliance, but I’m equally looking to share a rewatch with the rest of you who will probably discover new things. A good, collective discussion always brings out the best of a series.
I’m shifting to a new format here, minus the audio intro. I’d be fine bringing it back if people wanted it, but it’s one of those things that falls short of an actual podcast and anyway I have to kind of repeat myself in the writing of the post to make the key points (and, quite honestly, when you’re just riffing you’re not thinking as deeply, at least not for me, as when you’re actually writing).
We are going to burn through this series in no time — there are only eight episodes and almost none are over 20 minutes. The major achievement of “The End Of the F***ing World,” which you should have noticed in these first two episodes, is it manages a shocking amount of creatively executed emotion in an extremely short window. Countless hour-long dramas can’t match the greatness that this series routinely produces in 18 or 20 minutes. It’s impossible to overstate that achievement. It’s everything.
As you may have read in the (Re)View primer I did here:
“The End Of the F***ing World” started as a self-published comic novel by Charles Forsman and had its own interesting evolution in that director Jonathan Entwistle is billed as the series creator even though he didn’t write any of it, which fell to Charlie Covell, aka Charlotte Covell, an actress who broke out as a writing sensation when turning Forsman’s graphic novel into a series (and then writing the second season, which had no book for its basis).
If you’re already an active participant in the Box Set television club, then you’ve probably watched episodes of “Station Eleven” and you should know that after Entwistle deftly directs the first four episodes of the “The End Of the F***ing World” in the first season, Lucy Tcherniak co-directs Ep. 5, then does Ep. 6, 7 and 8 — and she’s the director behind two of the best episodes of “Station Eleven,” which were “The Severn City Airport” and “Goodbye My Damaged Home.”
So, in short, a lot of talent here.
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