Two Netflix Series - Borgen and Away - Feature Mothers In Critically Important Jobs. Plus Rached

I'll try to keep this short.  Trying to write on something a little lighter than the elections. Think of it as notes to readers about Netflix offerings they might want to watch or avoid.  

BORGEN and AWAY

The ten year old Danish series BORGEN features a woman propelled into the position of prime minister of Denmark.  The new Netflix series AWAY features a woman as the commander of a mission to Mars.  

Both have to deal with sexism in the job (though not all that much) along with the work demands that make  it hard to pay adequate attention to their children - each has a teenage daughter, the Danish prime minister also has a younger son.  

Birgitte Nyborg's constant task is keeping together a coalition of parties with different priorities.  Emma Green, Captain of the Atlas, has an astronaut from India, China (the other woman and mother), England/Ghana, and Russia to keep together.  But there's also her former astronaut husband who has a stroke after liftoff and anxious daughter back on earth to distract her.  

I was struck by how we were watching these two series at the same time and how each treated the difficulties of a married woman in a traditionally male position.   BORGEN flows quickly from crisis to crisis fairly organically while with AWAY the crises - both technical and interpersonal - seem more contrived, and like Indiana Jones, Emma always seems to narrowly escape disaster.   

BORGEN has three seasons and we're near the end of season two.  I thought in the trip to negotiate between the northern Islamic area and the Christian south of a fictional African country, Brigitta's preparation for such a difficult diplomatic trip seemed woefully inadequate.  We only saw the first part of this adventure and if the upcoming summit in Copenhagen falls apart, I won't be surprised.  But the show has a way of giving Brigitta lots of narrow victories.

I think BORGAN is well worth watching.  AWAY is certainly not must see tv, but not a total waste of time.  

RATCHED  

This Netflix series is like the most exquisite and decadent dessert in the bakery display case.  The colors are rich, the costumes and sets delicious, the actors arch,  and the camera makes love to it all.    It's noir in technicolor with the appropriate campy creepy music.  There's very little nutrition in this evil concoction. And there's lots of gratuitous gore.  But it's visually pretty spectacular.

It's the back story of Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which Netflix is also pushing right now.)  

That Cuckoo's Nest connection is probably what made me watch the first episode.  I read Cuckoo's Nest at the end of my Peace Corps time in Thailand and was possessed with the question "Who wrote this?  Why?  How did he know all this stuff?"  And soon after I was working at a Peace Corps training program in Hilo when a new trainee had the book Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  I read the blurb on the back that said it was about the author of Cuckoo's Nest.  It's not cool to use your position to get favors, but I was so obsessed I asked the trainee if I could borrow the book right then.  I consumed it that night and gave the book back the next day with my curiosity satisfied.  

RACHED really has nothing to do with Cuckoo's Nest.  It's just a gimmick to play off the name recognition of Nurse Rached to produce a highly stylized and visually beautiful, but empty, confection of a series.  It's a wicked distraction from today's COVID and Trump nightmare.