Grantchester!!!!!!!!!!

 Grantchester is the best thing you will ever seen on TV.  It may be the best piece of art you'll ever encounter, comparable to say "The Night Watch" or Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm Number #2 (the centerpiece of the current Krasner/Pollock show at the Met). Who the fuck is writing these scripts? Based on the James Runcie mystery novels, they are, indeed, Dickensian in quality. Like Great Expectations and David Copperfield, they're tear jerkers. But so what? As someone once said about brainwashing, sometimes your brain needs to be washed. Al Weaver is the gay student priest, James Norton, Sidney Chambers, the jazz loving Vicar and Robson Green, Geordie, the local gendarme.  In one episode, there's a new high-up in the church, an African intellectual,  who's taken the place of a disgraced pederast. He's all for tending to the gay, as if they were the wretched of the earth, but the clergy must be powers of example. It's a shocking scene, not particularly due to content. Nothing new, but simply the lines and how it's played out. It's hard to believe that it wasn't until l967 that homosexuality was decriminalized in England, but there's lots more, including a powerful scene where Amanda's (Morven Christie's) borish husband unexpectedly shows sentimentality and contrition--a mea culpa that further complicates Sidney's already guilt ridden existence. Then of course there's the matter of the church's sanctions about a priest marrying a divorced woman and Georgie's s affair. Just when you think all the strands have been neatly tied up in a homogenized misery, you're caught off guard. You may feel drained, say in the way you felt after experiencing Olivier playing James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey. What comes next. What happens next? Back in the day the chapters would appear in All Year Round, Dickens' weekly literary journal.