Chesterton spinning in his grave
I have watched a bit of the new Father Brown series. It is pretty awful. "Based on" a character from GK Chesterton, a man who wrote Orthodoxy, this version is a woolly-minded progressive Who is constantly telling people not to be "judgemental" and suggesting that suicide is not really a sin.
But the writers can't even get elementary facts correct when they are trying to show off their intellectual bona fides. In one episode a character quotes Confucius, and says, "you know: Buddhism." (The character is supposed to be an expert who studies these things seriously.) In another episode, a father is criticizing his teenage daughter's reading. He says, "at your age, I was reading Rousseau and Derrida."
The show is supposed to be set in the early 1950s. The father himself looks to be 50-something. And Derrida was born in 1930.
So the father must have been reading Derrida about 10 years before that writer was born. Which is fairly prescient of the dad.
But the writers can't even get elementary facts correct when they are trying to show off their intellectual bona fides. In one episode a character quotes Confucius, and says, "you know: Buddhism." (The character is supposed to be an expert who studies these things seriously.) In another episode, a father is criticizing his teenage daughter's reading. He says, "at your age, I was reading Rousseau and Derrida."
The show is supposed to be set in the early 1950s. The father himself looks to be 50-something. And Derrida was born in 1930.
So the father must have been reading Derrida about 10 years before that writer was born. Which is fairly prescient of the dad.
I loved the stories, and have read many twice. So I watched an episode. Lousy, missing *every single thing* that makes the stories so distinctive. A few months pass. I try another episode. I was longing for it to end but hung on, foolishly. Never again.
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