White Lines

[steveh]

Was looking for something easy to watch and ended up sitting through this nonsense on Netflix. It's the story of a DJ who was killed in Ibiza 20 years before, having moved there with friends, and then when his body turns up on the mainland on property owned by one of the big Ibizan families his sister goes out to the island to try and find out who killed him.

The Guardian gave it 4 stars but I thought it deserved way less than that even if I did watch to the end. The main plot is actually pretty slight so to pad things out it takes the approach of putting a new obstacle in her way in each episode even though they're the kind of things where someone could just say no, I'm not going to do that and it wouldn't matter. The personalities of the characters are all over the place and they frequently make decisions against character, even allowing for the copious drug use. There's also some racial stereotyping which you'd have thought Netflix would be better at avoiding by now.

While it's supposed to be set in the present day with flashbacks to 20 years ago, the 20 years ago seems to actually be the post acid house and Madchester period in the early 90s. (The flashbacks also have a bunch of historical inaccuracies like big LED screens behind DJs but I'll ignore that.) By the end the main characters have all come across as pretty dislikeable - worryingly only the one played by Laurence Fox comes out of it perhaps slightly better.

There's an interesting story to be told about crime and corruption in Ibiza and the involvement of the main families there in its growth as a clubbing centre, but this isn't it.

[paruses]

Yea - the trailer mis-sold it to me massively. Good point a out the flashbacks. I knew they didn't make sense but couldn't put my finger on why.

I made it to episode 6 whereupon I thought there was one more episode to wrap it up but saw there are another 4(?) and I've  it continued.

Which character is Laurence Fox? Took me ages to place the main character as the holiday romance girl from The Onbetweeners film but was very pleased when I did. Well done brain, I said.

[steveh]

David - the one who went to India and now does 'healing'.

Apparently there's likely to be a second series so lots of people must have liked it, though it does have an awful lot of 1 star reviews on IMDB.