Spontaneous Musings

Just finished watching the pilot for the new F/X series The Bridge, which like The Killing is based on a Swedish series of the same name, except this is...wickedly good. Best thing I've seen in a long while. Certainly the most suspenseful and compelling. And considering it's yet another gritty cop series investigating a serial killer (a trope I've grown incredibly weary of and despise) that is saying something. Best written one I've seen since the days of Prime Suspect and Homicide Life on the Streets.

Don't know if it will stay that way. But right now it's creepily good. The acting, writing and production is riveting. My only problem is it is about another gory serial killer.
But I'm over-looking that because I'm riveted by the characters.

The plot? They find a body on the bridge between Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Half the body is an fifty-something white woman American judge, the other half is twenty year old Mexican woman. Two cops come to the crime scene, one is Sonya (Diane Kruger), a single, young and attractive blond haired female cop with ausperger's syndrome, the other cop is Luis, a forty-something Mexican cop, who is a bit world-weary with three kids. They end up working the case together.

Like The Killing - there's more going on and other subplots...including one with Annabeth Gish, who disrupts the crime scene insisting they allow an ambulance carrying her husband from Juarez to El Paso, because he is having a heart attack. She loses her husband to a heart-attack that same night. Before he dies he wants a divorce, then leaves a locked closet full of secrets. Another is a reporter portrayed by Mathew Lillard, whose car was used to transport the victims. There's an incredibly suspenseful sequence with Lillard, that had me on the edge of my seat.

This is everything the AMC series The Killing should have been and wasn't. Check it out, on Wednesdays, F/X, at 10 PM. The pilot is reshowing at 12:30 am on Sunday on F/X.

In other news? I wonder about the reference library industry. Just the other day, heard from an old work colleague and friend - about EBSCO. And how bad it was. I've heard horror tales now about every single one of the library reference providers in the US. Worked for one, which is now out of business - H.W. Wilson. EBSCO who acquired it - basically gutted Wilson. Fired 5,000 employees, screwed over the employees they hired (30 in all), and resold Wilson's products to libraries at a higher rate. Reed Elseiver is just as nasty - my second cousin tells me horror tales. McGraw Hill ...oh dear, the tales a lawyer told me about them.
This is just sad. So glad I got out of that industry ten years ago. Was incredibly painful, but the smartest move I ever made.