TV Viewing: Counterpart

      My Amazon Prime Video home screen suggested TV show over the holiday weekend.  I'd never heard of it, but it looked interesting: Counterpart.

      The show even starred an actor I like, J. K. Simmons, perhaps most widely known from his appearances in Farmer's Insurance commercials. 

      So I gave it a look.  In the opening scene, a man is pushed out of a high apartment window to his death in a Berlin that appears to be just a year or two into the future -- and the small crowd of rubberneckers who show up are all wearing cloth masks.  There were two seasons of the show and yet I was wondering if it has been shot after the pandemic began?

      Nope.  The series was made in 2017 and 2018.  It's set in a divided Berlin, but not the divide we -- well, some of us -- remember.  A Berlin in which a Cold War lab experiment somehow branched off two diverging realities but left a single shortcut between them.  One looks a lot like our familiar world.  One appears to be more advanced and yet something's gone badly wrong.  Just what isn't quite clear, but relations between the two sides are tense.  Tam and I are four episodes in now and it's as tangled an SF spy story as I have seen.  (Imagine a Len Deighton-William Gibson collaboration.)  We 're really enjoying it.

     Starz aired the series originally, but pulled the plug after two seasons.  They were repositioning the cable channel to aim for a greater share of women viewers and felt the show was "too convoluted" for us silly girls.  Gee, thanks, pal.  But there are two seasons to enjoy.

     Edited to add: This series is definitely rated R, and I think the scenes that make it that way at least border on gratuitous; they don't tell us anything about the character (one of the, I'm pretty sure, baddies) that couldn't've been shown without nudity.  But they are used sparingly so far and many of the male viewers will probably enjoy them.