Born and raised with movies in the cinema, himself a very successful practitioner, Carlo Verdone at a certain point became intrigued like many of the TV series, the closest thing to a novel in images. And he has never moved away from it, even confessing to binge watching and himself getting to work with Vita da Carlo. He is passionately the testimonial of the book "for a good tasting" written by the film critic Mario Sesti.
"As if in front of an endless cellar, he tries to show us which are the best bottles and why (the main parameters: colors, aromas, taste and balance, therefore genre, story, acting, mise-en-scène). But often, pay attention, the passion that is felt in writing, infects more than any evaluation, analysis, interpretation," Verdone writes in the introduction.
Born from a work of several years for a weekly online column on ANSA.IT, reporting series and films in streaming, through an audio and video podcast (Siamo serie), Le 250 serie tv da non perder (Fazi Editore) documents what is internationally to all intents and purposes the third Golden Age of TV, after the pioneering one between the Forties and Fifties and the one of maximum expansion in the Eighties. We are faced with an endless production that is now technically outdated to call television, since it is seen with streaming on TV of course but also on the mobile phone and on the PC screen. A production declined in a thousand ways, with hundreds of offers that are our daily dilemma when, opening a platform, we find ourselves choosing from the mare magnum of titles that an algorithm based on our previous choices then tries to organize to suggest a path.
Sesti has chosen not to include docuseries (masterpieces such as the recent The Second World War: voices from the front of English production or of great media impact such as Ilary Blasi's Unica con la verità on the divorce from Francesco Totti) nor animated series, both of which will deserve a dedicated selection for their value. The selection privileged, for a purely critical choice - explains Sesti - "the 'serial' format, that is, the one in which the so-called horizontal narrative that unfolds and animates the entire episodic chain of the season of a series, has a design of a robust structure capable of providing a virtually unlimited narrative, an articulated family of characters and the transparency of the totality of a world (a society, an era, a community) to which the very length of the narrative manages to give continuity, unity, complexity, richness, dramatic high definition as happens in the best literature. For these reasons," he adds, "there aren't many procedurals or sitcoms that privilege self-contained narration to each episode." In addition to descriptions, casts, production notes, there are also critical evaluations.
The mythical series? Here are ten of them, according to Mario Sesti. The Wire by David Simon, Mad Men by Matthew Weiner, The Best of Youth by Marco Tullio Giordana, Better Call Soul by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, Boris by Giacomo Ciarrapico, Mattia Torre, Luca Manzi, Carlo Mazzotta, Luca Vendruscolo, Breaking Bad by Vince Gilligan, Le Bureau - Under Cover by Eric Rochant, The Crown by Peter Morgan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel by Amy Sherman - Palladino, Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
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