![]() ![]() He showed us the most crazy skills and took every high dune which seemed like impossible. When he finished we started a very nice bumpy way through the dessert. When we arrived at the dessert Anil changed the pressure of the tires for the best circumstances to drive trough the sand. It was an about 1 hour drive but the local music and the stories from Anil did it seems felt like an half an our! Meanwhile he told us about the Arabic culture and standards which gaves us more insight in how the Arabic citizens live and think. So did “Seinfeld,” as a comedy of manners particular to Manhattan and its unspoken rules about parking, waiting in line, bread, and corner diners.Before I was in Dubai people told me to do a desert safari and from my own experience I can say now, it’s really worth it!! We got picked up by our own driver Anil, who drove us to the desert. Like “Emily in Paris” with its own city, “Sex and the City” gave us a New York way of life and an attitude. The well-known stores, the galleries, Central Park, and the brownstones, along with the nightlife and the obsession with fashion, are all essential to the tone. New York is ingrained in the original “Sex and the City,” too, just as the title indicates. It is a group portrait of the city, of a variety of people who wouldn’t live so close together anywhere else, who find themselves and lose themselves in the city’s anonymity. For me, New York is inseparable from everything in “High Maintenance,” which follows the daily adventures of a pot delivery guy and his customers. New York has become a character on a number of TV series, where the action, the people, and even the story lines are extensions of and particular to the place. Yes, the series is an urban crime drama, and the Baltimore on the show represents corrupt cities across the country - but the city is unlike any other, too, and the show amplifies those particularities. In “The Wire,” Baltimore is a lead character, from the streets to the docks to the political offices. I certainly don’t mind watching series that don’t have deep roots in their locations, and I have spent many hours watching the franchise crime shows set in various American cities but it’s always a big plus when the location asserts its specificity and uniqueness. It’s like Will without Grace, or the Freaks without the Geeks. The miniseries is good enough, but, largely because of the new location, it doesn’t approach the richness of “Justified.” It feels incomplete, like watching Special Agent Dale Cooper of “Twin Peaks” looking into a murder outside of Twin Peaks, Wash. But outside of Harlan County, Raylan - who wasn’t in the novel, but was written into the story for TV - makes less sense. In terms of Leonard, that makes some sense the late author lived outside Detroit and set many novels there, including 1980′s “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” on which the eight-episode miniseries is based. But this time, the story is set in Detroit, the Motor City. Timothy Olyphant is back as a graying but no less sharp Raylan, and he is as magnetic and charming as ever. So it has been strange to watch “Justified: City Primeval,” the revival miniseries currently on FX and Hulu. The place was a protagonist and an antagonist, and he was interacting with it as much as he was interacting with anyone else. Harlan County was embedded in everything, and Raylan was dealing with his hometown region as much as he was dealing with fighting crime. But “Justified” was twinned with its setting. “Law & Order” and other franchise crime shows can take place wherever - and do, when you recall “CSI: Miami” and “CSI: New York.” They have a kind of generic bent. Later, “Ozark” would try to replicate that kind of rural realness, whereby the story could not occur anywhere else. Far from the gritty urban backdrop of most TV crime dramas, the locale was so present and distinct it was a kind of character on the show - almost as essential as Raylan, with his Stetson and his fast draw. It was wound into everything - the stories, the backstories, the brand names, the accents, the music, the pacing, and the out-of-town exploiters hoping to use and abuse its inhabitants. ![]() It’s hard to imagine “Justified” without its Harlan County location, especially given Raylan’s complicated relationship to it and his own past. As an adult he became the antithesis of that backwoods world, with its small-time criminals and hillbilly drug trade, but after a messy shooting in Miami, he was sent back and set loose upon his bank-robbing, white-supremacist childhood friend, Boyd Crowder. The occasion for the show, which was based on the fiction of Elmore Leonard, was US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens’s return to that depressed region, the place where he’d grown up and worked so hard to escape. During its run from 2010-15, “Justified” was set in the hills and hollers of Harlan County, Ky. ![]()
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