Happy december! Here we already have been having snow for quite few days now but what a better way to celebrate start of winter than with Reksio episode about the very thing!

Man, watching Reksio real evokes pure bliss. It's just an instant happiness pill. 'Cozy' as the youngsters say. The peak right there.

In this episode Reksio befriends a dachshund that's laughed at by everyone. In the end the dachshund proves himself as a fearless hen protector when a fox tries to get himself an afternoon snack.

Haven't been feeling great today so Reksio is a perfect way to relax. I love Reksio himself of course, but I love seeing how other dogs breed look in this series. They are always a delightful.

Due to owner neglecting his duties Reksio suffers a mental breakdown but an owl cheers him up with music. In a meta twist the specific song that cheers him up is about himself and his show. The owl is also real cute & adorable. There's actually a whole subset of Reksio episodes that are centred around various birds.

Not sure what this is. It's not Edith Wharton. It's maybe trying to be Bridgerton, with all the same problems that Bridgerton has with erasing Britain's colonial history - a history which in structural terms, still affects every person of colour living in this country today. It's anachronistic, in some ways that I can appreciate, but also in other ways that (again) feel like they flatten out parts of British history or culture. The writing veers wildly around in tone, one minute trying to be wry and acidic (trying for Wharton, maybe?), the next somber or dramatic (but actually just... really dull), the next being incredibly twee with dialogue riddled with sub-Whendonesque verbal tics. It's irritating, and I think it doesn't do many favours to the actors, who I suspect are probably better individually than they are as a group given these lines to speak, given this direction, given this cinematography.

I'm two episdoes in and wondering if this is going to get better in future episodes. Edith Wharton was very good at writing about class, culture, repression, unhappy marriages, people caught between duty and personal longings they can't square with the societies they're in. In theory, this series is touching on similar themes. But... Everything is so flattened out, which Wharton doesn't do. Where's the depth? Why these clunky lines that don't sound like Wharton, don't sound like speech of the time, but also don't sound like how actual people speak today? Why this particular vision of England that pretends to say something about class and repression, but says nothing at all about how that intersects with constructions of race or colonialism?

I think none of this feels real to me, either emotionally or intellectually because it's... Well, it's shallow, and not in a good way. Why bother to base yourself on Edith Wharton if this is what you make? If you're doing your own original story and characters, then... It's still probably going to be dreadfully shallow, but I wouldn't be sat here comparing it to Wharton at least. It's never going to stand up well to that comparison.