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.

Started watching this TV series for Keanu Reeves, who is doing the interviews and narrating the documentary. Stayed for the overall documentary and story.

In other documentaries of this type, the interviewer is not usually in the frame, so you could wonder if this series is compromising something of the focus on the subjects by including the interviewer as much as it does. But Keanu - with his love of motorbikes and racing - is an affable and enthusiastic host. You can see people warming up to him, and when you watch his empathetic reactions to what they're saying, you can understand how they would. He's no distraction from the interviewees. In fact warming them up means we, the audience, get more of an insight into their experiences. And Keanu's knowlegeable about the sport, but also reacts in a very human, accessible way to what he's hearing.

In fact sometimes he does some especially graceful things that I really like to see. For instance, Hiroshi Oshima, Honda Motorsports Managing Officer is trying to find the words to describe his feelings about "selling" the original team for a pound to Ross Brawn. But he says that it's very hard to do that in English. Keanu says: "In Japanese", inviting him to speak in the language he's fluent in instead.

If you're multilingual, and speaking outside your first language, I think you can understand that feeling of not being able to find the words in a different tongue. You can see how much more emotion people sometimes feel and express when they're able to speak freely in their own language, and this is the case here too. The interviewee is able to express himself more fully and the viewer is able to get a deeper understanding in the process. Plus of course there's always subtitles for everyone watching this at home.

Keanu, being as affable as he is, is not the sort of character who needs to center himself constantly, and in fact, he almost never does. And over time the inherent drama of the story speaks for itself. It's that old tale: will this underdog sport team survive a large array of challenges and even thrive?

Motorsports are not really my thing - they're so far away from ordinary life, that I see them a bit like high fashion. An escape from the everyday world. Something that involves huge sums of money, highly engineered, luxury objects, and entire teams of people who dedicate themselves entirely to the single purpose of creating something that most ordinary people will never even get to touch in their daily lives.

Not really my cuppa tea. I get bored seeing cars going round and round a circuit if I actually try to watch the sport. But I do enjoy documentaries about it that go into the challenges of the engineering, or the experience of the drivers, or the politics in the sport, and so on. All the contextual layers that you probably don't see if you're just watching cars go round and round a track. On that level, this documentary does a really good job.

Plus there's still footage of cars going round and round a track, and also the driver's camera view, all set to stirring music. I mean, if you are into the sport I think you will enjoy this a lot. If you are not into the sport (like me), but you also enjoy getting a look into a totally different world from your own (like me), then you will soon get sucked into this story too. The last episode in particular is full of especially warm, human moments. Would recommend.