It’s a wonderful show and I highly recommend it.

Too bad they’re trying to invent an unnecessary second season instead of filming the second book, Tai-Pan. It’s about Western trading companies in Hong Kong at the beginning of China’s so-called century of humiliation that followed the first opium war.

I can’t get the vibe of this movie. Is it “W” or is it “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Or, god forbid, “Reagan”?

Here’s the thing. There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the way their lives turned out. Or they have relationships that they wish were different. Regret is a universal theme. And this movie explores what might have been for characters in those circumstances with the possibility of changing those things in their past that they regret, while at the same the movie maintains a surreality and sense of humor that’s memorable and endearing.

I think it might resonate more with people who have lived long enough to experience that feeling of “is this all there is?”—and I don’t mean younger people whose lives are still mostly ahead of them. I mean those people who are divorced or contemplating divorce, parents with disappointing relationships with their adult children, those caring for an older family member who feel trapped. There’s a reason most actors in the film are in their 50s and 60s, as well as 40s.

If you didn’t like it, maybe that’s why. I finally reread The Great Gatsby when I was approaching middle age and it resonated with me in a way that it didn’t when I was in high school, to the point where it became one of my favorite novels. You are literally and figuratively a different person when you experience something at a later age.

I’m not suggesting everyone of a certain age or experience should like this movie. I’m just saying it might be why some didn’t connect with it.

I’ve watched that clip probably a dozen times and laughed every time. They have an entire row of fake mannequin people in the middle of the shot surrounded by lots of real actors and extras. Utterly bizarre.

This is why I don’t use the word “content” to describe this stuff. That’s the word execs use, and it’s because they see this kind of thing as fine. It’s just mass-produced product to them.