Best accent

From WalesOnline: The Welsh accent is officially lush (and that's according to genuine academic research).

I don't know what "lush" means in that context. But I do know that when I started watching Hinterland, the Welsh accent drew me in.

How is Hinterland different?

How is Hinterland different? What makes the show special?

Ray Donovan, now that's a good show. It is good mostly because of the particularly fascinating character after whom the show is named. He makes it a great story.

Hinterland doesn't offer that kind of story.

Or, maybe it does. But the particularly fascinating character in Hinterland is the hinterland itself, and its people. Not Mathias specifically; not Mathias and his team, though I love them all dearly. The fascinating character in Hinterland is Wales.

Time to come back. The past is the past, Tom. Two weeks. I need an answer.

Season two, episode one: The whole opening conversation is short enough to be the title of this blog post.

After the opening credits, two conversations equally sparse: with Elis, and with Rhys.

Awesome.

Words dilute meaning, but not on Hinterland.

He's inspecting. He's detecting. He's doing his job.

I thought there were four. I find only three. If there is a Number Four, when I find it I'll add a note to the end of this post.

Before I started Watching Hinterland the blog, I was watching Hinterland on Netflix. I found it intruding into my thoughts when I was writing for my Econ blog. Ended up writing three or four Hinterland-related posts. It was always my intention to round them up and make note of them here. Now, finally, I'm getting to it.

The first evidence that the show had intruded into taken over my life was The Exquisite Tragedies of Hinterland (26 March 2016):

Best part? The eyes. The eyes of DCI Mathias and the eyes of DI Mared Rhys. Mathias walks up to a crime scene, stops, and looks at everything. He's inspecting. He's detecting. He's doing his job. Then he walks into the crime scene and stops to inspect and detect some more.

Then there's a cute one on my "frivolous tales" blog: Learning Welsh (4 April 2016).

And then you can see me working Hinterland in to the econ topic of my Thank God for them billionaires, huh? (20 April 2016):

The show is set in Wales in the midst of poverty, desolation, and faces full of character... In our time, that's a model of the economy. That's one reason I like the show so much.

That same day I started this blog. Simple recognition of the fact that, inexplicably, the show had become a significant part of my life.