RETRO FILES / AVOID THE TV SERIES "SILK" BETTER YET RUN AWAY.

Silk's Rupert-Penry Jones with co-lead Maxine Peak deserve better as do audiences.

Unfinished/unprofessional series ending gives audiences reason enough to yank Brit series off the airways. 

There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from mediocrity, but from betrayal. 

Silk earns that distinction. 

 Forgive us if we speak ill of the dead and the yank headline pun.  Reviewers are American. 

For three seasons, Silk [2011-2014] positioned itself as a serious, intelligent British legal drama. The writing was sharp. The performances—especially from Maxine Peake and Rupert Penry-Jones—were disciplined and persuasive. The show respected the audience’s intelligence, building long arcs about ambition, ethics, gender, and the quiet brutality of professional life at the Bar. 

It asked viewers to invest time, attention, and emotional capital. And then it simply walked off the stage.  There should be a warning at the beginning of the series.

The final episode is not merely unsatisfying; it is evasive. Threads carefully laid over years are left dangling. Character journeys are abandoned mid-stride. Conflicts that demanded resolution are shrugged off with a sense of haste that borders on contempt. 

It feels less like an ending than an evacuation—cast and creators departing before the bill comes due. This is not bold ambiguity or daring restraint. It is narrative abdication. Good drama may leave questions unanswered, but it does not leave its story unfinished. 

Silk does. 

And that failure stains what came before it. What makes the collapse sting is how avoidable it was. The series had all the tools to land properly: a seasoned cast, a literate audience, and a world already built. 

Instead, it chose to stop rather than conclude, confusing abruptness for sophistication. British television has long prided itself on strong endings, even when they are bleak. Silk breaks (no, it shames) that tradition, and not in a way worth defending. 

Viewers who stayed faithful deserved better. 

Maybe, even the actors. 

A series that once argued persuasively for integrity ends by abandoning its own. That is bad form—and a reminder that no matter how fine the cloth, it still has to be finished at the edges. 

Perhaps, some day--if anyone really cares, will there be an accounting as to what happened to "Silk?" Prime time actors like Maxine Peake and Rupert-Penry Jones were part of the abandonment.  They and series producers owe us an explanation since the series is still on the air.  

TUESDAY THINK PIECE / FANTASY OR REALITY ACCORDING TO FREDDIE MERCURY

“Is this the real life? 

Is this just fantasy?” 

That opening question in Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a philosophical thesis so much as an emotional doorway. What Freddie Mercury was doing there was deliberately unsettling the listener. From the first breath, he puts us inside a mind that no longer trusts its own footing. 

“Reality” versus “fantasy” isn’t about metaphysics; it’s about psychological dislocation. The speaker feels detached from the normal rules of consequence, time, and identity. 

Several things are going on at once. 

First, confession. The lyric sounds like someone waking up after a shock, asking whether what’s happening can possibly be real. That primes the listener for guilt, fear, and emotional collapse. 

Second, theatrical framing. Freddie loved opera, and in opera the audience is often warned immediately that they’re entering an unreal space where emotions are heightened and logic bends. 

These lines say: suspend ordinary expectations. 

Third, denial and bargaining. The narrator is facing something unbearable. Questioning reality is a classic human reflex when responsibility or loss feels overwhelming. “If this is fantasy, maybe I can escape it.” Freddie himself repeatedly resisted literal interpretations of the song, and that’s important. He wasn’t writing a puzzle with a single solution. He was writing a mood piece about fragmentation: of self, of truth, of consequence. 

The lyric invites you into that fracture before the story even begins. So when he says “real life,” he doesn’t mean objective reality. He means emotional reality: the moment when you realize that what you’ve done, or what you are, can no longer be undone. 

It’s a brilliant hook because it asks the question we all ask at moments of reckoning, quietly or aloud: Is this really happening to me? And once that question is asked, the song owns you.