One of the new series, 800 Words, seems to pick up on a theme from the Masterpiece story, Durrells in Corfu. There we were told the 1930s story of the newly widowed English woman and her four children who left England in search of a more affordable existence in a small village in a Greek island. Her eldest embarks on a career as an author.
With 800 Words, the story is modified. It's a contemporary Australian widower, George Turner, who transplants to a small town in New Zealand with his two teenagers. Each day is a new adventure of errors and calamities. The family learns the house they thought they were moving into is not the ideal abode. Instead, it's more than a fixer-upper. It's a disaster that is barely tolerable - and then gets worse. Then the boat with all of their furniture and belongings sinks. The family is left to quite literally rough it as they learn about the island, the people, the customs, and survival in a new place.
Now in a new place with offspring who need to be cared for, George needs to earn a living. He finds a job as the local newspaper columnist and journalist. Somehow, that job pays for the family's most immediate needs and affords George the ability to pay for the numerous repairs for the house and the car. While the teenagers go through their form of grieving and trying to make sense of this new life, we learn about Dad as he works through his own battles through his weekly column that has a word count limit of 800 words - thus the name of the series. He speaks to us, and the village, through his column. He philosophizes. He learns. He discloses.
The story is made more endearing because it's situated in a very small town on an idyllic island. Needless to say, everyone knows everyone else. Gossip is the mainstay. People pitch in to help one another. Spontaneous housewarmings happen. Scandals come; scandals go. Peace abides as Life shifts and existence spins its way into a new day and new situations.
We go through the maturation process with the teens. It's easy to recognize that the story is authored by a man. The older daughter seems a bit more mature for her years than we would expect of a 16 year old. She is also not shy about speaking her mind to anyone, whether adult or peer. The younger son is learning about claiming territory and where he fits into the pecking order of the land. But he is also learning about his voice and he uses his voice and sophistication to work through the various situations that confront him.
Both of the youth are very sophisticated and philosophical. They make the viewer wonder what type of woman Mum was and what type of parenting was happening before the transplant occurred.
When George isn't writing, he's negotiating his way through existence as he goes through his own form of release from grieving. He attempts to reclaim the precious days of his youth when he longed to surf the New Zealand waters. Now approaching middle age, he realizes that may be more of a daydream than something that will be attained but it creates an occasional respite and an opportunity to meet more of the neighbors and become one with the land. He wants to fit in and he wants his family to be accepted by the locals. After all, they're going to live there for the rest of their lives.
Like the petals of a flower that slowly peel away from the bud, so the knowledge about the transplanted family comes to life in the series and we're drawn into the drama of life in a new place. We laugh at the double-handed doses Life dishes out in the form of tragedies that morph into moments of laughter that make it all the sweeter to be in Weld. We begin to yearn for that simpler time when Life was much more mellow in spite of what seems like chaos.
Perhaps the chaos is merely the unpredictable nature of living one day into the next. It's all a surprise and an exercise in a type of game of survival. In this idyllic setting, the threats and dangers are sparse. It's a relief to believe that type of existence can happen both in the past for the Durrells and in the present for the Turners.
If only more of us were as articulate so that we would paint word pictures for others to savor while we surf through our days.
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