I’ve been back in Vermont for almost a week now. The Greyhound ride was kinda fun in some ways, I’ll write about it in another post. This week, I haven’t gotten housing on campus at Middlebury so I’ve been staying at my friend Htar Htar’s place in Burlington and commuting over to Midd. I missed the bus back to Burlington today so I’m stranded at Middlebury for the night, so I’m probably sleeping at some random place on campus.

Anyways, I was bored and got on Hulu and found this new TV series, about a billionaire playboy turned philanthropist. It’s called “The Philanthropist“and stars the dude who played Marc Anthony in HBO’s Rome. I would probably have passed over this show if I had better things to do but decided I’ll try it out. It is kind of an interesting premise for a TV show. But obviously a potential minefield of clichés and PC’ness. The pilot episode (that’s the only one’s that aired up to now) is pretty descent thanks to the brilliant acting by James Purefoy, who plays Teddy Rist the philanthropist.

The storyline of the pilot is that he’s trying to get a box of vaccines to a village in Nigeria through a series of unlikely events, including bribery, orgies, deals with drug traffickers, calls to Michelle Obama, and snakebites, he finally makes it there. The show obviously walks the fine line between being a really crappy show about sentimental white man’s burden BS and a fun adventure-like show with a witty actor in exotic locales. Hope they keep it up in future episodes.

According to the review in the NYTimes, he’ll be travelling to Myanmar in future episodes. Gotta watch out for that one. I’ll write another post about it when they get to that episode.