TV Diary
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Ben Stiller has a solid track record of directing broad comedy but when he veers towards dramedy he's wound up with dreck like "Reality Bites" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." So I wasn't sure which way things would go with his miniseries about the 2015 upstate New York prison break, but this is really, really good. Just the right amount of bleak prison drama reality with Benicio del Toro and Patricia Arquette adding these tastefully restrained comedic notes to their performances to kind of acknowledge how bizarre the story is in and of itself. Paul Dano has given some of the worst, most overacted performances I've seen in films in the last 12 years or so, but so far even he has been just pitch perfect. I like the way they kind of put you in the not-quite-current setting with the diegetic soundtrack of Top 40 radio blaring in the background of scenes, random 2nd tier hits by Nick Jonas and Meghan Trainor that were on the radio in 2015 but wouldn't be obvious needledrops if someone was making a period piece about that time 20 years from now.
b) "Dirty John"
When "9-1-1" returned this fall without Connie Britton I kind of assumed she realized how bad the writing was on that show and wanted to move onto some better material. And the first episode of her new show was pretty promising, Eric Bana kind of reminds me of Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights in terms of being this bland cargo shorts-wearing guy who you just know the other characters are wrong for trusting. I think probably the most promising part of the show is how it's not afraid to have these banal notes where even Britton's daughters, the most reasonable people in the story, come off as annoying kids.
I really liked actor/director/writer Desiree Akhavan's 2014 debut feature Appropriate Behavior and was excited to hear that she'd gotten her own TV series on Hulu. But "The Bisexual," which first aired on Channel 4 in the UK, was at first a little of a letdown, and I found myself wishing that an American network had financed the production and it had an American setting and supporting cast. It grew on me by the end of the 6th episode, but I still have mixed feelings about the Brian (dead ringer for his father Brendan) Gleeson and the rest of the cast. Tanya Reynolds was really funny, though, I wish she was in more than one episode.
d) "Sally4Ever"
I'm not too familiar with British TV star Julia Davis's work, but this fall HBO aired an American adaptation of one of her shows, "Camping," as well as her new show "Sally4Ever." I think I prefer the former, although I don't know how faithful it is to the original. But "Sally4Ever" is kind of interesting in that I thought the premise, a woman breaking off her loveless engagement to a cartoonishly pathetic man to have an affair with a woman, would be played more straightforward as a queer love story. But instead Davis's character, Emma, is even more cartoonish, and all sex in the show, gay or straight, is kind of portrayed as a gross joke.
e) "Sick Note"
I don't want to sound too down on British comedy, because I grew up on a lot of it and love a lot of modern performers, including "Sick Note"'s Nick Frost. But watching these shows really left a bad taste in my mouth about the state of British sitcoms, particularly "Sick Note," which exists in a world where everyone is about as intelligent, complex and sympathetic as the average "South Park" character. The whole thing just starts loud and broad and keeps getting nastier and dumber as it goes, with Don Johnson relishing his abrasive, unfunny role as "stunt casted aging celebrity who yells and curses a lot."
I've long been kind of a Chuck Lorre apologist who thought he had the potential to make quality television if he got away from the churn of formulaic CBS shows. So his first Netflix show, "Disjointed," was especially disappointing because he stuck to a shrill laugh track and hacky jokes while wasting a star of the caliber of Kathy Bates. Lorre's second Netflix production, "The Kominsky Method," gets a lot closer to what I was hoping for -- Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin bleakly quipping about mortality in a single camera show with no laugh track. It's just okay, though, they don't knock it out of the park like they could've.
Earlier this year I decided to embrace my ugly American instinct to not bother with subtitled foreign language shows, since Netflix and the Sundance Channel are producing so many of them now and I haven't really loved any of them. But this HBO miniseries based on the hugely popular Elena Ferrante novel is entirely in Italian and probably the most high profile foreign language series on an American network ever, so I figured I should check it out. I like it so far, but honestly, this seems like a story that works better as a novel, even the best adaptation probably wouldn't retain what drew readers to it.
i) "Charmed"
I've probably passively watched dozens of reruns of the original "Charmed" just crushing on Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan, so I don't really care about the show itself that much to care either way that they rebooted it, although Madeleine Mantock and Sarah Jeffery from the new cast are pretty beautiful too. This version of the show seems to take itself slightly more seriously than the old one and the visual effects are moderately better, but those aren't necessarily pluses.
j) "Light As A Feather"
The premise of this Hulu show is kind of interesting but the acting is really bad. I get that the argument for having high schoolers played by much older people all the time is that you can get more able and seasoned actors to pull of the role, but everyone playing a teen in this show is 20-26 and the acting is still terrible, so they may as well have tried casting actual teens.
Cheesy Netflix kids show, really reminded me of '80s family shows. I should probably watch trailers for Netflix shows before checking them out so I know whether I'm wasting my time on something I'm not in the demographic for.
m) "Super Drags"
The idea of an adult cartoon about LGBT superheroes is cool, but it kind of reminds me of a lot of really corny Comedy Central adult cartoons like "Drawn Together," wasn't into it.
n) "The Final Table"
Among the million other genres that once seemed best suited to traditional broadcast networks that Netflix is now trying to get into competitive reality shows. I don't know if the weekly suspense of narrowing down the field and eventually declaring a champion really works the same way if you release a whole season of the show at once, though. This cooking show has good production values and I like the way it's a big international competition across several different countries, but it's also kind of loud and obnoxious, and I quickly tire of watching shows about food I can't eat.
o) "Westside"
Another Netflix attempt at a popular reality genre, but this is a lot further from the traditional broadcast reality show about aspiring musicians. The whole thing looks really slick and you get to experience fully produced songs and music videos from the artists during the show as you watch them work on their careers and interact with each other, which is a really cool, novel approach. And yet, I found it unwatchable because these are all the usual vain, vapid wannabe pop stars you see on "American Idol" except somehow made more annoying in this context.
p) "Real Country"
Country music has always been a little more suited to reality TV than other genres in my opinion, just because the Nashville machine is already very regimented and structured in similar ways. And this show has some clever ideas, like having nights themed around 'drinking songs' and other country music conventions. But it's also kind of a loud annoying show with lots of "American Idol"-style filler taking up most of the show's running time.
q) "Enemies: The President, Justice & The FBI"
A pretty interesting Showtime doc series about historical conflicts between POTUSes and intelligence and law enforcement agencies, obviously you watch these things thinking a lot about the present day. But for every way that the Nixon presidency was different from the Trump presidency and so on, they really brought up some interesting footage and little details of the Watergate era that I hadn't seen or thought about before that illustrated its relevance to current events.
r) "Medal of Honor"
This Netflix series is basically docudrama recreations of various medal of honor recipients' personal stories, the production values are good but I don't need to see more than one episode of this just like I don't need to see every Lone Survivor type movie that comes out.
s) "Shut Up And Dribble"
Laura Ingraham coined both "shut up and sing" and "shut up and dribble," which the Dixie Chicks and now LeBron James have turned into the titles of documentaries about standing up for your personal beliefs, which I guess is kind of a good rebuff to Ingraham but I also worry about how much more important it makes that terrible woman. This is an interesting miniseries, though, I particularly liked the second episode that kind of zoomed in on the legacy of Michael Jordan saying "Republicans buy sneakers too."
t) "Dogs"
I half expected this Netflix show to just be hourlong episodes of dogs running around like the "Puppy Bowl," but it's a nice little documentary series about bonds between dogs and humans, the first episode was pretty touching (and I say that as someone who enjoys occasionally walking dogs but prefers to live with cats).
u) "Axios"
This show really showed its true colors in its awful debut episode's awful Trump interview where their oily reporter dudes seem to delight in egging the president on to speak about trying to end birthright citizenship in America. They try to be measured and analytical in their little show but there's something totally hollow and amoral about how they approach these kinds of stories that's just rotten.
v) "Into The Dark"
Blumhouse Productions has released so many of the most acclaimed horror movies of the last few years that it was exciting to hear their anthology series for Hulu would feature a different feature-length story each month of the year, themed around a holiday from that month. I probably should have guessed that they wouldn't toss out a Get Out-caliber film as a Hulu freebie, though, the first two installments have been merely okay. The Halloween episode, "The Body," had a good cast and some fun, creative moments but also felt a little flimsy and slapdash. The Thanksgiving episode, "Flesh & Blood," probably could have been an above average horror flick in the right hands, but Dermot Mulroney just could not pull off his role and there have been like 3 other movies in the last decade that used agoraphobia similarly as a plot device and I'm really over it.
w) "Channel Zero: The Dream Door"
The 4th season of SyFy's creepypasta-inspired horror anthology series might be my favorite to date, from a visual standpoint it was just really creative and gory and gross. And Troy James's performance as Pretzel Jack was just incredible, to put a contortionist into this weird surreal costume and have him move in these bizarre unnatural-looking ways makes for a great character, I feel like they could've made a Pretzel Jack movie and he would've become an iconic horror movie villain.
x) "Room 104"
I pretty strongly disliked the first season of this old little Duplass brothers experiment on HBO where each episode is a standalone story taking place in the same hotel room. But there were one or two episodes that I thought made good use of the format, and they keep getting great actors to do their little show, so I wanted to give it another chance. But it almost feels like the better the cast is, the worse it gets, the Michael Shannon/Judy Greer episode was just the dumbest bullshit, at one point Shannon raps in a Russian accent.
y) "Midnight, Texas"
Ever since Andy Richter described this show's genre as "pile of hotties" it's all I can think about when I watch it. I think I'll stop watching it, though, hotties or not. It's just not remotely as good as "True Blood," which was plenty flawed but at least was on cable and didn't have to hold back on the sex or the gore.
z) "Stan Against Evil"
This show has been on for 3 seasons and I still don't think I've encountered another soul who's watched it, which I guess is what happens when you're on IFC in its era of daily "Two And A Half Men" reruns. It's good, though, at least once or twice an episode John C. McGinley says something that makes me throw my head back in laughter.
