TV Diary
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
a) "Hacks"
Maybe it's partly because "Designing Women" reruns always seemed to be on TV when I was growing up, but I think Jean Smart is one of those actors who so effortlessly plays characters that feel like a real person you actually know -- once I worked with her at the Kennedy Center, and I had this odd moment where I was walking toward her and kind of thought "do I know this lady? no, wait, that's Jean Smart!" So it's been cool to see her have this sort of late career renaissance appearing in acclaimed HBO shows like "Watchmen" and "Mare of Easttown" and now "Hacks," in which she plays a sort of Joan Rivers-esque iconic comedian who hires a young writer to work on material for her Vegas residency. There's a Devil Wears Prada sort of dynamic between Smart and the writer, played by Hannah Einbinder, who I'm totally smitten with, but their interactions are less about differences in experience or generation gaps than about how much comedy has changed in the last few decades.
b) "Girls5Eva"
"Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" writer Meredith Scardino created "Girls5eva," a show about a "TRL"-era pop group reuniting as middle-aged women, with a great cast including Busy Phillips, Hamiilton's Renee Elise Goldberry, and my adult contemporary fav Sara Bareilles, who has surprisingly good comedy chops. But the real scene stealer is Paula Pell, to an even greater degree than she was on "A.P. Bio."
It's kind of fascinating that Paul Theroux's 1981 novel The Mosquito Coast was adapted into a TV series 40 years later at just the perfect time for the author's nephew Justin Theroux to be at the right age and the right place in his acting career to star in it. From what I understand it's a pretty loose adaptation, though, and it kind of feels like they did as much as they could to form this story into an extremely familiar cable drama antihero family saga like "Breaking Bad" or "Ozardk" where an intelligent but self-absorbed father repeatedly plunges his wife and children into mortal danger. It's an entertaining show, and gives Theroux a great outlet for his kind of manic energy that he hasn't necessarily gotten in many of his other roles,
d) "Halston"
I don't know much about fashion so I don't know if I had heard of Halston, or at least didn't know there was a man behind the brand, before checking out the Netflix biographical miniseries. But I appreciate that Ryan Murphy kind of has this overarching project of producing a TV series about every corner of 20th century culture that interests him. I always hope that biographical series or miniseries won't feel as rushed and compressed as 2-hour theatrical biopics invariably do, but "Halston" is just 5 episodes and the first really felt like it was speeding through events of his life with as much shorthand as possible, but it was done artfully enough. And Ewan McGregor, who I've always regarded as more a charismatic actor with star quality than a great actor per se, really poured himself into the role, I think it's one of his best performances that I've seen. "Fosse/Verdon" was a better miniseries which covered the same time period in a similar way, but "Halston" has the better Liza Minnelli of the two shows, played by Krysta Rodriguez.
I know that historical fiction that puts a little alternate universe twist on what really happened is very big in TV these days, but this show basically being an accurate and realistic portrayal of American slavery except the underground railroad is a literally underground train track, I have to admit I don't understand the point. It's less a Wakanda-style fantasy and more like an extended pun that, as far as I can tell, doesn't really add much to the story. It's a really well made show with great direction and acting, but the concept, I dunno, maybe I need to give it a few more episodes to appreciate it.
"Intergalactic" is a British sci-fi show with actually impressive special effects as well as a show that takes place in space with a mostly female cast. The first couple episodes didn't blow me away, the characters and the 'wrongfully convicted prisoner trying to escape' tropes felt a little overly familiar, but it's still pretty promising.
There are a lot of sort of darker, adult, semi-realistic shows about superheroes out these days that are based on comics, and Netflix "Jupiter's Legacy" has the bad luck to come out after the TV version of "The Boys" and "Invincible." But more than that, it has the bad luck to be just kind of bad, feeling more like a CW show than a big budget streaming series, especially with Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb constantly jumping back and forth between two timelines, one of which features them in really bad gray wigs.
A Netflix sitcom with a really loud laugh track and hacky writing, Wanda Sykes and Mike Epps definitely deserve better.
With dozens of Marvel characters now regularly appearing in blockbuster movies, it's nice to be reminded that there are some characters like M.O.D.O.K. that are just too goofy and cartoony to fit into the MCU and are better left in something like an animated comedy series. Despite a great voice cast lead by Patton Oswalt, though, the first episode didn't really grab me -- I've never cared for the stop motion aesthetic of "Robot Chicken," and the humor is kind of "Archer" where I was hoping for more like "Harley Quinn."
I could never stand the look of the "Clone Wars" series and hoped that the newest Star Wars animated series for Disney+ would have a different, more cutting edge aesthetic, but nope, still just hideous, I don't know how people watch this stuff.
I know that "Saturday Night Live" is infamously a big machine-like franchise where everybody has to adapt their comic voice to the house style and the format, but it still seems kind of wild to me that the current co-head writer of "SNL" has his own sketch show on HBO Max to I guess get out the many ideas that even he can't get on the air at his day job. And I guess it's cool for Michael Che to pursue his own kind of abrasively sardonic brand of social commentary without Colin Jost as his smug yuppie foil, but Che being incredibly thin-skinned on the internet all the time really does make his cool calm one-liner TV persona ring hollow.
Sam Jay is a former "SNL" writer who also has a new show on HBO, I'm less familiar with her work but in the first episode she complains that people got mad at her about trans jokes in her standup special so I dunno, seemed like a red flag. "Pause" has a very casual party atmosphere with a little bit of "Daily Show"-style field interviews, interesting format but I don't know if it really cohered, at least in the first episode.
m) "Ziwe"
"Desus And Mero" writer Ziwe Fumudoh became something of a viral sensation over the last year or two with an online show, "Baited," where she'd interview celebrities and would frequently ask white people the kind of playfully pointed questions about race and hot button issues that are near impossible to give a "good" answer too. So her Showtime show is mostly arranged around that conceit, and the first episode featured Fran Lebovitz kind of stumbling around those questions and Gloria Steinem emerging relatively unscathed, but the sketch with Cristin Milioti and Jane Krakowski was by far my favorite part of the episode. This week's episode with Andrew Yang, however, was a much better example of the kind of entertainingly awkward interviews that made Ziwe a star.
I've loved late night talk shows since I was a kid, so I've been enjoying CNN's recent miniseries about the history of the genre. A lot of the big players in the story are no longer with us or didn't give interviews (Letterman, Leno, Stewart), but there's still a lot of good stuff in there -- for instance you get the benefit of a lot of Merrill Markoe's perspective of Letterman's NBC years. But I think the best stuff in this series covers the old days before I was born -- my dad used to tell me how brilliant Steve Allen was on the original "Tonight Show," but this is the most actual footage of him that I've ever seen, and the stories of other early late night hosts like Ernie Kovacs and Faye Emerson.
I was pretty thrilled to see that Apple+ has an 8-episode docuseries based on one of the best music books I've read in the last few years, David Hepworth's 1971 - Never A Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year. And it's great stuff, lots of amazing footage and interviews, but a few episodes in, I am finding myself sort of missing a fair amount of what made the book great. Hepworth has some pretty original and sometimes irreverent insights on some of the big musical figures of the year like Marvin Gaye or T. Rex or the Rolling Stones, and for the most part the series foregoes using any of that material in favor of sticking to the conventional wisdom and the established narratives.
This Apple TV+ show hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry is a very serious and sensitive thing about mental illness, talking with regular people as well as entertainers. It's a little dry and a little more focused on celebrities than I'd like, but I appreciate that they're trying to lead a delicate conversation.
This Netflix miniseries is about David Berkowitz but it's really about a guy who obsessively pushed a theory that Berkowitz didn't act alone and that there was a whole satanic cult behind the Son of Sam murders. But I don't think I ever read or watched too much about this stuff so I mostly just found the first episode with the basic story pretty interesting, and it was kind of hilarious how they interviewed multiple old New York cops who literally said "I says" on camera.
r) "Pride"
A pride month miniseries on Hulu, I liked that the first episode went all the way back to the '50s and talked about early public figures or well known people who were trans even back then, things I had never heard about.
Since I signed up for Apple TV+ after it had been around for a year, I've spent a lot of the last few months just catching up on shows before their 2nd seasons debut. And this one, which was "Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet" before dropping the clunky subtitle for the new season, is one of my favorites, a sitcom about video game development created by "It's Always Sunny" guys and "Community" writer Megan Ganz. And in a way it's kind of a classic workplace sitcom, a genre I've always loved, in a modern setting with a lot of the sort of emotional dysfunction of "Community" driving the comedy. I particularly like that Danny Pudi gets to play a character that's against type and not Abed at all, although if anything he's kind of underused in the show's big ensemble.
t) "Trying"
"Trying" is another Apple TV+ comedy that just returned for its second season, and it's probably the closest thing they have to their biggest hit "Ted Lasso," sweet and sentimental with lots of British people, but I found the first season kind of lacking as a comedy. The first episode of the new season was by far the funniest to date, though, so maybe they got new writers or were trying a little harder for laughs -- the bit about Scott writing 'the great American novel' about the Baltimore drug trade was hysterical.
u) "Special"
So few Netflix shows get past 3 seasons now, and "Special" is ending after only 2, but on the upside, they basically doubled the episode length from 14-17 minutes in the first season to 26-30 minutes. I liked the brisk pace of the show before but it works at a longer length. The whole cast is funny but Marla Mindelle really steals every scene she's in.
This show is still hit and miss but occasionally really funny, loved the bank heist sketch. Obviously most sketch shows with a black cast and creator are going to address racism sometimes, but it kinda feels like "A Black Lady Sketch Show" makes a point to almost never have any white people in sketches and just free themselves up to do jokes about other things, in a way it feels like a throwback to "In Living Color."
w) "Pose"
It kind of feels like there's a big air of disappointment around "Pose" ending at just 3 seasons, I feel that way particularly because I thought season 2 was better than one. And I kind of wish they'd stayed longer in the time period they started in, I kind of rolled my eyes when suddenly it was 1994 and they were watching O.J.'s white Bronco chase. Elektra is my favorite character so I enjoyed the flashback episode with her backstory.
It feels weird that I've now watched 3 seasons of this show without having seen the original Soderbergh movie, but it seems kind of hard to find now. So far I'm not finding this season's plot as absorbing as either of season 2's stories, but I'm not sure where they're going with the whole AI thing, maybe it'll end up somewhere interesting.
"Van Helson" just started its fifth and final season, and I've watched every episode in just the past year. And it's funny that they occasionally sort of acknowledge how ridiculous and complicated the story has gotten since the show started, because it really has. I think that maybe the best episode in the entire series was "No 'I' In Team," which flashes back to the first day of the vampire uprising and felt genuinely thrilling in a way the show rarely has been.
Another vampire show on its final season, but a more entertaining one, I'm enjoying the last run of episodes, I just barely am following the plot but the dialogue is great.
