TV Diary
a) "Severance"
Ben Stiller has had a weird sporadic directorial career that has succeeded the most with full-on comedy (Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, "The Ben Stiller Show") and faltered with stuff that took itself a little more seriously (Reality Bites, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). So his great work directing the miniseries "Escape at Dannemora" a few years ago was a pleasant surprise, and this Apple TV+ series that Still has directed most of the episodes of is just fantastic. It's about a mysterious corporation where many employees have had a 'severance' operation so that at work you have no memory or knowledge of your life outside work, and then you leave the office and have no memory or knowledge of what you did at work. It's kind of like many "Black Mirror" episodes where the premise is so disturbing on its face that it defies belief that it would happen even in a dystopian future world, and yet "Severance" sets up this world so intriguingly, and explores the idea in such a thoughtful and creative way, that I'm just on the edge of my seat. The first episode alone had so many great little twists and reveals to draw me in, and Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Michael Chemus, and Christopher Walken are a great ensemble.
Toni Collette is one of my favorite actresses working today, but you rarely see her play characters in happy circumstances, and Netflix's "Pieces Of Her" is a pretty dark one, where she and her daughter, played by Bella Heathcote, both survive two violent attacks in the fist episode. And then this quickly starts to reveal this whole complicated backstory and the story really goes in places I didn't expect. Creator Charlotte Stoudt was a writer/producer on "Homeland" and it has a little of that vibe to it, but it's adapted from a book by Karin Slaughter, and I like watching shows based on novels, kind of gives you an assurance that the whole story was conceived with a beginning, middle, and end and you're not just being strung along with episodic cliffhangers that these kinds of shows often rely on.
I never really cared about the whole "Tiger King" phenomenon, and the idea that we need actors to play these people in a miniseries is a good example of everything that's wrong with the ripped-from-the-headlines TV craze. I feel bad for Kate McKinnon that she wasted her time and missed half a season of "SNL" to do this.
I've never seen "Downton Abbey," but I'm enjoying Julian Fellowes's new show for HBO about New York City in 1882. Carrie Coon seems like she's having a blast doing the period piece thing and wearing several colorful over-the-top gowns in every episode. But it's not all polite high society drama and the whole thing started to get more interesting around the third episode, when her robber baron husband, played by Morgan Spector, drove a rival to suicide and the darkness around the edges of the story got a little more pronounced.
e) "From"
"From" on Epix is about a family on a road trip in an RV who drives into a small town that has all sorts of crazy supernatural stuff going on -- once you enter you can't leave, with roads that seem to just loop and take you back into town, and every night people hide in their homes from human-looking monsters (or maybe ghosts of people who lived there?) who eviscerate anybody they find. The production values and acting are pretty excellent, but it's just such a dark and dreary show, it can be a lot to take. But there are intriguing glimpses at what the mythology of the show is all about, I'm curious to see what gets revealed.
My wife was excited about this SyFy series, about a couple of outcast teenagers who open an interdimensional portal and have to battle monsters, but the first episode was kind of a letdown, the acting and the production values are just a little weak and it fell short of its potential. But I've kept watching it and they're slowly finding their footing, it's still a likable little show.
In "The Tourist," Jamie Dornan is a British guy vising Australia who gets into a car crash and wakes up with no memory of who he is or why he's there. The first episode gives you some ominous clues, including one of those great bits where someone pretending be a stranger is, you find out, someone who knows him, so a pretty good start, looking forward to watching more of this.
"Superstore" was a great workplace sitcom that was both an empathetic portrayal of retail workers and the issues they face and a silly comedy where all the characters were flawed people. "Superstore" creator Justin Spitzer's follow-up show for NBC, "American Auto," is about executives at a car company, and tonally it's very similar, but the context is different: instead of seeing low level employees deal with the consequences of a giant corporation's bad decisions, we're watching the highly paid people in charge make the bad decisions. In that sense, "Abbott Elementary" feels more like a successor to what "Superstore" did well, while "American Auto" is more like a vicious satire of corporate culture in the vein of "Better Off Ted."
The third season of "The Boys" is coming in the summer, but in the meantime Amazon has released this little spinoff of one of their biggest hits, animated shorts taking place in the universe of the show, kind of like "Marvel Studios' What If...?" But "The Boys" is a bit more violent and adult than Marvel movies, and so are these shorts, and I think the experiment works better here where there's more license to be darkly funny and absurd and gorey. Of the ones I've watched so far, I particularly liked the one by "Rick & Morty"'s Justin Roiland, and the one drawn in the style of the original graphic novels and written by creator Garth Ennis.
Apparently "Castlevania" showrunner Adi Shankar is famous this 'Bootleg Universe' thing that started as a YouTube channel with unlicensed satirical shorts about Marvel characters and James Bond, etc. And his new Netflix series "The Guardians of Justice" is kind of an over-the-top Justice League satire starring Diamond Dallas Page, violent and weird like "The Boys" but a lot less serious or narratively coherent. Not sure how much I like it yet, seems promising but the 'superheroes with a subversive twist' genre is so oversaturated right now.
k) "Suspicion"
"Suspicion" starts interestingly -- we meet five characters who don't know each other and are going about their lives, including a woman on her wedding day, and then they're all arrested for a high profile kidnapping and this whole big mystery starts to unravel. But I don't know, I think it's gotten kind of convoluted very quickly, Elizabeth Henstridge from "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is adorable and I'm annoyed they seem to be teasing some kind of relationship with Elyes Gabel's creepy character. Uma Thurman, overdue for a meaty television role, once again doesn't have much to do here.
l) "Take Note"
A cute little family sitcom on Peacock about a kid who auditions for an "American Idol"-style singing competition show, a little cheesy but charming.
Usually, I get annoyed by shows where the main character is keeping a secret from everyone else, and think the shows get more interesting once more people find out the secret and the stories stop revolving around preserving the secrecy. But I dunno, "Resident Alien" was a little more fun in its first season when nobody knew Alan Tudyk was an alien, now more characters know what's going on and there's less small town silliness and more tense action.
The idea of making a sitcom about Space Force immediately after then-President Trump created the new military branch probably seemed like an exciting idea at the time. But just as the current administration is now left figuring out what to do with the Space Force, Greg Daniels and Steve Carell are still here with "Space Force" and have to see if the show has legs beyond existing to spite Trump after a widely panned first season. The second season has been praised as a course correction, and I'd say it worked because I couldn't really put my finger on any way the show has been overtly retooled, other than maybe making Carell's character a little less obnoxious, but I've enjoyed it a little more. And really, it's the only show on TV with John Malkovich, I'd watch it for him alone. But they only put out 7 episodes, don't know if that means more episodes are coming or if that bodes poorly for the show's future.
The Ridley Scott-produced "Raised By Wolves" is such an imaginative and surreal sci-fi show, but when it started up in 2020 my wife was the one who was really excited about it, and she kind of fell of watching it, and I don't enjoy watching it as much without her. There's still some pretty cool weird shit happening in the second season but I haven't really paid close attention to totally understand what's going on. Amanda Collin as Mother is an incredible performance, though.
p) "Servant"
"Servant" is only the second Apple TV+ show to reach its 3rd season, after "Dickinson," and it's been exciting to watch a horror show sustain the mystery and suspense this far without writing themselves into a corner. Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) remains this very strange character who is sometimes a sympathetic protagonist and sometimes this terrifying, mysterious agent of chaos. The last episode almost seemed for the first time to circle back and put all the characters were they were at the beginning of the first season, but I'm really curious where it could go from here.
Season 2 and 3 of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" weren't bad, but they definitely felt like a show had peaked early and its charm was gradually tapering off. But season 4 is really strong, feels like they've kind of gotten past making Midge this absurdly polished talent moving up in the world and gave her a couple losses to make her career struggle compelling again. Hari Nef's antagonist journalist is an interesting new character, and the cranky old dudes (Tony Shalhoub, Jason Alexander, and Kevin Pollak) are as entertaining as ever. Even the B plots focusing on Joel, who's been a schmuck I can't stand since the first episode of the series, are easier to watch now because Stephanie Hsu is a great addition to the cast. I also liked the latest appearance of Lenny Bruce, who felt a little closer to real life and less like the weird fantasy dreamboat that he's often been in earlier seasons.
r) "Grown-ish"
"Black-ish" is wrapping up this year and the 4th season of the college spinoff "Grown-ish" has been promoted as its 'senior year,' but they've been renewed for another season, so I guess they're gonna let these characters graduate. I kind of hope they let everybody move on and have slightly more adult lives, though, it kinda feels like they've been stuck in silly freshman year he-said-she-said drama for most of the series now.
This Japanese series on Netflix is about the extramarital affairs of six women who live in the same apartment building, their stories are told sensitively and empathically but sometimes I'm like wow that was a lot of gratuitous sex scenes.
A Netflix drama about a Bollywood star who goes missing, started it but didn't really find it interesting enough to watch much of.
John Lurie is such an odd guy, it's fun to just put this on and see how he fills the airtime. One recent episode is mostly him telling a long story about taking a friend's speaking engagement as an excuse to visit Barcelona in the '80s, and giving a nonsensical 45-minute speech for $500 and a free flight. At the end of the episode, John smiles and says "thank you for the money, HBO!" as if to wink that "Painting With John" itself is kind of a ridiculous scam, but honestly it was one of the best episodes of the show to date
v) "March"
I was in marching band all through middle school and high school and we had a pretty good band that went all over the place, marched in the new year's day parade in London one year. But I didn't stick with it in college, and it's interesting to watch this show on The CW about an HBCU marching band that's on just operating on a way higher level than anything I ever did in marching band, I get exhausted just thinking about how hard those people must work. Not a big fan of the 'docu-soap' style that makes a reality show look and feel more like a scripted show, though.
One of the best things about the recent The Velvet Underground documentary by Todd Haynes is that it felt like an art film true to the VU/Warhol/Factory scene it was about. By contrast, this Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix docuseries kind of feels like a more generic pop culture doc, even with Warhol's voice as a constant presence narrating everything, it just feels like the wrong approach for the subject matter.
x) "Making Fun"
A fun Netflix show where this team of grumpy guys get instructions from kids to build some absurd idea like a "dinosaur taco toilet" and then actually make it and present it to the children, it's kind of a fun inversion of all the more honest reality shows and crafting and building things.
I feel like having roommate horror stories is a rite of passage of young adulthood. I had 7 roommates before my wife and I moved in together, and I have some good stories about most of them. This Netflix docuseries obviously gets into some more serious situations than anything I've dealt with, but I didn't think there was much style or personality to the show, really fell short of its potential.
This Apple TV+ docuseries about Abe Lincoln opened with an epilepsy warning about flashing lights, which really confused me, I didn't see anything in the first episode that seemed to necessitate that. Pretty good doc, though, as much as I've heard or read about Lincoln I feel like there's always a little more to learn there about the context of his presidency and who really was as a person and what choices he had to make.
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on Thursday, March 10, 2022 at 12:28 PM.
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