Good as they ever were

This post is a check-in with new seasons of series that continue to engage and entertain me.  I’ve written about them before, but hereby renew my recommendations.

Sometimes the cheesiest premise can lead to the most audacious show.  Remember that the “new golden age of television” really began not with The Sopranos, but with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Case in point, GLOW (MC-81, NFX) – this show about the 1980s-era Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling may come across as a T&A extravaganza, but each season has extended its reach at examining feminist issues in period costume.  In the just released 3^rd season, the group has had their tv show cancelled, but moved up to a live casino show in Las Vegas.  Like Orange is the New Black, this Netflix series features an unusual range of female characters in a communal setting, but unlike Orange, GLOW has retained my interest, and remains funny, sharp, and touching.  Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin are the headliners, but there’s a delightful diversity to the performers, with Marc Maron as the director and Geena Davis as guest star.  This show is much better than you may expect, and I hope it will be renewed for another season.  

Another show that redeems suspect male-gaze subject matter through almost exclusively female creators is Harlots (MC-77, Hulu), about prostitution in Georgian-era London (sort of The Deuce in fancy dress).  I wrote about the first two seasons here, and am equally favorable toward the third, filled with incident and surprise in a way that suggested they were trying to wrap up all the threads of the story in a headlong rush.  But then they managed to thread the needle with a conclusion that works well in its own right, but sets up intriguing possibilities for a fourth season.  This is prime Masterpiece material in period production values, but cranked to the max, heated up, and delivered with a gynocentric perspective.  I really love these actresses, led by Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville, and enjoy hissing all the evil males, aside from one stalwart black man.

The divine doubleness of Mum (BCG, Britbox) is suggested by its title.  Lesley Manville is a loving and beloved mother and widow, but she is also mum about her feelings in Stefan Golaszewski’s lovely comedy about grief.  She goes about her emotions as silently as she picks up after every other person who tramps through her house.  They are all caricatures – the clueless son and his dimwitted girlfriend, the hapless brother and the virago who uses him mercilessly, the cranky old in-laws – but so well scripted and performed that they take on more dimensions than you would imagine.  Manville, however, is achingly real and poignantly comic, as is Peter Mullan, cast totally against his steely-eyed type as the gentle, thwarted friend who has pined his entire life for his best friend’s wife.  Now the husband/friend is gone, and the sadness mingled with hope is nearly unbearable – as are the reactions of all the other characters – to the pair’s final stab at happiness.  The first season picks up on the day of the funeral, and covers a year in six half-hour installments.  The second season covers the same.  The third spans a week spent by all the characters at a posh country rental, in a beautifully realized and fully satisfying series finale.  I hope Golaszewski keeps to his resolve to end it there, but I certainly hope he teams up with Manville and Mullan again, a ménage made in heaven.   As a limited half-hour sitcom, Mum is in the same top-flight league as Fleabag and Catastrophe (i.e. among my all-time favorites), but a different sort of creature, dealing with the issues of being sixty rather than thirty or forty.  Warning: the theme song is an ear-worm that will drill into your brain after repeated hearings.

I’m amused at the thought of Lesley Manville commuting between the sets of Harlots and Mum, and going between the malign and the benign, between the pure evil of the grasping madam and the selfless serenity of the unflappable mother.  To square off the dimensions of her range, I tracked down DVDs of two of her outstanding performances in Mike Leigh films.  Somehow I had missed All or Nothing (2002, MC-72), a typical collaborative effort from Leigh, in which Manville is a supermarket cashier paired with cab driver Timothy Spall (James Corden is their son); other Leigh regulars like Ruth Sheen and Sally Hawkins also appear, all living in council flats and struggling to get by.  In his gritty kitchen-sink style, the story is grim but somehow funny and heartening at the same time.  These are unhappy people in unhappy circumstances, but the potential for redemption exists.  In Another Year (2010, MC-80, reviewed by me here), Manville is a drunken, desperate flirt, in four seasonal drop-ins on her rather self-satisfied married friends Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent.  They tolerate her behavior until they don’t, as she spirals toward self-destruction.  The situation is comic and heartbreaking in equal measure, and as always with Leigh’s method, the characters are fully lived-in.  On second viewing, I am more impressed with Lesley Manville’s range; like a Meryl Streep, she seems able to inhabit any kind of character, and to make them sympathetic in any kind of awfulness.

Another new British sitcom plays as the love child of my raving faves Fleabag and Catastrophe, the unmemorably-named This Way Up (MC-69, Hulu).  Creator and star Aisling Bea is one of two Irish sisters living in London; the other is Sharon Horgan of Catastrophe.  She has suffered loss and had a breakdown, but is an irrepressible jokester, and the sororal relationship is a delight.  The solid supporting cast has some pleasingly familiar faces, such as Aasif Mandvi.  In the typical UK format of six 23-minute episodes, this is a delightful taste of a wacky and winning show to look forward to, now that its progenitors have wrapped up their runs.

To fall under this rubric, Unbelievable (MC-82, NFX) has to be considered for its three lead actresses, who are indeed as good as they’ve ever been.  Kaitlyn Dever first made an impression on personal fave Justified and delivers an award-worthy performance here, looking far more frail and vulnerable as an 18-year-old rape victim disbelieved by the police, than she did eight years ago as precocious adoptee of a Harlan County crime family.  (I look forward to seeing her triangulate in Booksmart.)  I’ve followed Toni Collette’s career since Muriel’s Wedding (which deserves another look), and have always found her worth watching, here as a bad-ass detective who works the case of a serial rapist three years later in another state.  Merrit Wever, beloved from Nurse Jackie, is a younger and calmer detective from a nearby town, who joins forces on the case.  The series, especially toward the end, has too many odd-couple, cop-buddy beats, albeit with a female twist and well-performed.  But it’s based on a piece of prize-winning journalism about an actual case, and has veracity and resonance, if too much CSI detail.  A lot of important points are made about sexual violence, beyond the banner headline “Believe Women,” but it would have been better at six episodes rather than eight.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the title of The Victim (Britbox) is misleadingly singular, since all the characters seem to be victims in one light or another.   Despite the set-up of a child’s murder, this is neither a criminal nor legal procedural, but a profound meditation on guilt and forgiveness, rage and revenge.  Though more limited in scope, I’d put it in category with Rectify, which happens to be my second favorite tv series of all time (after The Wire).  I do not have a thing for British mysteries, but while trying to make the most of a temporary subscription to Britbox (in order to watch Mum), I gave this a try largely because it stars Kelly Macdonald.  And she is fantastically good as the mother who cannot get past the murder of her young son almost twenty years before.  The juvenile who committed the murder served his sentence and was given a new identity on release.  The mother is determined to track him down and see that justice is done, according to her own lights.  This originally put me in mind of the HBO limited series, The Night Of, for an existential mystery that keeps one guessing through all its ingenious twists, but the fourth and final hour ascends to a powerful conclusion that transcends questions of good and evil, guilt and innocence, to propose something like redemption.

Not to be confused with Unbelievable is Undone (MC-88, AMZ), about which my feelings are confused.  In shorthand, I’d call it Waking Life meets Russian Doll, which probably doesn’t clear up much.  The technique is live action, animated through rotoscoping and other means, for a very distinctive look.  The story is about 28-year-old mestizo woman in San Antonio, who has a car accident and enters a state of madness – or what?  She sees her dead father, and is encouraged by him to travel back in time to discover the real cause of his death.  Rosa Salazar is the woman, and Bob Odenkirk is the father, still recognizable after the painted overlay.  She has a boyfriend, a mother, and an about-to-be-married younger sister, all of whom keep urging her to take her meds.  I was certainly drawn through the eight episodes of twentysome minutes, but I’m still not sure what to make of it.  Not inclined to watch again, however, though I do suggest you sample at least one episode to admire the technique.

In much the same vein, I might pitch Living with Yourself (MC-72, NFX) as Adaptation meets Russian Doll, but that would giving it too much credit, though I was happy to binge the 8-part series in a single night.  Paul Rudd shines as a sagging advertising “creative,” who seeks to refresh his life by a cloning treatment, which by mistake winds up with two of him.  Aisling Bea is also appealing as his frustrated wife, who inevitably finds out about the duplicate and actually prefers him.  With multiple viewpoints and a fractured timeline that overlaps events from differing perspectives, the story keeps moving along from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, in a way that is more artificial than organic, but still entertaining if you don’t think about it too much.  It’s all quite clever, though perhaps not as clever as it thinks.

In its second season, Succession (MC-76, HBO) finally generated the buzz this incisive and hilarious series deserved from the beginning, nailing a coiled-snake conclusion, to set up great expectations for a third season.  If you are a fan of Peep Show (and if you’re not, you don’t know the laughs you’re missing), you would expect great things from creator Jesse Armstrong, and he delivers cringe-worthy characters and biting, witty dialogue at impressively enhanced scale.  About a media colossus run by a family that resembles a mash-up of Murdochs and Trumps, the series combines soap opera and satire into a deliciously tart and tasty concoction.  The very rich are different from me and you, thank goodness, but there is a definite glee in watching scorpions in a bottle sting each other.  Brian Cox is the domineering patriarch, but it helps that the rest of the family is not so familiar from other work, though many of the passing characters have highly-recognizable faces (such as Holly Hunter in the second series).  Really, it’s time for you to get on board this bandwagon.

The Deuce (MC-85, HBO), like any David Simon production, is a solid piece of journalism about communities and professions that are generally unrecognized and underreported, though not quite up to the level of The Wire or Tremé.  The series follows the transformation of the eponymous 42^nd Street, and the evolution of prostitution and pornography from 1971 to 1985, with seven-year gaps between each of the three seasons.  James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal are the headliners, he playing twins who run various shady businesses beholden to the mob, she as a streetwalker turned filmmaker.  But again as is usual with Simon, the cast is broad, diverse, and solid, with many storylines juggled effectively, looking at the social system from different angles, based on first-person testimony from survivors of the scene.  In the final season, the porn industry has mostly moved to SoCal, drugs are taking over as the criminal profit center, with pimps and parlors becoming obsolete, and women reclaiming ownership of their bodies in various ways, though fitfully so.  In the final season, the AIDS epidemic becomes an underlying theme that affects all the characters.  Many characters come to bad ends, but an epilogue set in today’s Times Square rounds off the story impressively, if not exactly hopefully.

(As pendant or postscript to The Deuce, I recommend a well-made documentary that appeared in the POV series on PBS.  The title of Blowin’ Up (PBS) refers to prostitutes escaping from their pimps or from “the life,” and follows the activities of a judge, public defenders, and advocates for a diversion program in Queens NY, where (mostly Asian) women who have been arrested are given the opportunity to have their record expunged (and frequently, to escape deportation) by attending meetings and counseling.  It’s good to look at compassionate women serving others in dire straits.  The film is more observational than polemical, and I’ll be looking for more docs from Stephanie Wang-Breal.)

The perfect conclusion to the theme of “good as they ever were” comes with new seasons of two long-running British hits.  Perhaps my most unlikely recommendation of all, for someone who never watches cooking shows and never watches “reality tv” competitions, goes to The Great British Baking Show (MC-88, NFX).  But I am devoted to the series, having watched not just the most recent season, but the other six seasons available on Netflix.  It’s just so British; I would have enjoyed watching it with my mother.  I continue to enjoy it, even though three of the four regular ingredients have been replaced by inferior substitutes.  Each season is filled with a dozen diverse UK types, all plucky and all pulling together, under the blitz of baking challenges, in the established weekly sequence of signature, technical, and showstopper bakes, with one named “star baker” and one “leaving the tent,” all to have a reunion after the finals, in a reassuring ritual.  For me this fills the niche of “comfort tv.”

Equally comfy is Doc Martin (BCG, Acorn), which I’ve followed through nine seasons and will follow as long as it or I last.  Come for the cozy setting of a Cornish seaside village, stay for the village characters as they evolve over the years, in amazing continuity, with fresh faces cycling through.  Laugh with the comic interchanges, learn from the medical mysteries and diagnoses that are solved each episode by the title character, played with delicious obliviousness by Martin Clunes, as the brilliant London surgeon derailed by hemophobia and shunted to the position of rural GP.  He never met a medical problem he couldn’t solve, and never met a person he could.  Clunes has a native warmth that manages to shine through his character’s brusque and chilly behavior.  As broad as some of the characters may be, they do not remain one-note, not even the dogs.