Monday, May 04, 2020

Stevie watches TV

[Updated 5/21 with my list of all-time favorites]

While I am among those who consider premium television the new cinema (while movies have become the new video game or amusement part ride), and divide my viewing indiscriminately between non-blockbuster films and tv series, I’m not going to offer anything like a review on the following shows, just some random reactions and recommendations based on what I’ve been watching lately.  You may have your own preferred reference, but I always include a link to the relevant Metacritic listing, which includes trailers and other info, besides links to the better review outlets.   For purposes of consumer guidance, I am aggregating these ongoing comments under the streaming service on which they are available.

[Hulu]

I was thrilled when Hulu struck up a new deal with FX, so after waiting a year for the third season of Better Things (MC-90), I was able to watch the fourth season week by week as it appeared (with no commercials!).  The things just keep getting better and better as Pamela Adlon takes more creative control and makes it all more personal.  I’ve raved about this show before, but if you’re not on board already you just don’t know what you’re missing, because it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.  Yes, there are plenty of comics who do sitcom series based on their own lives, but few who do so with such fierce depth and fearless finesse.  If you ever had a reason to take my advice, watch this!

As usual, what Hulu features is the least of what they offer, so you have to know what you’re looking for to find the good stuff.  For example, just by looking at the channel’s menus, you’d never know they program such estimable films as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Parasite, or Shoplifters, as well as an impressive array of documentaries.  I consider a commercial-free subscription to Hulu one of the staples of an all-streaming viewing diet. 

FX also had two other recent sitcoms created by their familiar stars, which I was glad to see.  I liked Martin Freeman’s Breeders (MC-65), in a vein much like the later seasons of Catastrophe, as he pairs with Daisy Haggard in raising two children with comic incompetence and well-deserved comeuppance.  Josh Thomas’s Everything’s Gonna Be Okay (MC-79) was certainly watchable, but nonetheless nowhere near the delight of his earlier Please Like Me (also available on Hulu), as he moves from Australia to the U.S. to take care of two teen stepsisters (one of whom is autistic) after the death of their father.

Hulu does not reach the heights of Netflix with their original series, but has had some modest success.  Little Fires Everywhere (MC-71), is a minor-league imitation of HBO’s Big Little Lies, which itself was not all that good ultimately, but certainly major-league.  Here the format is much the same, and so is Reese Witherspoon, but I don’t think I would have stuck with the series except for its supposed setting in Shaker Heights.  I have to give credit to my viewing partner for being even better than me on this one, in reciting lines of dialogue before the actors could speak them, so that parlor game stood in for more substantial pleasures in watching this.  By the time we got to the final episode, we were laughing every time some character cried.

On the other hand, Hulu is the best place to watch the outstanding new FX miniseries, Mrs. America (MC-87), with Cate Blanchett starring as Phyllis Schlafley, ardent anti-ERA activist.  She’s arrayed against Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug, and Tracey Ullmann as Betty Friedan, heading a generally fine cast, which is immediately identifiable as both their historical characters and themselves.  Each character gets featured in an episode, and four of the nine are directed by the estimable team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Sugar, Mississippi Grind), for show creator Dahvi Waller, whose background includes work on Mad Men and Halt & Catch Fire.  I  heartily endorse this docudrama review of the 1970’s women’s liberation movement (and the opposition it faced), on a par with FX’s O.J. miniseries.  It's evocative if you lived through the era, and informative if you did not.  And Blanchett makes Schlafley something more than hissable villain, but rather an ambiguous example of female empowerment. 

Wait a minute, I take it back.  Hulu does have at least one outstanding original series, namely Normal People (MC-84), a hormonal teen dramedy that’s on a par with, maybe even better than Netflix’s Sex Education, having more of both sex and education.  The two shows reverse genre expectation, with the hour-long show tending toward raucous sitcom, and these half-hour episodes turning darker and darker.  Adapted by Sally Rooney (with Alice Birch) from her novel of the same name, with direction shared by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald, the story follows two teens from a Sligo prep school to Trinity College Dublin and beyond.  The boy and girl are played magnetically by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, the magnetism manifest both between the characters, and between the actors and viewer.  They mate and break up repeatedly over the course of twelve episodes, exasperating some viewers perhaps, but eliciting knowing nods from others.  You wish the best for both of them, but it’s an open question whether they belong together or not.  One thing is certain, these people are anything but normal, though they are exceptionally interesting.  [P.S. Once you've watched this series, this analysis is well worth reading.]

[HBO]

Unsurprisingly, the new David Simon/Ed Burns series The Plot Against America (MC-81) is among the best things on tv right now.   Adapted from a novel by Philip Roth, it follows an alternative history about Charles Lindbergh, Nazi sympathizer and proponent of "America First," winning the presidency in 1940, and its impact on a Jewish family in Newark, clearly based on Roth’s own.  I doubt this show had a GoT-like budget, but the density of period recreation is impressive, and as one of the few Roths I haven’t read, the story gripped me all the way to its ambiguous conclusion.  The show has been tailored a bit to the present moment, but it ends on a cliffhanger election that presages 2020.  I was surprised when the sixth episode turned out to be the finale, because I felt that the show could go on and on, unlike others that wear out their welcome (looking at you, Handmaid’s Tale).   Zoe Kazan and Winona Ryder, along with little “Philip” (Azhy Robertson) were excellent.  The rest of the cast is solid, headed by John Turturro as a collaborationist rabbi with an incongruous Southern accent and Morgan Spector as the family’s dad.  Add this to the list of great television from the creators of The Wire and Generation Kill, along with Simon’s other collaborations like Tremé and The Deuce.

In its fourth season on HBO, after starting as a Web series, High Maintenance (MC-81) has not come down.  It’s not running out of gas, but as the show’s miscellaneous, try-anything format would suggest, it has its highs and lows, its moments of hilarity and insight, and its moments of what-the-heck?  Just as last season the episode from the perspective of a dog stood out for its brilliance, this year the highlight was a dating sequence between an intimacy counselor and a voluntarily celibate magician.  Since there are usually two vignettes in each half hour, as the biking weed dealer makes his rounds in Brooklyn, nobody overstays their welcome.  And the show has achieved enough cachet to offer some amusing celebrity cameos.  For me, Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld have earned enough cumulative credit to keep me watching whatever crazy thing they get up to next.

[Netflix]

Have we had enough of stand-up performers doing sitcom series based on their own lives?  Not when they feel as good as Feel Good (MC-83), in which Canadian comic Mae Martin – one-of-a-kind androgyne, Bart Simpson look-alike, recovering cocaine addict, with a thing for straight girls – meets her ideal “English Rose,” played by Charlotte Ritchie.  The pushes and pulls of their relationship come through with humor and empathy, with an excellent supporting cast, and after the initial six-episode season I would definitely watch more.

Watching Shira Haas is the best, and sufficient, reason to watch Unorthodox (MC-85), but she’s not the only attraction in this four-episode series about a woman fleeing her marriage and her ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn.  She winds up in Berlin lost and alone, but finds a different sort of community in a music school.  Authentic and revelatory, poignant and inspiring.

Having enjoyed his performance in Glow, I tried out the recent stand-up routine, Marc Maron: End Times Fun, which I found marvelously acerbic, intelligent, clever, and funny – up to the one-hour point, after which he goes into an overwrought rant that mostly just vents how much he hates Mike Pence.  I also checked out some of his earlier routines, and find him bracingly smart and entertaining.

I readily re-upped for season two of Dead to Me (MC-72), based on the outstanding performances of Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate, and the witty, twisty, sensitive work of Liz Feldman and her team.  And I quite enjoyed it all the way to the final ten minutes of the tenth episode, where the frenzy to show all the stories they still had in store came across as too naked a plea for a third season, so I can’t promise to be back for that.  The show was already contrived, but enjoyably rather that desperately so.  The bond between the two opposite women – sweetie and shrew, dark and light, blond and brunette, grieving and deceiving, all the time switching roles – and the ways they deal with grief and anger, are explored with some depth despite the headlong plotting, and the relentless cliffhangers meant to trigger bingeing.  At least through two seasons, this show still seems lively to me.

[Other]

Here’s how much I wanted to see season five of Better Call Saul (MC-92) – I actually paid for it.  Tried repeatedly to sign on for AMC Premiere, but failed for some reason (their helpful error code: “Oops, something went wrong”), so I finally purchased the whole season on Fandango for $15.  When you consider two or three viewers, that’s cheaper than seeing a single film at a theater, and a lot of bang for the buck.  As BCS matches the run of its predecessor/sequel Breaking Bad, with one final season to go, it’s fair to say that Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have exceeded their initial success, an amazingly sustained achievement.  Narratively and visually inventive as always, they have reached a new depth of characterization in the relationship of Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy/Saul and Rhea Seehorn as Kim, along with the usual assortment of colorful characters around them.

With this season, the BB/BCS tandem moves back into the #2 spot on my list of all-time favorite hour-long tv series, edging closer to The Wire in the top spot, and moving past Rectify, which only ran for four abbreviated seasons.  So this is how the ranking stands:

1) The Wire
2) Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul
3) Rectify
4) Buffy the Vampire Slayer
5) Justified
6) Deadwood
7) Friday Night Lights
8) Borgen
9) Mad Men
10) The Sopranos

Current shows most likely to crash the list:  The Crown, Succession
Honorable Mention:  Halt & Catch Fire, Doc Martin
Special mention for one-season wonder:  Freaks & Geeks

The list for favorite half-hour comedy shows is much more volatile and expansive, but you should consider all of these (listed alphabetically, and leaving out oldies like MTM or Cheers):  Better Things, Catastrophe, The Detectorists, Fleabag, GLOW, Mum, Parks & Recreation, Peep Show, Silicon Valley.  You will note this list is heavy on British series (with others that are nearly as good: The Thick of It, W1A, The Office, Gavin & Stacy), and definitely has a recency bias.  I could dredge around in memory and come up with a number of shows as enjoyable as these, but this list includes the ones I feel most evangelical about these days.


I would be happy to be called upon to justify or rectify any of my choices, or to post any alternative lists you may send in response, so feel free to comment below -- by clicking on “No comments:”, a quirk of this blog design that may have something to do with why I don’t get any, so please translate in your mind to “Please comment here:”