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
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
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
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:”
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