Streaming pro tips

This is part of a recurring series on ways to make the most of streaming availability, produced with the conviction that all-streaming is superior to a cable subscription, not just in cost but in range of choice and ease of use as well.
 
I’m not sure of the many ways you might be accessing Netflix and all the rest, but I can say from my experience with Roku that one of the most evident advantages is an intuitive remote control with exactly seven buttons and one four-way toggle.  (One thing it lacks, or I have not yet discovered, is volume control, so you will still need your tv remote handy.)  Certain channels pay to have one of four additional buttons that go direct to the specific channel, but they are easy to ignore if not your thing. 
 
The onscreen user interface is also intuitive (though it takes some getting used to the different means of navigation on each channel), with a pretty comprehensive search engine across all available channels, where you can select to watch immediately, or “follow” a movie and be told on “My Feed” when it becomes available on a subscription or pay channel.
 
There are several Internet sites that offer even fuller search options to pursue streaming availability.  I have found Reelgood to be useful in a variety of ways, and generally reliable.
 
I have to include one caveat.  Streaming obviously depends on the quality of your WiFi connection, and certain channels may have more problems and slower response than others.  For a long time I had difficulty with buffering on Amazon Prime (now corrected), and recently HBO Max has been wonky and at times unwatchable, just after I was pitching its offerings.  So I haven’t yet gotten around to watching the rest of In Treatment, but I have some better programs to report.
 
Besides learning to manage your cross-platform queue or watchlist (or whatever it’s called on each channel), one thing to be alert for is that many channels offer premium “hubs” or subchannels, which allow multiple free trials or special deals.  So it was that on Prime Day, Amazon offered Starz, Showtime, and others for less than a buck for a month, which was certainly worth it to see the second season of Couples Therapy, after I opined that show was superior to the latest season of In Treatment.
 
Which decidedly it is.  In fact, I give Couples Therapy 2.0 (MC-tbd, Show) my highest recommendation, urge it on you as a hidden gem (not enough reviews for a Metacritic rating, though the one listed is a perfect 100).  Though this documentary series had two strikes against it in my view –could be construed as “reality tv,” which I never watch; and as a Showtime production, of which I’ve sampled many over time, but only one have I ever watched through its entire run, Nurse Jackie (all hail Edie Falco!) – it comes back to hit a home run in its second season (of nine half-hour episodes), a great favorite I feel a bit evangelical about, want to spread the good news.  Dr. Orna Guralnick returns with a new roster of couples, her office a studio with multiple hidden cameras, so the audience is an unseen fly on the wall, with a compound eye that takes in action and reaction unobtrusively.  Following the diverse bent of the first season, the second features couples who are gay, mixed race, or Orthodox Jews.  We follow key points from session to session for each couple, with brief excursions into their home lives, and “pillow shots” of other couples interacting in public scenes (aside from NYC’s period in Covid lockdown).  We also see Orna in consultation with her supervising therapist.  It all has an aura of truth, and genuine grappling with real issues.  Funny and touching as well.  Ah, the wonders of honest, thoughtful communication.
 
(If you do take my advice for a month’s trial of Showtime, to make it even more worthwhile, I refer you to two recent posts of mine, “Show-me-time” and “On with the show.”)
 
A couple posts back, I was badmouthing Netflix as a streaming dinosaur, but the empire has struck back with two more programs that I heartily endorse.
 
In Bo Burnham: Inside (MC-98, NFX), the teenaged YouTube star turned stand-up comedian turned film director (Eighth Grade), not to mention actor and singer-songwriter, graduates to a whole other level of one-man comedy special.  Alone in one room, with an array of recording and editing equipment, Burnham survives an unnamed pandemic lockdown with a Robinson-Crusoe-with-video-camera vibe, hair and beard growing progressively longer and shaggier, as he passes his 30^th birthday and goes deeper and deeper into mediated, alienated isolation.  Hilarious, insightful, and virtuosic, he sings brilliantly witty songs with inspired minimalist visual effects.  The man meets his moment, and breaks it all down in absolutely compelling fashion.  Though I am totally unfamiliar with Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest, I dare say Burnham’s parodies of social media are spot on, and funny as hell.  As is his commentary on living inside one’s own house and one’s own head, while trying to connect through the Internet.  Not to be missed.
 

While a new season of Master of None did not sustain my interest, a second of Feel Good (MC-84, NFX) compounded its interest.  Creator and star Mae Martin is certainly a one of a kind comedian, of indeterminate age or gender, but compulsively watchable, and bold in mining her own life and character.  She remains on-again, off-again with her girlfriend George, goes into and out of rehab, and comes to uneasy terms with a history of sexual abuse.  (These days it seems every female comedian has a #MeToo story to tell.)  This short six-episode series does not overstay its welcome, and I’ll be eager to see more.

Since I'm on a run of strong enthusiasms, let me offer one more:  Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (MC-78) is now available free on Kanopy, but is worth the pay-per-view on other channels.  And also would have been worth showing at the Clark, if I were still doing that.  As it is, I highly recommend you see it whichever way you can, truly one of the best art documentaries I have ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.  Hilma af Klint was a turn-of-the-20^th-century Swedish artist who was painting abstracts before Kandinsky, and working in large scale on the floor long before Pollock.  Nationality and gender, as well as her Theosophical spirituality, kept her marginalized in her lifetime.  She bequeathed her life’s work to a nephew, who just stored the works in a basement, so they did not really come to light until a touring retrospective a few years ago, which became the occasion for this film.  There’s an excellent aggregate of talking heads making the case for her significance, asserting that her rediscovery necessitates a rewriting of art history.  But the work itself holds center stage – and dazzles.  Since she worked so often in series, as one painting dissolves into another they become an exhilarating animated film.  Really, see this one if you can.

HBO to the Max

When HBO Go morphed into HBO Max, it wasn’t available through Roku for a while.  I missed it and I’m glad it’s back, better than ever, not just with the whole HBO back catalog, but with an enhanced line-up of recent films and even some good original programming, plus day-of-release availability of Warner Brothers films in this pandemic year. 
 
I’m not categorically averse to modern takes on old classics, or to color-blind casting, but I had more resistance to The Personal History of David Copperfield (MC-77) than I would have expected, coming as it does from Armando Ianucci, who has a track record I admire.  This is not a Dickens classic that I would resent tampering with, but I found it hard to get into the spirit of this enterprise, despite effective turns from Dev Patel as the title character, Peter Capaldi as Micawber, plus Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton in stylized comic roles.  It’s lavishly designed and briskly paced, but for me the story never took hold, and the insistent and illogical introduction of Black characters began to strike me as racist in reverse.  The film comes in at under two hours, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome, but would have been better as a six-hour series.
 
Miranda July is never going to click for me the way she does for some folks, but Kajillionaire (MC-78) won me over less than her previous films, despite some critics asserting it was her best.  She’s different for sure (I resolve not to call her quirky or whimsical), and she enlists some engaging co-conspirators, but I found myself stubbornly unmoved by the proceedings.  Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger (unrecognizable except for her voice) are aging scavenger/con-artists (possibly old hippies), who have raised daughter Evan Rachel Wood as an accomplice, without any parental affection.  Consequently, she is affectless and averse to human contact.  In the midst of a low-stakes caper, the trio meets up with congenial shopgirl Gina Rodriguez, who destabilizes the balance of the family, while eagerly buying into their con-games.  Is this a comedy, a caper film, a family drama, a fantasy, or a surprising romance?  All of the above, but less than the sum of its parts.
 
HBO continues to be a good channel for documentaries.  Alex Gibney’s latest, The Crime of the Century (MC-84), details the opioid crisis in two 2-hour segments.  Between Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in 2005 (MC-82) and Totally Under Control (MC-80), last year’s dissection of the Trump administration’s handling of Covid-19, Gibney has become a prolific documentarian, almost always worth watching.  He addresses timely topics in a serious way with a lively style and a progressive bent.  This one pulls out all the stops, from an animated history of the opium trade, to legal and medical and business analysis, to ride-alongs on drug busts and police-cam footage of fatal overdoses.  It’s a long haul, but it rarely drags and always informs.  The first half focuses on the Sacklers and Oxycontin, while the second tells an even more horrifying tale of Fentanyl and its pushers, along with the D.C. revolving door of Big Pharma regulators and lobbyists, illuminating many of this century’s crimes.
 
Next up we have two new half-hour HBO series.  I was somewhat surprised by how much I liked Hacks (MC-82), in which Jean Smart plays a stand-up comedian, a longtime Vegas fixture reminiscent of Joan Rivers.  With her regular gig threatened, she reluctantly takes on a 20-something comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder), who is equally reluctant in turn.  Of course the story is going to be that they overcome their initial distaste for each other, and find out that they have something to learn from one another.  Obvious enough, but the playing out of the scenario is impressively smart (pun intended), subtle, and layered, and sustains itself well through ten episodes, with an ending that definitely sets up another season.
 
I was intrigued by the revival of In Treatment for a delayed fourth season (MC-73), the earlier seasons being aparticular favorite of mine.  Initially put off by the change of lead and setting – from Gabriel Byrne to Uzo Adubo, and from NYC to L.A. – I was gradually drawn in again.  Initially I considered Adubo miscast, in comparison not just to Byrne but to the actual therapist in the similar Showtime series, Couples Therapy.  I’d liked her in roles as different as Crazy Eyes and Shirley Chisholm, but here I wasn’t willing to suspend disbelief in this character.  Over the course of the season, six weeks of sessions for four separate characters, many layers of armor were peeled away and the therapist’s backstory filled in, and I found myself continuing to watch.  By now I’ve caught up with the first half of what will be 24 episodes, and may come back for further comment when the series is complete.
 
HBO Max also keeps a large selection of older films in rotation.  Recently, there were two I was happy to find on the channel.  After I read several John Quincy Adams biographies, he became a hero of mine, so I wanted to re-view him as played by Anthony Hopkins in Amistad (1997, MC-63).  That’s a low Metacritic rating for a Steven Spielberg film, but in retrospect I see it in light of his Lincoln and am more tolerant.  This film is not without its Spielberg-esque elements (not a compliment BTW), but having spent the intervening decades reading extensively in the history of that era, I was pleased with the general historicity of the piece.  Morgan Freeman’s character was a composite, but it was a kick to see Stellan Skarsgaard as Lewis Tappan, a little-known but absolutely central abolitionist leader (sort of the George Soros of the movement).  Matthew McConaughey still rubbed me wrong as the first lawyer to take on the Amistad case, and Nigel Hawthorne was too Mad King George to play MVB, the Sage of Kinderhook.  Djimon Hounsou remains impressive in a statuesque way as Cinque, the leader of an onboard slave mutiny on a ship that wound up in a northern American port, and generated a case that finally decided for their freedom, in a Supreme Court ruling that would be overturned two decades later in the infamous Dred Scott decision, which finally declared that Black people had no rights and were excluded from constitutional protection. 
 
A friend’s daughter produced and appeared in a YouTube short with Rajiv Patel, in an AAPI series on “Moms & Pops,” in which he tells his parents’ marriage story while playing each of them in turn.  He and they were quite endearing, so I was happy to find Meet the Patels (2015, MC-70) on HBO Max, and pleased to make their acquaintance.  The film is all about the mating game, Indian style, and the pull of the culture you came from, even after Americanization.  Rajiv at 30 is getting romantically desperate and allows his parents to match-make among the Indian diaspora, in this comic and semi-staged documentary, directed with his sister Geeta Patel.  Mom & Pop don’t care who he marries, as long as her name is Patel (as is nearly everyone from their native Gujurat).  Pleasingly diverse, this film put me in mind of the excellent AppleTV+ series, Little America.
 
Saving the best for last, I’ve been waiting for In the Heights (MC-84), a film adaptation of the Broadway musical Lin-Manuel Miranda did before Hamilton.  Filmed before Covid lockdown, after other unlucky delays, it’s a simultaneous release to just reopened theaters and HBO Max.  Unlike Disney’s Hamilton, which was simply an artfully-filmed recapture of the original cast in performance on Broadway, In the Heights opens out to the streets of New York in the pre-Covid era, under the deliriously energetic direction of Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians).  It’s a movie that moves, and an affectionate portrait of a neighborhood, a Caribbean melting pot in NYC’s Washington Heights, an intriguing heatwave counterpoint to Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy in Do the Right Thing.  Led by Anthony Ramos, the cast is well up to the challenge of singing and dancing their hearts out.  I doubt I’ve ever enjoyed a movie this much while actually understanding so little of the dialogue and lyrics, but unlike Hamilton, which I gladly watched again with captioning, here I was content with the self-evident spectacle of the thing.  Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story will have to go some to top this.
 
I would consider HBO Max as somewhat pricey for a regular streaming subscription, but I confess to piggybacking on a non-streaming friend’s cable subscription to HBO.  But anybody who takes a stand-alone month-at-a-time subscription for HBO Max will find plenty worth watching.

MVP of streaming channels

In the interests of consumer guidance, I’m going to be writing a series of posts that focus on various streaming channels, as a follow-up to “Streaming along,” my primer for cord-cutters.  Fact is, the best-known of the streaming services, Netflix and Amazon Prime, have gone long in the tooth and would be in line to have subscriptions suspended, except for venerability and the occasional original new production.  Netflix floods the zone with generic programming, but also produces the occasional unmissable prestige presentation.  Amazon has cut way back on its own slate, and offers more product pay-per-view than free on Prime.  Neither is a particularly good place to see either recent or classic films of interest (likely to change some now that Jeff Bezos has gobbled up MGM and its back catalogue).  But a Netflix subscription is a two-decade habit of mine (going back to DVDs and then Blu-Ray) and Amazon’s is just an add-on to free shipping.
 
Truth be told, there is no streaming channel on my Roku (or whatever your device of choice may be) that I go to more frequently than YouTube, for news and sports, comedy and music, history and science, author talks and interviews.  I was late in discovering just how much is available on YouTube – well duh, granddad! – so I may be telling you something you already know.   (And you are probably aware of how they feed you more of what you want to see, based on what you’ve watched or searched for, even if you never sign in.)
 
I first had recourse to the YouTube channel on Roku after cutting cable service, looking primarily for a place to watch Stephen Colbert on a regular basis.  There are other satirists I look at from time to time, but the other regular segment that I watch consistently is “A Closer Look with Seth Meyers” – I didn’t often catch SNL when Seth ran Weekend Update, but now I find his political breakdowns indispensable.
 
The PBS Newshour – which has been the only daily news show that I’ve ever watched, since its debut as The Robert MacNeil Report in 1975, later joined by Jim Lehrer, through Margaret Warner and Gwen Ifill, up to the current anchor Judy Woodruff – is available through the PBS Passport streaming channel, but delayed till later in the evening, whereas YouTube carries a livestream starting at 6:00 pm, so that’s my regular channel for viewing.
 
Similarly, I never listen to podcasts, but when I am following the news, which blessedly I have felt less compelled to do lately, no longer in a perpetual state of alarm over the malevolent idiot in the White House and other disasters, I like to watch the “Pod Save America” boys on YouTube.
 
YouTube is not good for live sports, but great for game recaps and highlights, and superb for sports history.  During the pandemic lapse in current sports, I took to reliving past highlights like the Cleveland Browns NFL championship in 1964, and the Cleveland Indians World Series win in 1948.  Once I saw how deep the visual archives went, I also checked out the Brown season highlights during the Otto Graham era (ten straight 1^st place finishes from 1946-1955), as well as those of QBs Brian Sipe and Bernie Kosar.
 
It’s so easy to stumble upon themes and subjects that go as deep as you might want to go.  Two that I recently dived into myself, with great satisfaction, were British Archaeology and New England Forests.  I’ve also found decent copies of old films unavailable elsewhere (e.g. when the pandemic sent me in search of On the Beach, for an apocalyptic scenario that haunted my youth).  So I urge you to pick any topic of interest and explore all that YouTube has to offer.  (While you develop a filter for the good from the bad.)
 
And it’s all free, with fewer and shorter (and often skippable) commercials than broadcast channels.  In coming weeks, I will be commenting on other streaming channels that have taken precedence over the oldtimers like Netflix and Amazon – i.e. HBO Max, Hulu, and the Criterion Collection (with a glance at Kanopy).