New on the tube

I finished this post shortly before the Emmys were announced, but I have to preface my remarks with amazement and delight at the unprecedented result that almost all the awards went to shows that I heartily recommend.  (One I missed so far, but was about to watch on the recommendation of an old and trusted friend, Mare of Easttown, will be postscripted here soon.)  Essentially this is an addendum to my early round-up of the year’s best tv so far, catching up with some older shows and taking in some new ones.
 
The White Lotus (MC-82, HBO) has attracted a lot of attention this summer, and held mine through its six hour-long episodes.  Writer and director Mike White has crafted a perfect show for Covid-era production, set in an isolated high-end Hawaiian resort and bringing together a talented cast to interweave a number of individual stories in a manner that mixes satire with a bit of mystery.  Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, and Jennifer Coolidge are the best-known faces, but many others make a good first impression, most particularly Murray Bartlett.  The concluding episode has elicited negative observations from everyone I’ve talked with, and I was certainly ambivalent if not outright disappointed, but the show deserves credit for verbal and visual wit, and an engaging though narrow cast of characters, none very nice but all fun to watch and detest.  A soupcon of Succession, a smidgen of Big Little Lies, this series cooks up a tasty bit of HBO fare.  Mike White is adept at creating a faux reality-tv situation, and keeping the surprises coming.  His view of humanity comes through as bleak though not hard, the colonialist approach to anticolonialism leavened by humor and some distant sympathy for these strange creatures.
 
Of course, I have no objectivity about Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (MC-72, HBO).  I love the guy, and I loved this documentary series, three episodes of more than 1½ hours each, from Peter Kunhardt.  The first episode details his life up to bursting on the scene with the 2004 DNC speech, and was the most visually interesting to me, for a rare view of the younger boy and man.  The second traces his campaign for the presidency, and effectively recreates the exhilaration and anxiety of his election.  The third looks at his time in office almost exclusively from the perspective of racial issues, after his election was supposed to initiate a post-racial era, only to elicit virulent and sustained backlash.  By then the film is mostly well-known news clips interspersed with commentary by a host of talking heads, most familiar and cogent, from Obama staffers like Axelrod and Jarrett, thoughtful writers like David Remnick, Jelani Cobb, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, critics like Cornel West and rivals like Bobby Rush, old friends and some who were lost along the way, like Jeremiah Wright.  This series is well-put-together, inspiring, and not as painful now that the Anti-Obama is in exile, and Barack’s sidekick Joe is now back in the Oval Office.
 
Can we ever have enough teen sex comedies?  Apparently not, especially when diversity, inclusion, and intersectionality are all the rage, taking new angles on a tired genre.  While waiting for forthcoming new seasons of Pen15 and Sex Education, I gave a look to Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever (MC-80, NFX), whose second season of ten half-hour episodes has just dropped.  Having binged both seasons (not in the drinking game sense of the title), I can recommend this show with enthusiasm.  Kaling launched an open call for an Indian girl to play a character based on her own teen years, and struck gold with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, a Tamil-Canadian ready to make a big leap from high school drama productions.  The character Devi is adorable and clever, if a bit devious.  She has two besties, Chinese-American drama queen and Afro-American robot nerd.  Her mother is a dermatologist, her glamorous live-in older cousin is getting a PhD in genetics at Cal Tech, her father has died recently but literally haunts her days and nights.  For boys, she has her Jewish brainiac adversary and her part-Japanese hot-jock-swimmer dreamboat.  And oh yes, Devi’s voiceover POV narrator is John McEnroe.  Mix and match, it’s all sprightly fun, and frequently touching as well.  I defy you not to enjoy this show.
 
Academic campus comedies were once my favorite genre of novel, so I was primed to enjoy The Chair (MC-73, NFX).  Sandra Oh stars as the newly-installed chair of the English department of a sub-Ivy-League university.  Maybe she was a diversity hire, or maybe the dean (David Morse) just wanted a woman to be holding the ticking time-bomb when it explodes.  Nonetheless, she’s passionate about her job as well as literature, though tasked with eliminating superannuated (i.e. my age) dead-wood profs as enrollment declines.  The chair is a tottering hot seat.  The new chairperson has a complicated relationship with the old chairperson (Jay Duplass), an academic superstar who is falling apart after the death of his wife.  Oh also has a complicated relationship with her adopted Latina daughter, and as a single mom relies on her Korean father and ne’er-do-well predecessor for child care help.  The actress Amanda Peet turns showrunner, and enlists a doctoral student as co-writer, and the creators of Game of Thrones as co-producers.  Daniel Gray Longino directs.  So the show has authenticity and polish, and proves both funny and topical about issues like cancel culture.  Its six half-hour episodes could be considered a long movie, or a down payment on future seasons, which I would be glad to watch.  I never regretted bypassing academia myself, but now I’m positively giddy about having avoided it. 
 
While this post is mostly about new tv, I’m including comments on some newly-streaming movies, though what’s the difference these days?  I expected Together Together (MC-72, Hulu) to be an amusing distraction, but found it to be substantially more.  Ed Helms is single man in his forties who decides he wants to be a father, and sets out to recruit a surrogate mother to carry his child.  He decides on a forthright woman of 26, played by the unfamiliar but delightfully offbeat Patti Harrison.  (After watching, I found out some of the character’s piquancy came from the actress being a trans woman – a thought that never occurred to me while watching.)  Many of the expected rom-com beats are avoided, in this story of two lonely people who find a common purpose in an untraditional relationship.  Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith, the film also includes some very welcome comic cameos, all the while going for truthfulness rather than laughs.
 

I certainly welcome more films written and directed by young women, but I can offer only a lukewarm endorsement of Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby (MC-79, HBO), a cringe-comedy of embarrassment starring Rachel Sennott.  She’s a college-age woman getting by through deception, fooling her family about her career plans while selling a “girlfriend experience” to older men.  Her parents insist that she go with them to sit shiva for a family member, which puts her in a situation in which strands of her past and present interweave to put her into a tight knot.  In 72 economical minutes, through which the Jewish family humor shades into horror, she confronts a host of bad choices in her young life.  It’s a promising debut for both creator and star, but doesn’t strike me as fully realized.

Looking again at Metacritic’s best tv of the year list, I noticed a show in the top ten that I had seen but somehow forgot to comment on at all -- the second season of This Way Up (MC-87, Hulu).  I suppose I gulped it all down in one night, and then moved on to something else, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite shows of the year.  Show creator Aisling Bea is great as she tries to put her life together after a stint in rehab, aided by Sharon Horgan as her tough-love sister, who has plenty of problems of her own - two manic but endearing Irishwomen out and about in London.  This is a show I strongly recommend to anyone who misses Fleabag or Catastrophe.

Mr. Soul! (MC-88, HBO) may not fit under this heading, as a 2018 documentary, but you must acquit me for offering a strong recommendation now that it has just turned up on HBO Max.  Ellis Haizlip was producer and host of Soul!, a WNET program that ran from 1968-73, a celebration of Black culture at a time when it was nearly invisible on TV, except in caricature.  His niece, Melissa Haizlip, has put together a film that places the groundbreaking program in the context of that era, featuring diverse creators from James Baldwin to Stevie Wonder.  Haizlip himself was an unusual and piquant character, but the focus is on the show, and the amazing array of talent that it presented, in an innovative format.  The film makes an outstanding counterpoint to the recent (and excellent!) concert documentary, Summer of Soul.  I urge you to watch both, even if – maybe especially if – you didn’t live through that era yourself.  
 
Christian Petzold is a great filmmaker, but if you’re not familiar with his work, the recent Undine (MC-75, Hulu) is not the place to start – it works best as a reprise from themes in his earlier films.  And it helps to know something about Undine as folkloric figure, a water sprite who takes human form to love a man (Neil Jordan made the estimable Ondine in Ireland).  Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski return from Transit (she seems to have replaced Nina Hoss as muse and fixed point around whom Petzold’s films revolve).  It’s possible to take the film as enigmatic or as merely muddled – half lecture on urban development in Berlin from Kaiser Wilhelm to reunification; half woozy, watery romance.  But all impeccably made, from acting to photography to music.  It’s possible to resist the myth and mystery of the story, and just revel in the film’s other elements, but in retrospect I find the whole more comprehensible than when luxuriating in its melodramatic yet realistic surface.  Of Petzold's films, I’d start with Barbara (MC-86), but many consider Phoenix (MC-89) his best.

In NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½ (MC-86, HBO), Spike Lee gathers a host of friends, family, and acquaintances to talk at length about all that New York has endured in the 21^st century so far, in four episodes of up to two hours each.  He mixes in news and documentary footage with clips from feature films shot in the city (incl. his own).  Spike is Spike – funny, obsessive, outrageous, self-indulgent but socially conscious.  Always making himself a center of attention, but with a humorous candor that makes his ego palatable, most of the time.  This series does not rise to the level of his great documentaries, 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, but kept my interest throughout its extended length. The title is not just clunky but misleading, since the series works backwards from Covid to the fall of the Twin Towers (and even to archival footage of their rise).  It’s all a ramble through Spike’s mind and his feelings for his native city (and its sports teams), but compulsively watchable if not shapely or altogether coherent.
 
It was recently re-watching Spike’s Malcolm X (and the premonitory Do the Right Thing) that led me to re-read a 55-year-old pocketbook of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  And after One Night in Miami, I was definitely primed for Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (MC-69, NFX).  Marcus Clarke’s documentary is based on a book of the same name, and the two authors figure among the talking heads that hold the story together, along with daughters and other family of the two men, plus assorted commentators.  But it was all that footage from the Sixties that really made the film an evocative experience for me, to see Malcolm and Ali in their heyday.  I look forward to similar sensations from Ken Burns’ forthcoming documentary series on Ali.
 
Being young in “this day and age” is foreign territory to me, but I still find it interesting to watch teen comedies with a different ethnic bent, and Reservation Dogs (MC-83, Hulu) fills the bill.  Made by, with, and about indigenous people, the series depicts a teen gang of two boys and two girls, who get into various scrapes with family and neighbors.  How many TV series are set in Oklahoma?  Show creator Starlin Harjo is a native, in both senses of the term, and strives for authenticity and representation.  The show’s capers didn’t win me over immediately, but by halfway through its eight episodes, I was hooked, invested in the characters and amused by the twists of their stories.  Deservedly renewed for a second season.
 
I’m not sure why I could tolerate the sheer silliness of The Other Two (MC-80, HBO) more than, say, Schitt’s Creek, but I did make my way through two seasons, though I would not wish to see any more.  It’s a jokey parody of contemporary culture, where I frequently don’t have the familiarity with social media to get the jokes.  Maybe the exploration of that foreign territory was enough to keep me watching.  The title pair are a gay struggling actor brother (Drew Tarver) and former dancer sister (Helene Yorke), who have to come to terms with the overnight success of their 13-year-old brother, who rockets to fame on the basis of a viral music video.  In the second season (which jumped from Comedy Central to HBO Max), their mortification is compounded when their mother (Molly Shannon) also becomes a daytime TV star.  Enough of the jokes land, and most of the performers are appealing enough, to make this show a painless time-filler, but not something I would recommend.
 
I’ve started the second season of Ted Lasso, and am enjoying it as much as I expected, but will save my comments for a future post on “Another bite of Apple.”