Keeping up with the tube

[Updated through mid-November]

I have no taste for police mysteries, and revulsion from those dealing with the murder of young boys or teen girls, but a number of factors finally led me to Mare of Easttown (MC-81, HBO).  First off is Kate Winslet, who never disappoints.  Second was the semi-familiar location of gritty southeast PA.  Finally the Emmys, but more importantly the recommendation of a trusted friend.  Well, I wasn’t sorry to watch it, but I’m not going to turn around and recommend it to you, unless twisty murder investigations are your sort of thing, and then you don’t need my opinion.  Kate was predictably great as the beleaguered detective, and the rest of the cast was good too.  The sense of location and community was strong, with the interconnections of small town life front and center.  But the story was too much, too many threads, too many reversals, too many cliff-hangers – and yet many obvious attempts to subvert genre expectation as well.  A construct rather than an exploration, ultimately going for effect rather than authenticity, despite Kate’s inherent realness.  Made me wonder whether a writers room, with diverse voices, is inherently more creative than a single writer following the screenwriting manual and churning out the beats.
 
Though I am an ardent devotee of Ingmar Bergman’s version(s), the latest iteration of Scenes from a Marriage (MC-70, HBO) left me lukewarm, despite a masterclass in acting by Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac.  Hagai Levi explicitly adapts the original, but winds up closer to his Showtime series The Affair, rather than anything Bergmanesque.  I can’t recommend this unless you’re a fan of the stars, who have been friends since Julliard days, and are certainly suited to the lacerating intimacy of this series, which shares the pain, but does not dig as deep nor soar as high as its model.
 
Matters of attraction and affection among young people are the subject of two Netflix series that I enthusiastically recommend, one raunchy, one sweet, both consistently funny.  Sex Education (MC-83, NFX) can be quite explicit about the adventures of randy youth, always on the verge of being off-putting or embarrassing.  In fact, the pre-credit sequence of the third season’s first episode is rapid-fire non-stop sex amongst various members of the large and diverse cast.  But oddly, this series is in fact a subtle and honest exploration of relationships.  Gillian Anderson continues her great turn as the sultry sex therapist mom (now in delightful contrast to her Margaret Thatcher in The Crown), as son Asa Butterfield gets better (and worse) at advising his teen peers, now that he is getting some himself.  Though not with Emma Mackey, who plays his true love (it never runs smooth).  Still best friends with Nigerian Ncuti Gatwa, who has turned his bully into his lover.  And so many more characters, most of whom were introduced in the pilot episode, and have gone on to interesting character arcs over three seasons.  Beautifully shot and well-acted across the board, the show is funny and serious at the same time, befitting its one-hour format and eight-episode seasons.  Laurie Nunn continues as exemplary showrunner.  Come for the sex, stick around for the education.
 
Love on the Spectrum (MC-83, NFX) is an Australian reality-tv dating show with a twist that made it palatable to me.  The second season more than lives up to the appeal of the first.  Autistic people (the only category in which I consider myself “high-functioning”) are hilariously transparent in their relationships, quirky to be sure, but unsettlingly direct and indirect in their desires.  And the dates they go on paint a delightful picture of Sydney and environs.  It’s all quite charming and funny, and moving too.  Everybody needs somebody.
 
Uprising (MC-93, AMZ) is Steve McQueen’s documentary complement to his superb Small Axe series of films.  I may have to take a third look at Lovers Rock within the context that Uprising supplies, imagining that ecstatic house party scene being ripped through by fire and leaving 13 young people dead, and many others maimed by burns and memories.  The 1981 New Cross fire was a racially inflammatory event, with Blacks blaming a white supremacist firebomb, and the police putting together a story about some conflict among the partygoers.  The incident led to a massive protest, covered in the second hour, and eventually to the Brixton riots, subject of the third hour.  The Small Axe stories interweave with each of these events, as McQueen comes to terms with the formative events of his youth, and provides a very interesting counterpoint to American race relations (with a reminder that Reagan was only a pale imitation of Thatcher).  For someone unfamiliar with these events, it might even make sense to watch this documentary series before watching the Small Axe films, which you really should do [preferably with captions].
 
By now, Ken Burns is more brand manager than individual filmmaker, but he can definitely marshal the resources to make impressive documentaries.  The latest is Muhammad Ali (MC-88, PBS), which doesn’t skimp on the boxing gore, but embeds it within cultural history in a manner that justifies its eight-hour length over four episodes.  Clay/Ali was a figure of note through much of my life, generating considerable heat and light, and this ample documentation certainly proved to be an immersive time-travel experience for me.  Ali truly was “The Greatest,” a mythic and electric character of his time, notwithstanding the fact that his superlatives emerged from a grubby profession.  Whether associating with Malcolm X or The Beatles, Jim Brown or Sam Cooke, he seemed a central figure of American and global culture for a long time.

In the interest of completeness, I’ll mention two shows I couldn’t make it all the way through.  Not sure who decided that Maid (MC-82, NFX), the fictionalization of Stephanie Land’s bestselling memoir, warranted ten hour-long episodes – but they were wrong.  There was certainly enough material there to make a good movie, or maybe even a six-hour series, but padded out by the immersion in immiseration of a beautiful young white woman, with merciless piling on of bad luck and bad choices, the show’s good observations were overwhelmed by the implausibility of its plotting.  I somehow made it through five episodes, remaining unsure whether it was worth continuing; a change in the sixth suggested it might turn a corner, but that was immediately reversed by the compulsion to punish its heroine.  At that point, I watched some of the final episode just to confirm my sense that the makers had less concern for truth than so-called dramatic effect.  Margaret Whalley is decidedly watchable in the central role, but just how much of her watering dark eyes and trembling luscious lips are we supposed to endure.  The role of her wacky hippie mother is played by her insufferable real mother Andie MacDowell.  The rest of the acting is no better than okay, except for the maid’s three-year-old daughter, who is more real than most of the characters.  The setting in the Pacific Northwest is another attractive feature of the series, but not enough to warrant its length.
 
I’m not into sci-fi generally, but the hype and immediate streaming availability of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (MC-74, HBO) led me to give it a look.  That Metacritic score is a perfect balance between scores of 100 and scores of 50, and I would fall in with the latter group.  It’s hard not to be impressed with the look of this film, but equally hard to find any human interest in it.  I made it to the first big battle scene, before deciding it just wasn’t for me.
 
On the other hand, I grew up in a period when westerns were the dominant genre, and I’m receptive to many sorts of revival and updating.  So I made it all the way through The Harder They Fall (MC-68, NFX), a movie-saturated western with a twist – all the significant roles are played by Black actors.  And what a roster it is:  Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Lakeith Stanfield, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, and more.  Writer-director Jeymes Samuel channels Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, and a host of others, while putting his own stamp on this delirious horse opera.  I liked the acting and dialogue; the widescreen cinematography, set design, and camera tricks; the music and humor – enough to tolerate even the video-game-like violence.  And the Black Panther-like appropriation of a typically-white genre made for a highly entertaining turnabout.
 
Sometimes it seems that intelligent romantic comedy is dying out as a genre, so I was pleased to be led to Love Life (HBO Max) by reviews that indicated the second season (MC-78) was much better than the first (MC-54).  Turns out the new season (of ten half-hours) is genuinely worthy of praise, but the first is not that bad either (especially if you find Anna Kendrick appealing – which I do).  Show creator Sam Boyd has no track record, but delivers a smart and engaging product, well-written and well-performed, with a real New York flavor.  Each season follows a different central character, as she or he sorts through the romantic possibilities of the metropolis.  The second centers on William Jackson Harper’s book editor, as he navigates the complexities of Black and interracial romance, with Jessica Williams as the female friend he turns to between his faltering relationships – they are both excellent.  In the first, Kendrick is a would-be gallerist, and has Zoë Chao as best friend, with a string of unsatisfactory men passing through her life.  Each season spans a decade of affairs and hook-ups as the protagonists negotiate the erotic opportunities of sex in the city.  Nothing startlingly new here, but a nice refreshment of the genre, especially from a different ethnic perspective.
 
I’m definitely enjoying HBO’s current flagship series Succession, now halfway into its third season (MC-92), and will have more to say when I see the rest.  If you’ve somehow missed the hullabaloo about this show, I refer you to my reviews of previous seasons [here and here], and also point toward the earlier writing of creator Jesse Armstrong on the British series Peep Show and The Thick of It, where he honed his talent for hilarious invective.
 
Another personal favorite well into its third season is Dickinson (MC-91, AppleTV+), which I will return to update in “Another bite of Apple” (just below) – and refer you to my comments on the first two seasons here.