Coming home to Netflix

I maintain a manual watchlist of a dozen or so streaming channels, and I’ve begun to save money by subscribing only when I’ve developed a critical mass of programs on any given channel.  Earlier this year, when Netflix had literally nothing I wanted to watch, I suspended my subscription for the first time in 22 years.  After a number of months not sending them my $15.49 – which in turn caused their stock price to crater – I’d built up a list of shows-to-see that warranted a month or two back on the channel.
 
Preeminent among them was Borgen: Power and Glory (MC-87), and the belated return of one of my all-time top-ten tv-shows did not disappoint.  Having won and lost as Prime Minister of Denmark, Birgitte Nyborg returns as Foreign Minister in a new coalition government, still played by the dazzling Sidse Babett Knudsen.  Many other characters return as well, to good effect.  This delayed fourth season revolves around the ramifying crises emerging from the discovery of oil on Greenland, where the indigenous majority hopes it will finance independence from Denmark, while the Danes are caught between their Green commitments and a financial windfall of billions, and the U.S., Russia, and China all take a geopolitical interest.  Birgitte navigates these waters with impressive skill, but also with a compulsion for power that corrupts her thinking and makes her forget who her friends are.  This is a political show that believably takes you into “the room where it happens.”  If you were a fan of the first three seasons, rejoice at this reprise.  If you weren’t, be advised that they rank with the best tv ever, and that they’re also available on Netflix.
 
The second season of Russian Doll (MC-79) is more sci-fi and scattershot than the first, but Natasha Lyonne is still marvelous in the lead, and the show returns with an intriguing if incomprehensible story and a striking visual style.  This season has a time-travel rather than a Groundhog Day premise, with the character Nadia inhabiting the body of her mother in the 1980s and grandmother in the 1940s, in a quest to recover a cache of gold stolen from her family by the Nazis.  Though not as enthusiastic as I was about the first series, I still enjoyed this follow-up, at least till I gave up trying to decipher all the off-hand dialogue or follow the zigzags of the plot.
 
Candidly a rip-off of the original Australian series (my comments here and here), Love on the Spectrum U.S. (no MC) has its own appeal.  But its coast-to-coast coverage of familiar locations loses some of the piquant individuality of the original.  On the other hand, the “reality-tv” range of characters, with all their different manifestations of autism, conveys that while we are all different types, we basically want the same things, intimacy and connection.  Funny and touching, and never icky.
 
If you want - or need - a lesson on the legacy of white supremacy, then Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (MC-89) would be good place to start.  Jeffrey Robinson’s illustrated presentation is for the most part common-sense, by-now-familiar history and not the Right’s boogieman of CRT.  It follows a timeline from 1619 to today that is cumulatively enraging and convincing, but the only news to me was a revolt of enslaved people in pre-Revolutionary times.  Built around an actual lecture, with graphics and cutaways to personal documentation, this show seems truthful and telling, with a minimum of exaggeration or special pleading.
 
The drama and the humor are a little thin in Adam Sandler’s Hustle (MC-68), but the basketball action is pretty great, with a bunch of current and former NBA stars playing themselves.  Sandler is an international scout for the 76ers, who finds a diamond in the rough in Juancho Hernangomez.  Jeremiah Zagar does a nice job of Philly-centric directing, which enhances the sports movie formula.  Of recent hoops-oriented shows, this movie cannot run with Swagger but posterizes Winning Time.
 
Richard Linklater is probably my favorite director from the generation after mine (late as opposed to early Boomer).  Apollo 10½ (MC-79) does not rank with his classics, but is a very pleasant memory piece about growing up in Houston in the late Sixties, given added dimension by the practice of rotoscoping, live action overlaid by animation, which Linklater debuted in Waking Life.  While slightly fictionalized, the film has all the specificity of memoir, and is more a matter of time travel than space travel, digging into the culture of childhood in that time and place, in a nuclear family of six siblings, and a new-built neighborhood crawling with other children.

Netflix has a nice thing going in the tradition of Sex Education, and the new teen LBGTQ+ comedy Heartstopper (MC-85) continues in that vein, though gentler and less raunchy.  Adapted by Alice Oseman from her extremely popular (but previously unknown to me) series of graphic novels, it’s live action with a few animated touches, and tells the story of an openly gay, but bullied, English 15-year-old with a crush on a popular rugby player, who amazingly returns his affection and struggles to come to terms with his apparent bisexuality.  In the group of friends are a movie nerd, a book nerd, a trans girl, and a lesbian couple.  Hard to say how this series remains so sweet without ever becoming saccharine, but it must have something to do with the authenticity and sincerity of the characters and their creators.  These eight half-hour episodes are highly recommended, and a second season is on the way.

In the same vein, Never Have I Ever (MC-84) returns for a third season (my rave for first two seasons here), and remains charming, truthful, and funny as ever.  This show I recommend without reservation -- I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying its wit and heart.  Mindy Kaling and her co-creators revisit the familiar territory of a SoCal high school, with an emphasis on broadly-appealing diversity.  Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is delightful as the lead character, now a junior (as the series, with one more season to go, covers high school year by year).  Devi is a brainiac nerd who somehow has landed her dream boyfriend, but that does not solve all her teenage problems.  (John McEnroe is also delightful, crankily providing her stream-of-consciousness narration.)  Her circle of friends confronts various other romantic surprises and quandaries, in refreshing a tried and true genre with ethnic spice.  Winsome and winning.

In a different vein, I returned to Peaky Blinders (MC-77) for its sixth and final season (MC-86), after skipping the previous two, having found the series to run out of interest, just repeating a stylistic exercise that was initially striking, but now reduced to formula.  Dark, heavy, loud, bloody, in thrall to the Godfather Saga – this show seemed a novelty at first, but wound up just going through the motions.

I usually get around to seeing the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature, so I caught up with the Netflix production The Mitchells vs. The Machines (MC-81), which deserved the nod.   The novelty of its visual style; the non-stop barrage of gags, too many for any single viewer, but something for everyone; the winking adaptation of action movie clichés; the tech satire of robot apocalypse; the anti-heroics of a normally dysfunctional family – all work well, even if the obligatory action scenes go too fast and too long.  

Following upon the success of Wild Wild Country, Netflix presents another documentary about a closed community out West with Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (MC-80), this time a polygamous sect of Mormons, one of the models for the HBO series Big Love.  This series of four 45-minute episodes doesn’t have the scope or ambiguity of the prior doc, but offers some impressive personal testimony illuminated by home movies and photos, to tell the sketched-in history of the FLDS.  Two missteps are the inclusion of some recreations that undermine the veracity of the archival footage, and the failure to delve more into the psychology of believers, rather that making a mere crime (or horror) story about the pursuit and conviction of a moral monster.  What held this patriarchal tyranny together?  This story is only half-told.

So all in all, there is plenty of reason to subscribe to Netflix for a month or two at a time, but also no reason to automatically renew every month, given the workaday quality of so much of their programming.