Jolly good shows - or not so

This post is like the Jeopardy! category “Potpourri,” covering recent programs on various streaming channels, starting with AMC+ on a trial subscription.  [Updated through September.]

This Is Going to Hurt (MC-91, AMC+) is the best new show of 2022 so far, if you were to believe Metacritic.  I’m not quite that high on it, but found it highly watchable, despite my general indifference to medical dramas.  With the notable exceptions of St. Elsewhere and Nurse Jackie (and of course, Doc Martin), I haven’t been a follower of hospital-based shows (don’t remember ever watching an episode of E.R. or Grey’s Anatomy), but here’s one that caught and kept my interest.  Adapted by Adam Kay from his memoir of the same name, into seven 45-minute episodes, this BBC import stars Ben Whishaw as an overtaxed junior doctor in the ob-gyn department of an NHS hospital.  He and his colleagues are stressed to the max, to the detriment of both work and home life, to ends both comic and tragic.  The level of acting and verisimilitude is high, and leavened by humor and outrage.  If you like this sort of thing, you will certainly like this.

While I really enjoyed the first season of State of the Union (MC-79, AMC+), I was even more taken with the second.  Nick Hornby, a reliably funny and truthful writer, and director Stephen Frears return with another series of ten short episodes of 10-12 minutes, each detailing the meeting of husband and wife on their way to a marriage counseling session.  After a London pub with Rosamund Pike and Chris O’Dowd, now the scene is a Connecticut coffee shop, and the couple are played by Patricia Clarkson and Brendan Gleeson.  This series makes a great pairing with the Showtime documentary series Couples Therapy, where they go behind closed doors to disclose what actually goes on in counseling sessions, but these preliminary discussions are illuminating in their own amusing manner, brilliantly staged and acted.

I gave Ten Percent (MC-63, AMC+) three episodes to distinguish itself as anything but a pale British imitation of the far superior French series Call My Agent! – which I raved about repeatedly through its four seasons – but that was a test this show did not pass, so it seems strictly for English speakers who couldn’t read subtitles fast enough to keep up with the antic dialogue of the original.

In reading my comments, you ought to know that in my view “whodunit?” is about the least interesting question that fiction or film can ask.  Mysteries are a mystery to me – who cares?  More so the older I get, since I used to read a number of Tony Hillerman novels, so I tuned into several episodes of a belated adaptation, Dark Winds (MC-80, AMC+), mainly for its Native American flavor and atmosphere.  Zahn McClarnon is solid as Navajo Tribal Police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, but not as good as he is in Reservation Dogs (the highly-anticipated second season now underway on Hulu).  The rest of the cast is variable, and the direction merely serviceable.  In striking contrast to Better Call Saul, which is so immaculately done on all levels.  So with new episodes of BCS and RD available, it’s easy to pass up this “Southwestern.”

I’ve long been a Paul Newman fanboy, and more recently a consistent follower of Ethan Hawke, and the latter offers an unabashed appreciation of the former, along with Joanne Woodward, Newman’s longtime partner in love and work, in The Last Movie Stars (MC-91, HBO), a well-made six-part documentary series.  Initially that seemed like a lot of time to devote to a celebration of the pair, but it turned out to have many more levels than celluloid hagiography.  With the impetus from the couple’s children, there was a lot of material to work with.  Crucially, transcripts of interviews done for Paul when he was contemplating an autobiography; he eventually decided against doing so, and burned the tapes.  The transcripts came down to the children however, and in a Covid-lockdown project, Hawke got many of his acting pals to read them aloud (e.g. George Clooney as Paul, Laura Linney as Joanne).  The story encompasses both movie life and domestic life over a half-century together, and beautifully matches scenes from their movies with narration from their personal lives.  And the beauty of the doc’s duration is that it includes full scenes from the films, rather than clips or snippets.  If you want to drown in those blue eyes, or the green pair, then this immersion is for you.

I follow the career of Olivier Assayas, but wasn’t eager to see his 8-hour series remake of his earlier film, derived in turn from a famous French silent serial.  Nonetheless, the new Irma Vep (MC-84, HBO) captured my interest when given a chance.  First off, Alicia Vikander -- nuff said, easy on the eyes, could just watch her for hours.  The Day for Night meets Call My Agent! vibe shines brightly for me, always receptive to films about filmmaking.  In such a self-referential work, it certainly helps to have the key to the roman-à-clef elements.  The director of the film-within-the-film is clearly a satiric Assayas self-portrait, played by Vincent Macaigne from CMA!.  Alica V. is pretty plainly playing a character based on Kristen S. (who cameos).  And so on.  At first glance, the whole thing may seem rather self-involved, but it turns out to be an intimate lens on the madness of movies, with much to say about the culture of the moment.  Its historical perspective is exemplified in the way the series glides seamlessly among backstage realities, the update under production, and the Louis Feuillade silent classic.  Most of all, the series is a meditation on cinema, what it has been, what it is today, what it can be – a secular ritual, a magical rite, a calling forth of the light.  Not for everyone, but a treat for specialized tastes.

Toby Jones’s mug on the series promo was enough to draw me to Capital (Wiki, PBS), though he is only one character of many on a gentrifying street of South London, where everyone is being subjected to mysterious postcards that say “We want what you have.”  That means different things to different people – the dying widow, the overextended banker, the Pakistani shopkeeper, the Zimbabwean refugee.  In the vein of social satire, the Dickensian interweaving of neighborhood characters and situations is convincing, but once again the unraveling of the mystery was not all that interesting.  This adaptation of a John Lanchester novel, in four hour-long episodes, does not overstay its welcome.

In the realm of nature documentaries, David Attenborough and his team are pathbreakers, and their latest is Green Planet (PBS).  I’ve never seen such an adept combination of time-lapse photography and tracking shots, which animate the plants that are the stars of this series, with animals and humans as bit players.  Music also contributes to the experience, though sometimes laid on a little heavy to goose the drama.  Nonetheless, I’m beginning to accept my brother’s argument, made while he was selling off New Jersey’s public tv bandwidth for other worthy causes, that PBS doesn’t provide any programming that couldn’t be found on a commercial channel.  It may be because the CPB was starved during the Trump years, but I am certainly watching the channel less than previously.

After equivocating about the first season of Undone (MC-86, AMZ) and looking in on the second only in due diligence, I ultimately found myself absorbed and admiring.  This series is both deep and far out, highly visual and psychologically penetrating.  Before I likened it to “Waking Life meets Russian Doll” in somewhat belittling comparison.  Now I’d put it in the same class, and with their simultaneous second seasons, I’d say Undone exceeds Russian Doll in telling a peculiarly-similar time travel tale, the animation offering a free hand to make the temporal transitions, and the quest more uplifting (family harmony the goal, rather than krugerrands). 

Speaking of due diligence, I took in the similarly-rated series Chloe (MC-86, AMZ).  I was not drawn in immediately, and put it aside, but then I was looking for something to watch as I was riding my new stationary bike, and picked this as something to which I didn’t have to devote full attention.  More a psychological thriller than a whodunit, the series follows a young woman, played by Erin Doherty, who had a best friend as a teen, but was rejected for a new group of friends.  Left out, she followed that glamorous coterie on social media.  When the friend calls her out of the blue, just before her apparent suicide, Becky assumes a new identity to insert herself into the clique, either to understand Chloe’s death or to inhabit her life.  Can’t say this story warranted six hour-long episodes, but it did make the virtual miles go by.

I checked out the first two episodes of the new series adaptation of A League of Their Own (MC-70, AMZ), which weren’t exactly bad, but lackluster.  I took a look at some of the original film again, and wondered why any remake was thought advisable.  Then tried another series episode as bike material, and it just made the cycling more arduous.

Two acclaimed FX series induced me to re-subscribe to Hulu.  The Bear (MC-86, Hulu) debuted to great acclaim, and I join the chorus of praise.  Christopher Storer was not a familiar name to me, even though he has worked with Bo Burnham and Ramy Youseff, but this is his breakout as the full package: writer, director, showrunner.  It’s a frenetic comedy/drama of eight half-hour episodes (already renewed for a second season), set behind the scenes of a family restaurant called Original Beef of Chicagoland.  The older brother who ran it rather haphazardly has died and left it to his younger brother, who took a different path and became an award-winning high-end chef, played by Jeremy Allen White, again unfamiliar to me but quite convincing.  There’s his brother’s old friend and other staff members resistant to the new regime, but he attracts a fellow Culinary Institute graduate as sous-chef, played by Ayo Edebiri, with high aims for the establishment.  With a raucous helter-skelter pace, lightning wit, and explosive situations, the viewer is immersed in the back-of-house chaos of restaurant work, and marinated in Chicago local color.  I look forward to future seasons.

The second season of Reservation Dogs (MC-93, Hulu) lives up to the promise of the first, and then some.  It’s really a showcase for Native American talent on both sides of the camera.  (Is “Native American” still okay for a white man to say?  Or should it be “Indigenous Peoples”?  Canadians seem to have the right idea with “First Nations.”)  Where the first season followed a group of four teens mourning the loss of their leader by suicide, and scheming to get off the rez, the second widens its lens to take in more of the community, with each character getting their moment in the spotlight.  (Right there is the one advantage of “their” becoming a singular pronoun.)  Anyway, I really enjoy and recommend this show.  Give it some time to establish its world, and you will be drawn in.  This series is a convincing argument for diversity, and letting unheard voices be heard.  Show creator Starlin Harjo invites many collaborators in telling a variety of stories about various characters, increasing to ten episodes this season.  A big thumbs up for this one.
 
In temporarily re-subscribing to Hulu, I took advantage of the cheap add-on of Disney+, having accumulated a few programs to watch since last taking a short subscription (to see Hamilton a couple of times, with and without captioning).  Top of the list was On Pointe (MC-61), a 6-part documentary series promoting the School of American Ballet and its training for Balanchine’s New York City Ballet.  We follow a number of students, ranging from 9-17, as they study, audition, rehearse, and perform – all of them appealing, graceful, articulate, and super-motivated – with commentary from parents and teachers, through a school year centered on the annual run of The Nutcracker.  Though anything but hard-hitting, this series is a pleasure to watch, for the dancing and for the kids themselves.
 
Another Disney offering was The Beatles: Get Back (MC-85), Peter Jackson’s eight-hour re-edit of the raw rehearsal, recording, and performance footage that went into the 1970 film Let It Be, after the band broke up.  The film highlighted the tensions that led to the break-up, but this longer version celebrates the intense and joyous process of collaboration that went into the Beatles’ incredible success.  It’s fascinating to watch the Fab Four (plus Billy Preston) interact, and to see familiar songs take shape in the studio.  (Who knew “Get Back” started off as a protest against anti-immigrant policies?)  The characters are familiar and beloved, but the process is the fascination of this series.  Rock out, friends.
 
To catch a couple of films I’d been looking for, I took a week’s free trial of Starz.  While on the channel, I sampled one of their original series.  Gaslit (MC-70) turned out be better than I expected, but not good enough to pay for a month’s subscription, so I only saw six of eight episodes.  This semi-comic retelling of the Watergate saga features an all-star cast, led by Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell and a barely-recognizable Sean Penn as John Mitchell, with Dan Stevens as John Dean and Betty Gilpin as his wife Mo.  Based on a Slow Burn podcast, this series was not up to the level of Hulu’s Mrs. America, for example, but did vividly recall a momentous episode from our Boomer history.  [Update:  I saw the last two episodes after all, and wish I hadn’t.  It was one thing to look at a common historical event from the perspective of some peripheral characters (cf. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), but another to lose sight of the event itself, in the personal minutiae of figures like Martha or Dean or (God help us) Gordon Liddy.]
 
Herewith I wrap up a summer of tv viewing, with comment on Better Call Saul still to come, and also some final words on the films of 2021.