TV past peak

We may have passed the glory days of prestige TV.  With the glut of streaming options, channels like Netflix and HBO are turning from pricey productions like The Crown or Succession toward cheaper, crowd-pleasing, pre-sold programs to keep the firehose of content gushing.  Covid shutdowns, and strikes by writers and performers, have also thinned out the quality of product in the pipeline.  So here we survey the so-so offerings from several secondary sources.

There are still gems to discover – case in point: the third season of Slow Horses (MC-82), in which AppleTV’s continuing adaptation of Mick Herron’s “Slough House” series of spy novels really finds its groove, after its promising start.  Superior acting and dialogue, clever plots and stylish directing, general wit and verve – all conspire for shameless entertainment.  Gary Oldman has become even more seedy and disheveled as the leader of a disreputable cohort of MI5 rejects.  He’s caustically dismissive of his crew, and could easily pass for homeless himself, but he has a mind that instantly integrates disparate details together with a view of the big picture.  I would have preferred the last two episodes (of six) to have more plausibility, fewer bullets flying, and a lower body count, but oh well, if the makers have to appeal to the Ian Fleming as well the John le Carré crowd, then so be it.  I’ll look forward to the next six episodes that are already in the can.

Also new on AppleTV is Masters of the Air (MC-73), following the lauded Band of Brothers and The Pacific as the third in a series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, portraying the experiences of American military men in different theaters of World War II.  It follows the men and Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force on daylight bombing raids over Nazi Germany.  Many of the planes go down, and many of the men wind up in prisoner of war camps, or psychiatric facilities where they might have met the young doctor who was the father of my watching partner, which was my point of entry on yet another story of aerial combat in WWII.  The in-flight action is as gripping as a video game, and if the characterizations are paper-thin, the immersive experience of flying in a tin can under relentless fire from flak and fighter planes clearly establishes why so many of the surviving men needed psychiatric care.  Other than dazzling pictorial recreation, this is a standard-issue WWII drama, of the sort I grew up with while playing with plastic toy soldiers.

Apple does put money and care into their history-based series and, like Dickinson, Manhunt (MC-65) is a generally veristic look at America in the mid-19^th century.  But where Dickinson used anachronism consciously to satiric effect and retained fidelity to historic fact, Manhunt simply absorbs historical coloring to tell a typical police procedural.  I gave it a try, since Jill Lepore used the series as a jumping off place for a serious historical essay in the New Yorker, but by the fourth episode, the fakery wore me down and I bailed.  So I was leery of Franklin (MC-57), even though it was based on a Stacy Schiff biography – I’ll have to see rave reviews before I give it a try.

On the other hand, I was rather engaged by the first several episodes of Sugar (MC-67).  In my selective viewing I’ve always liked Colin Farrell, who plays the title character, an LA P.I. with many noirish predecessors, from Philip Marlowe to Jake Gittes.  And ever since The Wire, I’ve had fondness for Amy Ryan.  He’s not as rough as many a detective, and she’s sweeter than the usual femme fatale.  Everything else is something you’ve seen before, and are seeing all over again, explicitly in quick clips from old movies.  So all that attracted me, while a variety of stylistic tics put me off.  Having read allusions to a very alienating twist in episode six, I was quite content to stop when my current Apple subscription expired, but might find reason to continue with the series in the future.  

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine followed up on their excellent Apple documentary Boys State with Girls State (MC-76), which is also very good, but in quite a different way.  In fact, that difference becomes the main throughline of the film.  This time we are in Missouri, where the boys and girls are meeting at the same time on the same campus, separate and decidedly unequal.  Where the boys focus on issues and replicate the partisanship of national politics, the girls focus on icebreakers, girl power, and solidarity.  Though filmed shortly after the Supreme Court leak about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, it barely registers as an element of debate even though differing views on abortion are broached in conversation.  With the contrast right in their faces, the girls come together over their disparate treatment from the boys, and overcome their otherwise differing views.  Seven camera-sound pairs, all female apparently, follow a diversity of appealing and sympathetic characters, as they run for various offices and subject their views to unfamiliar perspectives.

I’m deep into rereading Jane Austen and now in the middle of Emma, so when I noticed Clueless (1995, MC-71) on Apple, having seen it referred to once or twice as the best of all Austen adaptations, I took another look.  It’s certainly not the best of anything, but is quite fun to watch, closer to Amy Heckerling’s own Fast Times at Ridgemont High than any recollection of Emma.  Alicia Silverstone is delightful in the role of the teen matchmaker, though I am unaware of anything she has done since, in a very extensive filmography.  Paul Rudd, however, has gone on to a substantial career, even being named “Sexiest Man Alive.”   

One more AppleTV offering before I signed off again was Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (MC-64).  He’s far from a favorite of mine, but you have to give Scott credit for mounting such a mammoth production well into his 80s.  But not much credit otherwise accrues.  The battle scenes are spectacular (and gory), but the deadpan humor of Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal seems misguided, and Vanessa Kirby’s of Josephine as well, along with their decidedly unerotic rutting.  It’s one thing to cut historical figures down to size, but it’s another to make their actions and motivations completely inexplicable.  A four-hour director’s cut may fill in some of blanks in this historical epic, but is unlikely to supply the missing taste and sense.
 
I continue to lament the devolution of HBO into “max.”  I sampled but could not commit to recent seasons of The Regime or True Detective, but after a couple of episodes I’m more inclined to stick with The Sympathizer (MC-79), an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning novel about the Fall of Saigon and the Vietnamese diaspora.  If I make it through all seven episodes, I’ll come back and comment further.

So far “HBO Documentaries” still exists (until it’s slashed to pay the demonic David Zaslav’s salary), and God Save Texas (MC-84) continues the worthy tradition, inspired by a book of the same name from the estimable Lawrence Wright, who appears in each of the three episodes with three different filmmakers from Texas, returning to examine their roots.  The first and best is “Hometown Prison,” a feature-length meditation by Richard Linklater on how his hometown of Huntsville (vide Dazed and Confused) came to be defined by multiple prisons and a multitude of executions, delving into the liabilities of the prison-industrial complex, the carceral state, and the ethics of the death penalty.  Alex Stapleton’s “The Price of Oil” jumps off from the way the growth of Houston’s oil business has impacted the Black community from which she emerged, and explores the state’s long history of Black exploitation.  Iliana Sosa returns to “La Frontera,” the sister cities of El Paso and Juarez, a community once intertwined but now divided by The Wall.  The latter two episodes are hour-long, deeply-personal investigations highlighting significant themes.

And MAX did offer one last Best Picture nominee (with a consolation Oscar for Best International Feature), Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (MC-92) was inspired by the Martin Amis novel of the same name, based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz.  The title refers to what the Nazis called the residential area immediately around the concentration camp.  I kept mistaking it as “zone of silence,” which would have been equally appropriate (the film won another Oscar for Best Sound).  I approached the film somewhat reluctantly but was won over by its mastery and seriousness.  Glazer is inventive, and adept at evoking horror by the quietest means, much of it as impassive as surveillance footage.  Sandra Hűller got her Best Actress nomination for another film, but is equally adept here as the wife of the commandant (Christian Friedel).  Along with their five children they lead an idyllic life, with their garden and swimming pool sharing a tall wall with the camp itself, managing to ignore the constant sounds of screams and gunshots, or the hellish glow of the crematoria at night.  Displaced Poles wait on them and their deluxe lifestyle is enhanced by appropriated fur coats and gold teeth.  They are monstrous, but oh-so-human, exemplars of the “banality of evil,” in this chilling but essential and all-too-relevant film.
 
Besides John Oliver’s continuing practice, the best comedy I’ve seen on MAX since Gary Gulman is Alex Edelman: Just for Us (his website), less a stand-up routine than a run-around-the-stage performance of a one-person play, about a very Jewish dervish from Boston who decides to infiltrate a white-supremacist complaint-fest in Queens.  This artfully put-together extended anecdote is pointed and very, very funny.
 
Here’s a recommendation from out of left field, only available on Kanopy so far, but as a BBC series likely to end up on Britbox or PBS Masterpiece.  Life after Life (Wiki) is a four-episode adaptation of the acclaimed Kate Atkinson novel, about an English girl growing up in a well-off family from WWI to WWII, who dies repeatedly in different ways but keeps coming back for another chance at life, with some inchoate knowledge of previous lives to guide her.  It stars Thomasin Mackenzie, who made an impression on me as a teen in Leave No Trace (reviewed here) but I haven’t seen much of elsewhere.  Her talent and appeal are certainly confirmed here, along with an all-round good cast.  I was also attracted by Lesley Manville’s name in the credits, but she is just the narrator.  Director John Crowley is familiar from two very good feature films, Intermission and Brooklyn, and handles this difficult assignment with aplomb.  This ranks among the better BBC dramas I’ve seen lately.
 
And as for BBC sitcoms, for a while I’d been looking for the show Stefan Golaszewski made before Mum, and I finally found Him & Her (Wiki) on Kanopy, starring Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani as the title couple.  After an uncertain and rather raunchy start, I enjoyed all the first season, and soon caught up with the succeeding three.  Like Seinfeld, it’s “a show about nothing,” with two layabout twentysomethings never leaving their London bedsit but welcoming in a crew of weird neighbors and family.  There’s plenty of cringe-comedy, but the performances are appealingly naturalistic and the writing spot-on.  The final season, which breaks out of their flat to picture a wedding from hell, won BAFTA’s Best Sitcom in 2014.  Overall, this is a worthy precursor to great shows like Catastrophe and Fleabag.
 
Continuing with surprising finds on Kanopy, I half-recommend Surprised by Oxford (IMDB), a coy memoir-based rom-com enlivened by decent acting and excellent location shooting.  I enjoyed the travelogue aspect of being able to figure out exactly where the scenes were shot.  That may not work for viewers who have not spent as many hours walkingthose streets as I have.  Likewise with the focus on a book with personal meaning for me, C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, which in turn recalls the great Anthony Hopkins-Debra Winger pairing in Shadowlands.  And then too, how many viewers actually want to be attending class for a DPhil in English Romantic literature?  Well, I enjoyed it anyway.
 
Speaking of PBS Masterpiece, I was drawn to Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office (MC-80) by the presence of the always-reliable Toby Jones.  And of course he delivers in the title role of this true story, about an “affront to justice” in which hundreds of “subpostmasters” who run local post offices were accused, dismissed, or even imprisoned for accounting mistakes caused by a newly-installed central computer system, whose bugs the head office refused to acknowledge.  This led to a twenty-year legal struggle, well-known in the U.K., of little guys banding together to get justice from a reluctant government.  As the presence of twinkle-eyed Jones would suggest, this is a tragedy with some comic moments and a redemptive outcome.  Well-cast and well-shot, these four episodes make you care about an unknown injustice, but do not overstay their welcome.
 
I may have overstayed mine, so I’ll break off here, but I’ll be back with more explorations of streaming options.  I will note that in support of the theme of this essay, on the very day I’m posting it, the New York Times chief TV critic declares “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.”  If you’ve read this far, you really should follow that link.