No longer as devoted to
Netflix as I was for two decades or more, it’s been six months since my last round-up, and I have plenty to catch up with.
Buckle up, this is going to be a long two-part post that will remain
open till I pause my subscription again next month, after squeezing all the
latest juice out of Netflix – but still rooting for them to overcome Ellison
and Trump in the acquisition of WarnerDiscovery.
One of the new Netflix shows
I was eager to come back for was Death by Lightning (MC-80). I grew up a few miles from President James
Garfield’s memorial tomb, and followed him from Ohio to Williams College – one
of my favorite bits of historical trivia is that his intended destination when
he was shot in the DC train station was a meeting of Williams alumni in
NYC. My own obsession with American
history runs from 1840 to 1860, so I knew relatively little about the election
of 1880, and how Garfield was drafted for the Republican nomination after
giving a rousing nominating speech for someone else, eventually emerging as a
compromise candidate between deadlocked factions. The convention takes up most of the first of
four episodes and was one of the more convincing depictions of politics on film
that I have ever seen. Acting is
excellent across the board: as Garfield, Michael Shannon gives his most
sympathetic portrayal, Matthew McFadyen plays his deranged assassin Guiteau
(reminiscent of his role in Succession), Nick Offerman plays roistering
VP Chester Arthur, and Betty Gilpin is Mrs. Garfield. Other familiar faces don flamboyant beards
and believably inhabit Gilded Age pols.
Sets and costumes also evince authenticity, which the dialogue sorely
lacks. Sometimes it pushes contemporary
parallels, which is allowable and even welcome, but often it lacks any sense of
period speech, hitting a low point when the demure First Lady screams the
F-word. One thing I do know about the
era is the Oneida Community, and I took umbrage at a flashback that reduced it
to slapstick, as a fuckfest where Guiteau alone couldn’t get laid. But my viewing partner was on Wikipedia
through much of the series, confirming most of the salient details, so the
whole is far from braindead.
Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy
are actresses who have earned my admiration over multiple projects, so their
presence overcame the lackluster reception of Hostage (MC-62) to earn my viewing attention – and managed to
sustain it through five episodes. They
play British PM and French Prez respectively, who approach as adversaries but
act together when an international crisis develops. I have a hard time distinguishing this from
the other British political thrillers (esp. Slow Horses) I’ve been
watching lately, but despite the leads it’s relatively lacking in plausibility
and humor. (Neither lady leader is a
patch on Denmark’s PM in Borgen, also on Netflix, among the very best tv
series ever, with the kicker that the postscript fourth season is all about an
international crisis over Greenland.)
Steven Knight is a busy man,
churning out captivating historical dramas, best known for Peaky Blinders (which
has a feature-length follow-up coming in March) and more recently, A
Thousand Blows. House of Guinness (MC-72) is of a piece, featuring
impressively atmospheric period recreations of Dublin and Connacht in the
post-famine era and solid acting all round, with an anachronistic punk rock
soundtrack. Like an Irish Succession,
it follows four siblings vying for control of the legendary brewery after the
patriarch’s death. Anthony Boyle is the
eldest and most familiar, with the ubiquitous James Norton as the
establishment’s heavy-handed enforcer.
There’s a mix of fine ladies and Fenian Pre-Raphaelite beauties, as the
family business navigates between Protestant evangelicals and Catholic
revolutionaries. I was satisfied with
the cliffhanger conclusion after eight propulsive episodes, but would welcome a
sequel.
Despite raves, I could never
get into BoJack Horseman, but was immediately grabbed by Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s
new animated dramedy series Long Story Short (MC-89). It’s a Jewish
family’s collective biography, covering forty years in non-chronological order
(except for the rapid-fire title sequence, which is worth watching repeatedly,
to get the arc of those forty years, with slight changes foreshadowing the
focus of each of ten episodes). The
whole show is fast, furious, funny, and ultimately moving. The very authentic family drama is punctured
and punctuated by an avalanche of laugh-out-loud lines and gestures. To appreciate the humor, it helps to have
grown up surrounded by Jews, but I think many of the family dynamics will ring
bells for all backgrounds. All the voice
acting is spot on, and the animation by Lisa Hanawalt seems simple and
cartoonish but reveals surprising depth and dimension. Thankfully, we won’t have long to wait for
the second season. It will be enough to
bring me back into the Netflix fold, when I have strayed again.
The next three series in this
round-up share an identical Metacritic rating (beneath my benchmark of 80),
which says something about the current state of Netflix programming. The firehose of content is not about offering
the very best but delivering the good enough across a wide range of audiences.
Wayward (MC-71) is the one that appealed to me, based on Mae
Martin’s previous Netflix series, Feel Good, a clearly autobiographical
lesbian rom-com among the stand-up set in London. (Also, her own stand-up special SAP.) Martin has returned to her native Canada, for
a dramatic series that also seems based on personal experience, about a
restrictive school for troubled teens.
This one is set over the border in Tall Pines, VT, with Toni Collette in
fine form as the mercurial headmistress (and leader of a cult modeled on
Synanon, not to give too much away). As
well as writing, Martin plays an androgynous cop named Alex, whose wife is
pregnant, paternity not specified. The
couple moved back to her hometown from Detroit, Alex leaving the police there
for reasons that go unspoken but implied.
Mae/Alex is apparently transitioning (a bit of pillow talk concerns
whether their stubble is coming in), and happy to show off their good-looking
top-surgery. Alex meets and befriends
two girls who’ve been sent to that school by parents who don’t want to deal
with them, and then begins to trace the history of 18 cold cases of youths who ran
away from the school over the years and were never heard from again. Seemingly trying to fill a teen-horror genre
niche, the eight-episode series runs too long and tries too many twists of the
tale, but the personal aspects, and the effective acting that filters down from
the stars to the teens, make it a worthwhile watch for most of its length.
I’m a sucker for shows about
writers, so I gave a look to The Beast in Me (MC-71) despite the title and
the woman-in-jeopardy trailer. Never a
fan of The Americans or Homeland, I didn’t expect much but was
willing to give Claire Danes a chance to convince me. The show met my expectations – and one
episode was plenty. Similarly, I felt no
compulsion to watch more than a couple of episodes of the second season of Man
on the Inside (MC-71). I thought the shift in scene from old folks
home to college campus, and the addition of Ted Danson’s wife Mary Steenburgen
to the cast might revive my interest, but found the shtick had lost its
novelty.
Netflix frequently imports
shows which had success on other channels and a recent one I want to highlight
is This is Going to Hurt (MC-91),
which I reviewed here. Another series that deserves repeated mention
as one of the best of 2025 is Asura (reviewed here),
which led me to an earlier series by Hirokazu Kore-eda, The Makanai:
Cooking for the Maiko House (MC-70). I’m one episode into it, and will report back
here if I get through before this month’s subscription runs out.
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