TV of 2023

[Matt]

I was looking for shows similar to Gilmore Girls

Bunheads might scratch that itch. The follow-up from Amy Sherman-Palladino which also features Kelly Bishop (Emily Gilmore).

[Shanzam]

I enjoyed the first few seasons, but never finished it (through no fault of the series). If you like it, your next step after would be Friday Night Lights, which shares some of the same creative team

I'll check it out, thanks, Katims seemed to have written around 12 episodes of Friday Night Lights. I like the atmosphere of familiarity in Parenthood, but don't know if I will watch all the seasons.

I was looking for shows similar to Gilmore Girls

Bunheads might scratch that itch. The follow-up from Amy Sherman-Palladino which also features Kelly Bishop (Emily Gilmore).

..the show centers on a Las Vegas showgirl who gets married on a whim and winds up teaching alongside her new mother-in-law at her ballet school.

On a whim + dancing reminds me of Frances Ha, I'll remember it, thanks.

I also watched 4 episodes of Silo in the meantime, don't think I've watched many dystopian TV series in general so it reminds me of all the sci-fi series I've watched, but more character-driven and with the scientific aspect happening sometimes in (alternate) present or past rather than future tense. It could probably also be labeled as a detective show in a dystopian context.

[diamonds]

Putting in a good word for Soderbergh's Full Circle now that it's out in full. Didn't anticipate the post would be this long but maybe it will encourage anyone still trying to fill a Succession-sized hole in their schedule to seek it out.

I quite enjoyed the ride. It marks the third collaboration between Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomon (after Mosaic and No Sudden Move), but it also seems like the latest installment in a project that began in earnest with The Laundromat, which found Soderbergh (and there, writer Scott Z. Burns) attempting to find ways to dramatize complex financial crimes. While its aims—untangling labyrinthine global schemes and elucidating the Calvinball rules of capital—are ambitious, The Laundromat's messy patchwork of genres and tones doesn't come off, and Soderbergh's bizarre sense of humor ensured its reach would be more limited than Adam McKay's earlier companion piece The Big Short.

No Sudden Move represents a reworked approach and a kind of lateral advance. Instead of direct-to-camera addresses about the big issues, Soderbergh and Solomon integrate ideas about corporate conspiracy, environmental crimes, and the effects of urban renewal on the poor into a twisty genre plot. What begins as a home invasion sets two hired criminals of different backgrounds on a path cutting through a cross-section of Detroit's wealth strata, leading all the way up to an automotive company boardroom.

Spoilers for No Sudden MoveShow

Matt Damon's climactic monologue was reportedly directly inspired by Ned Beatty's Network speech, with Soderbergh wanting to stop the narrative dead in order to have him deliver what amounts to a rhetorical thesis for the film. It's a grand gesture, and though it does come uncomfortably close to the Banderas/Oldman/Streep addresses of The Laundromat, it also functions within the film as a satisfying way of contrasting the means, methods, and character of white collar and blue collar crime. A good film, and if nothing else No Sudden Move ought to be commended for accomplishing in under two hours what the dreadful fourth season of Fargo labored to do in many more.

Full Circle builds on the formula set by No Sudden Move, multiplying characters and plot complications across a larger canvas and moving the action to the current day, and it strikes me as the most confident iteration of this particular storytelling preoccupation yet. Solomon's script is extremely dense in plot incident and backstory, and it's a testament to Soderbergh's Premingerian skill with balancing multiple narrative strands and a large cast that it comes off as cleanly as it does. The story involves two families, one of well-to-do Manhattanites, the other a Guyanese crime syndicate, which converge in a botched kidnapping that subsequently reveals secrets and connections between them.

As a narrative tapestry it's an impressive feat, and it should come as no surprise that Soderbergh's directing instincts remain sharp and robust. In his post-"retirement" phase, Soderbergh has been pretty sparing with handheld camerawork, but Kimi seems to have decisively broken the seal—Full Circle finds him back in the jittery-precise handheld mode that made The Knick so exhilarating. He keeps things at ground level, moving with the characters as they move through city streets and suburban residences, police stations and hospitals, hotels and motels, posh apartments and parking garages (and, memorably, the back of a van), privileging no one character over the rest. The first two episodes, which lay out the characters and then let the kidnapping play out in real time, are thrilling work. The texture of his digital images here looks grittier than usual to my eyes; it looks very nice and occasionally quite striking. The colors of the Guyanese street market in the first episode are so warm and vibrant—enough to leave an impression of a paradise lost once the boys find themselves having to carry out a horrifying initiation ritual in a dingy, hellish back alley in NYC.

One of Soderbergh's not-so-secret strengths is his facility with actors, and the cast here, consisting of veterans and newcomers alike, is almost uniformly great. (The one surprising bum note for me was Zazie Beetz, who plays her stock maverick cop a little too casually obnoxious at nearly all times). The actors playing the Guyanese crew are real standouts (and one wonders why this wonderful accent and slang haven't graced the screen before!). I don't think I've seen a character quite like CCH Pounder's superstitious criminal matriarch Savitri Mahabir, whose sweet grandmotherly demeanor (at one point she winkingly quotes Bobby McFerrin) can shift on a dime to cold authority and menacing single-mindedness. The moral and emotional center of the series rests on newcomer Adia's Natalia, an impressive performance with some delightfully funny banter as well. Even a one-note character like Jharrel Jerome's Aked is enlivened by the actor's intense eyes and Kanye-esque snarl, a lively soloist in the symphony.

In interviews Soderbergh has stressed the difficulty of adapting drama to a world where smartphones make people accessible to one another 24/7, but he and Solomon deserve praise for how seamlessly they integrate smartphones within the thriller mechanics and general fabric here. Many initial press articles about the series highlight the tense moment in E2 where a character

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must race against his rapidly dying phone battery—not as contrived as it seems given that the events are taking place at the tail end of a very long day.

But even their passive existence in the show's world feels just right. For example, in the middle of a furious brainstorming session in E3, a character suddenly thinks to make a quick Google search only to find "Not an article, not even a fucking New York Post!", stoking his suspicions and providing him an epiphany. At another point, a character figures out where someone is by

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accessing his fiancée's account on a food delivery app (a common enough practice among couples) and checking the last location where she had food delivered.

And many more examples. The economic issues relating to First World exploitation of the Third World are for the most part right on the surface, though the depiction is uncommonly nuanced. In Full Circle, the exploiter/exploited dynamic doesn't fall cleanly along racial lines; Mrs. Mahabir is very quick to take advantage of the migrants in trouble in Guyana, whom she knows about because she employs Natalia as a personal masseuse (a suggestive upstairs/downstairs dynamic). And the final plot revelation is about

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the collusion between the McCuskers and a Guyanese politician to rewrite zoning laws in order to profit from an investment scheme.

The focus on class is refreshing, and it is embedded in the drama's genre stratification as well. For the Brownes, the kidnapping sets off a kind of domestic melodrama involving questions of fidelity and parentage, exposing secrets about the origins of the family's wealth and jeopardizing their marriage. (Their son remains safe in a cabin upstate, and the worst they have to put up with is Zazie Beetz's insistent postal inspector). The young Guyanese characters however remain trapped in a film noir; the kidnapping sends them spiraling through increasingly claustrophobic, life-or-death situations where they find themselves at the mercy of more powerful forces, requiring constant movement and quick thinking.

Ending spoilersShow

These plots intersect again a few more times, and the final encounter between Louis and Sam in the latter's apartment is unexpectedly reconciliatory and immensely satisfying. Sam's decision to give Louis the painting is the first step in her atonement, a recognition of her responsibility for the chain of events set in motion decades ago that has led all the way to the arrival of this boy, thousands of miles from home, at her door. The past's tendency to resurface is a quintessential noir theme, and it is all over Full Circle, popping up even in the prohibition era tunnel underneath Garmen Harry's house that allows him and Xavier to escape the raid—the city itself bears traces of the past.

Soderbergh also caps off the Guyanese plot with one of the strongest images of his career:

Without a big ad campaign centering it in the conversation, the series unfortunately seems destined to be overlooked among the glut of streaming options. It's a shame, because while it is by no means flawless, it is very good—clean, fluid genre filmmaking, the kind that's easy to undervalue but which is very pleasurable to watch.

[therewillbeblus]

Nice defense- unfortunately I found it underwhelming as a whole, but still a fine way to spend six hours. The turns/reveals became increasingly obvious after the first two eps (the second episode ends with a glance that thinks it’s an ambiguous clue but is clearly exactly what you suspect, and things don’t really surprise from there). But I really enjoyed that two-ep first act - playing to Soderbergh’s strengths in narrative unveiling, where the plot itself is not complicated but rolled out in a fashion that keeps us both at a distance from the secret-keeping principals and blended with their limited vantage points sown from the isolation of their secrets

Command Z was similarly a mixed bag - I enjoyed the high concept and the Liev Schreiber bits were gold, but otherwise I didn’t laugh or care much about the short-form shenanigans. My partner loved it as an urban planner focusing on climate change and sea level rise, and she felt they got a lot right and were artistically clever about applying that knowledge. Not a shock given the care put into the science behind Contagion, but pretty cool I guess

[Matt]

I’m kind of dreading this new Mike Flanagan series, ”Fall of the House of Usher,” which appears to remix a bunch of Poe’s other stories into it to pad it out to miniseries length. “The Haunting of Hill House” was good with some very effective episodes until it flushed itself down the toilet in the finale, “Bly Manor” was instantly forgettable, and “Midnight Mass” I actively disliked. The Poe story is one of my favorites, and the Corman film is the best of his Poe adaptations, so taking all this into consideration, I’m already biased against it. But now Roderick Usher is “the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company who must face his shady past?”

Like all remakes and adaptations, it doesn’t erase the originals from existence and might gain them some new fans. And being able to watch the new Pablo Larrain within the same month will take some of the sting out of the Netflix subscription fee.

[therewillbeblus]

I wasn't a fan of The Haunting of Hill House, outside of that one episode composed of four long takes, but Flanagan is both formally skilled and has an keen sense of creative wit in his directional capabilities, so I'm always waiting for him to come out with another masterpiece. Granted, I haven't seen the majority of his catalogue, but I maintain the DC of Doctor Sleep is thematically brilliant and conveys stuff Kubrick was unable, and probably uninterested in doing, particularly in its accessibility to normally-esoteric addiction and recovery ethos via film grammar (please, nobody mistake that comment as "it's better than The Shining")

[The Curious Sofa]

I was impressed by Flanagan's debut film Absentia and still think it's his most effective work. If you can overlook a few shaky performances and the fact that it had a minuscule budget (it was crowd funded) the plot turns took me by surprise and it's among the more effective Lovecraftian horror movies.

I enjoyed the first half of The Haunting Hill House but it lost me once it turns sentimental, I checked out of Bly House afte two episodes and felt Midnight Mass was wildly overextended. This new series looks like more of the same, though mashing up several Poe stories is a more promising approach than turning the characters of the Shirley Jackson classic into a family and furnishings it with scares out of The Conjuring franchise.

[therewillbeblus]

Based off just the first episode of three, Telemarketers on Max is the most captivating doc I've seen in a long time. Think The Wolf of Wall Street, in terms of literal content and tonal wavelength, only documenting another tale in the age-old tradition of the capitalist elite pitting average lower-class people against one another to protect their position. It's hysterical, entertaining, horrifying, and feels authentic - especially since these guys were clearly fucking around with cameras, "planning" to execute this kind of exposé as a joke from the start, so it doesn't feel retroactively manipulative like so many of its ilk.

[therewillbeblus]

Based off just the first episode of three, Telemarketers on Max is the most captivating doc I've seen in a long time. Think The Wolf of Wall Street, in terms of literal content and tonal wavelength, only documenting another tale in the age-old tradition of the capitalist elite pitting average lower-class people against one another to protect their position. It's hysterical, entertaining, horrifying, and feels authentic - especially since these guys were clearly fucking around with cameras, "planning" to execute this kind of exposé as a joke from the start, so it doesn't feel retroactively manipulative like so many of its ilk.

One incidental effect I think this doc has is exploiting how widespread classism and its effects are, even with one's allies. The doc is transparently focused on immoral weaponizations of classist systems, but by centralizing the action on two (mostly one) kind-hearted but clearly lower-class individual with behavioral patterns and personality tics completely at-odds with the 'social ideal', we are passengers in a journey where he repulses and alienates many politicians and other organizational leaders who would've surely warmed to someone of their familiar ilk asking the exact same questions. This has sparked some interesting questions in my personal life, and I think it brilliantly reveals a lot of implicit biases -with people squirming away from Pat, the rehabilitated truly kind person, who many audiences wouldn't trust or find approachable in real life, and yet would trust and approach the silver-tongued, "put-together" people manipulating and morally abusing everyone, just based on how they look or speak. Its ironies are very self-reflexive to the subject, and I love how understated this aspect is, as well as how the documentary form allows for a visual aid of the medium to force that physical-observance-driven bias to birth outside of the fog of the telephone calls that mask the intruder. On the flip side, the filmmakers go to great lengths to show the love of community outside of these judgmental middle-upper class zones, and organically challenge assumptions that motivate the behavior impeding progress in the narrative, including - in the end - by people very much on the same 'side'.

[brundlefly]

Trailer for A Murder at the End of the World, the new FX/Hulu mini from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij with Marling, Emma Corrin, Joan Chen, and Clive Owen.

[Mr Sausage]

Looks more conventional than I’m used to from Marling and her usual collaborators, but then the trailer doesn’t reveal all that much, so there’s lots of room for, say, the odd spiritual themes she often favours.

[therewillbeblus]

I definitely sensed ominous hints at spiritualism from the trailer in how the protagonist was framed, but it still seems based around the milieu of a cult, so looking forward for a new spin on familiar terrain from this excellent creative team

[beamish14]

The second season of the incredible animated sci-fi series Pantheon, which was produced and shelved by AMC, is now on Prime

[Matt]

I’m kind of dreading this new Mike Flanagan series, ”Fall of the House of Usher,” which appears to remix a bunch of Poe’s other stories into it to pad it out to miniseries length

I gotta learn to trust my instincts more. I’m halfway through the series and I kind of hate it but will dutifully finish it. The Poe stories are not so much a framework as a kind of “I understood that reference!” running gag. Like someone says “Dammit Toby” to a character who…is not actually named Toby. And the Roderick Usher Experimental medical testing facility where several subjects died is referred to jokingly as the R.U.E. Morgue. But that’s fine because a straightforward poor adaptation in this vein would be much, much worse. It just can’t even summon up enough wit to be camp.

As it is, it’s just an incredibly crude Succession-meets-the-Sacklers riff on a And Then There Were None story. Like crude as in mutiple references to farting in otherwise serious dialogue, every few words being “f*ck” or “f*cking”, and nameless, speechless, topless women just sort of casually walking around in the background. I’m no prude or bluestocking, but it just feels like one of those early HBO/Cinemax shows that, because they could get away with nudity and profanity, carpeted every episode with as much of both as they could. It’s just an eye-rollingly cheap way to make characters seem “wicked.”

I liked Hill House because there was so much sadness in it, but this is just rote killing off of one-note unpleasant characters one by one (and not even in a gleeful “they got what they deserved” manner) peppered with the same exact jump scare in every episode.

But Carla Gugino has a lot of fun playing a mysterious character who seems to pop up in the most unlikely places. Lavish production values, too.

[The Curious Sofa]

I've never been a fan of Flanagan's Netflix shows but weaving elements from various Poe stories into a family saga at least works conceptually a little better for me than turning the characters of The Haunting of Hill House into the members of one family. I'm six episodes in and I'm glad that so far it hasn't swerved into the type of sentimentality, that undid the second half of The Haunting of Hill House for me.

While I'm happy to suspend my disbelief for all sort of supernatural shenanigans, one thing which lets this down for me is the godawful art direction, costuming, styling etc. This is how small children think rich people look and live, from the inauthentic look of the 70s flashbacks, to Mary McDonnell's cheap looking wig, to the fact that everybody is dressed up like they are about to go to the Met Gala even when mooching around at home, there isn't an ounce of wit or care in the visual design.

I'm also not sure casting actors because they are in Flanagan's repertory company always pays off here. Not because they are bad, in some ways Ruth Codd gives the most entertaining performance but is an edgy, disabled, Irish goth girl really the type of a trophy wife a pharmacy tycoon would take ? I can't buy into this mismatched, poorly attired bunch of actors as a Sackler-type family.

I increasingly have a problem with the current approach to minority representations, where evil people can commit every crime under the sun but two things they can't be is racist or homophobic. This show is going above and beyond in that regard. I see the need for providing roles for actors from minorities, but do it in a way that reflects the current political reality, not some no-discrimination utopia. I feel uneasy with a representation that pretends any issues of bigotry have been overcome, especially in the current climate it would be better to be true to the experience of discriminated minorities instead of pretending everything is just dandy.

[Matt]

I concur with just about everything you said there, and I especially appreciate that I am not the only person distracted by Mary McDonnell’s wig. Why does it have that huge bump? Is she wearing a Bumpit? Is there some kind of Malignant situation going on up there?

One thing about the ham-handed gestures towards diversity that bothers me is that every Usher offspring (except one maybe) is casually gay/bi/pansexual but also incredibly abusive of their partners. Is this supposed to be positive representation or is being LGBTQ just another signifier of decadence in this show?

[The Curious Sofa]

I watched the last couple of episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher and wig spoiler alert:

SpoilerShow

In episode 7 Mary McDonnell takes off her wig.....only to reveal near identical wig underneath, which is playing her real hair.

[Matt]

Glad to know there is an in-story explanation, but lol

[therewillbeblus]

Looks more conventional than I’m used to from Marling and her usual collaborators

Unfortunately after a promising start, A Murder at the End of the World does wind up following a conventional, and surprisingly slight route to its finish. Its set-up is basically a more serious Glass Onion-seclusion for Christie-like mechanics, but the opportunity for Twin Peaks season one-reveals throughout isn’t taken, and the drive of activity and its turns slow and peter out early, as if the series is priming us to care about a herring it discards purely out of disinterest (the most interesting active threat looming around the ‘side plot’ involving a conspiracy with other guests/victims is essentially elided in the last act - why?) The way everything comes together kinda works on a plot level, but it’s also annoyingly didactic in a simple and straightforward manner that eschews Marling et al’s staple artistic assets when it comes to rewarding dissonant narrative and thematic engagement. This is probably the worst Marling project - I hope she keeps making never ending series that get cancelled if the alternative is tidy, empty stories that has a leash preventing us from truly sitting with difficult stuff. It’s all the worse when a master at holding the line of that leash is at the helm