TV Reviews
Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor Is a Breathtaking, Ghostly Love Story: Review
The Pitch: It’s hard to imagine bigger shoes to fill for Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House set a high bar with its deft mixture of emotion and terror. When it was announced that he would be adapting Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in a similar style, the inevitable question became, “Could he recapture the same magic?” He does, mostly. Bly Manor is a moving examination of relationships that explores the ways humans hurt and heal each other, told from the perspective of ghosts and those they leave behind. In other words, with Bly Manor, Flanagan has created a breathtaking haunted love story. The Great Good Place: James’ Victorian novel tells the story of an unnamed Governess who accepts a position minding young Miles and Flora. Flanagan ta...
Fargo Season 4 Is a Thrilling and Timely Indictment of the American Dream: Review
The Pitch: Like the first fall of snow in an open field, Fargo drifts back into this desolate year with its fourth season. Three years after Mary Elizabeth Winstead blew us away and Ewan McGregor won our hearts twice, FX’s black comedy/crime drama returns, this time focusing on two rival crime families and their struggle for control over 1950 Kansas City. In order to broker peace, Loy Cannon (Chris Rock), leader of the Cannon crime syndicate, and Donatello Fadda (Tommaso Ragno), head of the Italian mafia, trade their youngest sons to be raised by their enemies. A sudden turn of events leaves this new peace in jeopardy as both family heads struggle to navigate shifting loyalties and outside pressure. Meanwhile kooky nurse Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley) befriends her neighbor, high schoo...
Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are Lingers on the Limbo of Adolescence: Review
The Pitch: Adolescence is rough enough in the best of circumstances; hormones rage, rebellion rises, and you’re left wondering about the state of the world you’re growing into. But try growing up on a military base in a foreign country during the 2016 election — surrounded by conformity in a terrifying year for budding authoritarianism — with the promise of joy and freedom just one town over. That’s the world in which rebellious iconoclast Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer) lives, his mother, Sarah (Chloë Sevigny), having just been promoted to the commander of a US military base in Italy. He bristles against the move, taking out that frustration in exasperated shrugs and outbursts at both Sarah and her partner, a fellow soldier named Maggie (Alice Braga), who tries to negotiate their dysfunct...
HBO Max’s Raised By Wolves Is Astounding Science Fiction: Review
The Pitch: On a mysterious virgin planet called Kepler 22-b, a small ship crash-lands, containing two androids and 12 frozen human embryos — a last-ditch chance to kick-start the human race after holy wars and devastation destroyed Earth. Following the programming of their atheistic Creator, Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) successfully bring six of the embryos to term, and set up a kind of life on the dusty planet, farming potatoes and learning the rational ways of their maker. But the harshness of the planet, and the androids’ own imperfections as parents, cut the group of children down to one, a young boy named Campion (Winta McGrath), who represents the last of humanity. That is, until an Ark containing Mithraics (religious fanatics who praise a sun god called So...
Disney Plus’ Muppets Now Survives on the Strength of Classic Characters: Review
State of The Muppets: It’s been a minute. That might sound strange to those who have tuned in to the recent mini-Fraggle Rock revival on Apple TV+ or binged last year’s critically acclaimed Dark Crystal reboot on Netflix. While it’s been wonderful to see these properties get new treatments, it’s worth noting that those productions have flown under the banner of the Jim Henson Company, which controls certain archival content and owns rights to some of the more “cult” properties left over from the entertainment empire that Henson created. The Muppets that multiple generations around the world grew up on, including characters like Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo the Great, are currently owned by Disney. That distinction may not matter to most, especially with Henson produc...
The Umbrella Academy Season 2 Swings into the ’60s: Review
The Pitch: When we last saw the super-powered, super-dysfunctional Hargreeves siblings, they had front-row seats to the end of the world — mostly because they caused it. In a last-ditch attempt to stave off the apocalypse, time-traveling Number Five (Aiden Gallagher) zaps the Umbrella Academy back to the past to stop it, only to find out he’s flung his brothers and sisters scattershot throughout different years in the early 1960s in Dallas, Texas. Each of them thinking they’re alone, they try to settle into new lives: Hulking Luther (Tom Hopper) turns to drink, despair, and bare-knuckle boxing; mind-control maven Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) gets married and embeds herself in the budding Civil Rights Movement; knife-throwing bruiser Diego (David Castañeda) is institutionalized; pansex...
Netflix’s Dark Traverses Time, Space, and Understanding in Its Final Season: Review
The Pitch: When will the sleepy German town of Winden finally catch a break? When we last left the chronologically-challenged cast of Netflix’s Dark, the apocalypse, the product of two warring factions battling for control of time travel across two centuries, is finally here. And if that’s not enough, young lynchpin Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) learns that the scope of this battle is bigger than he previously thought when he’s swept away to an alternate Winden where he never existed — his recently-killed girlfriend Martha (Lisa Vicari) now wears the yellow raincoat of responsibility for this temporal conflict. While Jonas tries to return to his reality and stop the apocalypse from coming to both versions of his world, the rest of Dark‘s four main families — including Charlotte ...
Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone Returns with All the Same Issues of Its First Season: Review
Welcome (Back) Travelers: Last year, Jordan Peele, Simon Kinberg, and Marco Ramirez tried their darnedest to bring back the magic of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access. They hid Easter eggs in every episode (clearly, they loved “Nick of Time”), they remade a fan favorite (see: “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”), and they even digitally resurrected the man himself (see: “Blurryman”). Some of it worked, some of it flopped, but mostly, it went from arriving with a big bang to shuffling away with a soft shrug. Even so, it was an intriguing enough run for a second season, and naturally, CBS kept the series’ trademark door open for 10 more episodes. Looking at the slate ahead, there’s a lot to be excited about: Peele went solo at the typewriter for “Downtime”; award-winning genre writer...
Eric Andre: Legalize Everything Adds Some Much-Needed Danger to Stand-up Comedy: Review
The Pitch: Eric Andre never stops performing. On his cult hit The Eric Andre Show, he’s not just interviewing guests and using himself as a canvas on which to paint Jackass-style feats of physical cruelty. No, he’s doing an impression of a talk show host. When he begrudgingly runs to the microphone at the top of each show to do Leno-style monologues, they seem to all but destroy him mentally. He does Man on the Street bits that are thinly veiled perverse pranks. He promises guests like Arnold Schwarzenegger, only to bring out comedy writer Bruce Vilanch on a rebel scooter. He runs into the audience as often as he allows the audience to run on stage. Because of this, his live shows are closer in spirit to the running of the bulls than any kind of comedy showcase. But chaos has always been h...
HBO’s Perry Mason Tweaks the Past to Build a More Exciting Future: Review
The Pitch. When I heard that Perry Mason was soon to be gracing HBO, I will have to admit, I laughed. Forgive me, Perry Mason obsessives, but my chief memory of the reruns of the Perry Mason TV show of the 1950s and 1960s (to which this series bears no resemblance) from adolescence is that my father used it on Sunday nights as a sleep aid. Usually, he conked out somewhere during the opening theme. When I stayed up to watch the show, what I saw was a collage of grays, whites, and blacks, a moving gallery of future character actors and movie stars swirling around imperious and determined courtroom lawyer Mason, played by Raymond Burr. Ultimately, there wasn’t anything terribly dramatic about any of it except for Mason’s eyebrows and the occasional blast of wobbly soundtrack. And ye...
Loren Bouchard’s Central Park Struggles to Hit the Right Notes for Apple TV: Review
The Pitch: Apple TV+ has been searching for a big show to serve as its first hit, since unveiling the streaming service last November. Could it be Central Park, a half-hour animated musical comedy from the creator of Bob’s Burgers and featuring a massive voice cast including Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Daveed Diggs, and Leslie Odom, Jr.? The streaming service’s metaphorical fingers are tightly crossed. Breaking Into Song: Any fan of the Fox animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers knows that the show isn’t shy about having its characters break into song, or about having music be an overall major part of its wacky hijinks in a seaside town where the eponymous restaurant resides. The Belcher family is very, very weird: there’s burger chef Bob, his gleeful wife Linda, his boy-obsessed teenage...
Netflix’s Space Force Is A Waste of Space, Talent, Resources, Time: Review
The Pitch: In the Summer of 2018, the U.S. government announced a sixth branch of the armed forces, to be called the “Space Force.” A nation scratched their heads, but President Donald J. Trump tweeted out “Space Force all the way!” to the delight of his neo-conservative base and those who still think the current administration taps into a rich vein of comedy. It played to the tune of 128,000 likes. In January 2019, Netflix announced a new series based on the venture, to be developed by The Office’s Greg Daniels and Steve Carrell, with the latter starring. And now, for May 2020, Netflix’s Space Force arrives with a veritable Right Stuff-grade line-up of sitcom stars – Carrell, Lisa Kudrow, Jimmy O. Yang, Ben Schwartz, Jane Lynch, Patrick Warburton, the late Fred Willard, and on and on – wi...
