Author: Debra Yeo (Page 29 of 29)

Happy Mother’s Day! Here’s what caught my interest this week.

I Know This Much Is True (May 10, HBO, 9 p.m., also Crave)

This show is first a testament to the talent of Mark Ruffalo. He plays twin brothers in this series about the ravages of mental illness and family dysfunction – paranoid schizophrenic Thomas and his fiercely loyal but volatile brother Dominick – and you’d swear they were played by two different people. 

Ruffalo shot Dominick’s scenes first, then spent five weeks gaining 30 pounds and researching mental illness before playing Thomas.

Credit is also due to Philip Ettinger, who plays both twins as young men.

If you’re looking for an easy breezy isolation watch, this six-episode series isn’t that. Based on Wally Lamb’s Oprah-endorsed 1998 novel, it begins with Thomas mutilating himself in a public library in what he sees as a necessary sacrifice to end the Gulf War. Things spiral from there, with Thomas sent to a forensic psychiatric institution and Dominick fighting to get him out while fighting demons of his own, including grief over the loss of his mother, wife and baby daughter, and the fallout of a bad childhood with a violent stepfather.

The series casts light on the relentlessness of mental illness and the human wreckage it leaves in its wake; the multi-generational poison of toxic masculinity but also the power of human connection. 

It is at times harrowing but also deeply absorbing.

This is Ruffalo’s show, but other fine actors play supporting roles, including Melissa Leo as the twins’ mother; Rosie O’Donnell and Archie Panjabi as a sympathetic social worker and psychiatrist, respectively; Kathryn Hahn as Dominick’s ex-wife; and Canadians Bruce Greenwood and Michael Greyeyes as the head of the forensic hospital and its janitor.

A Confession (May 12, BritBox)

A young woman missing for days. A detective racing to try to get her back alive. A suspect who in an apparent burst of remorse leads him to her body, plus that of another woman police didn’t even realize was dead. And then it falls apart for the detective and the mother of one of those girls. Those are the basic outlines of this BritBox original, based on a real 2011 case that cost detective Steve Fulcher his job. Prolific English actor Martin Freeman (“The Office,” “The Hobbit,” “Fargo,” “Sherlock” and too many others to mention) plays Fulcher. He is joined by other top-notch British stars, including Imelda Staunton (“Harry Potter,” “Vera Drake,” “Shakespeare in Love”) and Siobhan Finneran (“Happy Valley,” “The Stranger,” “Downton Abbey”) as the mothers of the two victims. The series makes clear the enormous amount of work that goes into catching a killer, the fact that not all victims of crime are considered equal, and that justice and the law are not necessarily the same thing.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend (May 12, Netflix)

I’m not a Kimmy aficionado, but there are worse time wasters than this special that has Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) about to marry her prince (Daniel Radcliffe) when she stumbles on another plot by the Reverend (Jon Hamm) who imprisoned her and other women in a bunker. Because this is an interactive show, with numerous places where you get to choose the characters’ actions, it can eat up quite a bit of time. Some critics apparently spent hours exploring the different scenarios. I ran through it once, long enough to say that it maintains the charm and gee whiz goofiness of the series. And thanks to creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock and their writing team there are some zingers in among the “fudging” and “what the h-e-single-c-single-k.” The gang is all back to support Kimmy, including Tituss Burgess, Carol Kane (in a double role) and Jane Krakowski. 

Dr. Miami (May 14, CBC and CBC Gem at 8 p.m.)

I should say up front that I’m not a fan of plastic surgery, which is the bread and butter of Dr. Michael Salzhauer, the Dr. Miami of the title. He has parlayed Snapchat videos and livestreams of his breast and butt lifts into pop culture fame, at least among the people who seek self-fulfilment in bigger boobs, flatter tummies or Kardashian-style bubble butts. It’s clear that Salzhauer is as vain and insecure as the people he treats, but he’s also skilled at what he does, and he’s an observant Orthodox Jew whose wife and five children tolerate his social media obsession. As abhorrent as I found parts of this documentary I also found it hard to look away. It’s part of the “Hot Docs at Home” series.

Hotel Paranormal (T+E, May 15, 9 p.m.)

Like his “Ghostbusters” character, Canadian actor Dan Aykroyd is a believer when it comes to things that go bump in the night, which is why he’s narrating this spooky new series for Canada’s Blue Ant Media and Saloon Media. Although it’s a Canadian-made show, the haunted hotels it features are in the U.S. and Europe, at least in the first two episodes. The one I screened featured a poltergeist that escalated into demonic possession in Texas, an evil entity unleashed by teens on a school trip to Rome and a grabby phantom in New England. The subjects of the encounters narrate their tales with assists from re-enactments, alleged “actual” photos and video, and paranormal experts. Whether you believe is up to you, but at the very least it should give you a shiver.

Odds and Ends

“Call Your Mother” (May 10 at 10 p.m. on CTV Comedy Channel) has various comedians paying tribute to their moms, including Louie Anderson, Awkwafina, Jimmy Carr, Judah Friedlander, Jim Gaffigan and more. If you’re in the mood for nostalgia, you might like “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall” on ABC May 12 at 8 p.m. It features stars like Henry Winkler and Julia Roberts recalling the late Marshall’s classic shows and movies, including “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Mork and Mindy,” “Pretty Woman” and so on. On May 13 at 8 p.m., CBS and Global TV have the 40th season finale of “Survivor: Winners at War”: the reunion and other live elements have, of course, been shot remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the reasons I like having a blog is because I get to write about TV shows that I really love and one of those shows is CTV’s “Cardinal.”

I was hooked on this detective drama from my first peek at the first episodes in 2017 and my admiration only grew as I got to meet and talk with people involved in the show, including the amazing Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse, and director Daniel “Podz” Grou. (You can read those stories on the Toronto Star’s website. I’ll post the urls below.)

Yet all good things truly do come to an end. For “Cardinal,” that end is Monday, May 11 at 10 p.m. on CTV. But here’s something that might ease your withdrawal symptoms: CTV’s “eTalk” is airing a special, “eTalk Presents: Cardinal,” this Friday, May 8, at 7 p.m. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m told I make a “cameo” appearance in it, since correspondent Danielle Graham did her interviews with Billy and Karine the same weekend I was on set in North Bay.

That was such a fun weekend. Myself and a handful of other media spent a Friday afternoon in April 2019 watching the shooting in the North Bay office that stood in for Algonquin Bay police headquarters, and grabbed short interviews with Billy and Karine , and producer Julia Sereny whenever we could. They were busy. It was their last day of shooting in North Bay and they were put behind schedule by an unexpected visit by Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his then finance minister, Vic Fedeli.

On Saturday we got to do photo shoots with Billy and Karine, and to attend the wrap party on Saturday night. That was my first ever wrap party. Who knows if I’ll ever get invited to another?

Anyway, one thing I regret is that when I wrote my Toronto Star feature about the set visit (url below), I didn’t have room to include my interview with James Downing and Zach Smadu, who play detectives Ian McLeod and Ash Kular, respectively. They’re very witty and charming gentlemen. Here’s a little taste of our chat, which started with me joking to Zach about the fact he started out in musical theatre.

Me: What’s a guy with a musical theatre background doing in a cop show?

Zach: Dancing with glee. I mean, I started in musical theatre. You didn’t know that?

Me: It’s amazing what you can find out on an IMDb page.

James: The punishment you’re gonna take …

Zach: Jimmy brings his guitar to set every day. When we’re not working we’ll sing songs. We actually had a running joke starting in Season 2 that we wanted them to do McKul …

James: They call us McKul.

Zach: That McKul is at a karaoke bar one night and just like, it’s some weird random thing because we do that all the time.

James: The director went, uh, not so much.

Zach: It would have been a very different show … Being in the world of police drama, especially the kind of intensity of this show and bringing life and realness, especially as our leads and Jim and all the co-stars and guest stars do, it’s really still like theatre because it’s a team sport.

James: That was so sincere. He just likes carrying a gun.

Zach: Actually that was the only ask I had this season, because I have yet to pull my gun out … There’s a lot of crime in this town. Can you believe the amount of crime in this little town?

Me: Well , maybe if somebody brings the wrong type of doughnuts.

James: Ooooh.

We chatted a bit more about how James, for instance, got into acting because he had a crush on a girl in the drama society at school; how Zach wanted to be a sprinter when he was growing up; and how much they’ve both enjoyed working on “Cardinal.”

So here’s to you McKul and the rest of the “Cardinal” crew. Thanks for the memories.

If you want to check out the first interview I did with Billy and Karine: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2018/01/03/canadian-tv-crime-drama-cardinal-returns-to-its-elements.html

My interview with Podz: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2019/01/23/director-daniel-grou-found-dream-cast-in-cardinals-billy-campbell-and-karine-vanasse.html

The story I wrote about the final season: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2020/04/05/billy-campbell-karine-vanasse-and-an-army-of-others-brought-north-bay-and-cardinal-to-the-world-the-final-season-arrives-monday.html

The Eddy (Netflix, May 8)

If you love Paris, jazz and the work of Andre Holland (“Moonlight,” “The Knick”) – and I love two out of those three – this could be the show for you.

It’s from British writer Jack Thorne (“His Dark Materials”), and boasts Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle and songwriter Glen Ballard as executive producers. Chazelle also directed the first two episodes. 

Holland is Elliot, the American owner of a small Paris jazz club (The Eddy of the title), a well known musician who stopped performing after the death of his son. Holland is an actor who can do as much with a look as some do with a page of dialogue, a talent that is well suited to the slower pace of the series and the attention it pays to the internal struggles of its characters.

Handheld camera work, liberal use of closeups and naturalistic dialogue (in several languages, with subtitles) give the series a documentary feel.

The Paris showcased here is not the city of travelogues or movie musicals. It’s gritty, sometimes dangerously so. We see the back alleyways, the banlieues and the nondescript buildings that real people live in, not a flower box or cast iron balcony in sight.

The cast includes American Amandla Stenberg as Elliot’s troubled daughter Julie; French actors (and real-life couple) Tahar Rahim and Leila Bekhti as Elliot’s best friend Farid and his wife Amira; French actor Adil Dehbi as bar employee Sim, who befriends Julie; and Polish actor Joanna Kulig as Elliot’s former lover Maja, the singer in the bar’s house band. 

The music, written by Ballard, threads its way naturally through every episode, performed and recorded live by a band of multicultural actor-musicians. 

It anchors the characters, brings them together when they’re at odds, brings them solace when they’re in pain. And there is a lot of pain here, some of it precipitated by a violent incident in the first episode; some of long standing, such as Elliot’s and Julie’s reckoning with the fallout of their broken family.

If you’re used to whiz-bang plotting and rapid-fire dialogue, “The Eddy” might feel plodding to you, but I found its humanity appealing.

It’s about people striving and failing; about love, family, friendship and their imperfections; about life in general.

The characters stay with you, like snatches of song.

Beginnings and Endings

Sunday night marks the beginning of Season 5 of “Billions” on Crave (9 p.m.) and the end of Season 3 of “Westworld” on HBO (9 p.m.). I’m behind on both shows so I can’t give you much insight into how either unfolds. I do know that Julianna Margulies (who I’ll always remember as Nurse Hathaway on “ER” although she’s better known now for “The Good Wife”) has joined the cast of “Billions.” It also looks to be a good season for Maggie Siff (“Sons of Anarchy”), another actor who’s very watchable.

Sunday also brings the second half of the fourth season of “Rick and Morty” on Adult Swim (11:30 p.m.), a show that I confess I had never watched until I screened this new episode. It seems clever enough (I got a particular chuckle out of the Bechdel test reference) and I’m sure people who like the series will enjoy it.

Odds and ends

Jerry Seinfeld has a new standup special, “23 Hours to Kill,” coming to Netflix May 5. It was not made available to critics to screen ahead of time, which seems odd to me given what a big name Seinfeld is. I’ve only seen a couple of trailers and neither of them made me laugh, so make of that what you will.

BritBox has “Florence Nightingale” launching on May 6. It’s timely on a couple of levels: this is the bicentennial year of her birth and nurses are very much top of mind during the coronavirus outbreak. Nightingale revolutionized the practice of nursing in Britain and around the world after she became famous for tending to soldiers during the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. This show is described as a biopic drama, but it felt to me more like an extended “Heritage Minute,” using Nightingale’s own words from her letters and journals to sketch her devotion to her profession and her religion. Nonetheless, Laura Fraser, who I’ve enjoyed in shows like “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul” and “Loch Ness,” makes a compelling Florence and gives you a taste of just how extraordinary this woman was.

If you haven’t seen them yet, I recommend “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix, “Looking for Alaska” on CBC Gem, “Run” on HBO/Crave and Season 6 of “Bosch” on Amazon Prime Video. Also, check out Toronto actor Robbie Amell in “Upload” (Amazon) as a young man who’s uploaded to a virtual afterlife after his sudden (and suspicious) death.

While the coronavirus pandemic has kept us in our homes and given us more time, in theory anyway, to watch TV, the fact remains that there is a glut of programming out there – even with production shut down. Aside from the shows I follow purely for my own entertainment – things like “Killing Eve,” “Outlander” and “Westworld” – I get a constant supply of “screeners” from broadcasters and streaming services, i.e. electronic links to the new shows they’re promoting.

Of course, I can’t watch everything and some of what I preview isn’t to my taste. But I aim here to give you my input on shows you might like, based on what has entertained, amused or intrigued me. So here goes …

We’re Here (HBO and Crave, debuted April 23)

Thanks to RuPaul and his “Drag Race,” drag queens have become mainstream pop culture staples. This series stars three “Drag Race” alumni, Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela and Eureka O’Hara, who visit small American towns spreading the word about the positive power of drag. As you would imagine, the inhabitants of said small towns aren’t all drag- or LGBTQ-friendly. But the queens, who roll in in fabulous custom vans and eye-popping finery, are on a mission: to take a few locals and turn them into drag stars for a one-night-only show. Think “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” meets “Queer Eye.” It’s not all glitter and sparkles (although there are enough of those to satisfy your eye candy cravings); there’s also an earnest message about acceptance. The “drag daughters” in the first episode, for instance, set in Gettysburg, Penn., include a young gay man who’s a target for bullies and a mother who is desperate to reconnect with the daughter she drove away when she rejected her bisexuality. By the time the drag show rolls around you’ll be ready for a catharsis. I had tears rolling down my face through the whole thing.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (Showtime via Crave, debuted April 26)

I was a latecomer to the original “Penny Dreadful,” but once I’d discovered it I was hooked. This followup from creator John Logan – an entirely unrelated story that shifts the action from Victorian London to 1938 Los Angeles – is harder to latch onto. Its supernatural elements are tied not to literary monsters but to the religious cult of Santa Muerte, the Angel of Death, but there are also plenty of non-supernatural plot threads to sift through. Among them are a gruesome murder that seems tied to the Mexican Day of the Dead; racial tensions related to a plan to build a highway through a Hispanic neighbourhood; a corrupt politician (Michael Gladis) in league with Nazis; a Jewish detective (Nathan Lane) on the trail of said Nazis; a Latino detective (Daniel Zovatto) torn between job and family; a German pediatrician (Rory Kinnear, the unfortunate monster from the first “Penny Dreadful”) with Nazi sympathies and a wandering eye; an Aimee Semple McPherson-like evangelist (Kerry Bishe) who may not be as pure as she seems, and on it goes. The through-line is the character of Magda (Natalie Dormer), a supernatural being with numerous identities whose purpose is to sow destruction and deliver bodies to her sister, Santa Muerte. Taken as a whole, the series has its frustrations but also rewards.

Hollywood (Netflix, May 1)

Quentin Tarantino took his shot at rewriting La La Land history in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Now it’s Ryan Murphy’s turn. The prolific producer, with his “Glee” and “Screams Queens” collaborator Ian Brennan, takes us back to 1940s Tinseltown in a series that both exposes and subverts the hypocrisy, homophobia and racism underlying the dream machine. This is a Hollywood where an undervalued older woman can become a studio head (the estimable Patti LuPone), a Black actress can headline a major picture with a Black screenwriter and a half-Filipino director, and Rock Hudson can come out of the closet. There are obstacles, to be sure, which are sometimes too tidily disposed of. Somehow people end up doing the right thing while not entirely sacrificing their self-interest, even the beast of an agent played by Jim Parsons. But the series is sumptuously shot, full of beautiful sets, beautiful costumes and beautiful people, with a cast that includes David Corenswet, Jeremy Pope, Laura Harrier, Samara Weaving, Jake Picking and Darren Criss. The show is pure fantasy and some of the fantasies it fulfils are sexual ones, with Dylan McDermott playing the owner of a gas station that services its clients’ desires as well as their cars.

Prop Culture (Disney Plus, May 1)

If you’re a fan of Disney movies, moviemaking or just pop culture in general, you might enjoy this look at the props seen onscreen in everything from “Tron” to “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” to “The Muppet Movie.” Collector Dan Lanigan is our host as he travels around the U.S. in search of objects, costumes and people that helped make movie magic. The first episode was the most special for me as it deals with the original 1964 version of “Mary Poppins,” starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Watching Lanigan unearth such items as Mary’s “Feed the Birds” snow globe, the carousel horses that Andrews and Van Dyke rode, and costumes worn by her and actress Karen Dotrice, who played little Jane Banks, was like a warm nostalgia bath. And how about original songwriter Richard Sherman playing the familiar tunes on Walt Disney’s piano? There are eight episodes in total, each dealing with a different film.