Tag: Conversations With Friends

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Night Sky (May 20, Prime Video)

The pleasure of watching “Night Sky” comes as much from excavating the layers of its well played characters as the mysterious extraterrestrial portal buried in its lead couple’s backyard.

In fact, there are few answers to be had in this sci-fi drama — yet, anyway, it’s clearly begging for a second season — and I’m forbidden from sharing the answers we do get thanks to a long list of “do not reveals” from Amazon.

It’s a good thing then that the people at the heart of the story are so compelling to watch.

Married 70-somethings Franklin and Irene York (Oscar winners J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek) are living a seemingly mundane life in Farnsworth, Illinois. But hidden beneath their garden shed is a portal that transports them to another planet.

Over and over again, for 20-odd years, Frank and Irene have ventured along the passageway hidden beneath a trap door in the shed to sit and stare through a window at the beautiful and deserted planet — it’s too dangerous to venture outside the chamber.

But Frank is starting to tire of the routine whereas Irene hungers to know more about the other world. When she ventures to the portal without Frank one night, a young man suddenly appears, physically ill and covered in blood.

Over Frank’s objections, Irene installs him in their late son’s bedroom, nurses him back to health and begins to form a bond with him, testing her relationship with Franklin.

Added to the mix is their granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan), who’s worried about her grandparents and suspicious of the stranger posing as their caregiver, whose name is Jude (Chai Hansen); and nosy neighbour Byron (Adam Bartley), who wants to know what Frank and Irene have been doing in the garden shed in the middle of the night. And then there are the dangerous people who are hunting for Jude, or so he tells Irene.

There’s also a parallel plot set in Argentina involving llama farmer Stella (Argentinian actor Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocio Hernandez). Their story eventually intersects with Frank’s, Irene’s and Jude’s, but I’m afraid I’m not allowed to tell you how.

The main thing to know is that you will care about the central trio and you will want to watch all eight episodes to find out what happens to them.

Simmons and Spacek do a masterful job of portraying the deep, abiding love between Franklin and Irene, but it’s an imperfect love, just like in a real-life marriage, one complicated by the suicide of their son, which happened around the same time they found the portal.

Hansen, a Thai-Australian actor, holds his own against the two titans, making Jude sympathetic even though we’re not sure he can be trusted.

Even Byron, at first glance a mere busybody and thorn in Franklin’s side, turns out to have some levels to him.

Building sci-fi mythology can be tricky. The season ends with several cliffhangers, and it remains to be seen if writers Holden Miller and Daniel C. Connolly can make the resolutions as satisfying as the human storytelling, assuming they get more episodes.

In the meantime, “Night Sky” will likely bring pleasure to those for whom the journey is as important as the destination.

Short Takes

Conversations With Friends (May 16, Prime Video)

Your enjoyment of “Conversations With Friends,” the latest adaptation of a Sally Rooney novel, will depend in part on your tolerance for awkward characters who lack communication skills. Main protagonist Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver) is a Dublin university student and spoken word poet who, under the influence of ex-girlfriend turned best friend Bobbi (Sasha Lane, “American Honey,” “Utopia”), gets pulled into the orbit of 30-something author Melissa (Jemima Kirke, “Girls”) and her actor husband Nick (Joe Alwyn, “The Favourite”). Awkwardness attracts, and Frances and the also conversationally challenged Nick begin an affair while the outspoken Bobbi, a New York import, is attracted to the more extroverted Melissa. The entanglement has implications not only for the marriage but for Frances’s and Bobbi’s friendship. As you’ll know if you’ve watched the much lauded “Normal People,” these kinds of complications aren’t tied up in neat linear bows in a Rooney adaptation. But Nick and Alison are no Connell and Marianne; there’s less of an emotional pull to this coupling. It’s also hard to see what makes Bobbi so indispensable to Frances given that she’s not particularly nice to her. That being said, the cast makes the most of what they’ve been given to work with, and Oliver’s expressive face helps us decipher what the often silent Frances is thinking.

Prime Video also has Season 2 of the dark comedy “Made for Love,” starring Cristin Milioti, Billy Magnussen and Ray Romano; French-made Cold War romance drama “Totems”; and the documentary “The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks,” all on May 20.

Hoarder House Flippers (May 19, 8 p.m., HGTV)

I’m no real estate TV aficionado, but this Canadian show appears to up the ante on the renovation genre by featuring properties so full of junk it’s hard to tell where the renos need to begin. But that can mean an extra frisson of appreciation once the garbage-strewn rooms are transformed. In the episode I screened, married couple Ryan and Kiki tackled a filthy bungalow in Springbrook, Ontario (the dead mouse in a kitchen drawer was a particularly nice touch). Other episodes feature Quebec brothers Mactar, Issa and Khadim, and Manitobans Heather and Nathan. I’m not sure where future instalments will take the house flippers, but it’s probably a good thing they stayed out of Toronto, where real estate is something of a dirty word, for at least the first one.

George Carlin’s American Dream (May 20, 8 p.m., HBO/Crave)

The jokes that George Carlin tells as this documentary opens, about Americans’ obsession with their rights and talent for warmongering, among other things, sound so relevant to the present day that you might have to remind yourself that the comedian died in 2008. And that’s partly the point of this two-part film, directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, that Carlin was in some ways a comedian ahead of his time. The doc delves deeply into the life and career of a man considered one of the greatest standups of all time, and it doesn’t leave out the bad parts: his dysfunctional upbringing, his cocaine use, his wife’s alcoholism, the career slumps. Even if you were already a fan, you might learn some new things and develop a new appreciation for a man who was as funny as he was — and is — politically and culturally relevant.

Crave also has the documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”; the Sesame Street shows “Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck” and “Elmo’s World”; and Season 7 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars.” all on May 20.

Odds and Ends

I can’t blame lack of screeners for my lack of Netflix reviews this week, just lack of time. Once again, the streamer has a lot of stuff coming out, including “Love on the Spectrum U.S.” (May 18), the American remake of the heartwarming Australian docuseries about people on the autism spectrum navigating dating and relationships. Also debuting: Season 2 of Japanese reality series “The Future Diary” (May 17); the Korean documentary “Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror” (May 18); Season 3 of Mexican crime drama “Who Killed Sara?” (May 18); comedy docuseries “The G Word With Adam Conover” (May 19); Season 2 of Spanish reality series “Insiders” (May 19); true-crime doc “The Photographer: Murder in Pinamar” (May 19); Season 3 of animated anthology series “Love, Death & Robots” (May 20); and Spanish revenge drama “Wrong Side of the Tracks” (May 20).

Apple TV Plus has the bilingual thriller series “Now and Then” (May 20), shot in English and Spanish, about the aftermath of a celebratory weekend that left one of a group of college friends dead.

Finally, Super Channel Fuse has the original series “Forgotten Frontlines” (May 16, 8 p.m.), about lesser known stories of World War II. The first episode covers the same topic as the Netflix movie “Operation Mincemeat,” when a corpse was floated off the coast of southern Spain to convince the Germans that the Allies planned to invade Greece instead of their real target, Sicily.