Realityeo.com

Because I love television. How about you?

Tag: Julian Fellowes

Watchable Jan. 24 to 30, 2022

January 24, 2022 /

SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Gilded Age (Jan. 24, 9 p.m., HBO/Crave)

Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski in “The Gilded Age.” PHOTO CREDIT: Alison Rosa/HBO

In a year that already promises period drama treasures, including second seasons of “Sanditon” and “Bridgerton,” “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes gives us this treat: a show that drops us in the midst of the 1880s version of America’s 1 per cent with all the visual splendour that implies.

“The Gilded Age,” which Fellowes conceived while “Downton” was still airing, is centred in the New York of the Astors and Vanderbilts, when the so-called “Four Hundred” ruled society, but the nouveau riche were nipping at their heels.

There’s some irony in the fact these Old New York families would be parvenus compared to England’s oldest, aristocratic dynasties, but their snobbery is no less virulent.

Our main guide to the old money rules of engagement is Agnes van Rhijn, played by a wonderfully formidable Christine Baranski. She was forced to marry money, unhappily so, when her brother squandered her parents’ fortune, leaving her and sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) penniless, and she fiercely guards her status as part of the upper crust.

Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell. PHOTO CREDIT: Alison Rosa/HBO

On the new money side is the equally formidable Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), who is as ferocious in her ambition to take her place at the pinnacle of society as her husband George (Morgan Spector) is in his rapacious business dealings.

The Russells have built a palace of a house — in which the gilding of the title is on full, decadent display — right across 5th Avenue from Agnes and Ada, so it seems likely Agnes can’t avoid interacting with Bertha forever, despite her best efforts.

The viewer’s proxy in all this is Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson, one of Meryl Streep’s daughters), Agnes’s and Ada’s niece, forced to move from Pennsylvania to Manhattan when she is left destitute by her spendthrift father’s death.

Despite her initial reluctance to take Marian in, Agnes is determined to mould her into a model of old money respectability, a goal that is at odds with Marian’s curiosity about the Russells and the scandalous Mrs. Chamberlain (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and her romantic interest in lawyer Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel), whom Agnes deems an unsuitable suitor.

Denee Benton and Louisa Jacobson as Peggy and Marian. PHOTO CREDIT: Alison Rosa/HBO

Marian is intelligent, kind-hearted and open-minded, but she’s not the most interesting character in the show. Apart from Agnes and Bertha, that would be Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), a young Black woman who rescues Marian when her purse is stolen at the train station and who subsequently becomes Agnes’s secretary.

Peggy is no cipher, inserted just to break up the whiteness of the cast. She’s an aspiring writer from a middle class Black family in Brooklyn — Audra McDonald plays her mother Dorothy and John Thomas Douglas her pharmacist father Arthur — and she is aware of the racism around her but not acquiescent to it. And she’s certainly not going to let it get in the way of her goals.

She turns down, for instance, a respected newspaper that wants to publish one of her stories, but only if she changes the race of the lead character and conceals her own. And when Marian blunders badly, showing up at the Scotts’ well-appointed home with charity in the form of an old pair of boots, Peggy won’t let Marian off the hook for her racist assumption.

Benton, McDonald and Douglas are among a wealth of accomplished stage actors playing roles in “The Gilded Age,” including Kelli O’Hara as society wife Aurora Fane; Nathan Lane as Ward McAllister, the Southern lawyer who was Mrs. Astor’s henchman in enforcing the social order; and Michael Cerveris as George Russell’s valet, Watson.

Of course, this being a Julian Fellowes show, there is a “downstairs” to balance the “upstairs.” In this case, we get two sets of servants to follow, in the van Rhijn and Russell households.

Although everybody in “Downton Abbey” seemed benevolent by the sixth season, you’ll recall that a couple of the servants, Mrs. O’Brien and Thomas Barrow, were rather nasty pieces of work in the early going. That role here is occupied by Miss Turner (Kelley Curran), lady’s maid to Mrs. Russell, who’s keen to do some social climbing of her own.

And while “The Gilded Age” is certainly not an American “Downton,” if you miss the quips of the latter’s Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) you can take comfort in the witticisms delivered by Baranski.

It’s always hard to know how these things will land — who would have guessed at the mammoth popularity of “Downton” in its first season? — but “The Gilded Age” is a worthy addition to the period drama canon.

I happily consumed the five episodes made available for review and look forward to watching the rest.

Short Takes

A counsellor leads class at the Westover Treatment Centre. PHOTO CREDIT: TVO

Come Clean (Jan. 25, 9 p.m., TVO and TVO.org)

This documentary by Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham puts an achingly human face on addiction. It follows four patients through their 19 days at the Westover Treatment Centre in Thamesville, Ont., and checks in on them intermittently in the year after the program. Annie is a 40-something alcoholic whose relationship with her husband revolves around drinking; autoworker and mother of two Julie is hooked on cocaine; 20something alcoholic Bryanna was suicidal before she got to Westover; teenage coke addict Ryan is there as part of his probation after he was busted for selling drugs. They all show up on New Year’s Eve 2018 professing their eagerness to change, but the doc makes clear that addiction is a powerful foe. Annie, Bryanna and Julie share stories of the childhood violence, emotional and sexual abuse that fuelled their substance abuse. For Ryan, the sense of importance he gained selling drugs in his small town seems as addictive as the high he got from the cocaine. All four face obstacles when they leave Westover, whether it’s Annie’s husband’s continued drinking, or Ryan’s loneliness and aimlessness as he tries to stay straight. You might be surprised by who takes to sobriety the best and who crumbles, but you’ll also find poignancy in the setbacks and the victories.

Jana Morrison and Samantha Aucoin as Astrid and Lilly. PHOTO CREDIT: Syfy/Bell Media

Astrid & Lilly Save the World (Jan. 26, 10 p.m., CTV Sci-Fi Channel and Crave)

Part of the appeal of this dramedy about a pair of high school friends who are forced to become monster hunters is watching Astrid (Jana Morrison) and Lilly (Samantha Aucoin) gain confidence in themselves with each gooey kill (besides dispatching the monsters, they have to harvest a specific body part from each). As plus-size best friends who are outcasts in their high school (which seems to be chock-a-block with skinny people), Astrid and Lilly are the main attraction of the series, which sees them accidentally open a portal to another dimension while trying to exorcise the “monsters” who mock them for their size. They’re the only ones who can close it again — and save humanity — with the help of their handsome but annoying guide Brutus (Olivier Renaud). This isn’t a show that’s going to change the world, a la “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” its most obvious influence, but it has its amusing moments. Having filmed in Newfoundland and Labrador, the series is full of Canadian actors, including Morrison, Aucoin, Renaud, Julia Doyle, who plays Lilly’s nemesis Candace; Spencer Macpherson as Astrid’s love interest Sparrow; and Geri Hall as Candace’s creepily religious mom Christine.

Odds and Ends

The TallBoyz, from right, Tim Blair, Franco Nguyen, Vance Banzo and Guled Abdi
with guest Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. PHOTO CREDIT: CBC

Comedy troupe “TallBoyz” returns for its third season (Jan. 25, 9:30 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem). Some of the sketches use humour to highlight serious issues like Toronto’s rental housing crisis, ongoing boil-water advisories in Indigenous communities and gentrification pushing out mom-and-pop businesses; others are just silly fun. The highlight in the season opener is guest star Paul Sun-Hyung Lee of “Kim’s Convenience.”

Prime Video debuts “The Legend of Vox Machina” (Jan. 28, Prime Video), the offshoot of a popular web series called “Critical Role,” which featured a group of voice actors streaming their “Dungeons and Dragons” campaigns. They reprise their roles in this animated show as a hard-drinking group of mercenaries for hire — a mix of humans, elves and one horny gnome — who call themselves Vox Machina and get conscripted to defeat a monster that’s terrorizing the kingdom of Tal’Dorei.

Netflix offerings this week include cliched action drama “In From the Cold” (Jan. 28), with Margarita Levieva (“The Deuce”) as a former Russian spy who has to work for the CIA when her ordinary single mom cover is blown; the mystery-spoofing miniseries “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” (Jan. 28), starring Kristen Bell; and “Getting Curious With Jonathan Van Ness” (Jan. 28), in which the “Queer Eye” grooming expert spins off his podcast of the same name.

Apple TV Plus has comedy murder mystery “The Afterparty” (Jan. 28, Apple TV Plus), which sounds like a hoot on paper given its cast of comedy vets but which, in all honesty, I found a slog after just one episode.

If you’re interested in watching people who sound like suckers for punishment in the romance department, Discovery Plus has “Love Off the Grid” (Jan. 30), in which urbanites try to give it a go with partners who live without conveniences like indoor plumbing, which would be a hard no for me.

Roku unveils its first original adult animated series, “Doomlands” (Jan. 28), a comedy from Josh O’Keefe about an outlaw, a bartender and other misfits whose habitat is a mobile pub in a wasteland.

Watchable the week of February 8, 2020

February 8, 2021 /

Clarice (Feb. 11, 10 p.m., Global)

Rebecca Breeds as Clarice Starling in “Clarice.” PHOTO CREDIT: Brooke Palmer/CBS Broadcasting Inc.

The opening scenes of “Clarice” — an artful collection of flashbacks from the Buffalo Bill case as Clarice Starling, in soft focus, recaps the events for a therapist (and the audience) in her distinctive Appalachian accent — suggest an aspiration to prestige TV. 

But it reminds me a bit of what killer Hannibal Lecter said to Clarice in “The Silence of the Lambs” about her “good bag” and “cheap shoes.” Behind the gloss of a psychological drama is a fairly standard police show.

By the way, don’t look for any mention of Lecter here. Due to rights agreements involving the source Thomas Harris novels, “Clarice” doesn’t mention the iconic serial killer character by name (just as NBC’s “Hannibal” never mentioned Clarice).

The action is set in 1993, one year after the events of the Oscar-winning film that starred Jodie Foster as the FBI trainee and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter.

Serial killer Buffalo Bill is seen and referenced, and the victim whose life Clarice saved, Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), is a recurring character as is her politician mother, played by Jayne Atkinson of “24” and “House of Cards.”

In fact, it’s Ruth Martin, who’s U.S. attorney general now, who sets the series’ plot in motion when she summons Clarice (Rebecca Breeds, “Pretty Little Liars”) from her hideaway in the behavioural science unit at Quantico to Washington to help with another serial killer case.

That case, which is more complicated than it initially seems, will presumably stay in play throughout the season, although the second episode veers off into a completely unrelated investigation that superficially echoes the siege at Waco.

My issue with “Clarice” is that it doesn’t dig in a particularly deep or nuanced fashion into either its cases or its namesake’s psyche, at least not in the three episodes I saw. The inner turmoil she keeps hidden is represented by flashbacks and hallucinations of the death’s-head moths that helped her catch Buffalo Bill.

Things move at a brisk clip here, probably a factor of network TV’s preoccupation with grabbing and keeping eyeballs. Clarice is something of a criminal whisperer, able to quickly and effortlessly coax confessions out of her targets.

Clarice’s male co-workers are predictably hostile, led by Deputy Assistant AG Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz of “The Walking Dead”). Just as predictably, she finds an ally among the threatened men (Lucca De Oliveira of “SEAL Team”). Devyn A. Tyler (“The Purge”) plays her roomie Ardelia.

The series was shot in Toronto, so Canadian actors pop up in small roles, including Shawn Doyle as Clarice’s therapist, Kris Holden-Ried as a murder suspect and Dalmar Abuzeid as the husband of a victim.

The show’s not bad, but it’s no “Silence of the Lambs.”

21 Black Futures (Feb. 12, CBC Gem)

Lovell Adams-Gray in “The Death News,” part of “21 Black Futures.” PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC

The futures imagined in the 21 “monodramas” in “21 Black Futures” range from the next day, as a preteen girl contemplates how she’ll present herself at school, to a time when a series of viruses has wiped out much of life on Earth.

What all of the short theatre pieces have in common is that the protagonists, the people deciding what those futures will be, are Black. Each is written by a Black playwright, staged by a Black director and performed by a solo Black actor.

Some have post-apocalyptic settings as in “Cavities” by K.P. Dennis, in which a woman (Alison Sealy-Smith) seeds the soil with her teeth and her rage before deciding to pass on joy to the next generation instead; and “Emmett” by Syrus Marcus Ware, in which a survivor of “the fall” (Prince Amponsah) decides he’d rather stay and try to heal the Earth than colonize Venus, where life has just been discovered.

Anti-Black racism is an undercurrent in all of the stories but not the point of them; they’re about Black people taking control of their realities.

So in “The Death News” by Amanda Parris, a Black man (Lovell Adams-Gray) prerecords his own obituary rather than let media dictate how he is remembered. In “Umoja Corp” by Jacob Sampson, a Black man (Pablo Ogunlesi ) is freed from jail on the condition he help other Black people navigate the system. In “Sensitivity” by Lawrence Hill, a Black woman (Sabryn Rock) treats her firing after a racial sensitivity seminar gone wrong as an opportunity rather than a failure.

This first batch of seven dramas, which includes “The Death News,” “Sensitivity” and “Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song” by Kaie Kellough, debuts Feb. 12, with another seven on Feb. 19 and the final seven on Feb. 26.

I found the ones I sampled by turns touching and thought-provoking and worth watching.

If you’d like to know more about Black visual artists, at least in the United States, HBO has “Black Art: In the Absence of Light” (Feb. 9, 9 p.m.).

If you’d like another series that falls outside the white gaze, check out “Gespe’gewa’gi: The Last Land” (Feb. 13, 7 p.m., APTN), a docuseries about the Mi’gmaq fishing community in Listuguj, Que. It’s certainly a timely topic given the ongoing conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous fishers in Nova Scotia.

Belgravia (Feb. 14, CBC Gem)

Tamsin Greig as Anne Blanchard and Alice Eve as Susan Trenchard in “Belgravia.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of CBC

“Downton Abbey” was such a sensation that anything Julian Fellowes did as a followup was bound to pale in comparison (although I still have high hopes for “The Gilded Age”).

His “Belgravia” is a respectable addition to the period drama catalogue but not one that will inspire “Downton”-level devotion.

For one thing, it’s not what it might at first appear. It opens in Brussels in 1815, just days before the Battle of Waterloo. The focus is on an ill-advised romance between Sophia Trenchard (Emily Reid), daughter of the man who supplies provisions to the British army, and the aristocratic Lord Edmund Bellasis (Jeremy Neumark Jones). They rendezvous at a ball held by his aunt, the Duchess of Richmond (the ball really happened) but, before a scandal can erupt, the British march off to confront Napoleon. Soon it’s 26 years later, Sophia and Edmund are both dead, and we’re in London, in the upper-class neighbourhood of Belgravia.

The story shifts to the older members of the cast, which is not a bad thing given that the main protagonists are played by two formidable actors, Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter. They are Anne Trenchard, mother of Sophia, and Lady Brockenhurst, mother of Lord Bellasis. 

They share their grief as well as a secret emanating from the long-ago relationship between their children but have opposing views of how to handle it. 

Anne’s husband, James (Philip Glenister), has an appetite for social climbing that she finds distasteful — an ambition inherited by their lazy but entitled son, Oliver, and his acquisitive wife, Susan.

Lady Brockenhurst and her husband the Earl (Tom Wilkinson) have greedy relatives of their own to deal with, including a brother with a gambling problem and his boor of a son.

There’s also a new pair of socially mismatched lovers, Charles Pope (Jack Bardoe) and Maria Grey (Ella Purnell).

“Belgravia” takes a sharper look at class differences than “Downton” did, with the Trenchards and Brockenhursts on either side of the new/old money divide.

Another way that “Belgravia” differs is that it’s harder to invest in these characters. Many of them are unlikeable, including the servants, a bitter and venal bunch with little if any loyalty to their employers.

Still, “Belgravia” is lovely to look at and there are enough plot twists to keep the six episodes interesting.

Short Takes

The Cecil Hotel in L.A. has a reputation as a scene of death and violent crime.
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Netflix

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (Feb. 10, Netflix)

Netflix’s latest true crime entry takes you down a disturbing and sometimes weird rabbit hole. It concerns the disappearance of a 21-year-old Canadian, Elisa Lam, at the infamous downtown Los Angeles hotel in 2013. Note though, that although Joe Berlinger, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated producer/director behind crime docuseries like “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” lays out the Lam case in painstaking detail, it’s a misnomer to call it a crime. I won’t spoil the series if you want to watch for yourself by telling you what happened to Elisa and why, but be warned that there’s a bait-and-switch going on here and that the very title of the series, “Crime Scene,” is grossly inaccurate. And while the violent history of the hotel itself is interesting (if you watched “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” you’ll be interested to know that Richard Ramirez stayed there) it has nothing to do with the sad story of Elisa Lam. The series also gives undue weight to the community of web sleuths and conspiracy theorists that has sprung up around the Lam case. Some of the theories are truly bizarre, completely ungrounded in reality and have harmed people’s lives, notably the death metal musician who was falsely accused of murdering Elisa. Netflix also has the new funeral home comedy “Buried by the Bernards” and the rom-com sequel “To All the Boys: Always and Forever,” both on Feb. 12. 

If you devoured the most recent season of “The Crown” and especially its Charles and Diana storyline you might be interested in “Diana: The Interview That Shocked the World,” debuting on BritBox Feb. 9. The interview itself, between Diana and BBC journalist Martin Bashir in November 1995, is sprinkled sparingly through the documentary, which mainly features commentary on how the interview came about, the effect its revelations about Diana’s failing marriage had on the royal family and the public, and whether it set in motion the events that led to Diana’s death in 1997.

I ran out of time before I got to preview “Little Birds” (Feb. 14, Crave), but it sounds like it’s worth a look. It’s set in 1950s Tangier and stars Juno Temple (“Dirty John,” “Ted Lasso”) as an American heiress trying to find freedom in a colourful setting stocked with eccentric characters, including Yumna Marwan as a Moroccan dominatrix.

A couple of Canadian shows debut new seasons on Valentine’s Day. “The Great Canadian Baking Show” is back for its fourth edition (Feb. 14, 8 p.m., CBC) with new hosts Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel. And the comedy “Second Jen” starts its third season (Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m., OMNI 2) with Jen (Samantha Wan) trying to deal with a social media troll and Mo (Amanda Joy) having to endure a conflict resolution seminar at work.

CLARIFICATION: I edited the item on “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” on Feb. 15, 2021 to reflect my revised opinion on the series after I watched the entire thing.

© 2024 Realityeo.com

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑