SHOW OF THE WEEK: Nine Perfect Strangers (Aug. 20, Amazon Prime Video)
On the face of it, the Tranquillum House wellness retreat exudes comfort, luxury and exclusivity, but from the moment its nine guests arrive for their 10-day stay there are hints they’re in for more than bliss.
They’re under surveillance, for one thing. And the smiling staff members pleasantly but firmly insist they surrender their cellphones and submit to having blood drawn. There’s even a hint of menace in the way the blades of the blender pulp the fruit that goes into their individually tailored smoothies.
Ethereal guru Masha — Nicole Kidman in long golden locks, flowing pastel clothes and steely blue gaze — makes it clear that they’re not there to be pampered. “This is Tranquillum. I mean to fuck with all of you,” she says.
The guests include bereaved mother Heather (Australian actor Asher Keddie), her husband Napoleon (Michael Shannon) and their daughter Zoe (Grace Van Patten); romance novelist Francis (Melissa McCarthy), ex-pro football player Tony (Bobby Cannavale), newly rich couple Ben (Melvin Gregg) and Jessica (Samara Weaving), divorced mother Carmel (Regina Hall) and cynical journalist Lars (Luke Evans).
They’ve all been hand-picked by Masha for their traumas, which include an assortment of relationship issues, professional crises, insecurities, drug addiction and unresolved guilt over others’ deaths.
Despite the sometimes uncomfortable activities they engage in (digging their own graves, a day of eating nothing but what they can forage), defences come down, the guests warm to each other and they start to feel incrementally better. But Masha doesn’t think they’re getting to the heart of their pain fast enough and institutes a new treatment protocol over the objections of counsellor Delilah (Tiffany Boone), one that poses psychic if not physical dangers.
Masha isn’t being truthful about her own trauma, either, even though she shares with the guests that she was once a corporate CEO who died after being shot in the chest and was brought back to life by Yao (Filipino-Canadian actor Manny Jacinto), a former paramedic who is now her right-hand man at Tranquillum.
What viewers will realize — although Masha is blind to it — is that she’s still addicted to power, but rather than wielding it in the business world she’s playing god with the lives of the people who’ve entrusted her to make them better.
Having seen only six of the eight episodes, I don’t know whether she causes any of her charges lasting harm or how the death threats that Masha is simultaneously receiving play out.
Like the treatment being meted out at Tranquillum, “Nine Perfect Strangers” is itself imperfect. Some of the stories — the Instagram influencer who’s insecure about her looks, the discarded wife who resents anyone younger and prettier —are a little too on the nose.
But there are also plot twists and surprises, at least for those who haven’t read the Liane Moriarty novel. There’s also a lot to be said for watching actors of this calibre play together.
In a TV universe that often offers up junk food, “Nine Perfect Strangers” is more of a high-end meal, even if it leaves you still a bit hungry.
In the Same Breath (Aug. 18, 9 p.m., HBO/Crave)
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of HBO
It’s impossible to know for sure whether lives would have been saved if Chinese authorities had been more open with their own citizens and the rest of the world about the pneumonia-like illness being seen in Wuhan as early as December 2019.
We all know now that mystery illness was COVID-19, which to date has killed more than 4 million people worldwide.
But as Nanfu Wang admits in her documentary, even though she had seen, and archived, Chinese social media posts about overloaded hospitals and people dying in the streets, she believed American officials who said the virus didn’t pose a threat in the U.S. and scoffed when her mother, back in her hometown east of Wuhan, urged her to wear a mask outdoors.
This doc is critical of both Chinese and American authorities for downplaying COVID and, indeed, punishing those who spoke out about it — “I have lived under authoritarianism and I have lived in a society that calls itself free,” says Wang, who now calls New York home. “In both systems, ordinary people become casualties of their leaders’ pursuit of power.”
For me, the film is most striking when it’s sharing human stories, captured with the help of camera people in Wuhan: a father in tears at the bedside of his adult son, who’s unable to do much more than blink; the woman who ran a medical clinic near the infamous wet market and whose husband, having caught the virus from patients, was turned away by four hospitals after they saw CT scans of his lungs; the son and husband who have to decide on the spot whether to take their loved one back home or let her die in the street when paramedics are unable to find a hospital with room for her.
Some of the most eye-opening images, at least for those of us without exposure to Chinese media, are of news anchors parroting the same government-approved script about the lack of COVID dangers, or of health-care workers at rallies celebrating China’s victory over the virus, waving flags and singing patriotic songs about the motherland. The doc contrasts those images with footage from inside the hospitals of those workers breaking down in tears, exposing the reality glossed over by the upbeat, state-sanctioned propaganda about China’s “Angels in White.”
That, and Wang’s interviews with sad and angry nurses in New York, reaffirm there’s a secondary pandemic of trauma among front-line workers, one that will only worsen as those same workers deal with the fourth wave of COVID surging around the world.
I don’t know that any lessons will be learned from this documentary — Wang includes footage of anti-mask, -lockdown and -vaccine protests across the U.S. and we know they’re still happening even as the Delta variant rages and politicians refuse to do what’s necessary to protect their citizens — but it’s worth watching nonethless.
The Chair (Aug. 20, Netflix)
I have a lot of time for Sandra Oh in whatever role she’s in and she delivers a reliably smart and sympathetic performance as Ji-Yoon Kim, a Korean-American professor who’s just become the first female and the first person of colour to chair the English department at fictional Pembroke University.
Created by actor Amanda Peet and screenwriter Annie Wyman, who’s also a lecturer at Stanford University, “The Chair” portrays Ji-Yoon as struggling with the things you’d expect a career woman to struggle with while balancing a demanding job with family. In Ji-Yoon’s case, ethnicity adds another layer as she’s a 40-something single mother to an adopted Mexican-American daughter she’s raising with the help of her father Habi, played by Ji-yong Lee, who speaks only Korean.
And of course, Ji-Yoon’s is not just any job. As chair, she has to worry about faculty egos, budgets, and keeping the dean (David Morse) and the donors happy, not to mention the students, a sometimes fickle, fractious lot. (There’s a cameo I won’t spoil for you by a well-known TV actor who’s parachuted in give the university’s marquee lecture because he’ll put “butts in seats.”)
“The Chair” touches on issues like academic freedom, conflict between traditional and modern teaching, sexism and racism in hiring and promotion, campus protest and social media censure, although not in a deep way.
The senior male professors (Bob Balaban and Ron Crawford), who are at the top of the dean’s hit list because they cost the most and attract the fewest students, are portrayed as fuddy duddies. Balaban’s character, in particular, is threatened by Yaz (Nana Mensah), a young Black female professor who teaches a popular course called “Sex and the Novel” and lets her students use rap and spoken-word poetry to interpret “Moby-Dick.”
Holland Taylor plays an equally senior professor named Joan and steals scenes as she fights against indignities like being relegated to a tiny office next to the basement gym and crudely targeted by a male student on Rate My Professors.
I didn’t love the fact that Ji-Yoon expends considerable energy trying to rescue the job of fellow professor and love interest Bill (Jay Duplass) after he does something boneheaded in the classroom that gets immortalized on YouTube. Sure, Bill is a widower and a nice guy who cooks her dinner and helps with her daughter, but he also behaves like an irresponsible man-child and I feel like we’ve had enough of those on television.
Just as Ji-Yoon doesn’t quite manage to revolutionize the Pembroke English department, “The Chair” isn’t going to revolutionize your TV-viewing experience, but at six half-hour episodes you can watch it in less time than it would take to write an essay.
Chapelwaite (Aug. 22, 10 p.m., CTV Sci-Fi Channel/CTV.ca)
PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Reardon/Epix
If you like classic horror stories and you are a patient viewer, you will find things to entertain you in “Chapelwaite,” the latest Stephen King adaptation to hit screens, inspired by the short story “Jerusalem’s Lot.”
Certain elements of the original are intact here, including the creepy ancestral home that gives the show its name; a possible family curse; a mysterious, ancient book; hostile townspeople; undead folks and an obsession with worms.
But adaptors Jason and Peter Filardi have changed and expanded the story. Charles Boone, played by Oscar winner Adrien Brody, is now a widowed father of three and former captain of a whaling ship. Instead of a manservant, his confidante is a woman named Rebecca, played by Emily Hampshire of “Schitt’s Creek,” an aspiring writer and governess to his children. And there are plenty of side plots and new characters.
The town of Preacher’s Corners, Maine, to which Charles brings the two daughters and son he had with his late Polynesian wife, is a hotbed of superstition and racism. The townspeople blame the Boone family for the disease that is killing some of their children, shun Charles’s offspring for not being white, and reject his plans to expand the sawmill he inherited and bring shipbuilding to the town.
Since the series was filmed in Halifax, the cast is loaded with Canadians, including Eric Peterson (“Corner Gas”) as Charles’s chief antagonist; Gord Rand (“Orphan Black”) as the sympathetic town minister; Julian Richings (“Todd and the Book of Pure Evil”) as Charles’s Uncle Phillip; Steven McCarthy (“The Expanse”) as his cousin Stephen and newcomer Devante Senior as Able, a Black sawmill employee who’s the only worker to stand by Charles.
But all the extra faces and scenes mean the show can plod when it’s not sticking to the gothic horror plot, which it brings to life in moody, foreboding fashion.
The most successful new characters are the children, Honour (Jennifer Ens), Tane (Ian Ho) and especially sensitive middle child Loa. Toronto’s Sirena Gulamgaus, who also stars in “Transplant,” plays the part with depth beyond her years.
Hampshire, who’s second to Brody in the credits, brings energy and charm to Rebecca, but the character seems to have been parachuted in from a more modern show, with a way of speaking and behaving that doesn’t fit the 1850s time period.
Still, if you have a taste for atmospheric, supernatural horror stories you might be able to overlook “Chapelwaite’s” shortcomings.
Odds and Ends
The show that is a summer highlight for most “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” fans, “Bachelor in Paradise,” returns for its seventh season after sitting it out last summer due to the pandemic. It debuts Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. on Citytv.
A show that I think has been trudging on for far too long, “The Walking Dead,” debuts its 11th and final season on AMC Aug. 22 at 9 p.m. Oh sure, I’ll probably hate-watch it just to see how things end.
Disney Plus has “Growing Up Animal” on Aug. 18, which features lots and lots of baby animals, so how can you go wrong?
NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time, and reflect information provided to me and cross-checked where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste.
This post has been edited to tweak my review of “Nine Perfect Strangers.”
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