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Tag: Paper Girls

Watchable on Disney, Prime Video, Netflix Aug. 1 to 7, 2022

SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Bear (Aug. 3, Disney+)

From left, Jeremy Allen White, Lionel Boyce and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in “The Bear.”
PHOTO CREDIT: FX

First things first, if the behind-the-scenes operation of a restaurant is as chaotic as in the fictional Original Beef of Chicagoland in “The Bear,” it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to open one.

But it’s to viewers’ advantage that sandwich shop Original Beef is up and running. If you’ll forgive the bad food pun, there’s a lot to chew in this story about a hot shot young chef (Jeremy Allen White, “Shameless”) who returns to Chicago to take over the restaurant he was willed by his dead brother.

When Carmy Berzatto takes on Beef, it has a tired menu, an inefficient kitchen and recalcitrant staff who resist the changes he wants to make, especially his so-called “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “Girls”), an aggressive loudmouth who was the best friend of Carmy’s brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal).

Michael was a drug addict who committed suicide and has left a pile of debt behind, including hundreds of thousands owed to his Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt). Carmy could wipe out the debt by selling to Jimmy, but against all odds he wants to keep the place and fix it up.

New employee Sydney (Ayo Edebiri, “Big Mouth”), an ambitious young woman who has her own ideas about how to run things, tries to help Carmy whip the kitchen into shape, which adds to the tensions among the staff, particularly with long-time employee Tina (Liza Colon-Sayas) and with Richie.

And Carmy, on top of everything else, is still processing his grief about Michael’s death, particularly since they were estranged for a couple of years before the suicide. He also has a tenuous relationship with his sister Natalie (Abby Elliott), who’s partly on the hook for the restaurant’s unpaid back taxes.

Add in mundane screw-ups like incorrect orders from suppliers, kitchen accidents, a bad rating from the board of health, an exploding toilet and a power failure, and it’s a wonder anyone’s getting fed.

Series creator Christopher Storer told Esquire he saw the chaos of a restaurant kitchen firsthand when he spent a couple of days as a line cook, but there was also a lot of research done and the show has a secret weapon in Canadian chef Matty Matheson, a co-producer who also plays the Beef’s resident handyman, Neil Fak.

If it seems like a restaurant kitchen is an unlikely setting for drama, I can tell you the show is fast, intense and never boring, and some of its most dramatic scenes take place in that cramped space .

In particular, in Episode 7, part of which was filmed in one continuous shot, something as ordinary as a restaurant review kicks off a nightmare of a shift in which many harsh words are exchanged, two people quit and another is accidentally stabbed.

But there is a resolution — a little too neat of one, but one that points the way to the already greenlit Season 2 — and the team pulls together.

Cooking is life for people like Carmy, Sydney and aspiring pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce).

For those of us who would rather just enjoy the end result, a show like “The Bear” makes it entertaining to see how the sausage is made.

Paper Girls (Prime Video)

From left, Fina Strazza, Sofia Rosinsky, Riley Lai Nelet and Camryn Jones in “Paper Girls.” PHOTO CREDIT: Amazon Studios

(Note: I don’t normally include shows that have already debuted on the Watchable list, but I missed out on reviewing “Paper Girls” last week because of an embargo.)

There’s been an inevitable linking of “Paper Girls” with Netflix juggernaut “Stranger Things,” but aside from the fact both start in the 1980s with bike-riding preteen protagonists confronted by supernatural forces, they’re not anything alike.

The girls of the title — 12-year-olds Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Tiffany (Camryn Jones), KJ (Fina Strazza) and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) — are battling humans, not monsters, albeit ones that possess advanced technology and can jump through time. And our heroines, despite their youth, shed their innocence more quickly than the Hawkins gang of “Stranger Things” and in ways that feel truer to real life.

In the early hours of Nov. 1, 1988, the girls are on their paper routes when they band together to avoid Hell Day hooligans and finish their deliveries. But it looks like nobody in this part of Stony Stream, Ohio, is getting their paper on time, because Erin is jumped by a couple of men in black who steal the walkie talkie that Tiffany lent her and the quartet gives chase.

That pursuit kicks off a series of events that puts them smack in the middle of a fire fight between two groups of time travellers known as the Old Watch and the Standard Time Fighters, or STF.

The walkie thieves save the girls’ lives but at the cost of them travelling 31 years into the future. They spend the rest of the eight episodes trying to get back to 1988, while avoiding an Old Watch assassin (Adina Porter) who is hunting them, with the help of an STF member named Larry (Nate Corddry) and older versions of Erin (Ali Wong) and Tiffany (Sekai Abeni).

That last wrinkle adds depth to “Paper Girls.” Each of them learns disappointing or confusing things about their futures and the people they become. Youthful optimism runs smack into the compromises that adult life demands and the girls don’t take it gracefully.

But they’re 12, so why would we expect them to?

The time-travel plot line is fine if not always well explained. It’s the performances of the show’s young and relatively unknown stars that elevate the material.

These girls have layers that are sympathetically and thoughtfully excavated, whether it’s KJ, who’s from a wealthy Jewish family, glimpsing a sexuality she doesn’t even know how to name; Tiffany, who is African-American, fighting to preserve her vision of what success means; Chinese-American Erin coming to terms with fractures in a once close family; or Mac, who lives in the rough part of town, realizing she might never escape the violent blight of her upbringing.

The girls straddle the line between childhood and young adulthood. One moment they’re eluding Old Watch travellers after seeing people they know die; the next they’re trying to figure out how a tampon works after Erin gets her period.

They start out as near strangers and end up friends, and it feels both earned and rewarding.

There is one other way that “Paper Girls” is like “Stranger Things”: it’s at its best when its young characters come together to grapple with whatever is plaguing them, whether it’s warring time travellers or the pain of growing up too fast.

Short Takes

Concert-goers dance as what’s left of Woodstock ’99 burns in “Trainwreck.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 (Aug. 3, Netflix)

The title of this three-part docuseries is appropriate because, as with the proverbial train wreck, it’s hard to look away as it documents this disaster of a music festival day by day and hour by hour. If it all seems familiar, it might be because HBO’s “Music Box” series also covered the chaos in the doc “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” last summer. The Reader’s Digest version is this: what was supposed to be a three-day sequel to the blissed out hippie vibe of the 1969 Woodstock festival turned into a sort of “Lord of the Flies” nightmare of anger and violence that culminated in a riot on the final night. “Trainwreck” (whose original title was “Clusterf**k,” also very appropriate) is long on details of the mayhem but short on explanations. Promoters Michael Lang and John Scher; musician Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; untrained security guards; aggressive, young men in the crowd: all get fingered for some part of the blame. Scher, in particular, still seems determined to deflect any responsibility for what happened and still seems to blame the women who got raped at the festival for their own misfortune. As far as I can tell, the die for the catastrophe was cast the minute it was decided the festival would be more about squeezing participants for every possible dollar than keeping them comfortable and safe. And as I said in my review of “Peace, Love, and Rage,” “One does wonder what geniuses thought packing 220,000 or so people onto a largely asphalt surface in searing July heat was a good idea.” This series makes no mention of the one (and only one, surprisingly) death from the festival: that of David DeRosia due to hyperthermia from overheating. But it does provide a cross-section of voices, including Lang (who died three months after he was interviewed), Scher, event staff, musicians, reporters, MTV personalities who covered it live and concert-goers, a couple of whom say they’d do it all over again despite the fear they felt that weekend. Lucky for them and for us, there will never be another Woodstock.

Netflix also has the rom-com “Wedding Season” (Aug. 4) and, of far more interest, “The Sandman” (Aug. 5), based on the comic book series by Neil Gaiman about what happens to the Master of Dreams (Tom Sturridge) and the world after he is imprisoned for a century. Reviews for this one are embargoed until release.

Odds and Ends

CBC and CBC Gem have “FreeUp! Emancipation Day” (Aug. 1, 8 p.m.), celebrating the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, including Canada, on Aug. 1, 1834. The two-hour show includes a special about Emancipation Day celebrations across Canada, talks about what emancipation means, and performances by Jully Black, TiKA and Measha Brueggergosman. CBC Gem also has Season 2 of the Quebec series “C’est comme ca que je t’aime” (Aug. 1) and reality sitcom “Bobby & Harriet Get Married” (Aug. 5) in which a real-life couple, Brit Harriet Kemsley and Canadian Bobby Mair, play heightened versions of themselves.

Crave has the second season of workplace drama “Industry” (Aug. 1) about young traders in London, England. And if you missed Guillermo del Toro’s latest Toronto-shot, Oscar-nominated movie, “Nightmare Alley” comes to Crave Aug. 5.

Speaking of movies, “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear” is on Disney+ Aug. 3.

Apple TV+ has the animated film “Luck” (Aug. 5) and Season 2 of “The Snoopy Show.”

Finally, Prime Video has another film, “Thirteen Lives” (Aug. 5), a fictionalized account directed by Ron Howard of the rescue of young members of a soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand. I’m sorry I missed the chance to screen this one because the Disney+ doc about the event (“The Rescue”) was fascinating. Also new to Prime Video is Season 2 of “The Outlaws” (Aug. 5), about ne-er-do-wells banding together while doing community service in London.

Watchable on Crave, Netflix, Prime Video July 25 to 31, 2022

SHOW OF THE WEEK: City on a Hill (July 29, Crave)

Kevin Bacon as Jackie Rohr and Aldis Hodge as DeCourcy Ward in “City on a Hill.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Francisco Roman/SHOWTIME

Jackie Rohr is a bastard: a corrupt ex-FBI agent, a murderer, a booze- and drug-abusing philanderer, someone who’ll throw just about anyone under the bus to save his own skin. There’s no good reason to root for him and yet the character, as played by Kevin Bacon, compels you to watch him.

As Season 3 of this Boston-set crime drama opens, Jackie — having quit the FBI last season rather than be fired — is tending bar and burning through his emergency funds when his old FBI mentor offers him a private security job at $2,000 a week, which would be a real windfall in 1993.

But it soon becomes clear that his rich boss, Sinclair Dryden (Corbin Bernsen), is doing reprehensible things, which means Jackie has to decide whether to take the high road or keep his mouth shut for the money.

The other star of the series, Jackie’s sometime nemesis, sometime collaborator DeCourcy Ward (Aldis Hodge), who is as moral as Jackie is bent, has a shot at becoming Suffolk County district attorney if he gets his boss some high profile wins. But he resists quickly prosecuting the case of an alleged police killer when it becomes clear the young Black man was likely set up.

Both Jackie’s and DeCourcy’s wives are dealing with their own trauma: Jenny Rohr (Jill Hennessy) from sexual abuse at the hands of her estranged father and Siobhan Quays (Lauren E. Banks) from being shot last season and having a miscarriage.

Jenny finds new purpose volunteering at a community centre, where she re-establishes contact with Irish priest Diarmuid Doyle (Mark Ryder), which angers Jackie. And Siobhan, who has quit her law firm to work with the American Civil Liberties Union, goes up against the powerful forces behind the Big Dig megaproject when a worker is injured on the job.

This season also gives Boston police officer Chris Caysen (Matthew Del Negro) way more to do, helping root out corruption within the force.

The series is reminiscent of “The Wire” in its focus on the rot within the political and justice systems, although it doesn’t have that series’ finesse. There’s also a little “Homicide: Life on the Street” DNA, with Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson executive-producing both shows. (Boston boosters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are also EPs on “Hill.”)

“City on a Hill” doesn’t tread new ground in the genre, but if you’ve already seen seasons 1 and 2 — and I’d recommend doing so before digging into Season 3 — you’ll want to keep following its characters, particularly the reprehensible but irresistible Jackie.

As Siobhan’s therapist says, “Most of life falls into grey areas,” which is certainly the case in “City on a Hill.”

Crave also has the spinoff “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” (July 28), in which a new set of teenagers is tormented by someone who goes by the initial “A”; and the comedy special “Dave Merheje: I Love You Habibi” (July 29).

Short Takes

Charlotte Law, a mother who fought to take down the Is Anyone Up? porn site after her daughter
was victimized, in “The Most Hated Man on the Internet.” PHOTO CREDIT: Netflix © 2022

The Most Hated Man on the Internet (July 27, Netflix)

I’ll be honest, I watched this docuseries because the Netflix releases that I most wanted to review were embargoed, but I only got through two of the three episodes. I was so thoroughly disgusted by Hunter Moore, the “man” of the title, who started a repository of internet evil in 2010 known as IsAnyoneUp.com, that’s all I could stomach. Sure, the series is meant to be about the victims and the people who brought Moore down, chiefly Charlotte Law — a mother whose daughter’s topless photos were hacked and displayed on the “revenge porn” site — but it also devotes time to the nastiness spewed by Moore and his degenerate cult of followers. Do we need this show to remind us that crap posted on the internet can ruin people’s lives to the point of making them want to kill themselves? I’m not sure we do but, if you disagree, “The Most Hated Man on the Internet” is there for the watching.

Netflix also has “Keep Breathing” (July 28), the British Columbia-filmed drama about a lawyer (Melissa Barrera) who has to fend for herself when a small plane crashes in the wilderness; “Uncoupled” (July 29), the Neil Patrick Harris comedy about a gay real estate agent whose life is upended when his partner leaves him; the docuseries “Street Food: USA” (July 26); the third season of “Dream Home Makeover” (July 27); Season 4 of car-flipping show “Car Masters: Rust to Riches” (July 27) and rom-com “Purple Hearts” (July 29).

Odds and Ends

Fina Strazza, Sofia Rosinsky, Riley Lai Nelet and Camryn Jones in ” Paper Girls.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Anjali Pinto/Amazon Studios

“Paper Girls,” the sci-fi drama about four 12-year-olds who get caught in a war between time travellers while out delivering papers in 1988, would have likely been my show of the week had reviews not been embargoed until July 29, the day it debuts on Prime Video.

Apple TV+ has “Surface” (July 29), which stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman trying to rebuild her life after a suicide attempt, and “Amber Brown” (July 29), based on the Paula Danziger books, about a young girl using art and music to cope with her parents’ divorce.

Disney+ has Season 3 of “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” (July 27); and “Light & Magic” (July 27), a behind-the-scenes look at  Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects arm of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’s Lucasfilm,

Before he was Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek,” Patrick Stewart was a science professor who helped the British government solve dangerous cases in “Eleventh Hour,” which comes to BritBox on July 26.

Finally, if you’re a fan of Gordie Lucius’s daffy science show “Frick, I Love Nature,” CBC Gem has a bonus episode on July 27 about animals that live in the Arctic.

NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times 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. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.

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