Have you noticed that while there are still a lot of new shows being released week by week they’re not always, well, great?
To be fair, I don’t get to watch absolutely everything out there, but more often than not I have found the latest content is fine but not invigorating in the way the best TV often is.
My favourite show of the year has been “Shogun.” When I attended the Television Critics Association press tour a couple of weeks ago in Pasadena, Calif., the TCA (of which I am a member) gave “Shogun” four awards, including best new program and program of the year, which I wrote about here.
But it’s been difficult to find a lot else that lives up to that quality, although I am enjoying Season 3 of House of the Dragon, which I didn’t write about this year. And I was on the “Baby Reindeer” wagon, like a lot of other people.
As for what else I’ve been up to, in my last post I mentioned that I had interviewed Elisabeth Moss about “The Veil” (another one of those shows that was fine, but not earth-shaking). That’s here.
My most enjoyable interview of the year, hands down, was with Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton about Season 3 of “Bridgerton.”
I wrote a preview piece on 10 shows to watch this summer and the fact I included more returning shows than new ones is a reflection of how much production was affected by last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes.
One of those shows, “My Lady Jane,” was part of a feature I did on the ongoing influence of the Tudor era on TV. If you haven’t seen it yet and you have Prime Video, check it out. It’s a hoot, certainly not historically accurate, but suspend your disbelief and enjoy.
And finally, I wrote about the Emmy nominations and why there are things to be celebrated (two noms for “Reservation Dogs”!) and things to be disappointed out (why only two noms for “Reservation Dogs”?).
I continue to work full-time as an editor at the Star, which is why I’m not posting here much. Even though I delegate some reviews and interviews to other writers, it’s still a lot to do a demanding 35 hours of editing every week and fit in being a TV critic on the side. But I love the work and will continue to do it. Although, apologies to “Bachelorette” fans, I’ve been too busy to watch Jenn Tran’s season.
Next on my plate, I’ll have a feature on the final season of “The Umbrella Academy,” for which I did a set visit last May; an interview with Canadian actor Enrico Colantoni, who co-stars in a Starz show called “English Teacher” (will probably debut on Crave, as far as I can tell); one with Canadian showrunner Michael Grassi, who has graduated from writing on shows like “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and “Riverdale” to creating one called “Brilliant Minds” starring Zachary Quinto (Canadian network still to be announced); a preview of fall TV; a column about the Emmy Awards before they air and probably one after as well; and always more to come.
So sorry that I haven’t been able to recap The Bachelorette here. It has been an entertaining as well as a fast season, but my Toronto Star duties have kept me too busy to write it up every week. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to clear some time in my schedule for “Bachelor in Paradise” and “The Golden Bachelor.” (How about that Gerry, huh? Did you love him on “Men Tell All”?)
What I have been doing, alongside my full-time editing job, plus writing features here and there (less these days with the writers’ and actors’ strikes), is filing a weekly streaming/binging guide called “The Watch List.”
Once a week might not sound like much work but, of course, I have to watch (or in some cases rewatch) the shows I write about and then create a hopefully cogent and entertaining review.
Since I’ve been barred from posting links to my work on Facebook, I thought I would post them here for anyone who was interested. And if you can find it in your heart and wallet to subscribe to the Star, there is a lot of excellent work being done, including really valuable political and investigative reporting, that goes far beyond my modest contributions.
So this weekend’s Watch List was about “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” and “Star Trek: Picard,” which you can find here.
Last week’s covered “The Bear” and “Julia,” both of which I reviewed previously on the Watchable list.
And the week before that was a special Watch List that featured several shows that dealt with class because the entire Saturday section that week was about economic class and how artists and works of art deal with it.
Hope you’re all having a great summer. Until next post . . .
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.
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.
Recent Comments