SHOW OF THE WEEK: Flack (Jan. 22, Amazon Prime Video)
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
This show seems like a throwback to the days when television was ruled by anti-heroes, except it’s women instead of men who are breaking bad.
Robyn (Anna Paquin) is a highly skilled fixer who cleans up messes for various celebrities in London, England. When we meet her she’s in a hotel room with two naked men, one of whom is closeted and famous, and the other of whom isn’t breathing.
Naturally Robyn saves the day, but it should come as no surprise that, like any good anti-hero, her savvy as a troubleshooter doesn’t extend to her personal life.
Robyn can’t stop lying, either to herself or to the people she’s closest to, including her sister Ruth (Genevieve Angelson), a stay-at-home mom whom Robyn followed from New York to London after their mother died, and her devoted boyfriend Sam (Arinze Kene).
Robyn’s best friend is her co-worker Eve (Lydia Wilson), who uses cynicism and snobbery to keep people from getting too close. Rebecca Benson is wet-behind-the-ears intern Melody, who idolizes Robyn, and Sophie Okonedo is their fearsome boss Caroline, sort of a PR version of Miranda in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Marc Warren is Tom, who is drawn into Robyn’s orbit after meeting her at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
The series overall is quite cynical. Some of the fixes that Robyn and the team concoct are preposterous, whether it’s a natural skin care purveyor falsely accusing her husband of abuse to explain the bruises from a facelift or a failing footballer pretending to be gay to get attention and sponsorships, but the underlying message is that everyone can be bought.
Paquin has received lots of attention for the show, her first lead role since the one-season “Bellevue” and “True Blood” before that, but over the first season’s six episodes we merely skim the surface of Robyn’s dysfunction.
The dialogue, written by creator Oliver Lansley and his team, is snappy and sometimes funny. Okonedo, who I’m used to seeing in dramatic roles, gets all the best lines: “It’s like being slowly stung to death by incompetent wasps,” she tells her employees when they’re having trouble closing a case.
Of course, no one really talks like that. But if you can suspend your disbelief, excuse the moments that are too on the nose and lean into the characters’ naughtiness, “Flack” can be fun.
Painting With John (Jan. 22, 11 p.m., HBO, Crave)
“Painting With John” was in the works long before the pandemic turned those of us who can work from home into hermits, but it seems fortuitously prescient. It’s just John Lurie — artist, musician, actor, Grammy-nominated composer, cult TV show maker (“Fishing With John”), former New York scenester — painting and talking from his home on a Caribbean island.
We catch glimpses of his assistant, Nesrin Wolf, and his cook, Ann Mary Gludd James, but this is essentially a one-man show. Lurie wrote and directed the series, and we hear his music on the soundtrack along with his voice.
It’s by turns soothing, funny, interesting and weird. Lurie is a compelling storyteller, whether he’s recounting how he almost blew himself up trying to reheat a curry and sat naked, applying aloe vera to his burns, as a shocked neighbour drove by; the lengths he went to, while living in Manhattan, to get a live eel to photograph for the “Voice of Chunk” album cover; or the hideousness and side effects of cancer treatment.
And he deftly wields his wit against others (“Talking into a camera is just wrong and people who can actually do it well, they’re probably sociopaths”) and himself (“I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing”).
“I will teach you things I learned from life as I go,” he says.
It seems a fair bargain.
The episodes are short, the natural scenery is beautiful, watching Lurie paint is almost hypnotic and he’s got lots of life to share.
HBO also has Season 3 of “C.B. Strike,” subtitled “Lethal White,” Jan. 20 at 10 p.m.
If You Missed It … WandaVision (Disney Plus)
PHOTO CREDIT: Disney Plus
The appeal of this series for me was more in its imitation of the classic sitcoms I grew up with than its connection to the Marvel Universe, into which I have only occasionally dipped a toe.
But the first episode, a riff on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” left me a little disappointed. Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) make a charming pair of suburban newlyweds, but I found it all rather corny and clunky.
It got better in the second and third episodes — reminiscent of “Bewitched,” “The Brady Bunch” and a titch of “The Partridge Family” — as Wanda and Vision began to interact more with their neighbours (including Kathryn Hahn as the brassy Agnes) in an effort to fit in. There’s a nice bit of comedy involving android Vision, his works jammed up by an accidentally swallowed piece of gum, doing a magic show at the town fundraiser and forgetting to hide his superpowers, with witch Wanda having to improvise to make the tricks seem fake.
It becomes clear that Wanda is exerting some type of control over their small-town existence and trying desperately to keep an alternate reality from seeping in, presumably a reality in which Vision is dead, as per “Avengers: Infinity War.”
That’s all likely all old hat for Marvel fans who — if they’ve read the comics and seen the movies — will have an inkling of where the story is going.
For non-Marvel fans, the fun of “WandaVision” lies in its retro trappings and the performances of Olsen and Bettany.
Odds and Ends
Mean girls, bad boys, outcasts and misunderstood loners: “Fate: The Winx Saga” (Jan. 22, Netflix) has all the usual tropes of angsty high school drama, except the hormones are mixed with magic powers, plus there’s a monster out in the deep, dark woods. Welcome to the Alfea College for Fairies and Magic, the setting for this drama based on Nickelodeon’s “Winx Club” animated series. Abigail Cowen (“Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) stars as first-year student Bloom and the grown-up cast includes Robert James-Collier of “Downton Abbey.” Netflix also debuts Season 2 of made-in-Canada glass-blowing competition series “Blown Away” and film “The White Tiger,” based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, on Jan. 22.
“Political Blind Date” (Jan. 19, 9 p.m., TVO) begins its fourth season of pairing politicians who hold opposing viewpoints to hash out issues of interest to Canadians and, at least while they’re shooting the show, move beyond partisanship. Episode 1 features NDP MPP Sara Singh and Conservative MPP Natalia Kusendova hanging out to discuss hospital overcrowding, health cuts and “hallway medicine,” a topic of even more interest in these COVID-19 times. Future episodes cross party, provincial and even national lines with the mayor of Flint, Mich., meeting the mayor of Huron-Kinloss, Ont., to talk clean water; and an Ontario MPP tete-a-teteing with a Quebec MLA about religious symbols.
If, like me, you’ve watched and rewatched all your British detective favourites in lockdown you’ll be glad to know that Season 2 of “The Bay” is coming to BritBox on Jan. 20. DS Lisa Armstrong (Morven Christie, “Grantchester”) is back with a new murder to solve and a new family to get entangled with.
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