Tag: World War II

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Staged (April 1, 9 p.m., Hollywood Suite)

We could all use a laugh right about now, couldn’t we? Then let me direct you to fine British actors David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who play exaggerated versions of themselves in this series set and filmed in lockdown.

Scottish thespian Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Broadchurch”) and his Welsh counterpart Sheen (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen,” “Masters of Sex”) are among the best U.K. actors out there, with Shakespearean and other stage credits as well as film and TV under their belts, but they’re not too lofty to take the piss out of themselves.

In “Staged,” they communicate via Zoom calls from their respective homes, alternately squabbling and commiserating as they battle pandemic boredom and unruly hair. 

The premise is that they’re attempting to virtually rehearse the Pirandello play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” with director Simon Evans (the real-life director and creator of “Staged”), which proves to be an uphill battle — until they’re put in their places by Judi Dench.

Along the way, they display actorly egos and neuroses. There’s a running gag about who’ll get top billing on the play, with Tennant at one point reverting to his birth name of McDonald just so he can precede Sheen alphabetically. Sheen, worried about the evidence of all the extra wine he’s been drinking, tries to pawn off his recycling on his 80-year-old neighbour with unexpected results.

The guest stars include Tennant’s and Sheen’s real-life partners, Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, as well as Evans’ sister, Lucy Eaton, and actors Nina Sosanya, Adrian Lester and Samuel L. Jackson.

It’s a more entertaining version of what the rest of us have experienced trying to transfer our lives online. Our Zoom calls would be far more amusing if Tennant or Sheen was on the other side of the screen.

The six-episode series went over so well in Britain that a second season was ordered and has already aired on BBC One, but it hasn’t been as well received by critics, so never mind that and just enjoy this one.

The Serpent (April 2, Netflix)

Evil doesn’t always look the part. It can wear a smile and a fancy shirt and extend a helping hand.

This eight-part limited series tells some of the story of Charles Sobhraj, a serial killer suspected of murdering at least 10 people in the mid-1970s. Many of them were young “hippie” tourists who were charmed into Sobhraj’s orbit while backpacking around Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, then drugged, robbed and killed.

Sobhraj, who posed as a jewel merchant named Alain Gautier, was aided by girlfriend Marie-Andree Leclerc, a Quebec woman who met and fell in love with Sobhraj on a vacation in India. French actor Tahar Rahim (“The Mauritanian,” “The Looming Tower”) plays Charles while British actor Jenna Coleman (“Victoria,” “Doctor Who”) portrays Marie-Andree, a.k.a. Monique.

The other real person who’s prominently featured in the series is Herman Knippenberg, a Dutch diplomat who independently investigated Sobhraj after tying him to the murders of a Dutch couple in Bangkok. He’s played by Billy Howle (“Outlaw King,” “MotherFatherSon”). 

The series is described as inspired by true events, so some liberties are taken with the facts; all the dialogue is imagined and some of the victims’ names have been changed.

I found the three episodes I watched quite engrossing, but note that the show requires close attention as it jumps back and forth in time, sometimes revisiting the same event from different points of view.

Rahim is suitably chilling as Sobhraj, like a dead-eyed spider in the midst of a web of hedonism that ensnared young victims keen to experience foreign lands. 

Also new to Netflix this week is “Worn Stories” (March 25), a docuseries from Jenji Kohan (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Morgan Neville (“Ugly Delicious”) about the meaning that people attach to clothing — or lack of clothing, seeing as the first episode features several nudists.

My Grandparents’ War and Atlantic Crossing (April 4, 8 and 9 p.m., PBS)

Both these series concern themselves with the Second World War, the bloodiest and largest conflict in global history but one that seems largely abstract today, given that it started more than 81 years ago.

Even for someone like me, whose grandfather fought in World War II (my other grandpa fought in World War I), it’s uncharted territory. My grandfather never talked about it and, as a child and then a self-absorbed teenager and young adult, I never thought to ask. So “My Grandparents’ War,” in which four British actors explore what their grandparents did during WWII, hit home for me as someone who would love to know more about her own family’s war history.

Helena Bonham Carter is first up. Her paternal grandmother, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, was a Liberal politician and renowned public speaker, so outspoken against anti-Semitism that she was on the Gestapo’s black list, and an air raid warden during the Blitz. Her maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejon, was a Spanish diplomat who personally helped perhaps thousands of French Jews escape the Holocaust by giving them visas for passage through Spain, against the direct orders of the Spanish government. 

So it’s a particularly heroic history that Bonham Carter is revisiting. She even gets to meet descendants of people who were spared death by the efforts of her grandparents.

Future episodes feature Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas and Carey Mulligan.

I felt less of a direct emotional connection with “Atlantic Crossing.” It’s a period drama whose main character is Norwegian Crown Princess Martha (Swedish actor Sofia Helin). The early episodes portray her happy marriage to Prince Olav (Tobias Santelmann) and the flight of the couple and their three children from Norway when the Nazis invaded in 1940. 

The family was divided, with Olav and his father, King Haakon (Soren Pilmark), fleeing to London, and Martha and the children to Sweden, under the protection of her uncle, King Gustav V, who had uncomfortably close ties with the Germans. After Gustav tried to broker a deal with the Nazis that would see Martha return to Norway and her very young son Harald made king, she went instead to the United States, where she stayed for the rest of the war. 

“Atlantic Crossing” then pivots to the relationship between Martha and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, played by Kyle MacLachlan of “Twin Peaks,” a friendship that was rumoured to be romantic, at least on FDR’s part. 

American actor Harriet Sansom Harris co-stars as Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Whether viewers take to a story about people and events that are little known on this side of the Atlantic remains to be seen. It’s certainly a beautifully made series, but based on the two episodes I had time to watch I found it strangely unaffecting.

Short Takes

First Day (March 31, CBC Gem)

There’s a good chance you will find your heart going out to Hannah, the transgender lead character of this Australian miniseries, played by trans actor Evie Macdonald. She’s about to start high school and the jitters that transition would normally arouse are compounded by her fear that her classmates will find out she was born a boy. It’s a valid fear given that a bully from her old school, who insists on calling Hannah Thomas, has followed her to the new one. And the principal refuses to let her use the girls’ washroom despite boasting about his school’s openness to trans students, an infuriating example of the type of obstacles thrown in the path of people like Hannah. Only one episode was provided for review, but it was touching and very relatable.

CBC Gem also has Season 2 of “Farm Crime” (April 1), which concerns, yes, criminal activity of an agricultural nature. Mind you, there’s nothing in Episode 1, about an invasion of murder hornets in Nanaimo, B.C., that would stand up in a court of law, which doesn’t make it any less interesting.

New to CBC and CBC Gem is “Miss Scarlet & the Duke” (March 29, 8 p.m.), starring Kate Phillips (“Peaky Blinders”) as a Victorian-era female detective. The public broadcaster also has “Us” (April 4, 9 p.m.) about a British man (Tom Hollander, “The Night Manager”) trying to win back his wife (Saskia Reeves, “Belgravia”) during a European vacation.

The United States of Al (April 1, 8:30 p.m., Global)

The latest sitcom from Chuck Lorre’s laugh factory, created by “Big Bang Theory” scribes Maria Ferrari and Dave Goetsch, is about the relationship between a Marine who fought in Afghanistan (Parker Young) and his Afghan interpreter, Awalmir or Al (Adhir Kalyan), whom he helped bring to the U.S. and away from the reach of the Taliban. It undoubtedly means well, but the episode I watched traded in stereotypes about masculinity (Young’s stoic, heavy drinking Riley) and being Muslim. Perhaps it will improve as the series go on, but nothing in the pilot made me so much as chuckle out loud.

Gangs of London (April 4, 10 p.m., AMC)

I’m no prude when it comes to violence — I have eagerly consumed “Peaky Blinders,” for instance, through every bloody twist and turn — but this ultra-violent series about criminal organizations jostling for power in England’s biggest city left me cold. Despite a good cast  — including Joe Cole (“Peaky Blinders”), Colm Meaney (“Star Trek”), Michelle Fairley (“Game of Thrones”), Lucian Msamati (“His Dark Materials”) and Paapa Essiedu (“I Will Destroy You”) — I didn’t feel invested enough in the characters to care who they were brutalizing and why.