Watchable Nov. 15 to 21, 2021

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Jagged (Nov. 19, Crave)

I can’t pretend to know what Alanis Morissette finds offensive about the documentary “Jagged” beyond her statement that it’s “a reductive take” on her story made by someone with a “salacious agenda,” by which I presume she means director Alison Klayman.

It seems to me every documentary is somewhat reductive. No filmmaker, no matter how well intentioned, can capture all the nuances of another person’s lived experience.

As for “salacious,” that likely refers to Morissette’s headline-making revelation that she experienced “statutory rape” when she was a 15-year-old in the music industry being pursued by older men. There’s also a segment on the speculation around the identity of the man whom Morissette went “down on” in a theatre in her revenge anthem “You Oughta Know.”

But those bits are just small pieces of the whole.

“Jagged,” which is about the making of the blockbuster 1995 album “Jagged Little Pill,” is an admiring take on one woman’s triumph in an industry that didn’t entirely know what to do with her.

If you haven’t listened to the album in a while, this doc will remind you just how good it is.

It’s rather gobsmacking to think Morissette was just 19 when she was dumped by label MCA, which wanted to confine her to the dance pop mould of her early hits, moved to L.A., met producer Glen Ballard and started writing the songs that became “Jagged Little Pill.”

It’s still one of the bestselling albums of all time, having sold more than 33 million copies to date.

There’s plenty of documentation here of just how massive a star Morissette was in the 1990s, including concert footage and backstage video of her and her band, which included future Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.

Hawkins is among the admirers in the doc — others include filmmaker Kevin Smith and Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson — who extol Morissette’s achievement as well as the doors she kicked open for female singer/songwriters to come.

Ballard recounts how nobody would sign Morissette until Maverick Records, Madonna’s label, and a young A&R guy named Guy Oseary came along. Things started to snowball after L.A. radio station KROQ began playing “You Oughta Know,” the album’s first single, with second single “Hand in My Pocket” cementing Morissette’s fame internationally.

It wasn’t all adulation, of course. The film touches on her pigeonholing by media of the day as an “angry white female,” to quote Rolling Stone’s headline.

If you’ve heard the whole album you know that most of the songs on “Jagged Little Pill” are not angry, but even if they were, so what? Female anger deserves to be expressed and listened to.

Morissette herself says she was writing “not to punish,” but to express feelings and get them “out of my body because I didn’t want to get sick.”

Only Morissette herself can say how successful she was at that endeavour, but the older woman we see in the film seems clear-eyed, self-possessed and confident, a survivor.

I’m sorry she doesn’t like the doc. To me, it’s an interesting look back at a time when a young Canadian woman ruled the music world.

Short Takes

The Madame Blanc Mysteries (Nov. 15, Acorn TV)

There’s an exoticism to the title of this new Acorn original, but its namesake — Mrs. White in English — is as down to earth as they come. Longtime “Coronation Street” actor (and “Scott & Bailey” co-creator) Sally Lindsay created and stars in the series as an antiques dealer whose husband dies in mysterious circumstances, leaving her virtually penniless and forced to relocate to their one surviving property in the fictional French town of Saint Victoire. Naturally, while trying to untangle the circumstances of her husband’s death, Jean White gets pulled into other mysteries involving both murder and antiques. Her partner in solving crime is local taxi driver and handyman Dom (Steve Edge) and the town is peopled with colourful eccentrics including, most notably, chateau owners Jeremy and Judith Lloyd James (fellow “Corrie” alum Robin Askwith and Sue Holderness of “Only Fools and Horses”). It’s a charming addition to the British detective series canon.

The Sex Lives of College Girls (Nov. 18, 10 p.m., Crave)

Mindy Kaling continues her campaign for TV world domination with this HBO Max comedy she co-created with Justin Noble, a writer on her Netflix hit “Never Have I Ever.” Once again, the female POV is front and centre, with four young women from extremely different worlds thrown together as roommates at prestigious Essex College. Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) is a chill athlete with a senator for a mother and a taste for older men; Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet, sister of Timothee) is an earnest small-town nerd and sexual naif; Leighton (Renee Rapp) is a New York sophisticate with a secret and, initially at least, disdain for her roomies; and Bela (Amrit Kaur) is a former “Indian loser with acne, sweaty armpits and glasses” who’s reinventing herself as a sex-positive, aspiring comedy writer. There’s sex, yes, but it’s much less daring than, say, Netflix’s “Sex Education.” The show’s mainly about four engaging young women learning to love and trust themselves, and lean on each other.

Blown Away: Christmas (Nov. 19, Netflix)

If you’re a fan of the glass-blowing competition series “Blown Away,” this Christmas edition will probably jingle your bells. It encompasses just four episodes with five contestants, returnees from the first two seasons of the regular show. The hot shop is all decked out for the holidays, the challenges are Christmas-themed and eliminated contestants have to remove their stockings from the mantel, but otherwise the series hits all the familiar beats. “Queer Eye” design expert Bobby Berk hosts and Canadian glass artist Katherine Gray is back as the resident evaluator. A little blow, blow, blow to go with your ho ho ho.

Also on Netflix is “Cowboy Bebop” (Nov. 19), based on a previous animated show and movie that were themselves adapted from an anime series. It stars John Cho as bounty hunter Spike Spiegel. If you like splashy violence, characters that feel like cartoons rather than people and quips in place of dialogue, enjoy. Me, I’d give it a miss.

Netflix also has “Tiger King 2” on Nov. 17, continuing the sensationalistic story of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and the other folks who got famous in the first docuseries. It was not provided for critics to screen in advance.

Odds and Ends

I’d love to tell you about Season 4 of “Star Trek: Discovery,” having watched the first two action-packed episodes, but reviews are embargoed until Nov. 18, the day it debuts on CTV Sci-Fi Channel at 9 p.m.

Reviews are also embargoed for Amazon Prime Video’s big-budget fantasy series “The Wheel of Time” (Nov. 19), based on the novels by Robert Jordan, which stars Rosamund Pike as the leader of a powerful, all-female organization called the Aes Sedai that’s looking for the “Dragon Reborn.”

Yep, another embargo for “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson” (Nov. 19, 10 p.m., FX), the latest “The New Times Presents” project about Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and the hysteria that followed.

I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to screen “A Life in Ten Pictures” (Nov. 19, CBC Gem), which examines the lives of famous people with the starting point being photographs of each. The subjects include Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Amy Winehouse, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon and Tupac Shakur.

Hollywood Suite is paying tribute to great Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison, screening a selection of his movies beginning Nov. 19 at 9 p.m. with the comedy “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” Others airing between Nov. 19 and 21 include “In the Heat of the Night,” “Best Friends,” “A Soldier’s Story,” “Moonstruck” (one of my personal favourites) and “Only You.”

Edited to update my review of “The Sex Lives of College Girls.”