Watchable the week of June 21, 2021

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Epstein’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell (June 25, Crave)

A Toronto filmmaker, Barbara Shearer, made this three-part docuseries about the woman accused of procuring young victims for notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and it’s a fascinating and horrifying tale.

Epstein died in 2019, his death ruled a suicide, although there are still some who theorize he was murdered to hide the identities of famous and powerful men who shared his taste for sex with teenagers.

Maxwell is currently in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges — a far cry from the life of luxury she lived as daughter of notorious U.K. newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell. Her father figures largely in Shearer’s portrait of Ghislaine, a 59-year-old, Oxford-educated, one-time British socialite.

More than one of the former friends and acquaintances interviewed in the series suggests the key to Maxwell’s identity lies in her relationship as a “daddy’s girl” to a demanding, terrifying father and that, when Robert died under mysterious circumstances in 1991, Epstein took his place as a father figure.

The doc also gives credence to that famous quote about the rich being “different from you and me.” In the milieu of enormous wealth and privilege that Maxwell grew up in, rules were for other people, as one interviewee notes. One gets the sense of billionaire Epstein ordering up schoolgirls to defile as casually as a meal or a bottle of Champagne.

But why would Maxwell, who’s accused of acting as a madam for Epstein —procuring girls from places like the New York Academy of Art and Central Park, or Mar-a-Lago when she and Epstein were in Palm Springs — take part in such vile debauchery? Speculation about daddy issues and codependency aside, no one can really say.

Maxwell refused to be interviewed for the series and her case won’t come to trial until November.

When it does, some observers believe Maxwell’s defence will be that she was just another victim of Epstein’s, but that strikes me as an inherently sexist view and also an offensive one. If Maxwell is guilty, surely she exercised some free will in what she did. It’s as hard to picture her as a victim as it was to view Karla Homolka as a victim of her serial killer and rapist husband, Paul Bernardo.

There is another entity painted in a damning light in “Epstein’s Shadow”: a justice system that treats the rich differently than other people. Epstein was given a slap on the wrist in 2008 despite copious evidence of his sexual activity with underage girls uncovered by police in Palm Beach. It wasn’t until 2019 that he was arrested on multiple sex trafficking charges after a Miami Herald investigation embarrassed the FBI into taking action.

Some believe the case against Maxwell will never make it to open court, either because she’ll be killed in jail or because she’ll be given a deal to prevent her giving evidence against public figures who were part of Epstein’s sordid world.

From Earth to Sky (June 21, 9 p.m., TVO/TVO.org)

On Monday, National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, attention will still naturally be focused on atrocities of the past, particularly the 215 children found buried at a former residential school site in Kamloops, B.C, but this documentary film offers a narrative of inspiration and hope without minimizing the pain of what came before.

In 2017, Toronto musician and concert promoter turned filmmaker Ron Chapman met Indigenous North American architects who were preparing an installation for the 2018 Venice Biennale. That lit the spark of “From Earth to Sky,” in which seven of those architects are profiled.

The film begins with Douglas Cardinal, who’s Siksika from the Blackfoot Nation in Calgary and credited as the the first Indigenous architect in Canada, if not North America. Among his buildings are the Canadian Museum of History and the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Not bad for someone who was told as a student it would be impossible for him to become an architect.

Also included in the doc are the first female Indigenous architect in America, Tammy Eagle Bull of Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota; Wanda Dalla Costa of Saddle Lake First Nation in Alberta; Alfred Waugh, who’s Chipweyan from the Fond du Lac Band in Saskatchewan; Brian Porter of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario; Daniel Glenn of the Crow Nation in Montana; and Patrick Stewart of the Nisga’a Nation in British Columbia.

All of them have faced obstacles that white architects wouldn’t have to surmount. Cardinal is a residential school survivor; others have endured the generational trauma of residential schools and other fallout of colonialism. But there is an optimism in their work: a pride in traditions and hopefulness for the future that is expressed in the beauty and purpose of what they create.

Common themes emerge as the subjects discuss their practices: involving the communities the buildings will serve in the planning; incorporating traditional Indigenous designs and values in the construction; respecting the natural environment.

For Cardinal, these are practices that can benefit architecture as a whole, especially in the face of global warming.

“The Indigenous teachings can be the foundation for replanning and redesigning our cities,” he says. “We have the responsibility of set(ting) an example not only to our own nations, ultimately to the world as a whole.”

Short Takes

Nurses (June 21, 9 p.m., Global TV/StackTV)

The conceit of this Canadian drama is that it’s about, yes, nurses, rather than the doctors who are the usual heroes of medical dramas. Let’s not pretend it’s reinventing the wheel; the beats will be familiar to anyone who regularly consumes medical shows as the five lead cast members juggle patient care with personal issues and romantic entanglements. But they’re a generally likeable crew and you get to see familiar Canadian actors guest-starring as patients, including Jean Yoon of “Kim’s Convenience” in the first episode of the new season. A couple of new regulars join the cast, including Rachael Ancheril (“Rookie Blue,” “Killjoys”) as new boss Kate Faulkner and Jordan Connor (“Riverdale”) as nurse Matteo Rey, a potential love interest for Grace (Skovbye).

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (June 21, 10 p.m., HBO/Crave)

This special episode of the popular true crime series is a postscript of sorts. It deals with the 2020 sentencing of Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer — whose identity writer Michelle McNamara relentlessly chased before her death in 2016 — and the victims finally venting their fury directly to the man whose rapes and murders irreparably altered their lives. That story is woven together with the one that set McNamara on her lifelong true crime obsession: the unsolved murder of Kathleen Lombardo in Oak Park, Ill., in August 1984. But the fact that killing is still unsolved, along with the possibly related stabbing of a neighbour of Kathleen’s who survived, Grace Puccetti, leaves the viewer without a sense of catharsis and makes the whole episode an awkward addition to the original series.

Odds and Ends

I have seen a couple of episodes of the new Netflix drama “Sex/Life” (June 25), but reviews are embargoed so I’m not allowed to tell you what I think of them. It stars Sarah Shahi (“The L Word,” “Person of Interest”) as a wife and mother of two with a seemingly picture perfect life who suddenly starts lusting after her bad boy ex (Adam Demos, “UnREAL”).

Honestly, I think Helen Mirren could make reciting the phone book sound interesting, but I’ll have to reserve judgment on “When Nature Calls With Helen Mirren” (June 24, 8 p.m., Global TV) since I haven’t seen it yet and it looks kind of dumb in the trailer. Mirren narrates the “unscripted comedy,” in which humans give voice to animals.

Also arriving on June 25 is Season 7 of “Bosch” (Amazon Prime Video). Alas, the screeners I requested never materialized, but I recommend it on the strength of the other six seasons and the excellence of Titus Welliver in the title role. Amazon also has “September Mornings” (June 25), a Brazilian drama about a transgender woman whose new life is complicated when she learns she fathered a son in her previous life.

Disney Plus has “The Mysterious Benedict Society” (June 25), based on the kids’ books by Trenton Lee Stewart, about a group of orphaned children recruited for a secret mission inside a boarding school. Tony Hale (“Veep,” “Arrested Development”) stars as Mr. Benedict.

NOTE: The dates and times listed here reflect information provided to me and cross-checked where possible against broadcast and streaming schedules, 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.