The Eddy (Netflix, May 8)
If you love Paris, jazz and the work of Andre Holland (“Moonlight,” “The Knick”) – and I love two out of those three – this could be the show for you.
It’s from British writer Jack Thorne (“His Dark Materials”), and boasts Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle and songwriter Glen Ballard as executive producers. Chazelle also directed the first two episodes.
Holland is Elliot, the American owner of a small Paris jazz club (The Eddy of the title), a well known musician who stopped performing after the death of his son. Holland is an actor who can do as much with a look as some do with a page of dialogue, a talent that is well suited to the slower pace of the series and the attention it pays to the internal struggles of its characters.
Handheld camera work, liberal use of closeups and naturalistic dialogue (in several languages, with subtitles) give the series a documentary feel.
The Paris showcased here is not the city of travelogues or movie musicals. It’s gritty, sometimes dangerously so. We see the back alleyways, the banlieues and the nondescript buildings that real people live in, not a flower box or cast iron balcony in sight.
The cast includes American Amandla Stenberg as Elliot’s troubled daughter Julie; French actors (and real-life couple) Tahar Rahim and Leila Bekhti as Elliot’s best friend Farid and his wife Amira; French actor Adil Dehbi as bar employee Sim, who befriends Julie; and Polish actor Joanna Kulig as Elliot’s former lover Maja, the singer in the bar’s house band.
The music, written by Ballard, threads its way naturally through every episode, performed and recorded live by a band of multicultural actor-musicians.
It anchors the characters, brings them together when they’re at odds, brings them solace when they’re in pain. And there is a lot of pain here, some of it precipitated by a violent incident in the first episode; some of long standing, such as Elliot’s and Julie’s reckoning with the fallout of their broken family.
If you’re used to whiz-bang plotting and rapid-fire dialogue, “The Eddy” might feel plodding to you, but I found its humanity appealing.
It’s about people striving and failing; about love, family, friendship and their imperfections; about life in general.
The characters stay with you, like snatches of song.
Beginnings and Endings
Sunday night marks the beginning of Season 5 of “Billions” on Crave (9 p.m.) and the end of Season 3 of “Westworld” on HBO (9 p.m.). I’m behind on both shows so I can’t give you much insight into how either unfolds. I do know that Julianna Margulies (who I’ll always remember as Nurse Hathaway on “ER” although she’s better known now for “The Good Wife”) has joined the cast of “Billions.” It also looks to be a good season for Maggie Siff (“Sons of Anarchy”), another actor who’s very watchable.
Sunday also brings the second half of the fourth season of “Rick and Morty” on Adult Swim (11:30 p.m.), a show that I confess I had never watched until I screened this new episode. It seems clever enough (I got a particular chuckle out of the Bechdel test reference) and I’m sure people who like the series will enjoy it.
Odds and ends
Jerry Seinfeld has a new standup special, “23 Hours to Kill,” coming to Netflix May 5. It was not made available to critics to screen ahead of time, which seems odd to me given what a big name Seinfeld is. I’ve only seen a couple of trailers and neither of them made me laugh, so make of that what you will.
BritBox has “Florence Nightingale” launching on May 6. It’s timely on a couple of levels: this is the bicentennial year of her birth and nurses are very much top of mind during the coronavirus outbreak. Nightingale revolutionized the practice of nursing in Britain and around the world after she became famous for tending to soldiers during the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. This show is described as a biopic drama, but it felt to me more like an extended “Heritage Minute,” using Nightingale’s own words from her letters and journals to sketch her devotion to her profession and her religion. Nonetheless, Laura Fraser, who I’ve enjoyed in shows like “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul” and “Loch Ness,” makes a compelling Florence and gives you a taste of just how extraordinary this woman was.
If you haven’t seen them yet, I recommend “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix, “Looking for Alaska” on CBC Gem, “Run” on HBO/Crave and Season 6 of “Bosch” on Amazon Prime Video. Also, check out Toronto actor Robbie Amell in “Upload” (Amazon) as a young man who’s uploaded to a virtual afterlife after his sudden (and suspicious) death.
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