| | Welcome to Now See This, THR chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s weekly viewer guide newsletter dedicated to cutting through the daunting clutter of the broadcast, cable and streaming TV landscape! Comments and suggestions welcome at daniel.fienberg@thr.com. |
Morck of the Beast I generally enjoyed AMC's Monsieur Spade as a piece of elevated fan-fic, and when Monsieur Spade stands out as your WORST television series, that means you're having a pretty good run. Scott Frank's new Netflix drama Dept. Q (created with Chandni Lakhani), his first series that wasn't announced as a "limited" series, might not be quite as good as Godless or The Queen's Gambit, but it's another well-produced, smartly made piece of genre television for grownups, with Matthew Goode (as the amusingly named "Carl Morck") and Kelly Macdonald anchoring the Scottish-set mystery's tremendous ensemble. And if you haven't seen The Lookout, Goode and Frank's previous collaboration, it's streaming on Paramount+. |
A Z Grows in Brooklyn (or Queens) Based on the six episodes sent to critics, FX's Adults, a new twenty-something comedy from Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, has potential. The writing is often sharp and the cast is full of breakout contenders, including Owen Thiele (also appearing this month in a smaller role in Amazon's Overcompensating), Amita Rao and Lucy Freyer. The season has several fun guest turns from more familiar faces, including Charlie Cox from Daredevil in a multi-episode stint and a playing-themselves cameo that I won't spoil even though you probably won't care — unless you're Gen Z, in which case the show leads me to believe you'll care a lot. My major reservations extend to the series' directors and their failure to exercise proper volume control. Adults is one of the shout-iest shows I've ever seen, which makes long stretches wallow in try-hard exhaustion. Or maybe Zoomers just yell a lot. |
| | 'Live' Aid Through its fourth episode, in April, I'd have described Netflix's Everybody's Live with John Mulaney as a minor disappointment. The extension of last summer's Everybody's in LA was mostly just inconsistent. Mulaney and company's biggest problem was figuring out weekly topics that the host and his guests were interested in discussing, so you got a week built around "Cruises," when none of the panelists had ever been on a cruise, or a week on "Squatters," when none of the panelists had a clue how to discuss squatters in an empathetic and legally responsible way. But in the second half of the season, by approaching topics with well-earned skepticism, the entire show improved, whether it was the collective amusement about whether dinosaur bones reflect how dinosaurs actually look or a full hour of irritation at the roll-out of Real ID. Mulaney's best guests have been former talk show hosts like David Letterman and Conan O'Brien, who appreciate his meta examination of the genre, with wonderfully odd gambits like an episode Mulaney performed while blindfolded, an episode with sidekick Richard Kind behaving like Gene Simmons after a concussion and the build-up to Mulaney's finale fight against a trio of 14-year-old boys. Because Mulaney's approach isn't topical, the show became one of my favorite spring escapes, and because it isn't topical, you can just hop in whenever you want. Bring on season two, Netflix! And bring on more of John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, John! |
Mike Check Every year or so, it's nice to check in on Mike Birbiglia's heath and general well-being, so it's good that the comic/monologist is so prolific. The Good Life, Birbiglia's new Netflix special, begins with the seemingly obligatory update on his sleep disorder, but the primary health concern here actually relates to his father, whose stroke sets up a meditation on parenting and the things he's unable to explain to his daughter, including drugs, x-rays and Jesus. Birbiglia is working through a lot of thoughts on Catholicism in general and Pope Francis in particular, which maybe makes this special a bit of a museum piece. Fortunately, Birbiglia's appeal, stop me if you heard this in the last blurb, isn't primarily about topicality and The Good Life delivers his patented blend of sentiment and occasionally coarse — lots of molestation jokes — laughs. |
HBOver Both The Last of Us and The Rehearsal wrapped their second seasons last week and you can now tune in and watch their full run on Max. I thought The Last of Us had some great episodes — "Through the Valley," where That Thing Happened, was terrifying and heartbreaking — but as a seven-episode arc, it did nothing for me. Even the penultimate episode, as filled with beautiful moments as it was, was an exercise in filling in details and over-explaining character arcs that a show with more confidence would have trusted to viewer intelligence. Compare it to how Andor made a series of temporal leaps and said, "You're smart. You'll figure out what you need to." In contrast, The Rehearsal was wholly and unpredictably a six-episode journey from the questions Nathan Fielder posed in the premiere — "Are aviation problems usually a function of poor interaction between pilots and co-pilots?" or "Can a comedy show enact societal change?" — into something bigger, more ambitious, funnier and more introspective. | Stretch Armstrong Every time I type the name of Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead, my computer tries to fix it as Fountainhead, proving that autocorrect is capable of low-level textual analysis. Armstrong's first project since the juggernaut that was Succession, Mountainhead is a critique of hollow American wealth, specifically the most scathing deconstruction of the social media and tech space since the first Succession season. More than that, though, Armstrong uses this story of four tech moguls — played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzmann, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef — to focus on the narcissism of the rich and, without ever citing Ayn Rand directly, on the dead-ended philosophy of Objectivism. Mountainhead is more of a one-act play than a movie and, especially in the middle before things go entirely unhinged, it's hilarious and somehow bleaker than Succession at its darkest. I don't disagree with THR reviewer Frank Scheck that Mountainhead is somewhat "slapdash in its execution." But thematically I don't think it's insignificant to make a movie about how desperate and deluded a society would have to become to believe our salvation will come from a cabal of multi-billionaires. |
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