| | | | | | 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. |
Deaf Becomes Her On the surface (and perhaps below it), BritBox and ITVX's Code of Silence is a familiar entry in the busy Civilian Contractor With Specialized Skills Works Alongside the Police genre. The six-part drama — I've watched the first half — from Catherine Moulton is a reminder of how good the genre can be if it has an interesting angle. In this case, the tremendous Rose Ayling-Ellis plays a deaf cafeteria worker recruited to help a team of detectives (led by reliable British TV favorites Andrew Buchan and Charlotte Ritchie) to serve as a lip-reader in an investigation into a potential heist. Director Diarmuid Goggins plays with sound design, on-screen text and disorienting close-ups to capture the main character's perspective and Ayling-Ellis makes her feel complicated and real. Despite oddly repetitive suspense devices — count how often the main character returns home to somebody surprising sitting with her mother — it sets a brisk and frequently breathless pace that I found hard to look away from. Not only is Code of Silence a solid thriller, but I appreciated the secondary interests in gentrification, ableism in the HHS and more. |
Chronic Penis Insufficiency What a roller coaster of a week for Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They sign a $1.5 billion dollar deal with Paramount and they're mocked as sell-outs. They launch a new South Park season with an episode about Donald Trump's penis and they're hailed as free speech warriors. The FCC approves the Paramount-Skydance merger and … they're generally irrelevant. Now, I'm not going to tell you it isn't edgy to mock the size of the president of the United States' junk — this would never have happened in the Warren Harding administration — but the truth is that I found "Sermon on the 'Mount" to be an effective satire of Trump's penis and a limp satire of anything of actual political substance. The whole, "Look at the dictator who thinks he's tough but is actually Satan's boyfriend" thing is both a South Park franchise callback and, at this point, more than a little banally homophobic. To me, good satire instigates and engages conversation, while this is just satisfyingly puerile taunting. But that, streaming on Paramount+, probably has value, too. |
| | | There's a Rap for That Two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the legendary DJ Kool Herc party that's accepted as the symbolic birth of hip-hop, we got a lot of celebratory documentaries, a genre so widespread that even PBS did one (Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World). Paramount+ is calling its new docuseries Hip Hop Was Born Here "groundbreaking," which it absolutely is not, unless you mean "the first hip-hop documentary produced by Peyton Manning." The 28-minute New York-centric episodes, focused on extremely broad topics including hip-hop producers and women in hip-hop, are very sanitized and fairly superficial, but there are solid interviews with the likes of Reverend Run, Big Daddy Kane, Method Man, Cheryl "Salt" James and Roxanne Shante, plus cute if underutilized animated sequences. Hip Hop Was Born Here isn't close to "definitive" and although it's probably a decent primer for total neophytes, mostly it made me sad once again about the recent death of journalist-documentarian Sacha Jenkins (Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men), who was tremendously gifted at this sort of thing. |
I Keep on Malin, In and Out of Love Otherwise, you've got choices this weekend. Netflix’s The Hunting Wives is a Desperate Housewives knockoff, but it's more committed to its R-rated trashiness than most Desperate Housewives knockoffs. Our Angie Han called the series, which features a very tall Malin Akerman, "wildly entertaining." Angie found Hulu's adaptation of Esi Edugyan's Washington Black to be "surprisingly fleet" and I was surprised by how whimsically Spielbergian this topically bleak drama was. And while Traci A. Curry's five-part docuseries Hurricane Katrina: A Race Against Time won't replace HBO's When the Levees Broke and Treme as definitive portraits of the tragedy surrounding the 2005 hurricane, it kicks off (Sunday on NatGeo and Monday on Hulu and Disney+) television's 20th anniversary observances with undeniable power. |
Hoary 'Gilmore' Punch-Drunk Love, streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla, is easily my favorite Adam Sandler movie, but when it comes to the dumb comedies that launched Sandler's career, I have a soft spot in my heart for Happy Gilmore. It's full of great cameos and supporting performances, and it's endlessly rewatchable. Well, maybe not "endlessly," but I rewatched it as recently as last year and still laughed a lot. Netflix's new Happy Gilmore 2 brings back Sander, Julie Bowen and Christopher McDonald under the directorial eye of Kyle Newacheck. Our Frank Scheck calls the sequel "moronic, witless and vulgar," but adds that "fans will love it." So … to quote a different golf movie … it's got that going for it, which is nice. And for a sense of how Happy Gilmore still influences the comedy landscape, watch Apple TV+'s heavily derivative Stick, which was renewed this week for a second season. |
Honoring Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Ozzy Osbourne It was a sad week for Gen Xers. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who became America's older brother on The Cosby Show, died at 54. For predictable reasons, I'm not going to tell you to watch The Cosby Show, but you can check out Warner's work in Jeremiah (Amazon), Malcolm & Eddie (Tubi) and The Resident (Hulu). Ozzy Osbourne, who went from Prince of Darkness to America's befuddled dad on The Osbournes, died at the age of 76. For insight into Osbourne's contributions to the world of heavy metal, watch Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years (Tubi), while The Osbournes is on Amazon. (I wrote a bit about the impact of The Osbournes on the television landscape.) Hulk Hogan also died this week. |
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