| | | | | | 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. |
When Life Looks Like Easy Street / There Is Danger in Ecuador If Julio Torres (of Fantasmas fame) and Pedro Almodovar (of Pedro Almodovar fame) made a stop-motion comic soap opera about businesswomen and guinea pigs in 1980s Ecuador, it would probably look something like Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, premiering Sunday night at midnight on Adult Swim. Actually created by Gonzalo Cordova ( Tuca & Bertie), the show has a plot that’s hard to explain, but it’s bizarre, raunchy and more emotionally complex that you'll initially expect. Plus, it tells its story in eight episodes of around 12 minutes apiece. If not for the amount of sweaty nudity (sanitized with black bars), this energetic, clearly delivered Spanish series would make a tremendous language teaching tool. Or maybe just a tremendously odd teaching tool? Either way, it's a silly and visually distinctive look at motherhood, sisterhood, erotic obsession and the eternal question of whether guinea pigs are better eaten or raised as pets. |
Box of 'Rainmaker' Before Bluesky became the social media platform that outsiders called "an echo chamber" and insiders called "less overrun with Nazis than Twitter," it was USA's entire brand identity, referring to the successful run of upbeat semi-comic thrillers that included Burn Notice, White Collar, Royal Pains and more. Then USA hit some bumps in the original programming road, got out of the scripted TV business, watched Suits become a sensation for Netflix and got back into the scripted business, with a new adaptation of The Rainmaker premiering Friday. In imagining the John Grisham adaptation as a return to USA's "blue sky" identity, the Rainmaker team has stripped the legal drama of the aggressive cynicism and timely contempt for the health insurance industry that fueled the book and the 1997 Francis Ford Coppola adaptation. It's now a much more conventional series, carried by the supporting performances from John Slattery and Lana Parrilla. It's hollow, but entertaining — if not nearly as entertaining as the film (now streaming on Paramount+), which managed to be amply funny and sunny without losing its anti-corporate edge. |
| | | What a Long, Strange Strip It's Been Back in the early '10s, Starz aired two seasons of Magic City, a handsomely produced, well-cast, generally forgettable period crime drama that remains a part of my life through a very comfortable swag bathrobe that I still use. Try not to confuse THAT Starz-produced Magic City with the new Starz-produced five-part docuseries Magic City: An American Fantasy. THIS Magic City is a star-studded (talking heads include Drake and Jermaine Dupri, both executive producers, Shaquille O'Neal and Dominique Wilkins and many more) look at the iconic Atlanta strip club of the same name. This is Starz, so Magic City doesn't skimp on the casual nudity nor the indirect plugs for BMF . But it's got some things on its mind, including an exploration of Magic City's connection to Atlanta's explosion as an international mecca of Black excellence. There's some very welcome formal levity courtesy of director Charles Todd, who treats the club's history like a succession of deliciously exaggerated tall tales recounted by a colorful assortment of dancers, criminals and superstars and grounded by the family that has been involved with Magic City since it opened. The light tone and running times of under 30 minutes per episode help Magic City zip along, but when the subject matter gets dark and the body count rises, it's perhaps too flippant. More than anything, Magic City whet my appetite for the return of P-Valley, a superb show that deserved to be name-checked here somewhere. |
I'll Get Up and 'Butterfly' Away, 'Butterfly' Away I very much agree with Angie Han's contention that Amazon's daddy/daughter spy drama Butterfly is "pleasantly innocuous" when it seems to have the potential to be more than that. At the same time, I very much endorse the long-overdue development of an action franchise around Daniel Dae Kim — odd that both Kim and his Lost colleague Josh Holloway (RIP, Duster ) are getting, "Hey, remember how much you liked this guy 15 years ago?" showcases this year. I thought the first two episodes were rough, relying on barely-above-generic action scenes to build investment instead of characters. Once the show settles into the relationship between Kim's David, a former super-spy gone underground for nine years, and Reina Hardesty's Rebecca, following in the footsteps of a father she thought was dead, it gets much better. Newcomer Hardesty is especially good. The suggestion that Rebecca is more sociopath than sad little spy with daddy issues might be enough to make me check out a second season. |
Dallas, Got a Soft Machine Looking ahead to next week, Netflix continues its commitment to sports-based programming and extended commercials for the Dallas Cowboys with America's Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys , a far-too-long eight-part docuseries about the rise and fall of the Cowboys' mini-dynasty of the 1990s. Directors Maclain and Chapman Way have assembled most of the key talent you'd want to hear from — Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, Barry Switzer, Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, etc. — and the series embraces the internal squabbling and general lawlessness that left the Cowboys with three Super Bowl wins in four years, but short of extended greatness. The aesthetic choices to make this saga feel like a Western in general and a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western in specific is amusing and entertaining, if inconsistently applied. It's hard not to feel, though, like the adulation for Jones borders on cartoonish, especially when it comes to glossing over the past 30 years of repetitive, Super Bowl-free frustration in a rushed and reductive finale. As a personal preference, if you're going to spend this much time chronicling a franchise, I’d prefer a little bit more interest in the host city and its fandom, but Dallas and the Cowboys fans apparently lack the gravitational pull of Jones. |
Touch of Brown I'm not sure why Snoopy is "presenting" Apple TV+'s Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical. It is, oddly, much more of a Sally-centric story, as the gang heads to Cloverhill Ranch and learn that their beloved summer camp might be closing forever. The 40-minute special is very sweet and three of the five original songs were written by Ben Folds. "When We Were Light" and "Look Up, Charlie Brown" are both ultra-catchy emotion-bombs that should be submitted for Emmy consideration next year. For a VERY different musical experience, check out Netflix's format-bending documentary, Songs from the Hole, about an incarcerated man who spiritually escapes the walls of solitary confinement by writing songs. I reviewed Contessa Gayles' film out of SXSW last year and called it "a fresh and lyrical take on the genre." |
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