| | | | | | 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. |
America Runs on Duncan If you’re like me, the end of Game of Thrones blunted some of your enthusiasm for all things Westeros and the first two seasons of House of the Dragon left you exhausted. Consider A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, then, to be a six-episode palate cleanser , reminding viewers that the realm isn’t exclusively occupied by incestuous megalomaniacs in blond wigs riding CGI dragons of varying quality. HBO's adaptation of the novellas sometimes known as Tales of Dunk and Egg focuses on a gigantic lowborn hedge knight (Peter Claffey’s Ser Duncan) and his plucky bald squire (Dexter Sol Ansell’s Egg) as they head to a tournament to fight for money and honor. At its best, it’s a varied comedy (sometimes extremely broad and lowbrow, sometimes driven by co-creator Ira Parker and company’s wordplay) with an odd couple just wandering and meeting odd people — think The Meanderings of Ser Jack Reacher and Aang From The Last Airbender. And it’s low-key charming. Be sure to read James Hibberd’s THR cover story on George R.R. Martin and the development of the show. |
Cable Bundle One of the weaknesses of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is that other than one underwritten puppeteer and some sex workers, it has no female characters at all (much less fully developed female characters). Fortunately, the rest of the week’s major offerings steer in the opposite direction, with intriguing women at the center and one-dimensional male foils to the side. Take, for example, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials , focusing on plucky mystery-solver Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce). The Netflix three-parter is all about Bundle and McKenna-Bruce is a wise-cracking pleasure, as is Helena Bonham Carter as her mother, a misanthropic aristocrat fallen on hard times. The series lags in the middle, but sets things up well for future installments. For more Bundle, the 1981 PBS miniseries Seven Dials Mystery, featuring Cheryl Campbell as Bundle and Sir John Gielgud as her father, is on BritBox. Meanwhile, for more McKenna-Bruce, she’s spectacular in the harrowing indie How to Have Sex , which is streaming on Netflix and Mubi. Think Euphoria, only with tourists in Crete. How to Have Sex, I mean. For Seven Dials, think Knives Out, only less star-studded. |
| | | All ‘Riot’ on the West Yorkshire Front Speaking of BritBox — and periodically, I like to — Riot Women, the new drama from Happy Valley auteur Sally Wainwright, is now on the streamer. The premise is reductively a menopausal, non-religious We Are Lady Parts , as a group of middle-aged women in West Yorkshire come together to start a rock band for a talent show and come to realize it could be an outlet for their rage against the patriarchy. The cast is great, particularly Joanna Scanlan, Lorraine Ashbourne and Amelia Bullmore, but my attention was flagging until the third episode, when the series does something VERY smart and VERY emotionally effective that most shows would drag out for full seasons, making me eager to watch more. The real breakout star is Rosalie Craig, a British stage veteran whom I saw in the tremendous gender-swapped production of Company a few years back. |
Shoot ’em Down, Turn Around, Come on ‘Ponies’ I stopped watching Riot Women after three episodes because I was in sample mode this week, but I plowed through all eight episodes of Peacock’s Ponies, another female-centered drama. That isn’t necessarily reflective of relative quality, mind you. I don’t really disagree with Angie Han’s review , which says that despite “moments of dazzle” the ’70s-set Russian spy dramedy doesn’t always have enough depth. But even with its myriad flaws — an overreliance on wild coincidence, weak casting of its secondary male roles, some mammoth gaps in character logic — I couldn’t stop watching through to a finale that has at least three or four BIG twists and a massive cliffhanger. In this respect, the series has more in common with the uneven but bingeable second season of The Flight Attendant, directed and produced by Ponies co-creator Susanna Fogel, than the more nourishing first. Ponies kept me going with oddball comic detours, snazzy period details, always welcome co-star Adrian Lester and stars Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson. Richardson in particular grew on me, especially once I determined she’s playing her character like Natasha Lyonne if she were a spy in Cold War Moscow. Oh, and I loved the odd cameo from Patrick Fabian and wished he’d appeared in more than just the pilot. |
The Final Exam Frontier My biggest question about Paramount+’s Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is who thought this was the type of show capable of sustaining episodes often running over an hour apiece. In the four installments I’ve seen, there were just so many places that it lumbered when it should have moved swiftly. But when it moves swiftly, Starfleet Academy delivers ample fun, putting a CW-style YA spin on the franchise. Then again, it’s a young adult-centric series in which my favorite performances come from the delightfully relaxed Holly Hunter, a makeup-engulfed Gina Yashere, national treasure Robert Picardo and Paul Giamatti, who’s having an amount of fun that is currently legal in only 13 states. I agree with Angie that, of the young actors, Karim Diané and Kerrice Brooks, focus of the fourth and fifth episodes respectively, are the standouts. |
Ooze Your Own ‘Adventure’ Only Stranger Things could release a feature-length documentary covering the entirety of its final season and have it be, at 122 minutes, shorter than the actual finale. (Yes, the actual finale. Anybody who watched that finale, complete with its 45-minute epilogue, and thought there was a secret REAL finale coming is … let’s just say … reaching.) Martina Radwan got impressive access to the full pre-production and production process — apparently Stranger Things had no editors — and the Netflix documentary is full of very good moments spotlighting the stars, various people named Duffer and, best of all, oodles of deserving below-the-line talent. Sure, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things is an extended commercial, but I enjoyed seeing the writers debating the series’ end right up to the last moment, got emotional watching the cast bawl at the final table read and came away understanding why so much of the last season didn’t quite work — and I’m not just talking about Shawn Levy’s disappointment with the Goo Room. Also dropping on Netflix this week is The Rip , Joe Carnahan’s cop thriller that marks the latest teaming of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Our David Rooney praises the cast and twisty plotting. |
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