Previewing Only Murders in the Building: Season Four

Only Murders in the Building is the funniest show on television.  There are multiple times when I was laughing so hard while watching the show I had to rewind the scene because I missed what happened next.  Like at the end of the first season when Charles got drugged.  And at the end of the second season during the slow motion portion of the Killer Reveal Party.  (Unfortunately they took a more serious approach with the reveal of the killer in the third season fell a little flat.)  The hardest I laughed outside the final minutes of the season was when Jane Lynch showed up playing Sazz Pataki, Charles Hayden Savage’s stunt double during his CBS procedural days back in the nineties.

 

Unfortunately the end of the third season saw Sazz being shot and we the audience were left wondering if that bullet was meant for Charles and just hit someone who looked like him instead.  Unlike the first three victims, Sazz is a likeable and empathetic victim (sure flashbacked ended up softening all three of the previous victims), leaving us much more invested in the investigation.  But on the flipside, where the suspect list was much longer for the previous, more hate-able victims, who could possibly want Sazz dead?  Of course, Charles, on the other hand, has plenty of people on that list.  And what exactly was Sazz writing in her blood when she died?  And what was the time sensitive thing she had to tell Charles before she was shot? 

 

Of course, the skeptic in me also wants to bring up my number one rule of television watching: if you do not see a body, they are not really dead (and even if you do see the body, they still might not be dead-dead).  While we saw Sazz get shot, no one discovered her body in the third season.  This was the show that made it look like Ben Glenroy was very dead at the end of season two, but he still managed to show up to the after-party, so there may very well be a twist this season too.

 

The other big development is that Hollywood wants to make the Only Murders in Building podcast into a movie.  It seems like Amy Schumer wanting to buy the rights seems to be dropped; instead Paramount will be making the show.  Considering 20th Century, which is owned by Disney, produces the real show, I wonder just how hard up for money The Mount is for letting this show make fun of them.  With a Hollywood movie comes Hollywood stars, Eva Longoria, Eugene Levy, and Zach Galifianakis are set to play Mabel, Charles, and Oliver.   Melissa McCarthy, Molly Shannon, Kumail Nanjiani, Richard Kind and Edgar from You’re the Worst also make appearances this season.  Oh yeah, and Meryl Streep returns.  And thankfully with The Idol canceled, so Di’vine Joy Randolph was more available for this season. And her return this season might be as memorable as her season three return.  Now, that is a long list of guest stars, but there are a couple of surprise appearances that have not been announced yet to look out for.

 

With season four, the trio is back for more hilarity.  Thankfully there is not much to pull them apart like last season.  This may be the most the trio has been together compared to previous seasons.  And this season we even get a bonus trio!  Howard is back and has found a new purpose that works better than his time as the stage manager.  Some many guest stars can be tricky, especially whenever they play versions of themselves, but all the actors acquaint themselves perfectly within the story (well, except the directors of the movie who and not quite as bad as the producers from season three, but are still close).  So make sure you have the remote close while watching the new season, because you may have to rewind a few times because you missed something because you were laughing too hard.

 

Only Murders in the Building airs Tuesdays on Hulu.  Just one episode premieres tomorrow with new episodes weekly.

Previewing A Gentleman in Moscow

 

The communist revolution of 1917 in Russia saw the execution of the royal family.  During the next four years the Leninist re-organized the country.  The tsarist aristocracy was eradicated.  This is the setting for A Gentleman in Moscow where Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan) plays Count Alexander Rostov, whose life is spared after a poem attributed to him is presented at his hearing.  Though he has been sentenced to live the rest of his days in the hotel he had been living in.  Though he is resigned to the servants quarters of the hotel and if he ever leaves the hotel he will be shot on sight.  But hey, he eats for free at the very upscale restaurant inside the hotel. 

 

The story picks up when he runs into a precocious young girl who just happens to know all the secrets of the hotel.  Where are her parents?  Who knows.   That she does not interact with anyone else in the first couple episodes will lead to some speculation.  Is she even real?  It is she is the narrator of the show.

 

Another occupant is Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Asoka).  She is usually good in everything, but she does not really pull of a glamorous Russian actress.  The wig and accent (which, much like The Great is not Russian, but English) really do not work here. Thankfully the wig disappears after a couple episodes.  Johnny Harris (Without Sin) plays Rostov’s jailor with menace.  Fehinti Balogun (Dune) shows up as Rostov’s old friend who was also part of the revolution.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow is a well-crafted miniseries that can humorous as it is heartfelt.  In just eight episodes, the writers get you to get really invested in these characters, even the ones that do not even show up until the second half of the season while the story barrels to a thrilling conclusion after spending decades within the hotel.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow premieres today on Paramount+ with Showtime and will air Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing the Woman in the Wall

 

You know you are in for an interesting show when it starts off with a whisper before a woman wakes up in the middle of the road, surrounded by cows, with a little blood on her white nightgown.  When she gets home, “Stay awake” is scribbled on a door and a knife in the picture of Jesus.  Oh yeah, and by the end of the first episode, there will be a woman in the wall.  Hence the title: The Woman in the Wall.

 

The woman who wakes up in the middle of the road is played by Ruth Wilson (The Affair).  She has a long history of trauma-based sleepwalking that goes back to her time in the infamous Magdalene Laundries, institutions that housed promiscuous woman who were forced to work without pay aside from some meager food provisions.  They were essentially prisons.  Wilson’s painful time there is resurrected when she receives note saying, “I know what happened to your child” with a phone number on the back.

 

Around the same time, Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters) is investigating the death of a priest of whom he has a history with.  It does not take very long before the woman and the wall and the dead priest start to interconnect.  The Woman in the Wall is a harrowing tale focusing on one of Ireland’s deepest shame which is only heightened by an unreliable narrator who’s ever growing sleep problems are making her mental state get worse as the show goes along.

 

The Woman in the Wall airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime with Paramount+.  Episodes are streaming the previous Friday on Paramount+ with the Showtime plan.

Previewing Thriller 40

Taylor Swift had a pretty impressive year with her Eras Tour, she is the biggest artist on the planet, but even Taylor in 2023 pales in comparison to the year Michael Jackson had in 1983.  It has been forty years since Thriller dominated the zeitgeist.  70 million albums sold worldwide, 7 top ten singles, 12 Grammy nominations, eight won, including Album of the Year.  Forget Swift showing up to Chief’s game, Jackson showed up to the award ceremony that year with Brooke Shields and Emmanuel Lewis.

 

That album is now being chronicled with a new documentary, Thriller 40, with commentary from Shields, Mary J. Blige, Mark Ronson, Raphael Saadiq, Misty Copland, Thriller director John Landis, and many people who played on the album.  Though there is a glaring omission of any new comments from famed producer Quincy Jones, though he did just turn ninety earlier this year.  It is also a little surprising than none of Jackson’s siblings gave any new interviews for the film.

 

The doc stays focused on the time period so it never even hints at the many controversies that Jackson dealt with later in his life.  But they do focus on a few controversies from the time period.  I forgot that Michael was involved with ET and there was a big blowout with his record label because the film had a deal with a different label.  They also go into his accident on the set of the infamous Pepsi commercial.  But it was wild to remember that was for a tour with his family that his father Joe forced him to go on instead of touring behind Thriller on his own.

 

The film is a nice walk down memory lane focusing on one of the most iconic albums of all time.  Sure it is a fluff piece and in the middle there is a weird segment from some guy from Tik Tok talking about how Jackson is reaching a new generation, but came off more as an advertisement for Tik Tok, but is still worth checking out if you were ever a fan of the music, which, considering how many albums that were sold, was probably everyone who was alive in the eighties.

 

Thriller 40 airs Saturday at 8:00 is currently streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.  

Previewing The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

 

At the bottom of the press release for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, they made sure to let us know that, “The film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, was completed prior to William Friedkin’s passing on August 7, 2023.”  Friedkin was the director of such fabled seventies movies such as The French Connection and The Exorcist, though people of my generation will most likely remember him more for directing Blue Chips.  Friedkin was not the only person associated with the film that passed since the competition of the film, Lance Reddick, who plays the head judge in the film, left us back in March.

 

People of my generation will also likely watch the military courtroom drama and have a hard time not thinking of A Few Good Men.  Though to be fair, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is based on a book released three and a half decades before Aaron Sorkin wrote the play that was later turned into the acclaimed movie.  Since that play was written for a visual and audio medium, it has the advantage as books are written difference and there are no “You can’t handle the truth” moments in the new film no matter how the defense attorney tries to get a witness to break to help his client.

 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is about Executive Officer (Jack Lacy) who removes the commanding (Kiefer Sutherland) during a cyclone claiming he was not mentally stable and was charged with mutiny and now stands trial.  Monica Raymund plays the lead prosecutor while Jason Clarke tries to paint the mutiny as a courageous act as the defense.  The film moves the time and location of The Caine from the Pacific during World War II to modern day in the Persian Gulf where the ship is sweeping for mines.

 

The film takes place almost entirely in the courtroom with only a couple hallway scenes and a quick epilogue.  It is pretty bold to not show any scenes on the boat, even retroactively.  Instead we get a very clinical look at the trail which sometimes comes across as an old Court TV case with very few cinematic flourishes.  Instead we have to rely on the testimony of the people on board The Caine to paint the picture.

 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial airs Sunday at 9:00 on Showtime.  The film will be available to stream Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime.

Previewing Heist 88

 

Sit down kiddies, I have a story to tell: you now that phone in your hand that does just about everything you need, from banking transactions to playing games, and yes, it will even make phone calls.  But there was a time when there were not smartphones.  There was even a time when very few people even owned computers.  Even the few people that had them, these were very rudimentary computers that were not connected to the internet.

 

Heist 88 takes you back to this time; the 88 in the title being the year it takes place.  Courtney B Vance plays a criminal mastermind that recruits his cash strapped nephew and friends who work at a bank to pull off the second half of the title.  Sure, banks were some of the few places that had computers back then, but this is before secure transfer and encryption.  To transfer money, even millions of dollars, all you needed was a single conformation code and a second bank employee confirms the code via a phone call.

 

Inspired by true events, Heist 88 is a tight, just under ninety minutes.  We do not get much background on the players aside from a clunky montage where Vance goes around and sees just how struggling his potential accomplices are.  There is not even you usual epilogue of what happened to these people afterwards you usually see in these inspired by true event movies.

 

Despite some strong performances (unfortunately Keith David does not have much of a role), you can tell why Paramount decided to put it straight Showtime as it is a second tier movie, though one with a twist ending for those not familiar with the story it is based on.

 

Heist 88 airs Sunday at 9:00 on Showtime.  The film is currently able to stream on Paramount+ with Showtime.

Previewing Billions Season Seven

 

Poor Michael Prince, he was brought in to replace Bobby Axelrod but just one season after jettisoning Bobby to some nondescript European city, presumably to never be seen again, Axe is back.  Not only is he back, but front and center in the seventh and final season poster for Billions, pushing Prince to the edges.  Making things worse is that Bobby is barely in the episodes given to critics.  Another character that has not been seen in a while may actually have more screen time than Axe in those  episodes.

 

But hey, at least Prince gets to open the season with a very eye opening scene.  Unfortunately that is directly followed by a “5 months earlier“ chyron.  That gets us closer to the end of last season which ended in a high stakes game of chicken which left Prince $3.5 billion cheaper and Chuck in jail, though the latter was short lived as New York State Attorney General Dave Mahar bailed him out.  Prince would move on as he has bigger fish to fry.  After failing to bring the Olympics to New York, now he is trying to run for president as an Independent.

 

But this is an end of the era.  It has been announced that the seventh will be final season of Billions (though Millions and Trillions are currently in development along with versions of Billions set in Miami and London… geez).  And it is time to wrap things up if they think they need Bobby Axelrod to save the show after just one season without him even though the show had gotten stale with Bobby and Chuck going after each other for the previous five seasons (aside from that one stretch when they were on the same side).  The show even seems to run out of pop culture references, there is an awkward Nirvana references early in the season and I was left wondering if they were cribbing other shows’ with a couple of reference.   Like most Showtime shows, this one seems to be ended one to three seasons too late.

 

Billions airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime, though you can stream episodes on Fridays on Paramount+ with Showtime.

Previewing Ghosts of Beirut

 

“This is a fictional account of deeply researched events.”  That is how Ghosts of Beirut starts off.  It is not quite The Great’s “An occasionally true story,” but an interesting way of telling us this ripped from the headlines story may or may not actually be how the story went down.  The titular character is Imad Mughniyeh, the founder member of Lebanon’s Islamic Jihad Organization, second in command of Hezbollah, and was credited to killing the most Americans before the 9/11 attacks including the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing.

 

The show follows Mughniyeh follows him as a 21-year-old though his over quarter century reign of terror threw his eyes and the CIA and Mossad agents they tried to hunt him down.  The fictional retelling of his story is intertwined with real talking head comments from journalist and the agents who were in the CIA at the time and well as real footage of newscasts reporting many of the terror attacks credited to Mughniyeh.

 

Covering multiple decades in four episodes means a lot of jumping around and with much of the emphasis on Lebanese characters and many Mossad agents the show has plenty of subtitles.  Still Ghosts of Beirut is an important highlight on someone most Americans do not even know the name even if they lived through the eighties and definitely remember his warpath.  The limited series stars an international cast including Dina Shihabi (Jack Ryan, Archive 81), Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding), Garret Dillahunt (12 Years a Slave), Iddo Goldberg (Snowpiercer), Hisham Suleiman (Munich, Fauda), Amir Khoury (Image of Victory) and Rafi Gavron (A Star is Born).

 

Ghosts of Beirut airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime, but you can stream or watch all four episodes On Demand starting Friday.

Previewing Waco: The Aftermath

 

Yellowstone is the most popular show on television, yet I could not name a second show that has ever aired on The Paramount Channel aside from their very first scripted show based on the Waco tragedy starring Tim Riggins in a mullet.  Studios love digging for intellectual property, but I would have never guessed that we would get a Waco Extended Universe.  Waco: The Aftermath will not actually be airing on The Paramount Channel, or even the streaming service of the same name but a different channel in the Paramount family: Showtime.

 

Despite having “Aftermath” in the title, there are actually three storyline, one of which sees a younger David Koresh (sadly someone other than Tim Riggins is under the mullet this time).  The show also follows Michael Shannon, the lead FBI negotiator from the first show who has moved on to a new case about white nationalist that clumsily tries to tie into the Oklahoma City bombing.  The third storyline deals with the trial of four Branch Davidians that followed the siege, granted only one of the actors were actually on the original show, and I do not even remember that one.  Though the press release actually listed “Waco” as a previous credit so apparently she has not done much since if that was the biggest credit they wanted to highlight.

 

There are a couple other actors who reprise their roles like John Leguizamo (Super Mario Bros.), who played an undercover ATF agent, and Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) as the FBI agent who oversaw the siege.  Apparently his character was able to grow a mustache in the days between when that series ended and this one started.  But really, both of these roles just come off as glorified cameos, which is probably why Whigham did not bother to save off that mustache.

 

The three storylines come off as really disjointed.  The new David in the earliest timeline lacks the charisma to pull off being a cult leader.  While Shannon does his serious drama acting, two new additions come across as more as Saturday Night Live characters.  While being the over the top Wags on Billions works there, David Constable’s southern fried judge in the Davidian case is a little over the top.  Same goes to Gary Cole (Pineapple Express) who also seems to think he is a comedy playing a private investigator and part time conspiracy theorist who claims he used to be in the CIA. 

 

But to be honest, those two are the most entertaining part of the show along with possibly the weirdest needle drop in the history of television (though, another Showtime series, Yellowjackets, has an upcoming episode that ends with a needle drop that is also in the running) featuring George Michael.   But I kind of hope Waco: The Aftermath is successful if only for it to inspire Hulu to do The Dropout: The Aftermath featuring the trial of Elisabeth Holmes.  

 

Waco: the Aftermath airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime, but episodes are available to stream as well as On Demand the Friday before the linear premiere.   Which means the premiere is available now.

Previewing Yellowjackets: Season Two

 

You would have to go back to “We have to go back” for a final line of dialogue that got me so hyped for the next season as, “Who the fork is Lottie Matthews!?!?”  While we only had to wait seven months to figure out why Jack wanted to go back on Lost, it has been over fourteen months since the last episode of Yellowjackets where Nat’s banking buddy, who was looking into who exactly emptied Travis’s bank account, asked that question.   It only takes a short eight minutes into season two until we get our first look at adult Lottie in all her cult leader glory, though it is weird that her cultist refer to her as “Charlotte” (almost as weird as Lottie going from towering over Nat in high school to basically the same height in present day).  Do to their addiction to the color purple, her followers are occasionally referred to as “Purple People” and I cannot hear someone call them that and not think of the song Purple People Eater.  This cannot be a coincidence.

 

While it was not that much of a surprise when Simone Kessell (The Crossing) was cast as adult Lottie since her name was mentioned in the finale, it was really disappointing that a press release spoiled that Van, who almost died multiple times during the first season and will be played as an adult by Lauren Ambrose (Can’t Hardly Wait), made it out of the Canadian wilderness.  But unlike Lottie who we meet fairly quickly, it is a while before we see adult Van on screen, which manages to make the spoiler worse.  With the addition to the cast of the older version (and both younger version getting promoted to cast members) we do get and updated title sequence with more Lottie and Van, but thankfully the dearly departed Jackie and her throat slash / wink segment remains.

 

It does not take long to meet the other big casting news for the second season, Elijah Wood, in a The Ice Storm reunion with Christina Ricci, playing a fellow Citizen Detective alongside Ricci’s Misty.  Though, I do fear the longevity of anyone who crosses path with Misty, who is still a raving psychopath.  Early in the season, adult Misty makes a very inappropriate cookie while teen Misty gives another type of inappropriate present.  Of course, this is why Misty remains the most entertaining character on the show.

 

Those are not the only new faces this season.  Three of the background Yellowjackets are brought more to the forefront with a little more screen time and a couple lines of dialogue.  Of course all three are stuck together at the start of the episode before one starts spending a lot a time with Misty (again, I fear for anyone who spends too much time with Missy).  One of them seems like they are more of a theater kid than athlete, another I actually mistook for Laura Lee when I first saw her, and the third has to shoot to the top of the Who Is Pit Girl Power Rankings.  Oh, and it should be noted that Akilah has been recast, so that is not a fourth new Yellowjacket.

 

In 1996, it has been two month since Jackie was turned into a Popsicle and now resides in a meat locker because the ground is too cold to bury her.  I cannot confirm nor deny that my Encino Man theory is correct and she is thawed out in present day.  But I will say not much time has passed in current day. Now eight months into their Canadian adventure, everyone is starting to look rough (except for some reason Mari who is still looking really good) while cabin fever is setting in.  They even had to start burning porn for warmth.  But more disturbingly, there are also some creepy rituals that people are doing just to go outside.

 

In present day, we ended the season with Nat being kidnapped right after putting a shotgun in her mouth, Tai won her state senate race which may or may not have been aided by her (or someone else) cutting off the head of her dog and putting it on an alter in the basement, and Shauna murdered someone who seems like may have just been some random dude with a mysterious back tattoo and no digital footprint. 

 

While Shauna’s bored housewife routine was the least interesting part of the first season, it may end up being one of the more entertaining storylines this season.  Her daughter Callie, who gets more screen time in the first two episodes this season than maybe all of last season, is the big surprise of this season.  Obviously she is not as messed up as her mother who experienced extreme trauma at that age, but that girl is a little messed up too.  Then throw in Jeff, who we now know is actually kind of a good husband and a a big doofus.

 

Sure, the show sometimes stumbles under the weight of expectations after becoming a surprise hit in its first season and it is even more annoying this season that the show continues to lean into the supernatural without actually confirming nor deny the existence of some sort of supernatural element (what happens at the end of episode two will be extremely eye rolling if they want us to think what happens is just a coincidence), but you still have to be highly entertained whenever Misty does her Misty things.  While slow and plodding at times (each episode of the six I saw are very close to being an hour long), there is still always at least multiple highly entertaining things that happen each episode that will keep the Yellowjackets subreddit buzzing for a full week until the next episode.

Yellowjackets airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime, though episodes premiere on streaming the Friday before.

Previewing Let the Right One In

 

In a measure of full disclosure, I have not read the book, Let the Right One In.  Nor have I watched the Swedish movie based on the book.  Though I did watch the American remake, Let Me In with Hit Girl.  Granted, as I try and remember that movie which I have not watched since shortly it was released, the only thing I remember is a pretty cool one shot car crash shot from inside the car. 

 

Okay, I also remember the general premise of an elderly father taking care of his vampire daughter who has been stuck in a twelve year old body for a while and has to move periodically to avoid being caught.  That general premise remains for the new televised version; one again entitled Let the Right One In, but then severely deviates from my vague recollection of the movie.  The setting has moved to New York City, from a more rural area.  There is also a secondary storyline featuring an elderly father and his son who is older than the vampire girl.  The show is not quite the IP fraud Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, but anyone hoping for another faithful adaptation that has a little more room to breathe on the small screen show should temper their expectation.

 

Let the Right One In stars Demián Bichir (The Bridge) as the father who has moved him and his vampire daughter back to the City after spending the last ten years searching for a cure.  The spiking murder rate will help him hide the way he obtains her diet.  Just his luck, he move next door to a detective (Anika Noni Rose, Them) investigating all those murders who has a son around the same age as his daughter… or the age she was when she stopped aging.

 

Though, the show does not even start there.  Instead, the first scene involves a college aged kid who looks like he is enjoying his very first sunrise.  It because clear that this was probably the first sunrise he saw in a while as a couple seconds later, he burst into flame.  He turns out to be the son of a drug maker whose painkillers got everyone hooked and was sued out of business.  Now the father has called his daughter (Grace Gummer, Mr. Robot) home, hoping she can find the cure he was never able to.  Oh, and to tell her that the brother she thought was dead, is a vampire and got burnt to a crisp because his latest cure failed miserably.  Surprise.

 

Let the Right One In is the last of four vampire shows to premiere over the past month, but I guess it does say something that this was the first I even bothered to watch, three of the four tied to popular books that were previously movies.    While it probably is the best this show has deviated from the plot of the book because it needs to fill in the plot to stretch it out for a season, and the doctors trying to find a cure is an interesting addition, you do have to wonder where the writers expect to go after the first season.  The young actress playing the vampire is not going to look like a seventh grader for very long.  But if the mad scientists do cure her, which would dramatically chance what potentially future season would be.  It is already bordering on IP fraud, having a Let the Right One In show without a vampire daughter would make it full IP fraud.

 

Let the Right One In airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Prevewing We Hunt Together: Season Two

 

The first season of We Hunt Together was a twist on the murder mystery; we knew who the killer was, but the real mystery was if the detectives would able to catch her or her accomplice.  But the end of the season, Freddy eluded the police when her accomplice took credit for all her crimes.  The second season starts ten months after Baba died with Freddy as a minor celebrity with her own documentary, magazine cover, and a six figure book deal.  Now she grants charity loans to small business opened by victims of abuse.

 

Oh yeah, and she has attracted a new serial killer who wears a bird mask and sends her cryptic messages.  So for the second season, the show reverts back to a murder mystery but with the added mystery of will Freddy be impressed with the bird man killing in her name our will she actually help to bring him down.

 

We do get to learn more of Freddy’s early life this season as she grows closer to the brother of her friend that died mysteriously (and one of the many people that are potential bird men).  We also get to go home and spend more time with the detectives this season.  Oh, and there is one of their weirdest needle drops that I can think of at the end of episode one.

 

We Hunt Together premieres today, with all six episodes now available on streaming and on demand for Showtime subscribers.  It will make its on-air debut with its first two episodes on Sunday, July 3 at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT and next two episodes Sunday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT. Subsequent episodes will air Sundays starting at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Previewing The Chi Season Five

 

There are plenty of benefits to the shorter seasons of six to twelve episodes.  But one thing that we typically lose in the shrinking of seasons from the twenty-two episodes strung out across nine months are less holiday episodes.  NBC experiments this year with special Christmas episodes of Young Rock and Mr. Mayor but usually these short seasons rarely acknowledge holidays.  Or they just do what The Chi is doing and airing a Christmas episode less than a week after Independence Day.  But hey, The Hallmark Channel celebrates Christmas in July every year.

 

And with record highs already across the nation, watching a show taking place in snowy Chicago may be just the reprieve we need this summer.  There is no big mystery that starts this season, no who shot the mayor, who killed Coogie, or what happened to Kiesha.  Well, unless you count how long will Emmitt say celibate for.  Yes, that is an actual storyline this season, but a mystery much easier to solve than previous ones on the show. 

 

Other low stakes questions being asked this season include will Jada stay will her younger man or get back with her baby daddy?  Will Papa and Jake make up after Papa goes hard on him in front of the whole school?  Will Kevin embrace his inner geek to get a girl?  Can Trig turn his community action into real change while running for city council?  Or more importantly, why is Trig rocking afro puffs this season?

 

The Chi airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.  New episodes are released early on Friday streaming and On Demand so you can watch the premiere now.

Previewing Flatbush Misdemeanors: Season Two

 

Things went down at the end of the last season of Flatbush Misdemeanors.  Drew shot someone and the fallout hit Dan and Kevin hard.  Dan was suspended from his teaching job while casing strains in their friendship with Kevin moving out.   

 

Season two picks up four months later.  Dan is trying to get reinstated, having to work at his step-father’s while Kevin has moved back home to live with his parents.  It does not seem like the two have communicated much since Kevin moved out.  They are so separated; they get each get their own episode without the other appearing in it.  Oh, and Drew is on the run for the whole shooting thing.

 

While the two leads spend the first couple episodes apart, it still feels very similar to the first season.  Plus with the two starting off the season separated, we do get to meet some new characters.  Dan’s NA sponsor is partiuarly the biggest stand out of the new people we meet.

 

Flatbush Misdemeanors airs Sundays at 11:00 on Showtime.  Episodes are released early on Fridays on the Showtime streaming site so you can watch the premiere now.

Previewing I Love That for You

 

The truth is stranger than fiction.  And whenever fiction thinks it has come up with something they think is stranger, the truth comes through and proves it still is the strangest.  Case in point, when Showtime ordered I Love That for You, a story about someone who lies about their cancer diagnosis to get a job, they probably thought it was some farfetched comedy premise.  But about a month before the show premiered, new broke that a writer on Grey’s Anatomy lied about having cancer and having an abortion.  The truth remains undefeated in its weirdness.

 

I Love That for You stars Vanessa Bayer whose own childhood leukemia inspired the show (it is unknown if Breyer liked about still having cancer to get on Saturday Night Live or if Bayer as a child guilted nurses into giving her cake like her character in flashbacks does).  But instead of SNL, her character’s dream is to be a host on the Special Value Network, basically a fictional Home Shopping Network.  Fellow SNL alum Molly Shannon plays her mentor.

 

Jenifer Lewis, fresh off the series finale of Black’ish plays the CEO of SVN and anyone who watched her former shows knows she can easily deliver great one liner with her sharp tongue and steals every scene she is in.  The other notable part of the show is Bayer’s love of nineties music, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and The Cranberries are all featured in the first episode.  Though the only reference in the second episode is that someone wears a Tribe Called Quest shirt.

 

I Love That for You airs Sundays at 8L30 on Showtime, but episodes are uploaded the Friday before each televised episode On Demand and streaming.

Previewing The Man Who Fell to Earth

We see shows move from time to time, mostly because of cancelations and other places willing to continue it. But I do not remember a time when two shows got traded like professional sports players.  But that happened in the case of Halo and The Man Who Fell to Earth.  Okay, it was less of a trade and more like a cooperate overlord ordering a more high profile project to attack subscribers to their newly rebranded streaming serves and was nice to send back a different IP back in return.

 

Halo premiered last on Paramount+ to a mixed bag; it was met with a resounding meh by critics and the loudest voices on the internet but it was the most watched premiere in the history of the streamer.   Now it is time for the other half of the trade, The Man Who Fell to Earth to premiere and it is, well, not any worse than Halo, but I am not sure if it is much better.

 

The show is based on a 1963 Walter Tevis book of the same name that has already has been turned into a movie starring David Bowie released in 1976 (full disclosure notice: I have not read the book or read the movie; though I thought I had seen a remake, but it turns out that I was thinking of the similarly titled movie with a similar premise, The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves).  Bill Nighly plays Thomas Jerome Newton; the same character as Bowie, but it not the main character of the new show.  The Man Who Fell to Earth does honor David Bowie by naming each episode in the first season after one his songs.

 

The show does follow a new man who falls to Earth decades after the original played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.  He can spit gold, has four stomachs, and will vomit copious amounts of water if exposed to even small doses of radiation.  He quickly finds Naomie Harris a brilliant scientist who now works cleaning up stuff to support her daughter and sick father to reluctant help him.

 

Watching Ejiofor try to be human, it is hard not to think of Alan Tudyk on Resident Alien, another extraterrestrial who is not great at talking like a normal person and is unable to pick up on the most obvious social.  Though, to be fair, Tudyk did get a head start by watching months of Law and Order reruns before interacting with anyone else.  This show does tease that Ejiofor will eventually learn to act more human with an opening scene where he is doing his best tech billionaire speech.  But the first couple episodes are just Ejiofor being the most extreme case of fish out of water.

 

The show does pick up with the introduction of the Flood siblings (Rob Delaney and Sonya Cassidy) in the third episode.  They are the contentious heirs of a tech company that has ties to Newton.  Jimmi Simpson also shows up as a CIA agent who is on the hunt for both aliens.  While The Man Who Fell to Earth does have the slight edge in the trade for Halo, at the end of the day, this feels like a lackluster trade of a fifth starter for a catcher between two teams barely in the playoff hunt.

 

The Man Who Fell to Earth airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain

 

Showtime continues its HIP HOP 50 series, devoting two years leading up to the 50^th anniversary of the musical genre with two documentaries near and to my heart over the next two week.  Back in 1991, Cypress Hill released their debut album and the very next month, the Geto Boys released their seminal album with the controversial cover, We Can’t Be Stopped.  Premiering on 4/20 (obviously) is Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain.  Later this year is the premiere of Bushwick Bill: Geto Boy (date TBD).

 

Insane in the Brain comes from photographer and director Estevan Oriol, who was the group’s personal videographer who filmed plenty of footage that has gone unseen until now.  It follows the group from being one of the first to mix Latin music with hip-hop to being the first rap group to play the Reading Festival.  The doc features a firsthand account and archival footage of everyone in the group as well as new interviews from Ice-T, Chuck D, Fred Durst, and, of course, Cheech and Chong.  But maybe the most noteworthy statement in the doc comes from Ruffhouse Records founder Chris Schwartz who absurdly claims, “For all intents and purposes, Philly is the birth place of gangsta rap.”  What?  I am not sure about that.

Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain premieres tomorrow at 8:00 on Showtime.

Previewing The First Lady

 

There was an old adage that the best way to win an acting Oscar was to play a real person.  Both Best Actor and Best Actress winners this year and seven of the ten nominees played real people.  21 Best Actor and Actress winners of the past two decades played real people.  That seems to be finally seeping into the Emmy’s with half of the lead acting nominees going to actors playing real people last year.  That trend seems to be continuing as there was an explosion of ripped from the headline shows this year with actors from The  Dropout, Dopesick, Under the Banner of Heaven, and The Survivor very likely to get nominations, with shows like Pam and Tommy, We Crashed, The Thing About Pam  in the hunt (sorry Inventing Anna, The Girl From Plainville, Impeachment, Super-Pumped, Joe vs. Carol, and way too many more to list).  Gold Derby gives the odds of 49 potential Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie and 15 of the top 20 are actresses playing real peaple.  It should be noted both Gold Derby and Variety currently Margaret Qualley in Maid as the winner, one of the few original characters.

 

Complicating things is The First Lady with three very high profile leads; Gold Derby currently predicts nominations for former Emmy winners Viola Davis and Gillian Anderson (who won last year for portraying Margaret Thatcher) with Michelle Pfeiffer slight on the outside with the eight best odds.  Though Variety thinks those three leads will get complete shut out with the lone predicted nomination for the show going to O-T Fagbenle.  Of course a bunch of the shows mentioned so far have not even premiered yet, so take all this prognostication with a grain of salt.

 

While it is easy to predict nominations for actors who have already received the award, for me, if there was one of the three leads on The First Lady to receive a nomination, it should be Pfeiffer who plays the most interesting first lady in our country’s history, Betty Ford (though when she first came on screen, I thought she was playing Nancy Reagan).  Ford transcended the position, becoming synonymous with rehab after setting up the Betty Ford Clinic.  Even though I knew in the back of my head they were both part of the administration, I was surprised to see Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pop up quite frequently on the show.  Susan Ford at one point jokes they are having an affair because they are almost always seen together.

 

Davis plays Michelle Obama despite being currently just two year younger than the former first lady and making her 12 years older than Obama when her husband elected and plays Michelle as far back as the early 00’s (this show jumps around a lot like Dopesick and even has the date scroll on the bottom every time they change dates).  The age difference is only exacerbated by the casting of Fagbenle as Barack who is fifteen years younger than Davis and five years younger than Barack when he was first sworn in.  It should also be noted that Pfeiffer is seven years older than Ford when Nixon resigned and nine years older than Aaron Eckhart who is also a little young, and let’s be honest, way too attractive to be playing Gerald Ford.

 

Gillian Anderson currently is an age Eleanor Roosevelt was during her term as first lady (there were no term limits back then so she did get to reign for twelve years) and also has an appropriately aged Kiefer Sutherland as her husband Franklin.  The Roosevelt’s are also a blank slate for most of modern television watchers.  Most people are at the very least familiar with the Betty Ford Clinic and the Obamas were in office in the era of too much information so anyone who is at least a teenage today probably has a vivid memory of them, but the Roosevelts lived in a much different time.  Most Americans at the time did not even know FDR was confined to a wheelchair.  There is one very prominent rumor about Eleanor that is brought on the show.

 

The show does delve in the past of these three ladies; episode three is completely devoted to the origin story of how they met their husbands.  Thankfully they did cast younger actresses to play the future first ladies in their twenties.  Kristine Froseth (Looking for Alaska, her co-star Charlie Plummer plays young FDR), Eliza Scanlen (Sharp Objects) plays young Eleanor, while Jayme Lawson (The Batman) plays young Michelle.  I wish these actresses got more than one episode (at least so far, I have not watched the final three episodes yet) but unfortunately in the television business, when you can get actresses the caliber of Davis, Anderson, and Pfeiffer, you are not going to sideline them for very long.  Dakota Fanning (The Alienist), Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), and Lexi Underwood (Little Fires Everywhere) play first daughters Susan Ford, Anna Roosevelt, Malia Obama respectively.  There were times, like when Susan's prom which took place at the White House gets referenced, that I wished this was a first kids show instead.

 

Each first lady gets a third of each episode as their stories intertwine all season.  But there are times where I wonder if the show would have been better off with the episodes being an anthology with a new one devoted to each new first lady instead spreading three stories out over the course of ten episodes.  Betty Ford is the only one of the three that has held my interest throughout the season while the Obama and Roosevelt stories drag at time.  Looking at potential future season it is hard to think of anyone else compelling enough to fill even a third of ten episodes.  I am sure producers are eager to get to Hilary Clinton even though the general public is fairly sick of the former and I am not sure if the need to see JFK’s head explode yet again.  Then Nancy Reagan was an actress and Melania Trump was a model.  But if there are more seasons, maybe they should go deeper into American history where less is known about the first ladies so they can take bigger liberties and will not feel like they need to rehash the Wikipedia pages.

 

The First Lady airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber starts with the CEO of UberCab asking a potential employee, “Are you an asshole?”  Then he distracted by someone else and goes on a lengthy monologue that feels like I was watching at 1.5x speed.   Once done, he finally returns to the potential employee and asks, “Are you an asshole?”  The first time he asked, I though the obvious answer should be no, but after the monologue then I was thinking that UberCab CEO really hopes he answers yes.  I will not spoil what the answer was, not because I fear it will ruin the opening scene for you, but to be honest, the opening scene came me at such a breakneck speed, I forgot what the answer was, or if he even game an answer.

 

Super Pumped is created by the duo behind Billions, Brian Koppleman and Sam Levine.  Watching it, you probably would not even need me to tell you as the new show seem Billions after doing copious amounts of cocaine.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Travis Kalaneck, founder of Uber (you will learn what happens to the “Cab” part of the name fairly early) comes across as a mix between Bobby Axelrod and Mark Zuckerberg, specifically the Social Network version, not the real one.  And much like how the finance talk on Billions goes way over my head, much of the tech talk goes way over my head, especially comes from someone who seems to be talking at 1.5x speed.

 

Another way you can tell the show is done by the team behind Billions, it seems like they spent most of their budget on music.  In the first episode, there is not one, not two, but three Pearl Jam spanning three of their first for albums.  Before you get mad that Vitology gets skipped over, a song from that album shows up in the second episode.  Then even more Pearl Jam songs in episode three.  Okay, they do not spend their entire budget on artists that will cost you a pretty penny (considering the amo8unt of earl Jam songs, I have to wonder if you get a discount if you buy in bulk) because they also managed to get Quintin Tarantino to narrate the first season.

 

With Gordon-Levitt dialed to eleven for most of his performance and the always hyper Tarantino narrating (though, it is surprising how little he actually narrates) it is nice the show also features Coach Taylor himself, Kyle Chandler.  He plays the money guy who does not always sees eye to eye with founder who likes to speak first, think about what he says either.  While not in the main cast, Noah Weisberg plays an employee of Uber and is probably best known (only known?) as Danny Michael Davis, the Mark Zuckerberg stand in at SPRQ on Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.  Facebook is the subject of the already announced second season of Super Pumped.

 

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Billions Season Six

 

I do not know what it is, but Damien Lewis always stays a season or four too long on a Showtime show.  Maybe he is just a great hang.  But he spent three seasons on Homeland even though had he blown himself up on the season finale of the first season, it may have made that one of greatest season in the history of television.  But he stuck around; the second season was fine but had some diminishing returns, though season three was one of the worst seasons in the history of television.

 

Shortly after being written of off Homeland, Lewis then showed up on Billions and once again, the show would have been much better in the long time had it written him off after a season or two.  The cat and mouse routine between his hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod and Paul Giamatti’s District Attorney was fine for the first two season but, once again, diminishing returns for subsequent seasons.  The show would have been much better off had Chuck had a new antagonist each season (or even better, had it been a limited season where they both ended up in prison cells next to each other at the end of it).

 

Though this time it feels like it was not a creative reason as to why Lewis was written off the show because nothing really has changed for the new season except for the person sitting in Bobby’s chair and the name on the side of the building.  Dollar Bill and McPhee took off at the end of last season, but everyone else returns whether they like it or not. 

 

Sure, the show wants you to think there are big changes, the season starts with Chuck on a tractor, Wendy looks like she is working as an ice cream maker, Sacker is doing combat training, Taylor is watching The Bachelor (or maybe random engagement videos), Wags is actually exercising, and Bobby’s replacement Mike Prince is, well, that is hard to explain.

 

Okay, there is a slight difference between Bobby and Mike Prince; Bobby would cut every corner to win.  Mike Prince on the other hand is a Boy Scout (or wants you to think that) who wants to do things with honor and want you to know just how on the straight and narrow he is.  Basically the worst kind of foe for Chuck, a guy who is not going to slip up because he cannot be tempted in doing something illegal.  Or so we are led to believe, he did double cross Chuck to get Bobby out of the way.

 

While the show wants you to think there are big changes  by the opening montage, it is still the very same Billions at its course and even pull off their way overused “One week earlier” trope and even doubles down on that trope by dropping a “Two weeks ago” title card while we were already a week in the past.  And really, nothing says Billions more than starting the episode with a classic rock song and then ending it with a rap song that samples the exact same classic rock song that opened the season.

 

Billions airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.