Previewing Dexter: New Blood

A wise man once said, “Well, now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.  But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”  In a time when the creators of the upcoming I Know What You Did Last Summer television show get announced as also doing a Cruel Intentions reboot television show, it may be time to take the “maybe” out of that quote, at least when dealing with the entertainment business.  From here on out, it seems like IP will never really die.  So it is probably only a matter of time before the creators of those previously mentioned shows complete the Sarah Michelle Gellar trifecta and makes a The Grudge television show.

 

The latest reboot is going to undo what was probably the most maligned series finale in television history, at least until Game of Thrones came along: Dexter.  The first couple seasons of the show were very good, a serial killer who only kills bad guys that he vets through his day job in the Miami Police Department.  In true Showtime fashion, the show went on far too long to the point that it was laughable that no one at the police department figured it out.  Well, except Doakes who figured that out in the first season and LaGuarta and Deb finally caught on to Dexter by the final season, but even then it took too long.

 

That knowledge wrecked Deb that led to a spiral and was eventually fatally shot.  In the end Dexter took her lifeless body out to sea during a hurricane and was presumed dead, leaving his son to be raised by another serial killer in a South American country, only for the final scene of the show to feature a heavily bearded Dexter working at as a lumberjack. 

 

It seems like the people behind the show want to let that show die and the show now has a new name, Dexter: New Blood.  But this is the same Dexter with the same back story of the pervious show.  Okay, he does have a new name, James Lindsey (Jeff Lindsey was the author of Dexter series of books), but to the rest of the world, Dexter Morgan is dead.  Despite the same main character, the show could not be further from the original, the show went from the sunny coastal city of Miami to the wooded small town up north.  Okay, one thing the two shows have in common is there is still a multi-ethnic cast of characters as there is a sizable indigenous population in the town.

 

Dexter, err, James, now has a more lo-key job working at a sporting good show (you may recognize his boss as the cat guy from Only Murders in the Building).  But the biggest change is that James is not a serial killer.  It is implied Dexter has not killed anyone since we last saw him.  He does not even kill animals anymore despite living in a big hunting community and sells most of the hunters their guns.  In fact, now he owns plenty of animals that he takes care of.  Instead of his surrogate father helping him cover up his crimes, now Dexter is visited by his sister who tries to guilt him into not killing whenever the urge bubbles to the surface.

 

Much like the rebooted Veronica Mars, Dexter: New Blood is dropping the case, or kill, of the week format with an overarching storyline which seemingly is going to cover the entire season.  But Dexter still has a Big Bad to take down and this time around that comes in the form of Clancy Brown, an imposing figure who runs the local truck stop diner, but has some other extracurricular activities no one else know about.

 

To be honest, James is kind of a boring dude with his no killing edict.  And most of the first episode is also kind of boring as we see James go along his boring day.  He has a boring girlfriend (who seemingly has some secrets of her own, but it will take a couple episode to figure out what), a boring job, and is stuck in a boring routine.  Seriously who line dances to Heart of Glass?  The song that opens the reboot is very on the nose.  The only interesting parts of most of the first episode are his interactions with Deb and a douchebag customer who is so annoying you really hope Dexter breaks his no murdering pledge.  There is a point in the first episode where I realize there is not even some Dexter narration to break up the monotony of his day.  Every time something interesting is about to happen, it turns out to be a red herring… until something interesting happens and the narration finally kick in.

 

So does the reboot redeem the show?  Based on the episodes I have seen (four as I write this) it is way too early to tell.  The change of scenery does add to the show along with almost entirely new cast with just Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter reprising their roles (there is a recast character that does pop up).  Though I am not sure all the new characters are needed.  Jamie Chung as a true crime podcaster seems completely unnecessary so far.  Mabel Mora she is not.  But a disadvantage of dropping the kill of the week just to focus on one storyline puts a lot of emphasis on if the season sticks the preverbal landing.  Hopefully after an eight year hiatus, the writers were able to come up with a good one.

 

Dexter New Blood airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Wakefield

 

  

One quote about television that really stuck from me came from the creators of Homeland who early in their run on the show (and I am probably poorly paraphrasing here), you can no longer shock audiences with a twist anymore; they can only be shocked at when you do it.  Yet there I was at the end of the first episode of the Australian show Wakefield, completely shocked with what just happened.

 

The titular Wakefield refers to a psych ward in New South Wales where the show follows the patients and staff there.  It is similar storytelling of The Affair where each episode is segmented with different POV’s, sometimes, three different characters, sometimes four, alternating between staff and patients, with one episode that breaks from the format.

 

While the narrative rotates around, we do get one segment following Nik every single episode in the season.  Nik is a nurse at the hospital who someone dubs “The sanest person in this place” who once dated one of the doctors there and is looking to advance in employment when a better position opens up.  There is also the stress of his sister’s wedding that complicates things throughout the season.  As the season progresses, it seems like Nik may need some help at Wakefield himself.  Especially after getting a certain Australian ditty stuck in his head.  Just your normal medical drama stuff… well up until the end of the first episode.

 

Except unlike your normal medical drama where most patients are one episode guest stars, some of the patients are on the show for just an episode or two before they check out, while some are there the whole season and also seem like they were admitted long before the show started.  The show does a good job injecting humor into the show through some of the patents but you never spend too much time laughing before realizing the seriousness of why they are there.  While American medical shows seem like process line pumping out the same things episode after episode, season after season, Wakefield is something a little different, and the show is better for it.

 

Wakefield airs Mondays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Back to Live: Season Two

Of all the post Fleabag shows where a British female made a half hour show with limited amount of episodes starring themselves, Back to Life clicked with me the least.   The lead character was just too unlikeable and may have been better off in prison where she spent eighteen years, half her life for luring her best friend to her death, even though there was more to that story that was explored in the first season.

 

When season two starts, it has just been six weeks since Mari was released from prison.  Right after being released from prison, she gave herself some hideous bangs.  She upped that bad hair for the season season by pulling out her old crimping iron which disturbingly manages to stay for the entire season.  It has not been three weeks since she has talked to her mother despite still living with her parents.

 

Her father remains the best part of the season as he attempts a social media campaign to help the environment.  But he does have some competition this season in a cop who would like any chance she can find to put Miri back in prison for any reason.  While the show is a bit funnier in places, it does get much darker at times.  The second season does improve on the first, but still not something that fully clicks together.

 

Back to Life airs Mondays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing American Rust

Last month I lamented the timing of Nine Perfect Strangers which premiered days after another rich annoying people at a resort show, The White Lotus ended.  But we have had  dueling project with similar premises going back to two we gotta destroy an asteroid heading towards earth movies in the late nineties.  But those were from two different movie studios and Nine Perfect Strangers is airing on Hulu while The White Lotus aired on HBO.  What makes American Rust different is that it comes less than a year after Your Honor, another show about a gatekeeper of the law who bend the rules for someone close to them who was caught up in a murder investigation where drug dealers are involved and like Your Honor, also airs on Showtime.

 

Like past shows and movies with similar themes, there are some subtle differences.  Brian Cranston played a judge in a big city of New Orleans while Jeff Daniels plays a small town sheriff in Pennsylvania that is “more West Virginia than Pittsburg.”  Then where Your Honor was an adaptation of an Israeli television show, American Rust is based on a book that predates all of the shows. 

 

The book is twelve years old now, and the show may take place during that time as there are really no date markers that I noticed other being mildly surprised that a bunch of twenty-somethings getting weirdly excited for a Kool and the Gang song got played at a wedding.  But this is the type of town that time forgot so it could be take in a year closer to now, though thankfully it avoids COVID all together.  One of the main characters still sports a mullet to go with his letterman jacket despite being old enough to purchase alcohol and works as the linebackers coach at his old high school.  Granted, with twelve percent unemployment, you get whatever work you can get.

 

We first meet Daniel’s character, he is splitting pills in a way to ween him off what we know is the very addictive opioid.  It is a small town (though not Easttown), and he is the sheriff, so naturally, it does not take him too long to find a dead body.   But he also sees something familiar at the crime scene and has to make a split decision that affects the case and the whole town.

 

The mulleted football coach somehow managed to land himself a very attractive girlfriend who moved to New York City sometime after graduation and now is engaged to some Spanish businessman.  If this were real life no way this guy has any shot rekindling their relationship when she comes back home after the brother that had been taking care of their wheelchair bound father skips down.  But hey, they gotta fill ten episodes with some sexual tension.  But where I think I would have enjoyed Nine Perfect Strangers more had I watched it before The White Lotus, I wonder if I would have enjoyed American Rust more had it aired before Your Honor and Mare of Easttown.  Watching it now just feels like I have seen it before, and in the case of Mare, I have seen it done much better.

 

American Rust airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James

For anyone under forty-five, the first thing they probably think of when they think of Rick James is the Charlie Murphy True Hollywood Story from Chappelle Show.  If they were to think of a second thing about Rick James it would probably be U Can’t Touch This, the MC Hammer song that samples a Rick James song.  If there was a third thing, it would be appearing in the Eddie Murphy music video for the song he produced.  If there was a fourth thing, it would be that Rick James was a disgusting pervert who was arrested for keeping a sex slave in his basement for him and his wife. 

 

It is kind of amazing how artists can be so huge but can be completely unknown by future generation.  James had six top five albums on the RnB charts in six years back when being able to sell albums meant something but most people under forty-five can name a song that was not sampled by MC Hammer.  Really, I am not sure most people under twenty-five could name a song by MC Hammer.

 

Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James starts off with Rick James’s daughter unpacking some her father’s belonging for storages which she has not seen for 12 years.  We get plenty of information about James’s childhood growing up in Buffalo, New York, his draft dodging days, and the time he was in a band signed to Motown with Neil Young.  This is a story I have heard before, yet every time I hear it, I am still pretty shocked by it.

 

Aside from a short intro, they really do not get into Rick’s freaky side until about halfway through the doc.  Then it does not get to his legal troubles until the last twenty-five minutes.  Anyone looking for a takedown of someone who was sent to jail for imprisoning and beating women, this is not that documentary.  Most of the talking heads posthumously make excusing for Rick James trying to make the claim that Rick was a good person if not for the drugs.  But as Rick himself explains in the doc, no one has to force you to do crack.  The lack of culpability for someone who spent years in prison for his crimes and still refused to get clean is really lacking from this documentary.

 

Also conspicuously absent from the film are Dave Chappelle, MC Hammer, and Eddie Murphy, though archival footage of all are shown including the infamous Chappelle Show sketch.  The doc was able to get new sound bites from Niles Rogers, Ice Cube, Big Daddy Kane, Bootsie Collins, and his backing band that provided the best insight.  The documentary also uses animation for a couple scenes where there was not any footage of.  I really could have done without them recreating sex scenes involving James but there is a scene inside a record executive’s office which looked out of the Chappelle Show sketch.

 

Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James airs Friday at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing This Way Up: Season Two

COVID not only wrecking the filming schedule, it also ruined the writing too.  Not that screenwriters can write from home or over video conference, some shows decided to include the pandemic into their show, mostly to poor results.  Superstore is the only one that handled adding it to the show successfully, because after a couple months of going to the store with COVID protocols, we were ready to laugh at just how ridiculous how things were.  But for most shows, it really would have been best if they just pretended it did not happen.

 

This Way Up is doing something slightly different in that it still takes place in this world, but shut down does not happen until the last seven minutes of the season finale. So really, we will have to wait until season three to see if the show hits COVID straight on or if they will skip over the pandemic almost complete and start the next season after everything has gone back to “normal.”

 

Hopefully there is a third season because the second one is just as sharp and witty as the first.  If you missed the first season, it will take you less than two and a half hours to catch up (so go do that now because there are spoilers for the first season coming up).  Then the second season is another tight six episodes topping out at twenty-five minutes.  The first season ended with Africa kissing the father of one of her students while her sister kissed a girl.

 

Going into the second, only one of those kisses turned into a full-fledged relationship.  And it was not Shona who remains engaged to Vish though he spends the entire season in New York City (while COVID does not affect any of the character until the end, I have a sinking suspicion Aasif Mandvi was not able to make it to England to film in person there which is why Vish is stateside) as Shona has to make due with a Vish doll that partakes in a weird threesome.  But Shona still has to work Charlotte which makes this awkward.  But awkward is what makes this show so charming and this season features a pretty awkward sauna session and bachelorette part.  Hopefully COVID does not delay a potential third season and the next one comes sooner than two years.

 

All episodes of This Way Up season two will be premiere on Hulu tomorrow.

Previewing The Chi: Season Four

 

There was a shocking end to the third season of The Chi.  After rescuing Keisha from her abductor, Ronnie was rewarded with a bullet to his head, a delayed payback from murdering Coogie back in the first season.  That original season was about how the lives of four black men at different stages of their development on the south side of Chicago intersected.  Now half of them are dead.

 

Now there are just Emmett and Kevin left on the show.  But their lives have intertwines with plenty of other Chicagoans in the ensuing seasons to pick up the slack of those that were lost.  Kevin, along with his two best friends Jake and Papa, have grown from boys to almost men.  Jake has two surrogate fathers in his life now, his real life brother who showed up after his other brother died and Douda, a gangsta turned politician, granted what is really the difference?  Emmett finally married his baby momma, except before that happened, he hooked up with his business partner who is now dating his father.  That is some Jerry Springer shirt right there.

 

The third season starts off with a montage set to one of the greatest song ever put on wax.  Well, it is part montage, part promo because all of it turns out to be scenes of what is to come this season as the montage culminates with something very huge happening followed by a “One Month Earlier” title card.  Unfortunately what follows is a very clunky Black Lives Matter plot and a lot of heavy hand scenes that seems like they were added because the writers felt obligated to include it since it was such a big story in the lives of black people in between seasons.  Personally, I would much rather spend time watching Papa record his new podcast.

 

The Chi airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Black Monday: Season Three

 

Black Monday was one of the first casualties of the Coronapocalypse.  But the show was lucky that they had finished filming the season before shutdown and were able to finish editing the season and get the rest of it out by the summer.  Billions, which was airing at the same time still has not finished that season yet.  By the time Black Monday season two ended, big changes had occurred.  Dawn confessed to Black Monday.  Blair announced he was running for the seat his gay lover, who hung himself, used to have.  And we were down one Leighman brother.

 

Season three starts off with Dawn in prison, hustling while reading Shawshank Redemption (natch).  Mo has taken to producing jazz music in the old Jammer Group office after leaving Wall Street (or kicked off depending on who you ask).  Blair is a freshman congressman with an unfortunate historic office.  And there is a surprising Leighman brother replacement. 

 

The episode titles in the first season referred to the number of day until Black Monday.  They dropped that for the second season, but numbers are back for season three: the season premiere is entitled “Ten!”  Next week is “Nine!”  What are they counting down to?  It is not explicitly said, but one character does talk about heading to the nineties while the second episode features some nineties references like lyrics to a 1992 Ice Cube song.  So I guess we can assume that is it until proven otherwise.  Personally I look forward to the fourth season with Mo sporting a Kid n Play style flattop.

 

Black Monday airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing Flatbush Misdemeanors

Showtime is getting into experimental comedy game.  After the very broad comedy of Black Comedy comes Flatbush Misdemeanors.  Based on a short film of the same name that had a budget of zero dollars, the television show is also created, written, and stars Kevin Iso (High Fidelity) and Dan Perlman (That’s My Bus!).  Dan plays Dan, a teacher while Kevin plays Kevin, a painter who has to deliver food to make money because you have to be either dead or famous to make money and crashes in Dan’s apartment after moving back to Brooklyn.

 

It is an experimental comedy because it is one where the writers do not feel obligated to put in at least one joke a minute for better worse like more traditional comedies.  So the show is reminiscent in that way.  The show follows a four act structure; well the first episode does get a fifth act that is designated solely by the surprise emoji. 

 

The two leads mostly play it straight while they surround themselves with a few more outlandish characters (well, I did laugh when it was revealed that Kevin plays chess by himself).  The funniest is Dan’s new step-dad Kareem (played by Kareem Green) who keeps trying to get Dan to call him dad.  Then there is the local petty criminal Drew (played by, you guessed it, Hassan Johnson) that keeps entertaining himself in Kevin and/or Dan’s business.

 

Flatbush Misdemeanors will probably be enjoys by those who prefer their comedy more experimental like Hulu's Ramy, but those who want their comedies to have jokes that come fast and furious may want to stick with Black Monday.

 

Flatbush Misdemeanors airs Sundays at 10:30 on Showtime.

Previewing Cinema Toast

 

I am a simple man with simple pleasure, so when I see Alison Brie’s name, my brain goes, sure, I will check that out.  Maybe I should have paid more attention to the Cinema Toast press release than just seeing Alison Brie.  When I skimmed the non- Alison Brie parts of the press release that said the show was a reimagining of movies in the public domain, I was under the assumption they would be re-filming the scripts.  But it turns out the actors are coming up with new dialogue to put over the action of old films.  Other voices include those of Nick Offerman, Fred Armisen, John Early, Christina Ricci, Megan Mullally, Chloe Fineman and Chris Meloni.

 

But all you really need to know is that all ten episodes are being released on Showtime’s streaming service and On Demand page today.  Today as in 4/20, the most celebrated day for stoners.  You have to be pretty high to enjoy this show and unfortunately recreational legalization has not come to my state yet.  It probably also hurt that I am not much of a cinephile of movies older than I am so of the ten episodes, the only movie I recognized was Night of the Living Dead.

 

That movie gets turned into Attack of the Karen’s where the zombies are repurposed of whiney while ladies.  There are a couple episodes that reappropriate these movies into modern tales; the first episode features a family that reluctantly invited a Qanon believer to Thanksgiving.  Others stick to their times like the one where gay marriages comes to town where one brave straight dude tries to protest it by… sacrificing straight people off a giant ladder.

 

Another episode turns John Wayne into a gay cowboy… I think.  Is it gay if the actors are both dudes, but one is voiced by a woman?  You probably have to be high to properly answer that question.  But the strangest of all the episodes (which there is plenty of stiff competition for) features Ronald Reagan watching a film with Ronald Reagan where he watches a film that features… Ronald Regan.  My brain hurts now.  Maybe I can get my doctor to prescribe some medical marijuana to dull the pain.  At least that is legal here.

 

All episodes of Cinema Toast are now available on the Showtime streaming app or their On Demand page.

 

Previewing Into the Dark: Blood Moon

 

I am always most interested in the episodes of Into the Dark that feature a holiday you would not expect.  Sure, some of them do not turn out very well, like the March installment in the first season that was based on the ides of March.  After the obvious St. Patrick’s Day instalment last year, the pandemic stalled second season ends in March, this time with another somewhat surprising holiday for this March: the Blood Moon.   Okay, that is not really much of a holiday and technically the full moon in a couple days is just regular one and the next Blood Moon is not until May.  But hey… werewolves!  Oh… now that I think about it, I guess the “Blood” is more literally.

 

It is pretty easy to tell we are getting the mythical creatures when the episode starts up with a woman holding a shotgun, with a ripped shirt who then takes a baby out of what looks like a dog’s travel cage.  The next time we see the kid, he is ten years old moving to another town where the mother only wants to shop local and get paid in cash.  But this is a slightly different take on the werewolf story, not told from the perspective of the creature, but that of the mother who is raising the young boy.  But this is a boy who, like most kids a little older who are going through puberty, is not entirely sure how or why their bodies are changing.

 

No word yet if there will be a third season  of Into the Dark or if they will start it back up immediate or wait to premiere in October to coincide with their annual Huluween celebration like the previous two seasons.  Hopefully we will get more monthly installments.  As up and down as some of the installments are, it is an innovated release schedule that highlights up and coming genre writers and directors.

  

Into the Dark: Blood Moon premieres tomorrow on Hulu.

Previewing Into the Dark: Tentacles

Into the Dark banked a few episodes before the Coronapocalypse before shutting down productions going all the way to July before going on hiatus.  This was very unfortunate for me because August is the month I most look forward to being the month with no major holidays.  Though the first season gave us a start of school themed episode which was kind of anticlimactic but did make plenty of sense.  The anthology series is back just in time for Valentine’s Day which gave us one of the best episodes of the first season, but also one of the worst episodes of the second season.

 

The third February episode Tentacles falls in the middle of those two.    The story follows a homeless woman who goes around to open house for the free cookies and if she is lucky, no one notices she hid in the closet and finds a place to sleep for the night.  But after a chance encounter with a photographer / house flipper who has a place where she can crash, she may have some stability in her life.  Well, stability and copious amount of sex with the photographer / house flipper including a sex session so long they showed it is fast forward as to not add an extra ten to twenty minutes to the episode.

 

After a slow start (probably why they put in copious amounts of sex at the beginning) things start to get really creepy and you begin to realize what you thought the episode was about is a completely different thing leading to a pretty satisfying ending for fans of the horror genre.  But this makes the eleventh episode released in the second season and the twelfth and final episode coming next month.  So I do wonder if it is renewed, will Hulu start season three right in April or wait to launch in October like the previous season.  Hopefully it is right away, might as well produce the August and September scripts I am sure were already written, and yes I am suggesting this so I would not have to wait another year and a half for the next August episode.  Really, I mostly want weird, more obscure holidays for a potential third season.

 

Into the Dark: Tentacles premieres tomorrow only on Hulu.

Previewing Shameless: The Final Season

Back when Showtime announced that the eleventh season of Shameless would be its last, I joked: well, until it is rebooted in five to ten years.  Since then, Showtime announced that they were bringing back Dexter after canceling it seven years ago, do my joke may actually turn out to be a prophecy.   Of course there were bigger things that have happened since Showtime announced the final season that have altered the show.

Yes, the Coronapocalypse has hit the Southside.  Sure Frank thinks it is a hoax and Debbie wears her mask below her nose, rendering it useless, but I doubt this is how the writers envisioned the final season going, but they are trying to make lemon out of lemonade.  Kev and Vee even found a new revenue stream despite the city shutting down bars across the city for the third time.

Last season was the first without the main star, Emmy Rossum, but the rest of the Gallagher ramped up their antic, Lip knocked up some chick then rented out an apartment for them to live in without his baby mamma’s permission when her family gave them a house in Wisconsin.  Ian is also basking in marital bliss of his own after making an honest man out of a Mickey Milkovich.  Well, as honest as you can make a Milkovich. 

Debbie started dating her own Milkovich, but still had issues with her former girlfriend and her daughter who she also was lady forking which the city of Chicago was not too happy to find out about.  Then there was Carl who did some undercover work in hopes in getting into the police academy.  Though where the evil cop outine was pretty funny last season, it is pretty cringy watching that stuff go down now.

Sure, they may have to wear mask and Kev had to put up some social distancing markers, but like every obstacle that has come before them, it seems like the Gallagher’s are able to adapt to these times, some of which are even survive.   Sure, it is unfortunate that the show has to adapt to the new way of life in its final season, but then again, wait seven years, and we may very well see teenaged Franny and Freddy running wild on the Southside of Chicago.

 

Shameless airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

 

 

Previewing Your Honor

The first episode of Your Honor is so generic, take out the partial nudity and a couple naughty words and you probably could have mistaken it for a basic cable show from about fifteen years ago. The show follows the unfortunately even where a asthmatic runs over someone on a motorcycle while searching for his inhalers during an episode. But this is not just any asthmatic; he is the son of a judge. A very sympathetic judge, played by Bryan Cranston (Malcolm in the Middle) who will stop by a house where a crime was committed to see if a testifying beat cop could possibly see what he claims he saw before arresting someone.

Oh, and the kid on the motorcycle is also not just any kid, but the son of the most vicious crime family in the history of New Orleans despite being very religious. I guess some of those Commandments, like Thou Shall Not Kill are just suggestions. You can see exactly where this is going. Well, at least for the first episode. For as clichéd as the first episode was, the second episode is packed full of surprises, none more so than where we first see the girl the judge’s kid was forking in the premiere. Though that may be the most inconsequential part of the plot.

Crime shows like this usually feature smart people keeping one step ahead of the law and/or just barely one step ahead the antagonist, but what sets Your Honor apart and keeps itself somewhat interesting is that people start getting really dumb in the second episode. Seriously, if you are driving a stolen car, how about not run a stop sign, especially if you are black in a place where cops sometime do not even wait for a reason to pull you over.

While sometimes these stupid acts keeps things entertaining and unpredictable (see The Flight Attendant who has been great at this so far), sometimes plot contrivances can be too much like when the dog finds a blood rag, somehow loses it under a cabinet and then spends multiple episodes trying to retrieve while the owner just tells him to shut up. Almost half way through the season and I am still not sure if Your Honor is good enough, but thankfully it is billed as a limited series so I will not have to spend multiple seasons trying to figure it out.

Your Honor airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing No Man's Land

 
No Man’s Land opens up with what may be the longest string of title cards I can remember.  Five pages lets the views in on what the show is going to focus on, basically giving you a quick rundown on the Syrian civil war and highlighting on a predominately female voluntary militia that is fighting ISIS.  Maybe this lengthy diatribe is just setting up Americans to read because I would guestimate that seventy percent of the dialogue is in a foreign language (the show is co-produced by ARTE France) and thus subtitled.  On a side note, those three years of French in high school did not help at all for me here.  But Americans may want to keep the closed captioning on because even when the Fresh and Syrian speak English, it is still sometimes hard to understand.

But I got to say, a female militia fighting ISIS sounds pretty cool.  Except if there is a lead on the show, it is a dude which is kind of a bad look.  Seriously, No Man’s Land is a great title for a show about an all-women’s militia if there were not any, you know, men around.  This would be like if the upcoming FX (possibly on Hulu) show Y, the Last Man ended up having a bunch of dudes.  But anyway.  The narrative starts when Antoine is watching a newscast of the Syrian Civil War and spots a woman putting her hair up just like his dead sister did and is convinced it is her.  Either this is a pretty absurd plot devise or I am a pretty horrible brother who has zero idea how his sister ties her hair.

So after seeing this video and being convinced that it is her, Antoine, a constructional engineer (which actually comes in handy at one point), heads to Syria to hunt down a person with the only lead of where she was a couple days ago on this broadcast and the belief that it is his sister who has been dead for two years and had not seen her for two years prior to that because of some family drama.  Since this is an eight episode season, this go horribly wrong in this search before ending up in the hand of the female militia that is very suspicious of this foreigner. 

Though if you put aside all the reading, the silly plot devise, and the show spends the most time on a dude for a show about females fighting ISIS, No Man’s Land is pretty compelling in late seasons of Homeland kind of way but without the political intrigue or the crazy people.   There is also a tinge of Lost with certain character’s getting flashback episode.  But one of the female militia members does not get a flashback episode until the back half of the season.  But there is one episode that is almost entirely flashback.  At least an actual female is the subject of that episode.

All episodes of No Man’s Land premiere today on Hulu.

Previewing Moonbase 8

 
After being elected, President Donald Trump raised some eyebrows when he announced a new division of the military called the Space Force.  Netflix rushed a comedy into production by the same shortly after.  Near the end of his first term (and as I write this, looks to be his only term, hopefully by the time you read this it will be official) he announced more space themed initiatives for his second term including putting a man on Mars and establishing a permanent base on the moon.  Seriously.  Though please note these absurd plans were did not inspire the new Showtime comedy Moonbase 8.

Though in this fictitious series, NASA is building a base on the moon, but the main characters are still stranded in the Nevada desert preparing for the day they will be chosen to be sent there.  Watching the show, you can tell right away why Nasa would keep this crew grounded.  John C. Reilly is the captain, Fred Armisen is the resident doctor, Tim Heidecker is.. um, I guess just the religious guy, and Super Bowl champion Trais Kelse is basically there  to give the program good press.

Unfortunately Kelse turned out to be the funniest character on the show and he is gone by the end of the first episode.  I was hoping the fourth member of the team would turn into a Spinal Tap drummer situation but for reasons never explained, Kelse was never replaced on the fake base.  A rotating guest of stars may have saved what ends up being a fairly mediocre comedy with a few chuckle and no actual laughs.  It got a little interesting in an episode that takes a surprising dark turn but that quickly reverted back into the tone of the rest of the six episodes total.

In a measure of full disclose, I have never been much of a fan of the comedy stylings of Reilly or Armisen and before the show, was not familiar with the oeuvre of Heidecker but found him the least interesting of the three.  So your mileage might very if you are fans of the three.  But if not, Moonbase 8 likely will not change your impressions of them.

Moonbase 8 airs Sundays at 11:00 on Showtime.

Previewing The Good Lord Bird

The first things that greets viewers at the start of each episode of The Good Lord Bird is a title card informing you that, “All of this is true, most of it happened.”  This reminded me of The Great that claimed its show was “Based on historical fact (sort of)”.   Both shows features main characters wearing dresses that play opposite of crazy people except the protagonist of The Good Lord Bird is a work of fiction.  Oh, and a dude.

 

Henry, who is forced to wear a dress for most of the series because when he is rescued as a slave, his rescuer thought someone called him Henrietta?  So when that person that rescuers you from slavery gives you a dress to wear, I guess it would be rude to refuse it.  And when they start calling you onion because you ate one, I guess you just go as “Onion” now.  Now his savior was not just any person but John Brown who you may or may not remember from the paragraph in your high school history book when they call him the most famous abolitionist who went around the South freeing slaves and murdering slave owners.

 

After being rescued, Onion goes on a Forrest Gumpian travel across pre-Civil War America, not only does he spend much of his time in John Brown’s gang but also has run ins with Fredrick Douglass (Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs) and Harriet Tubman.  Even though Ethan Hawke (Tesla) plays John Brown (and at times comes across like Will Forte playing Zeb Miller) this is Onion’s story and considering how Hawke’s performance is turned up to eleven most of the time he is on screen, it may be for the best.

 

Also appearing in The Good Lord Bird are Wyatt Russell (Everybody Wants Some!!) as a real life Confederate Soldier who plays a big part in the John Brown lore.  Ellar Coltrane, who spend twelve years playing Hawke’s son while filming Boyhood, also play’s John Brown’s son here.  Later in the series, one of John Brown’s daughters shows up and is also played by someone who Hawke is very familiar with.

 

Book adaptations have flourished in the time of Peak television, getting to fill out the stories over the course of four to ten episodes which movies have to cram into two(ish) hours.  The Good Lord Bird may be one of the few book adaptations that would have been better off as a movie.  The joke of Onion in a dress gets old quick.  It seems more people notice John Brown in a time before photographs than people realize Onion is not a girl.  Ethan Hawke firing on all cylinders in every scene also gets a little grating to the point you may be glad when he disappears for almost full episodes.  Still, the John Brown story is one that deserves more than a paragraph and The Good Lord Bird does a decent job expanding on his legacy to this nation.

 

The Good Lord Bird airs Sundays at 9:00 on Showtime.

Previewing The Comey Rule

Late in the second and last episode of The Comey Rule, the United States Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, fighting back tears argues to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Andrew McCabe the he should wear a wire in meeting with the president of the United States, Donald Trump, so he and the cabinet would have enough evidence to invoke the 25^th amendment of the condition declaring the president is unable to serve.  Wow, what a bombshell if true.  I jumped on my phone and apparently this news was already out there with the New York Times reporting this back in September 2018 and McCabe, in an interview with 60 Minutes in February, confirmed such.  It is amazing that there has been so much craziness in the past four year that is easy to forget something as big as a conspiracy to remove the president.

 

Weirdly Rod Rosenstein is sort of the narrator of The Comey Rule.  He opens the two night event trashing the titular character sometime after the bulk of the show takes place and is also the last voice we hear.  We actually see more of Rosenstein in a post mortem of the show than during the time James Comey was leading the FBI.  But hey, it is weird to even have a show based mostly on the memoir of James Comey on the eve of the election featuring the guy who fired him.

 

The limited series was originally scheduled to premiere in late November, I guess because it wanted to adhere to the FBI rule of not wanting to open a case that might influence an election.  But unlike James Comey who stubbornly stuck to principals in hopes to keep the FBI non-partisan (and was attacked for it by Rosenstein who called him a boy scout, which apparel to Rosenstein is considered an insult) Showtime caved to pressure to move the show up to just six weeks before the election.  Granted, who at this point watch The Comey Rule and realize maybe it is not wise to re-elect a psychopath?

 

This is the second straight year Showtime has aired a based on a tell all political show, thankfully The Comey Rule comes off as much less icky than the Roger Ailes show, The Loudest Voice.  But Showtime split the five hours and forty-five minute over seven weeks, for The Comey Rule, they split the three and a half hour into two back to back nights.  Why not spread that out across four week, especially in the middle of a pandemic where they are probably running low on things to air?

 

Much like The Loudest Voice, The Comey Rule has a very recognizable cast led by Jeff Daniels as the former FBI director.  Granted this is weird for me as I was also watch The Newsroom while watch The Comey Rule because I mostly saw Will McAvoy with slightly darker hair (ironically the episode I watch prior to The Comey Rule was the first Anthony Weiner scandal, probably not a spoiler to say Weiner comes up in the new show too in a major way).  I am not sure why they did not go with the full black dye job that the real Comey likely does.  Brendan Gleeson (Gangs of New York) does a pretty bad job as Donald Trump and the bad wig and bad make-up job do not help him at all, granted, just how can anyone replicate such a mess?  Kingsley Ben-Adir (Love Life) does a better job as the former president Barack Obama despite looking a good thirty years younger than the guy he is playing.

 

Thankfully the show puts up a name card whenever someone new comes on screen, taking out the guess work of who they are playing.  It is surprising how many names I recognized.  I probably could not name many in past administrations other than maybe the head of the FBI, but I recognized most of the people who popped up on the show.  The limited series also features (honestly, I am just copying and pasting this from the Showtime press release) Holly Hunter (The Piano) as former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Michael Kelly (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) as former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Jennifer Ehle (Zero Dark Thirty) as Patrice Comey, Scoot McNairy (Halt and Catch Fire) as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Jonathan Banks (Better Call Saul) as former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones) as former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Amy Seimetz (The Girlfriend Experience) as former FBI lawyer Trisha Anderson, Steven Pasquale (The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story) as former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and Peter Coyote (The Disappearance) as Robert Mueller. Steve Zissis (Togetherness), Shawn Doyle (House of Cards), Brian d’Arcy James (Spotlight), Dalmar Abuzeid (Anne with an E), William Sadler (When They See Us), Richard Thomas (Tell Me Your Secrets), T.R. Knight (Grey’s Anatomy), Joe Lo Truglio (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Spencer Garrett (Bombshell), Michael Hyatt (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Damon Gupton (Black Lightning) and Seann Gallagher (Good Witch) also star. 

 

Bizarrely, comedian Truglio is playing former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and it is not as a joke.  I got to wonder just who The Comey Rule is for.  Unlike The Loudest Voice which came off as a liberal hit job, The Comey Rule seems to want to be as noble as James Comey wants us to think he was.  The second episode starts shortly after the election and we see a guy shooting off an e-mail about how Hilary got what she deserves and then pans to a crying woman upset than Clinton lost (well this is right after a pretty hilarious song that almost makes the series worth it).  The show also takes painstaking ways to make Comey out to be the Boy Scout Rosenstein complains about like when first briefed on the Steele dossier, Comey actually asks, “What’s a golden shower?’ which was just very eye rolling.  The liberals hate James Comey because they think he swung the election to Trump while conservatives hate him because they think the Russia investigation was just done to delegitimize his presidency.  So just who is The Comey Rule for?  Probably political junkies who want to complain on Twitter how poorly their side is being represented.

 

The Comey Rule premieres Sunday at 9:00 on Showtime and concludes the following day.

Previewing We Hunt Together

Well it took five months, but networks are finally running pretty low on content. I believe all Showtime have in the can are the miniseries The Good Lord Bird (which was supposed to premiere this week but was pulled in the wake of Black Lives Matter protest for some editing; who would have guessed a slavery show would be too racist?) and the Comey Effect. Your Honor recently got a teaser but no premiere date yet. And while shows are slowly restarting across the globe, it way be a while before Shameless and Billions will be able to film on location in Chicago and New York City respectively.

So here come the imports. Last month Hulu hosted a British Bingathon with five different shows from across the pond. Showtime is filling its hole with We Hunt Together which aired earlier this year in jolly ol’ England. The show is a cat and mouse show with two pairs. Baba saves Freddie from an assault and look to avenge those who wronged her. While Jackson is new to homicide and is teamed with the jaded Lola who try to prove a string of murders are connected.

This is a different kind of cat and mouse as British shows do seem to have different beats to them than their American counterparts. There also seems to be a tinge of very bleak British dark humour that peaks out everyone and a while. There is also an interesting question in the show of how much empathy do adults deserve if they had truly horrendous childhoods. Baba was a child soldier in Africa before moving to England and we learn as the show progresses, Freddie has some dark skeletons in her closet too.

Again, in light of Black Lives Matters, one thing that Jackson says that really stuck out to me was , “The good way to judge a society is by the conduct of its police officers.” While this show aired and was written before the protests here that even spread across the words, kind of a profound sentiment. Hopefully as our society is changing, our police force will also change for the better.

We Hunt Together airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.

Previewing The Go-Go's

The start of Alison Ellwood’s (History of The Eagles) latest documentary The Go-Go’s, it says the band was the first all-girl band to pay all their instruments and write all their singers and were successful. Not too surprising of a factoid. Then the film ends with that same fact but adds that they are the first all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to reach Number One in the Billboard chart and that no other band has matched that achievement. Now that was surprising. But when you think about it, Hole had a dude in it. Bands like L7 and Bikini Kill did not put much of a dent on the charts. Granted upon further reflection, I guess the band formally known as The Dixie chicks do not count because they are country? And to save you a google search, The Bangles topped out at number two on the albums chart, but had two number one singles and five top ten hits. So that fact does have a few asterisks to it.

I was hesitant to watch The Go-Go’s after watching Showtime’s Duran Duran documentary that pretty much seemed like an extended version of their Behind the Music episode. The Go-Go’s also had a very memorable Behind the Episode where their squeaky bubblegum pop image was dirtied up with tails of drugs and sex. But this documentary seems much more comprehensive than the salacious VH1 episode that aired over two decades ago.

We get a much more in depth look at the early life of the bandmates; include the two early members who did not make it to the first album. The band does not even release their first album until half way through the film, roughly the same time as a full episode of Behind the Music. So we get a lot more detail of that early time in the bands history with the 1979 punk rock scene where being terrible was cool.

Then we get the story of their three successful eighties album where, yes, the drugs and inter-band squabbles brought down the band as detailed in the Behind the Music episode but pretty much ends with the band. There is very little discussion of Belinda Carlisle’s successful solo career and the only time any of their various reunions in the nineties and 00’s were mentioned was a vague reference that when the band in present day is filmed writing their first new song since 2001. I may have not spent much time thinking about the band in the last thirty years, but after watching The Go-Go’s, the doc does make a decent case for their inclusion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Go-Go’s premieres tonight at 9:00 on Showtime.