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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 DemiĂ¡n 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showtime continues its HIP HOP 50 series, devoting two years
leading up to the 50th 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.
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 TheDropout, 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.
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.
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 changesby 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.
American Rust
recently had its season finale and when that show started I remarked how it
unfortunately premiered after shows with a similar premise like Your Honor and Mare of Easttown.The show
that replaces it on the Showtime schedule is Yellowjackets which also has the unfortunate timing of premiering
close to similarly sounding shows.About
a year ago, Amazon premiered its own Lord of the Flies but teenage girls survive a plane crash in a
remote area show The Wilds (to be fair, Showtime actually announced their version on May 9, 2018, while Amazon was announced
June 28 of that year).
Given the mid-nineties setting, it is also hard not to think
of Cruel Summer which aired earlier
this year on Freeform (who did not greenlight the series until September
2019).While Yellowjackets takes place the year (1996) the trio of years Cruel Summer takes
place they do share a similar soundtrack.But where Cruel Summer had
one of their actresses sing Smashing Pumpkins for the show along with other various
cover songs, the budget for a Showtime show is much higher and can afford
getting the actual Smashing Pumpkins song as well as a copious amount of
nineties jams.Though I do not remember anyone
still listening to Marky Mark or Snow in 1996 and the ending of the premiere does feature
a cover of an eighties power ballad.Okay, one
of the characters on Yellowjackets does
a kind of disturbing rendition of Breakfast
at Tiffany’s to another character. Then each of the
episode (at least of the ones I watched) are named after a nineties pop culture
references including a certain Red Hot Chili Peppers album which episode features
a lot of two of the words in the title, none of the third, while the fourth… well, the
fourth is still up to some debate.
Thankfully I did not watch The Wilds so I did not spend much time comparing the song, and aside
from the music and the time jumping (Yellowjackets
does not stay entirely in the nineties, it does flash forward to present day),
there is not much comparison to the Freeform show.The show follows an undefeated soccer team
from New Jersey area that is heading to Washington State to compete in nationals
when their plane, a charter flight by one of the player’s rich father (do not ask
me why that father, or any other of the parents did not bother going with them;
just two coaches and two sons of one of the coaches are along for the trip), crashes in the Canadian
wilderness after bad weather causes the plane to go off course. Then they have to
defend for themselves for nineteen months before being found.Do not ask me why none of them over that year
and a half just says,” Hey, why don’t some of us just walk south until
we hit civilization and then send help?”
I have one more comparison to a recent show (and not even
because it has a mostly female cast).The Yellowjackets premiere
suffers from the same issue as the Y:
The Last Man premiere had. Y: The Last
Man was marketed as a show with one dude left in civilization, but they wasted
an entire episode until finally killing off all the guys in the final
moments.Similarly, we were told Yellowjackets was a survival show, but
the plane does not even start going down until the last scene.Granted, while that Y: The Last Man first episode was mostly boring, I would totally watch
a Friday Night Lights type show about
girls’ soccer set in the nineties. But while I have compared Yellowjackets to many different shows and movies, and couple I could have also brought other like Lost (plane crash, weird stuff going on, flashback./forwards), Alive (plane crash in a remote place, possible cannibalisms), I Know What You Did Last Summer (someone seems to know what they did twenty-five years ago)Yellowjackets takes all those tropes and mixes them up into something that still manages to feel unique.
The slow start in the nineties timeline which takes a whole
episode until the plane crashed is matched by a slow start to the present day
timeline.Lynskey and Cypress seemingly are
on different shows for the first couple episodes, not really tied to the plane
crash like the other modern characters are.Sure the both receive a mysterious postcard which all the girls got
(though it is very vague who made it to present day other than those four main characters,
two of which talk about there have been no sign of the other survivors in months, though
by my count about twenty survived the crash), but after discussing with each
other once, and a reporter snoops around offering a seven figure book deal (no
one has yet to give the full story of what went on in those nineteen months) it
seems completely forgotten by those two for a while.That Ricci does not even show up until late
into the first episode also hurts that first episode.
Christina Ricci is the best thing about Yellowjackets and does a perfect grown up Tracy Flick impression (unfortunately
the younger version does not; but for the younger cast, the goalkeeper is the most entertaining which tracks because you gotta be a little weird to be a goalkeeper).She is so
good in this, it makes me wonder why she really has not gotten more high
profile roes since her nineties child star days (well, I do know, good roles
for women over twenty-five are not easy to find and Reece Witherspoon got most
of them).But it is inspired casting along
with another huge in the nineties actress Juliette Lewis.It is a shame they could not get Claire Danes,
Kirsten Dunst, Keri Russell, Rachel Leigh Cook, Alicia Silverstone, Tatiana Ali
and / or Gabrielle Union to fill out the other adult survivors.
From the soundtrack to the return of Christina Ricci in my
life, Yellowjackets hits that nostalgia from the era much like Cruel Summer did earlier this year.The Lord
of the Flies but Ladies in the woods instead of a desert island keeps the
show entertaining past the nostalgia.Then the mystery of who sent the postcard in the present days adds an added
layer to the show.Yellowjackets is aiming to be the next great mystery box show and almost
gets there.
Yellowjackets airs
Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.But why wait
until Sunday for the first episode to hit linear television; you can watch it
on via Showtime website or app or on YouTube below:
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.