Tag Archives: Amazon

Summer 2015 Review: Catastrophe

29 Jun

Catastrophe

Catastrophe is that frequent film, but rare TV beast, the romantic comedy. It’s common on film but rare on TV, because by the nature of their respective lengths, film and tv rom coms are very different creatures. Film rom coms have an obvious arc, and a sense of finality. The couple generally has an unlikely meet cute, goes through a couple of trials, including a big one towards the end, and then gets together to finish the movie after some grand gesture, or occasionally in artier rom coms falls apart. TV rom coms more usually consist of unlikely couples getting together, and largely staying together, with plenty of trials and tribulations along the way but without the big dramatic sweeps of a movie.

Catastrophe is also a British series. Surprisingly, for a series and a theme that is replete with people embarrassing themselves constantly, it’s not that awkward to watch, relatively  (a British show featuring a Brit dating American Andy Samberg a couple of years ago called Cuckoo was awkward to the extreme). What really makes Catastrophe work, more than the jokes or the laughs or the story, is the tone. Catastrophe finds the perfect spot between earnest and cynical, awkward and mawkish, sentimental and restrained. This tone makes the show enjoyable and excessively watchable.

Here’s the pitch for Catastrophe: Rob is an American visiting London for a week for business. He meets Sharon at a bar, they hit it off, and have sex in his room. They both seem to actually like one another, and hang out and have lots of sex for the rest of the week until Rob has to go home. A couple months later, they’ve more or less moved on with their lives, having great memories of their time together and no hard feelings, until Sharon calls Rob and lets him know that she’s pregnant. It’s pretty much the premise of Knocked Up (and I’m sure many properties before that) but with a more mature, both emotionally and age-wise couple. Rob, unsure what to do, doubles down, and proposes to her, believing staying the together for the kid and making a real go of it as a couple is the right move. Countless hilarious mishaps happen between point A and B, as both parties examine their decision to try to make it together even though they barely know one another and try to figure out if this is the right move, while they seem to actually like, and maybe one day love, each other.

The chemistry between leads Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan is casual and natural, and an essential part of what makes Catastrophe go. Everything is centered on the two of them and their relationship; if we don’t both believe deeply that they could be together and want to keep watching them interact, there’s no way the show can be salvaged. Luckily for Catastrophe, it works.

Catastrophe isn’t the funniest show, it isn’t a particularly unique show, and there’s nothing that makes it obviously stand out plot wise, or dialogue wise, or aesthetically. However, it successfully navigates the spaces within its genre to create an enjoyable viewing experience where you’re generally rooting for both of them; hardly a necessity for a show, but sometimes a welcome respite from more serious fare. I love big drama as much as anyone, but there’s nothing greater after watching an episode of Hannibal or Rectify, or whatever else, than watching a light half hour that can leave you smiling.

Will I watch it again? Yes. It’s British. There are six half hour episodes; it’s shorter than a Hobbit installment. I’ll probably be done by the time you’re reading this.

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Spring 2015 Review: The Man in the High Castle

30 Jan

The Man in the High Castle

 The problem with super high-concept pilots, and Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is certainly one of those, is that they often get bogged down so heavily in exposition that whether you’re interested in going forward with the show is determined solely by how intrigued you are by the premise rather than by the quality of the characters or the writing. This is because there’s no time to develop either of those in the effort to build the general world and explain what’s going on in the future/past/alternate reality in an hour or less.

The Man in the High Castle clearly suffers from these issues. Based on the work of legendary sci-fi writer and movie-inspirer Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle takes place in the early ‘60s in an alternate reality where the Axis powers won World War II. Japan and Germany have split the U.S. Japan controls the western half and Germany the eastern half, with a relatively small neutral buffer zone in the middle known as the Neutral States. The Nazis seem the crueler of the two powers; they of course don’t allow non-whites to live and they burn cripples and the old, but the Japanese are no softies either. Naturally, a resistance movement has emerged, but it appears small and not particularly well-organized. A key organizer in New York entrusts a crucial mission to a young man he’s never met before without any indicator of trustworthiness other than his word, which appears to be a testament to just how desperate the resistance is.

 An elderly Hitler is on his last legs, and everyone is speculating who will take over, with Himmler, Goebbels, and Goring the key contenders, and many expect the new chancellor, whoever it is, to take on Japan in an epic clash once and for all, ensuring complete racial purity for the Aryan race.

The young new recruit alluded to earlier in the resistance is taking some top secret cargo to the Neutral States, where he’ll meet someone he doesn’t know to deliver what he doesn’t know he has. A woman, who is given a treasonous film that poses a world in which the Allies won by her sister right before her sister is caught by the Japanese authorities and killed, takes a bus to that same location in the Neutral States, where she’ll be looking for someone she doesn’t know. Her boyfriend, who didn’t even know where she had gone, is arrested due to her sister’s crimes. For all that world building, that’s about all we know about our characters going forward. Calling the back stories for the characters thin would be generous. It’s almost shocking the writers couldn’t get more plot out of the hour-long first episode – two characters are meeting, and that’s about it.

It’s hard to recommend The Man in the High Castle based on what I’ve seen because there just isn’t a lot. It’s best viewed as a draft-and-follow; if you’re into the concept check it out, otherwise sit back and see if it manages to get more interesting or less over the first episodes, with the latter the more likely scenario, just based on the odds.

Of course, as I say this, I’m always the person who gets intrigued easily by these high concept premises and watches a few episodes only to see the show start to fall apart because the more fundamental aspects a show needs to succeed – characters and writing were lost beneath the high concept premise. I get fooled again and again – Revolution and Under the Dome are two recent examples, but I continue to come back for more.

Will I watch it again? Of course I will. I’m a sucker for exactly these types of high concepts. Will it deliver though, and will I be watching through more than three or four episodes, I’m less sure.

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Spring 2014 Review: Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle

21 Feb

With last year’s threesome of House of Cards, Arrested Development, and Orange is the New Black, I now take serious Netflix as a provider of original programming and pay close attention to shows the service puts out. Amazon hasn’t quite reached that perch yet. They’ve started making pilots, have tried to generate interests with fan votes to determine which pilots are turned into series, but they haven’t yet had that breakthrough show that catapults Amazon as a serious player in the quality TV market (John Goodman’s Alpha House made small waves; it was more than nothing, but more likely a mix tape released while everyone eagerly awaits the first major label album).

Their most recent batch contained five adult pilots and five kid-geared pilots. I’ll look at two half hours here, Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle.

Transparent

Transparent

Having come to these amazon pilots late, and without the normal shielding of reviews that I try to maintain before checking out a show for myself, I couldn’t help but catch the general whiff of effusive praise, if not the specifics.

The thing is, everyone else is pretty much right. There’s lots of ways to dissect television, and I can talk about individual shows and what makes great shows great for hours and thousands of words, but five minutes into the Transparent pilot you can tell it’s simply another class than any of the other pilots they’ve put out. It feels like a premium cable show, and I mean that in the best possible way. Transparent is a story about three siblings and their father, from Jill Soloway, a writer on Six Feet Under. The Six Feet Under connection shows. Since the Fisher clan have been off the air, there has been a serious dirth of great television about regular families – families that aren’t involved with the mafia, or with drug dealing, or any other hook, but just families, who, yes, probably have more issues than most normal families, but who are strong families who deal with these issues as a unit (Friday Night Lights was one, though that had the football hook, I’ve never seen Parenthood, so I can’t comment on that).

Here’s the quick lowdown. Transparent features three Los Angeles siblings. Sarah (Amy Landecker), is a former college lesbian (this is actually plot relevant) and now housewife married to a fairly well-off Len (Childrens Hospital and cameo appearances in every comedy’s Rob Huebel). Josh (Jay Duplass, of the brothers Duplass) is a music exec who seems to enjoy sleeping with the young musicians he courts. Ali (Gaby Hoffman) is the youngest and seems to be a disinterested layabout surviving on money from their dad. Their dad is Mort (Jeffery Tambor) who has big news to share with his kids.

The siblings interaction feels incredible genuine and characters feel surprisingly real after a measly 20 minutes of screen time, even though we know so little about any of them. Evoking that feeling however is a hallmark of good writing and a good show, and I’m excited to learn more about these characters and see the interaction between them.

Just watch it, it’s twenty minutes, and with the news that it’s going to series, Amazon may have their first bona fide critical hit on their hands, the show that demands TV viewers take Amazon seriously as a platform.

Mozart in the Jungle

Mozart in the Jungle

 

Mozart in the Jungle is a comedy set in the high-strung (pun intended) world of classical music in New York. The main characters are a Cynthia (Saffron Burrow, Boston Legal and more) veteran cellist sleeping with the retiring conductor Thomas(Malcolm McDowell), the new younger conductor, Gustavo, who wants to shake things up (Gabriel Garcia Bernal), a young oboist, Hailey (Lola Kirke – sister of Girls’ Jemima) desperate to earn her way in, and well, I’m sure a few  more of the people on screen will turn out to be characters, but those were the obvious ones. Oh, and Bernadette Peters in a small role as Gloria, who is in charge of the symphony.

Mozart in the Jungle features a great idea for a premise, and there could be a good show here, but after watching Transparent you can really feel the gulf in polish between the two shows. Transparent feels fully formed, while Mozart in the Jungle feels like a rough draft. There’s a sketch here, but it feels more like a bunch of ideas; a brain storm, that they would maybe then really bear down on if it went to series. The jokes are well-intentioned and in the right spirit but mostly don’t exactly work. The characters, well, I get what they’re going for with each, but they don’t seem imbued with any of the depth of the Transparent characters. Again, I think this could be good but it needs help from where it is now.

Will I watch it again? Maybe. It’s hard to analyze these pilots, which we’re seeing before any series orders have been placed, and it’s possible that there’s a lot of work that’s done between this and the series order. I do think there’s something here if the writers can really drill down. That said, based merely on the quality of the first episode, it was okay but not quite there enough to deserve regular viewing.

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Fall 2013 Review: Alpha House

3 Jan

John Goodman and friends

With Netflix this past year showing that television can come from, well, the internet instead of television, Amazon, desperate to be a player in the streaming video scene, said “me too.” The more visible of Amazon’s initial two efforts is Alpha House, because it stars the well-known and consistently excellent John Goodman (and less visibly The Wire and Homicide veteran Clark Johnson) and is created by long-time Doonesbury scribe Gary Trudeau. I’m not particularly familiar with Doonesbury other than knowing that it contained political satire with a liberal bent and caught fire in the ’70s. Reading it was daunting because it felt like you needed decades of catching up to figure out what was going on, and when I read comics as a kid I remember seeing a walking cigarette, saying what the fuck, and not ever trying again.

Still, I thought with what I knew about Trudeau and what I knew about Alpha House – that it’s about four Republican senators who live together in a house in DC – it would be a cutting satire. It’s certainly a satire, but it’s not particularly cutting, and I don’t mean this as a negative. The show actual shows a begrudging warmth if not entirely respect for its main characters, at least in the first episode.

It’s warm and more occasionally smile-inducing than laugh out loud funny. There are bits that feel like they should be funnier; I get the joke but they don’t necessarily click. Unlike other shows from this fall where the jokes don’t work (see my review of The Michael J. Fox Show), I don’t think they’re that far off. The jokes are in the right direction, and the cast is generally winning in their delivery. The funniest moment, still, is due to an uncredited Stephen Colbert cameo playing over the end credits.

The show is a much more stylistic parody of the inanity of the Washington DC political culture, than a mundane real life more accurate portrayal in Veep, the most logical television comparison, and a show which shares some similarities and sensibilities. The target of most of the specific barbs are the tea party types; the Republican main characters could be viewed, from their actions, as empty hypocrites, but it’s not how they come off. They certainly seem partly absurd but also partly sensible, having to adjust to the ridiculous whims of their constituents just to ensure they get to come back and do it again. Veep is purposefully free of American political parties, which allows it to explore certain aspects of Washington culture in a richer way while neglecting others. Alpha House does not shy away from partisan politics, and while that and other choices probably take this show farther from Veep’s take on day-to-day Beltway life, it allows a surprisingly gentle but still apt satire of American political culture.

It’s not great but it is decently well done, and due to my personal preferences I probably like this better than other comedies with pilots of similar quality because of its subject matter and style. There’s a lot of room for growth, but unlike many other so-so shows, it’s fairly easy to see where that growth could come from.

Will I watch it again? Maybe. It’s not a top priority and I certainly didn’t finish the episode just wanting to immediately see the next, as happens with the best pilots. Still, I grew more fond of the show as it went along and it’s conceivable that I could marathon this in a spare moment later in the year – I do enjoy political comedy when done well.

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