A New Star For The CW: Stargirl Shines Brightly

I was a huge booster of Greg Berlanti’s reimagining of the DC universe in its early days. But the longer many of its series stayed on the air they became more political (which didn’t bother me) and less enjoyable (which did). By the end of last year, I was so frustrated with it that I didn’t even bother to look at Black Lightning or Batwoman or engage with the final episode of Arrow.

But being locked in quarantine makes one desperate for entertainment, so last week I reluctantly engaged with Stargirl,  a superheroine even more obscure than the one’s Berlanti started with nearly a decade ago, and who (apart from a few late episodes of Smallville) I knew nothing at all about. So I watched, and became hooked within the first thirty minutes – a lot quicker than any Berlanti show ever did.

Courtney Whitmore seems to be an average fifteen year old. Her father abandoned her and her mother Barbara (Amy Smart) ten years ago. In the opening episode, her new stepfather Pat (Luke Wilson, never more appealing) takes her and her family to Nebraska for a ‘new job opportunity’. Courtney doesn’t seem able to blend in with her new high school, and doesn’t know what she’s doing here. Then she goes into the basement, and finds this heavy staff. And it reacts to her. Then the fun begins.

I’ve seen a lot of superheroes over my quarter century of watching TV and movies; I haven’t seen any that make the training part so much fun. The Cosmic Staff is alive – and though it recognizes her, it is very temperamental. Most of the fun of the opening episodes is watching Courtney try to control a staff that frankly has a mind of its own.  It turns out that Pat was a member of the Justice Society (actually he was a sidekick – and he clearly has resentment issues about that) He spends most of the first two episodes trying to persuade Courtney not to pursue her destiny. When she suggests that Starman, a critical character in the Justice Society, was her father, he won’t even entertain the idea, and he spends much of the first episodes trying to get her to stay away from the staff, clearly indicating that he has very little experience with teenagers in general.

What separates Stargirl from so many of the superhero shows on the CW – at least so far – is that it doesn’t seem to have a real agenda short of being entertaining. That may change as we get to know most of Courtney’s classmates and their families, but so far, there’s none of leaning towards politicizing when it comes to casting or issues. It’s a very retro show, and I mean this in the best possible way. Pat seems to have a transformer built into his eighties model car, and not saying a word has more character than anything Michael Bay has even tried with a far bigger budget. The major villain Brain Wave was one of the most unsettling heavies I’ve seen in any CW series in quite some time. And newcomer Brec Bessinger as the lead has the same kind of star quality that so many of the leads of the Berlanti verse to, only because she’s so much younger there’s an enthusiasm that so many of them were missing even in the early episodes.

Oh, I admit I’m wary. I have been down this road so many times with so many CW shows that I spent almost the entire two episodes waiting for the heavy-handedness to start weighing the series down. But there’s been a leaning towards flatout comedy that so many of the other series on the network don’t even try anymore. Not campiness or slyness, genuine humor as in the scene where Courtney tries to sew her father costume into something she can use in the Home Ec room – and ends up destroying pretty much every sewing machine in the process. I just hope the showrunner have the good sense to keep Stargirl away from the Arrow-verse for as long as possible. This series is in such a different universe as The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow  that I hope no portals open up to make her grow up way too fast.

My score: 4.5 stars.

My Reaction To The (Appropriately) Explosive Climax of Little Fires Everywhere

I’ve spent the better part of two months patiently making my way through Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere not so much caring who set the fire that opened the series but more to see how the clash between Mia  (Kerry Washington) and Elena (Reese Witherspoon) would end up. And it is a credit to the writers of this series (and no doubt to Celeste Ng, who wrote the novel it’s based on) as to just how good they were at subverting the audience’s expectations of the two central characters.

For much of the series run, I was convinced that Elena was trying to be the good person in this story and that Mia was the shifty one. But by the end of the series I realized that the whole time Mia was the more nurturing and far better mother to Pearl than Elena ever was to her children. And its pretty clear when you look at the series as a whole, just how much of Elena’s poison had wafted into her children.

Lexie spent much of the season trying to prove that she was deserving of her position at Yale, which led to doing some truly horrible things, including stealing Pearl’s story of problems with getting into a math class for a college essay, using sex to convince her boyfriend Scott to stay with her, and having an abortion and using Pearl’s name as a cover. When everything blew up on her in the penultimate episode, we finally realized just how close to the surface her racism was – and it was unsettling.

The rivalry between Trip and Moody unfolded quite differently as we expected.  For the first half of the series, Trip seemed to be the more sympathetic person and Moody just another dumb jock. But Trip always seemed to look down on everyone in high school, as if there was a level of elitism in him that made him superior even to his brother. When Izzy turned on Trip in the last episode, revealing that he was just as possessive of Pearl as the rich people he disdained, it was a real blow – which still didn’t make up for the fact that he basically grouped Pearl “with the rest of the sluts he sleeps with”

There were never quite the same depths to Moody that any of the other Richardson children seemed to have, but there was something in him that really was reaching for something better. He was the only one who felt a certain level of guilt for what he was doing with Pearl. Nevertheless, given opportunity after opportunity to tell the truth to his brother, he just couldn’t do it, and he was still trying to justify it in the end.

For much of the series, you could argue that Elena was trying to the right thing by children – and even by Pearl, who wanted what the Richardsons had after a migrant life in which her mother was constantly selfish. Mia no doubt took the job as the Richardson’s domestic to keep an eye on her daughter, and her initial involvement with Bebe could be seen as some kind of selfishness as well. Even the circumstances which led up to Pearl’s birth – she agreed to be a surrogate solely to earn the money for another semester, and then lied to the Ryan’s about their child being dead – could be viewed as a selfish act. But in retrospect, they pale in comparisons to the actions of Elena, who no doubt took Mia in to make herself feel better, who kept investigating Mia more to prove that she was lying then to help her friend, and who clearly cared more for the appearance of a perfect family then actually doing the work to have one – never more clear than we she insisted of having Christmas pictures done again, despite her families objections and the cropping Izzy out – made her more and more unsympathetic before she told Pearl the truth about the circumstances of her birth.

By the final episode, Elena has completely lost even the idea of being a good person. She wants her friends to win the custody battle so that they won’t hate her. She bullies the head of a Planned Parenthood, and spies around her office, and then delights in learning about ‘Pearl’s abortion not knowing that she has, in effect, lit a tinderbox.  She throws Mia and Pearl out of their house, and refuses to believe Mia’s story.

The last twenty minutes of the episode features some of the finest acting Reese Witherspoon has ever done. Completely unmoored, her reaction to Izzy about to burn her room down while her other children try to stop her is utter bile, telling Izzy that she never wanted her. And when Lexie tries to tell about the abortion and that she’s not perfect, her horrible blast of “YES YOU ARE!” is as close to a Walter White moment that I’ve seen Witherspoon ever do.

The revelation that it is not Izzy who set the fire, but all the other children, is the one act that Elena can’t escape from. The moment where, utterly blank, she says: “I did it” is her realization that in her effort to try and have perfection, she had lost everything – including Izzy, who has run away, her fate unknown.

In contrast, Mia finally tells the truth to her daughter – every bit of it – and demonstrates, just as she did with Izzy, that she didn’t have to be a biological parent to be a great mother. Pearl has been fighting with her mother ever since they came to Shaker, but having seen that ‘the perfect life’ is only perfect at the surface, she now realizes the truth of her mother’s love. The moment where Mia invites her daughter to see her last project – something we know she never did before – is an even greater level of acceptance that was truly brilliant. Throughout this series, Kerry Washington has delivered some of the most emotional – and realistic – acting I’ve ever seen her do, but watching her face in the final minutes as she read her daughter’s entry in her journal, was as worthy of awards as Witherspoon’s work.

This is one of the great triumphs for acting this year. In addition to Washington and Witherspoon, who will clearly be at the forefront of an already crowded Best Actress Movie/Limited Series, attention should be paid to Lexi Underwood as Pearl and Megan Stott as Izzie.  Attention should also be paid to Jade Pettyjohn as Lexie, the troubled oldest sibling who bears the brunt of her mother’s anguish.

I don’t think Little Fires Everywhere was perfect. The ultimate resolution to the custody battle that was the backbone of the series wasn’t satisfying in a clear way to me. But overall, this was one of the more mesmerizing limited series I’ve seen in a season that has already been full of them. I spent my quarantine watching this while the world was binging Tiger King, and I feel that this  by far gave better entertainment value.

How To Get Away With Murder ends - And So Does An Era

I always swear that the next article I end up writing about Shonda Rhimes will be the last one, and I always seem to write another one. But the fact of the matter is, Shonda’s era of dominance over ABC may finally be coming to an end.

Tomorrow night, How to Get Away With Murder will air its final episode. And once we learn the fate of Annalyse and the Keating (4? 3? How many have survived her class), Shonda Rhimes’ Thursday night will finally come to an end. With Murder gone and Rhimes now signed with Netflix (where her characters will be able to say the four letter word that they all do to an excess in her series), ABC can no longer make the same claim that Thursday is TGIT. Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 are still there, of course, but Rhimes passed control to both series over to her lieutenant’s years ago, and their ratings have been headed downward for at least two seasons. This coming decade will finally see her disappearance from the broadcast stage. Good riddance.

To explain why How to Get Away with Murder was such a trainwreck, one has to look at two other legal dramas: Damages, the Glenn Close FX series that I’ve repeatedly made clear that Peter Nowalk didn’t just borrow from as much as he did rip off wholesale, and For the People, the last new entry in Shondaland that was pretty much the only real series of her brand that I genuinely liked.

Damages was basically a drama about a monstrous corporate attorney who destroyed the lives of everyone around her in order to defeat bigger and more important targets = billionaire industrialists, hedge fund managers, energy companies, etc. For those reasons, the central character Patty Hewes would easily fit the description of an anti-heroine. The series also believed in flashforwards to murders or suspicious deaths that would only be explained in the final episode of the season. The series focused on Patty’s parasitic relationship with Ellen, a recent law school graduate who would over the course of the series be revealed to be as ruthless as Patty, even as she tried to destroy her. Damages was one of the great series of the New Golden ages that won four Emmy and got fifteen additional nominations during its run – roughly the same number that Murder has gotten in its.  But what separated Murder from Damages was that Damages at least tried to make you feel sympathy for some of the characters on the series. Murder makes everybody horrible – not just Annalyse and the Keating 5, but the lawyers they argue against, the clients, their families, even the people who should be the good guys.  And of course, they’re all screwing each other anyway, physically and mentally, so what difference does it make?

I’d say that this was an utterly cynical view of the law, which was utterly contradicting by For the People. A series that took place in a district court, and focused equally on the prosecutors and the public defenders, it was everything Murder was not. Many of the characters were cynical and political animals, but at their core, they believed in justice and the rights of the people. The discussion and arguments the characters made – often against each other – were mixed in a real world scenario with stirring dialogue that would not have been out of place in Aaron Sorkin or David E. Kelley at his peak. And while the central prosecutor and head of the PD’s office did eventually have an affair, it was by far more in the background by the second season. When Roger made a decision to leave his job so he could have a relationship with Janet in the open, it had more emotion and realism than all of the relationships on Grey’s and Scandal put together. For the People was the show television needed, and the fact that ABC threw it away is another of the most disheartening decisions the network has made. But in the end I wasn’t surprised. For the People was a legal drama about our system at its best; Murder was a legal drama that argued our system only existed to be manipulated by the worst.

I haven’t watched a single episode of Murder since the end of Season 4, and even the fact that it’s ending doesn’t exactly fill me with a desire to see how it finishes.  At its center, this was a legal drama that made no sense. Annalyse’s inner circle would commit murders, and ultimately frame their own clients or sometimes completely innocent people to protect them. Now, you can make argument – however flawed – that the deaths in Scandal were for some greater purpose: ‘to save the republic’.  But when you’re a defense attorney and you’re charging your own clients of crimes that you’re committing, that may be the most cynical reading of the legal system possible.  Over and over when I was watching the show, Annalyse kept teaching her students ‘to be like her’. Leaving aside that she was a criminal, she was an alcoholic, affectless, companionless woman who didn’t even really seem to like the students she taught. Why would any lawyer want to be like her?

Much of the final season has been based on the Governor and the Bureau investigating Annalyse for her crimes.  So in other words, we are hoping that Annalyse manages to escape responsibility for all of the horrible things she does? In Damages, Ellen Parsons spent the better part of the series trying to bring down Patty. I suppose if Nowalk really had written the series, Ellen would have ended the show as murderous as the woman she aspired to be. Viola Davis is a great actress (better, in some ways than Glenn Close was) but she can’t sell this bill of goods, and she never has been.

Broadcast TV has made many attempts to deal with the drain that cable and streaming have put on it. ABC’s determination to put all its eggs in the Shondaland basket has been one of the worst blunders they’ve ever made. I don’t know what the new normal for television will be when the new season begins. What I do know is that it can only be better without Rhimes and her series as a part of it. There are still a lot of great shows on Broadcast TV, and I’m well aware that we need diversity in front of and behind the cameras. What we don’t need is any more of Shondaland’s series. All that we seem to have gleaned from them is that African-American female protagonists can be just as bloodthirsty as the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos. We’ve also learned that African-American showrunners can write as many potboilers as Jerry Bruckheimer.  Now let’s hope we can get more of the former with better stories from the latter.

I Know This Much Is True Review

Ever since the exquisite Chernobyl premiered nearly a year ago, HBO has become a wellspring of some of the most exquisite and darkest literary adaptations from a network that has done more than its share. From the memorable updating of Watchmen (which many hoped would be a regular series) to the quiet darkness of The Outsider to the way too relevant alternate history The Plot Against America HBO has spent much of its post Game of Thrones world looking at some of the darkest parts of humanity.

Now, they look into one of their most ambitious projects (and for HBO, that’s saying a lot); a six part adaptation of Wally Lamb’s epic novel I Know This Much is True. This is another of those bestsellers that one constantly checks out of the library, but whose sheer size will often throw off all but the devoted reader; I took out of the library multiple times but 900 pages plus seemed too much even for me, along with very little revealed by its jacket. What I have been able to gleam is that this is the story of twin brothers; Dominic and Thomas, born on New Year’s Eve 1949, and New Year’s Day 1950.  They know nothing of their father and their mother (Melissa Leo) goes to her grave refusing to reveal any details about him. They are raised by a cruel stepfather, and Tom, from the earliest days on, is schizophrenic to the point where he can barely function. In October of 1990, the precipitating act of the novel occurs when Tom enters a Connecticut library, chops his hand off, and insists that it not be reattached – actions which get him committed to a state hospital utterly unsuited to him. Just reading the early reviews makes you think it will only get worse from here on.

What makes this series worth watching – at least so far – is the incredible work of Mark Ruffalo as both brothers. Most of the world only knows Ruffalo for his work as Bruce Banner in the Marvel Universe, which is a shame, because much of his work both before and during these productions has revealed him to be one of the greatest character actors working in any field today. Somewhat doughy, awkward looking, and not conventionally handsome, he has this gift for playing characters who never quite seem comfortable in their own skin (which may have been part of the reason he was ideal as Banner). Always lurking beneath the surface of so many of his characters (from the TV movie The Normal Heart and the Oscar winning Spotlight) is a level of outrage lurking below the surface. And that is very clear in his portrayals of both Dominic and Tom. Dom tries to withhold a lot of the time, and it rarely surfacing except through episodes but you can see in both brothers. Much like the work of James Franco in The Deuce, this isn’t simply a gimmick to draw you in or to grab award nominations (though I’m pretty sure Ruffalo will get his share). You can see the level of pain in each one; in Tom, it’s of a life wasted, in Dom, it’s of a life that he just can’t live.

Given the level of the others actors in this series, I have a feeling I’ll stick around for the rest of I Know This Much Is True. Kathryn Hahn, who lays Dom’s ex-wife had a brilliant scene that makes it hard to believe this is the same actress who made me laugh so hard in Mrs. Fletcher just a few months ago. Melissa Leo delivered her usual level of brilliance in just a few short scenes, and I look forward to seeing Archie Panjabi later on. Will it be dark and depressing? Sure seems that way, and given the times we live in, that may not be the biggest draw these days. But if we are driven to search for excellence, I have a feeling we can no more look away from this series than we can the work of its leading man.

My score: 4 stars.

An Argument Against Binge Watching

Now that the world seems to be stuck at home with nothing to do but watch endless amounts of television, it would seem like a strange time to argue against the idea of binge-watching, since it seems to be all were doing to fill our time. Nevertheless, as someone who has never understood the reasoning, I think it might be as good as time as any to try and play out the argument why we as a viewing society seem to have decided the only way to watch a series is all at once.

I realize that given the fragmenting of viewership with the rise of cable TV and especially streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, the idea of appointment television has all but disappeared. It’s therefore stunning to find out that the idea of everybody watching one episode a week has become almost unheard of in just the past decade. TV used to be a unifying thing, and I realize that’s gone with the wind. But the idea of patience when it came to television viewing has become not only unheard of, but practically ridiculous.

I just have never understood the logic to binge-watching. The whole premise seemed faulty. House of Cards or Orange is the New Black drops its season on Friday. You spend Saturday – or if you want to pause to eat and sleep, an entire weekend – watching the season. You now have to wait 363 days for the next season. Have our attention spans become so short that the idea of instant gratification now applies to even our viewing happens? Why wait a couple of months for a storyline to play out when you can see the whole thing in a few hours?

In a way, I blame much of Shonda Rhimes work as a counterapproach to the binge watching of Netflix. The pace of series like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder was so ridiculously quick that the average viewer never had time to breathe. And because it worked, I feel a lot of other series on network TV and cable took that same approach. Storylines that would normally take weeks to unfold would change course in an hour. Even the best series on TV – Mr. Robot may be the most obvious example – would have so many twists in some of their episodes, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could’ve taken it seriously after awhile.

As a result, a lot of the greatest writers who worked on television have refused to go along with this. Matthew Weiner, who’s Mad Men, may have been the last great series to rely on a measured pace – said bluntly that he wouldn’t develop TV for streaming services unless they agreed to show it one week at a time. I find it hard to believe that some of the other great writers of the Golden Age – David Simon, Joss Whedon, and Vince Gilligan among them – would ever be willing to adjust their writing for the binge-watching world.

More to the point, I have never understood the appeal. Does no one miss the anticipation of a new episode of television, of having to wait an entire week to find out how Jack Bauer was going to get out of his predicament or how much deeper into the abyss Philip and Elizabeth Jennings were going to get? I have been maintaining this approach to Netflix for a decade; when I finally decided to get caught up on Breaking Bad, I didn’t binge watch the series over a week; it took me over a year to get deeper involved in the abyss that Gilligan would put Walter and Jesse.  And I never regretted that decision. There was something comforting in the fact that the following week there was going to be another episode for me to watch.

I’ve taken this approach even with other Netflix series, most recently Stranger Things and The Crown and Russian Doll. And I don’t regret for a second that I spent so much time watching an entire season. On the contrary, it gave me time to process and relish in the mystery of the series and the majesty of the performances.

And some servers are willing to meet you halfway. Hulu, which I never had much use for until recently, has been willing to drop some of its original series, in a staggered way. I’ve gotten a lot more pleasure out of Little Fires Everywhere watching it week by week than I ever would’ve if I’d decided to see it all at once. Watching Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s battle with their children and each other over a weekly basis has been much more savoring.

So, now that we’re all quarantine – and maybe when this period does, as it will, passes – we should make a deal with ourselves. Maybe designate one day a week for one particular streaming show you want to see. If you want to, do it for as many days as you can spare. And when you reach the end of the episode, and your service asks you if you want to see the next episode, just don’t. Make an agreement with yourself that you’re going to wait a week.  We’re now in an era of forced patience, after all. This seems as good a time as any to try and exercise with our viewing habits.

It’s a suggestion. It may not come from the same logic of having to wait another eleven months for the next season of Ozark, but I put it forward just the same.

The Council Is Back In Session: Council of Dads Review

Last March, in a time that now seems as far back as the Pleistocene era, Council of Dads followed the season finale of This is Us. Another series in what seems to be the new genre tragi-comedy, it dealt with the Perry family, mother, father and four very distinct children. The pilot dealt with the father (Tom Everett Scott) diagnosis with cancer, his recovery, and the year in between. Worried about what would happen if the cancer came back, he made the suggestion for a ‘council of Dads’ to help raise his children. These involve three different men in various parts of his life: Evan, a fellow restaurant owner, Oliver (J. August Richards) a gay oncologist, who worked at the same hospital as his wife, and Larry (Michael O’Neill) someone Tom knew from AA. The inevitable happened at the end of the episode – the cancer returned and Tom passed away. Things moved forward from that point on, but for some reason NBC didn’t launch the series officially until last night. It doesn’t fit into their usual list of Wolf procedurals and comedies, but it might have a place in that middle ground of quirky series – Good Girls and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist – that don’t seem to show up anywhere else.

It doesn’t try to instantly make the Council a successful enterprise; indeed much of the second episode showing the council either trying to hard (particularly Larry) or trying to ignore their duties altogether (Oliver and Evan) It doesn’t help matters that Robin (Sarah Wayne Callies, a light year away from Prison Break or The Walking Dead) is still mourning her husband and is trying to do everything on her own.

Her family would be peculiar under any circumstances: Luly, the eldest, is a bi-racial twenty-something journalist who wanted to move to New York in the Pilot, got caught up with her Dad’s illness and recovery, and changed her entire life. She got married at the end of the episode, and its hard to know whether it was out of love or grief. JJ is a  child who was born as a girl and identifies as a boy. Charlotte was adopted and has been looking for her birth parents. Theo is an adolescent going through angst.

The series is an uneven mix so far, but it works when it does when it leans into the awkwardness. I’m particularly in favor of it because of the casting against type of Michael O’Neill as Larry. O’Neill has been working steadily in television, but usually as someone who gets killed early in the series (24) or someone who has a twisted soul (he shot up the hospital in Grey’s Anatomy) Its rare for him to get a chance to play a fully, mostly flawed human being, and he does a good job at it, as someone who is overreaching – mainly because he was a horrible father to his children because of his drinking, and really needs this second chance.

I’ll be the first to admit Council of Dads often tries to do too much – it’s got a large cast and it doesn’t know how to handle all of them well. And I have a feeling the grimness of the subject will not be a ready draw to many audiences. But it’s different, and it tries to really analyze what makes a family in this strange new millennium we live in. We don’t see that often on a lot of shows these days, much less on broadcast television. For that much, at least, I’m willing to give it a chance.

My score: 3.5 stars.