My Picks For This Year's Emmys, Part 2: Best Actor In A Drama

This category is the one that has been affected by Game of Thrones the least. There has been more variety in this category over the past decade than almost any others. A different actor has won every year for the past nine years, and Bryan Cranston was the only one to win more than once. There’s a lot of room for variety in this category, and little chance for a repeat. While I think Jason Bateman could make another dent in this category, as well as room for some of the men from Westworld, here are the men who are the most likely nominees.

Sterling K. Brown, This is Us

Of all of the actors in this great ensemble, Brown is by far the one who impresses the most year in and year out. Originally a candidate because of his character’s overall goodness, it has been interesting watching him going through areas of denial and darkness. From Randall’s refusal to seek therapy and his begrudging ability to accept his flaws to his ever complicated relationship with his mother and her fast-coming illness – which will lead to the biggest break with his family yet, Brown’s work is one of the great triumphs of television. His continued presence in this category is one of the few sure things about the Emmys, and I have no problem with it.

Brian Cox, Succession

Cox has always been one of the most undervalued actors in every medium he works in – from his portrayal of the first ever Hannibal Lecter to his superb work on Deadwood, he has been constantly given the short end of recognition. That has pretty much stopped when he landed the role of a lifetime as Logan Roy, the patriarch of a clan who represents everything we hate and love about the top one percent all at once. It’s hard to tell what’s harder for this communications billionaire; maintaining control of his empire or his family, and in the final minutes of the Season 2 finale, he seemed to lose both. And yet there was something in that last shot that made me think he was proud of his son at last. The Golden Globe gives him a slight edge for the Emmy, though he will face stiff competition (again possibly from his own family), but I’ll be glad to see him nominated.

Justin Hartley, This is Us

I’m still not certain whether Hartley’s move to be listed as a lead instead of a supporting actor is a smart one. What I do know is that Hartley has deserved recognition from the Emmys for at least the last two seasons, and especially for this one. Watching Kevin try to give support to the uncle he only recently learned he had for much of the first half, to his determination to try and start a family, to his learning of his mother’s illness which leads to him a collision course with Randall, was among the finest work I’ve seen him do, and he’s been the undervalued player of this entire cast. Is it likely that his father will once again swoop in and take credit away from him? It’s hard to ever deny Milo Ventimiglia’s work on this show. But in my opinion, on Season 4, the son finally has outshone the father, and I hope the voters see that.

Rami Malek, Mr. Robot

Just like the series receiving a nomination for Best Drama, it’s clear that the likelihood of Malek being recognized for his work in the final season of Mr. Robot is next to impossible – the series has basically been ignored by the Emmys since its first season. But looking at Malek’s body of work in the final season, its hard to figure how the Emmys could not nominate him. From Eliot’s obsession to rob ECorp blind leading him to the darkest territory yet – including the outright the blackmail of an innocent – to his learning the truth of what his father did to him in the freakiest therapy session of all time, to finally achieving his goals, and then getting trapped inside his own mind, Malek has demonstrated why he became a superstar in the first place. Maybe the Emmys think the Oscar he won last year is more than enough for him. But I think he deserves to be put in the winner’s circle one more time. Please tell me they’ll see it too.

Tobias Menzies, The Crown

I don’t know why the judges are considering Menzies’ work as Prince Philip a lead role in this series, whereas Matt Smith was content to go into the supporting category. That being said, having seen his work in this season of The Crown, one can hardly deny that he is unworthy of recognition. There were two exceptional episodes that more than demonstrated his skill –  one, where after decades of having no real relationship with his mother, he finally embraced her, and the other where, feeling lost in his role in the shadow of the moonwalk, led him to finally face his spiritual problems. Both were superb performances. Throw in the fact that he was unjustly ignored for his superb work in the early seasons of Outlander, and its hard to see how the Emmys can deny him.

Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul

I’ve been saying for four seasons that Odenkirk should’ve won at least one Emmy by now – though to be fair, given the intense level of his competition in this category, it’s hard to figure out who he should have triumphed over. But considering just how brilliant he’s been before, and how masterful he’s been in this season, it’s going to take a lot of effort for the Emmys to not acknowledge him this time. Watching Jimmy embracing Saul, and starting to get involved with the cartel that will bring him down, to his work in Bagman, where a simple money pickup ends in death to his confrontation with Lalo in the next episode, shows that Odenkirk has elevated his work to a level that even Bryan Cranston, for all his gifts, never achieved. Because five seasons in, we still feel for Jimmy in a way we had lost any respect for Walt by this time. We know how his saga ends – and yet we don’t. But I want to know what happened to Jimmy. And I want Odenkirk on that dais.

Billy Porter,  Pose

I’m still not a hundred percent sold that Porter’s work as Pray Tell was worthy of beating Odenkirk’s last year. I do think, however, that it was at the next level this season. As Pray Tell accepting his diagnosis of AIDS by getting angry, by deciding to fight it, and then finally embracing a new love, Porter has been one of the most dazzling points to watch this entire season. He is the pater familias of the gang at the ballroom and of his unlikely family, and as we watched the end of Season 2, we know that despite everything, he will continue to endure.  I honestly don’t know when we’ll finally get a third season of Pose, but I know that Porter is even more of a superstar than he was before. Somebody help this guy complete his EGOT.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Bill Pullman, The Sinner

It is rare that the Emmys give nominations, much less awards, to actors who underplay their characters. Indeed, that exact attitude has probably plagued Bill Pullman his entire career. But in his superb work as Harry Ambrose, a battered down detective who constantly finds himself investigating why people died rather than how, he continuously finds level of calmness in darkness. This season, he drove himself to darker places than he did in the past, trying to get inside the mind of an ordinary teacher who let a classmate die while he watch, and trying to get inside his head cost him even more than these cases usually do – something he didn’t realize until the last minutes of the season. Pullman has been forced to go between Limited Series and Drama due to the Emmys problems in categorizing The Sinner, and it’s cost him. I hope they find a way to acknowledge him this year.

My Hopes For This Year's Emmy Nominations: Part 1, Best Drama Series

Every year, I express my frustration at the way Emmys do business. This year I’m not going to, and I have very good reason why.

With Game of Thrones finally gone from the Emmy scene, that means the dragon that has been taking up space in every acting, directing and writing category for most of the 2010s is finally gone. New blood will finally have to occupy the Drama series nominations in nearly every category, even if some of it comes from series that spent most of last year on the bench because they didn’t want to get crushed by the Thrones juggernaut.

What is more, that will also be spread among the comedies.  With Veep and Fleabag gone, and Russian Doll and Barry on hiatus, a large number of new comedy series – and just as likely, several of the older series that are heading towards a deserving finale – are sure to be in the competition.

And in the greatest nod to the level of quality yet, the Emmys has decided to add one more nomination to all categories in Drama and Comedy series. (I’m less sure about the Limited Series, but we’ll get to that in a  bit.) Perhaps this will lead to the possibility of some actors and actresses who have been ignored for years finally getting their due, even if it is too late.

Keeping up with my tradition of predicting these shows, I will give a list of the series I think most deserve to be nominated in my mind, as will as one prediction for everybody’s consideration. Let us begin the search in the brave new world.

BEST DRAMA SERIES

A lot of series held off premiering last year cause they didn’t want to fight in the Game of Thrones juggernaut. A lot of good candidates ended up winning anyway, so maybe they shouldn’t have been so scared. Trying to figure out which shows will fill the gap is going to be a problem – The Morning Show and The Good Fight may not be in formats people watch, and Ozark may suffer because stronger contenders are there. So I’m going to admit I’m going in blind. That said, I still think I have some good choices.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

There are other likely contenders, but at this time, this series is my odds on favorite to win the whole thing. It’s ridiculous that in four exponentially better seasons the series has yet to win a single trophy. And Season 5 launched it into the stratosphere that Breaking Bad has occupied. Watching Jimmy embrace Saul until he realized just how horrifying his life would become, watching Mike recover from his murder of an innocent was great enough. But seeing all these characters not in the parent show – Kim’s rejection of her soulmate, and then her decision to marry him, as well as embrace his flaws; Nacho’s increasingly desperate attempts to get out of the cartel only to get deeper in with each move, Lalo’s behavior demonstrating that he is the darkest member of the Salamanca clan we have let met – makes us watch in terror, wondering who will get out alive – and we pretty much know there’s little chance of that. This isn’t just a series about how Jimmy McGill made the rise to Saul Goodman. It’s a contender for one of the greatest shows of all time. It deserves a shelve full of trophies.

Big Little Lies (HBO)

I fully admit I had real doubts when it was announced that David E. Kelley and his cast of dazzling actresses were going to turn one of the greatest mini-series of all time for another season. As I’ve mentioned in multiple reviews, those doubts lasted about five minutes, when Meryl Streep walked onscreen and took command of the show as Mary Louise, Celeste’s mother-in-law.  Watching the ‘Monterey Five’ deal with their new sets of the struggles in the aftermath of Perry’s murder was frankly one of the great joys of 2019. Every lead duplicated, and in the case of Zoe Kravitz, surpassed their exceptional work in the initial season. When Season 2 was announced, I thought everybody was crazy. When it was over, I wanted more than anything else for there to be a Season 3. I know that every actress in the cast is very busy, but they’ve all said they’d be willing to do it again.  A boatload of nominations would probably help the process.

The Crown (Netflix)

Exceptional in its first two seasons, Netflix’s brilliant series on the reign of Elizabeth II took an even bigger risk when it replaced all of its leads with older actors and actresses with Olivia Colman more than adequately filling the shoes of the incomparable Claire Foy. But what made Season 3 even more worthy was watching the show expand from mostly the perspective of Elizabeth to the entire royal family, and doing exceptionally. From Philip’s malaise at dealing with middle age, to Margaret’s trying and failing to live with her new love, to Prince Charles being pushed by his family in every perspectives, including his affair with Camilla. Whether you know the history or not (and considering how much license has been taking), you can see just how uneasy lie the heads that not only wear the crown, but have to work in perspective with the ones who do.

Mr. Robot (USA)

I’ll admit this is a real longshot, considering that it’s moment may have passed. But watching the final season of Sam Esmail incredibly cyber-story was one of the most exceptional works of television even in the history of the New Golden Age. With the body count rising, and unlike with Game of Thrones, it actually hurt to see the characters die, Esmail brought about some exceptional pieces of TV, from an episode done almost in silence, to a commercial free five act play that revealed just how truly broken Eliot was, to the finale that seemed to take place in an alternate world – and instead had one of the most incredible revelations of all time. The final act of Mr. Robot revealed that saving the world from an evil corporation was not nearly as hard as repairing Eliot’s psyche. There are a lot of great shows up for contention this year. But this season proved that Mr. Robot was one of the great ones.

Pose (FX)

I completely missed the boat on this show in Season 1, I admit it. But if anything the second season was angrier, and given everything that’s now going on in the world, far more relevant than the first. The eighties world of African American gays, transgenders, and everyone else proved just how real a family could be and how hard it can be to hold together in a time of tremendous change. Watching this cast, trying to move through 1980s New York, facing a world that doesn’t care about them if they live or die was heartwrenching, painful, and yet dazzlingly entertaining. Ryan Murphy’s final show for FX is one of his most brutal and most simple, and the entire cast from Billy Porter on down is inspirational. The category should be: Winners!

Stranger Things (Netflix)

The other 1980s set drama on this list couldn’t be more different except in one critical way – it’s brilliant. Has it lost some of the zest from the first two seasons? A little. But it’s still incredibly fun, enjoyable, and has one of the greatest young casts in the history of television  As they grow older, these kids are going to be mega stars from Millie Bobby Brown on down. And as we watch the world of the Upside Down being invaded by the Soviets, it’s hard to think that this could’ve been the most frightening part of our Cold War. Thank God we had Eleven. I suspect that this series and Ozark will fight it out for a spot at the dais. This series deserves to be there because it’s far more original.

Succession (HBO)

Another series I was late to the party on, having watched most of Season 2, its really hard to admit that this show isn’t any less relevant than so many of the other series on HBO. Watching the Roy family try to build themselves to be too big to fail while dealing with a sex scandal that could bring the company down was engaging enough. But as always, the family dynamic is what makes this arresting. Watching Brian Cox try to maintain control, to the children positioning themselves for power, to Logan acting like the perfect sacrificial lamb – until he didn’t.  The early statistics show that this series is the favorite for the Emmys. I’m not certain I agree. But I do believe its one of HBO’s best offerings.

This is Us (NBC)

Is it getting a bit hard to watch the Pearsons suffer? Yes. Is it any less dramatically riveting? Not by a long shot. From the season premiere which brought a new group of characters into the Pearsons orbit, to the week where every member of the Big Three seemed to have a crisis, to the long-simmering feud between Kevin and Randall that has led to a huge breach, this was an exception run for them. And everybody in the case, from Sterling K. Brown and Mandy Moore, to Griffin Dunne and Pamela Adlon, continued to demonstrate the very best that network television can offer. I don’t know when Season 5 will come, but I really need to know what will happen next.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Evil (CBS)

Robert and Michelle King can’t seem to catch a break from the Emmys; from five seasons of keeping The Good Wife from the Best Drama title, to not even acknowledging The Good Fight at all. There may be a chance that the latter show will be nominated this year, but I would rather see them push forward their network approach. This series may be the greatest horror-sci-fi meld since the early days of The X-Files. Dealing with skepticism and religious dogma in equal measure, some genuine frightening demons, to an antagonist who just might be the greatest personification of evil we’ve seen in some time. (Welcome back, Michael Emerson.) Maybe there’s something supernatural going on. Maybe it’s all in your head, and the world’s just a scary place. The show doesn’t take sides, and that’s why Robert and Michelle are now the Kings of horror as well.  

The Perry Mason Reboot the New Golden Age Needed

A confession (since this is the review for them): I never had much use for Perry Mason. The attorney whose clients are always innocent nearly killed the courtroom drama in its infancy. The idea that it was the lawyer’s job to prove his client innocent rather than the police set us up for more than three decades pedestrian courtroom dramas that it took us until David E. Kelley and Steven Bochco to spend half their careers overcorrecting. It didn’t help matters that, despite Raymond Burr’s best effort, the title character was absolute blank, with all his energy put through to his clients. His entire character was through the MacGuffins of his clients, and not even the relationships with his associates seemed real.

Which is why the fact that the Perry Mason that debuted on HBO is practically related to the 50s series in name only is just a blessed relief. In the opening fifteen minutes we get more detail on Perry than we did in nearly a decade on TV and God knows how many movies. This Perry is cynical, bitter, and just interested in making a buck. Hell, he’s not even an attorney yet. His official title is private investigator, but he calls that ‘a fancy name for a professional busybody’. He lives in a farm in the middle of an airstrip, with a Mexican aviatrix he has noisy sex with. He has no problem trying to blackmail the people who hire him and less use for his so called associates he has to bribe to business with. He’s a bitter veteran of the Great War, struggling to survive the Depression, and is divorced with a child he can’t even get his wife to put on the phone. Sam Spade wouldn’t give this Perry the time of day.

Matthew Rhys, whose doubt about everything he did was one of the greatest things about The Americans, is absolutely exceptional as Perry. He doesn’t wear the same kind of costumes that Philip Jennings was always in, but he doesn’t have too – this Perry is uncomfortable in his own skin. He barely has any patience to take on a case with a former boss (John Lithgow, in prime scenery-chewing form) hires him to do some looking into a kidnapping that has gone horribly wrong.  In a way, 1930s LA is the perfect setting for this Perry Mason – the cops are so corrupt they don’t even bother to hide they consider everybody guilty and are more than willing to put on ‘verdict first, proof afterwards’ approach.  The only reason they try to step carefully is because the suspect is the son-in-law of an important business man and the member of powerful church, led by Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany). In an impromptu sermon, she reveals just how well certain clergy can raise a lynch mob. Perry is convinced that everyone has a secret – but even when he finds one of the suspects, he doesn’t think he’s begun to plumb the depths of the case.

If this is the next step HBO is taking in drama series, I more than welcome it. It starts out with a franchise and then goes out of its way to violate every rule of it. So far, the most sympathetic characters on the show are E.B.’s secretary Della Street (Juliet Rylance) who is clearly doing more to be the conscience, and Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) an LA beat officer, who has to deal with his commanding officer’s corruption and prejudice to try and make a dent in his world. (Anyone who knows even the smallest bits about the world of Perry Mason knows just how vital Drake and Street are to Perry’s future.) And it’s incredibly well acted: Shea Whigham, as Perry’s sidekick, steals every scene he’s in, and old hands Lili Taylor, Robert Patrick and Stephen Root continue to demonstrate their gifts in smaller scenes.

I realize some people will complain that the setup might as well just be a revision of True Detective: 1930S Edition. I wouldn’t necessarily complain about that, but these characters are already more fully founded with more depth to them than so many of the protagonists we got. And Rhys was always good as raising the conscience of a character we should’ve been inclined to find despicable on The Americans, and is doing just as well her. Maybe it’ll falter, but for a change I’m looking forward to seeing how this Perry gets to the truth of the mystery – in or out of the courtroom.

My score: 4.5 stars.

New Rule: Quit Laughing At Yourself Addendum to Bill Maher Piece

There’s one more thing that has always bothered me about Bill Maher, and it’s only become more glaringly obvious in the shifts in format that have come since the quarantine hit.

To explain my issue, I always have preferred it when comedians – and late night comics in particular – do not laugh at their own jokes. Seth Meyers was good at that all the years he hosted Weekend Update and he has held strong to that when he does ‘A Closer Look’ on late night. Colin Jost and Michael Che will often try to crack each other up, but most of the time they managed to stay steadfast. John Oliver has always been fairly good at staying straight-faced (as he would put it, he’s English) and Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart were always artists at it.

The one outlier to this in the current era has always been Bill Maher. Throughout his entire career as a comic, he would always chuckle at his own jokes, something that I’ve always considered gauche. And I don’t find it particularly amusing that he’s almost always overcome by laughter during many of his routines on Real Time.

When everybody went into quarantine and no one had an audience, it’s been interesting to watch how the comedians have reacted. John Oliver has, if anything, grown harsher, but his jokes still land and a lot of his commentary is almost as funny as its ever been. Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers have both managed to do a good job of staying straight faced during their monologues. The only late night comics who have a great deal of trouble staying straight faced are Desus and Mero, but the two of them are always reacting to often hysterical things, and more frequently are cracking each other up. That’s always been a larger of their appeal, and I can respect that.

Maher however, continues to laugh hysterically at his own jokes, and while I could excuse that when he was performing in front of his studio audience, now it just makes him seem sadder. He seems determined to prove that he’s funny by cracking himself up, which may be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s as if he needs to validate his own humor now that he has no one to prove that he’s still funny.

The sad part is, now that’s he’s laughing at his own stale jokes and mixing with diatribes against political commentators, he now seems exactly like all of the far right talking heads he’s built his entire career railing against – a desperate old, white man trying to prove that he is still relevant in an era that has increasingly found little use for them.

I’ve already explained my problems with Maher, so I won’t go any further. But let me put it in a term he can understand: New Rule: “When the only person who’s laughing at your schtick is yourself, you’re the joke. And it’s time to accept that you’re just not funny any more.”

Things Are Breaking Bad for Everybody: Reaction to Season 5 of Better Call Saul

When Vince Gilligan was breaking into television in The X-Files, the vast majority of his scripts did not deal with the ever evolving and ultimately indecipherable mythology. (I like to think that he and fellow writer Howard Gordon took their lessons from Chris Carter what not to do with a serialized story.) Instead, the majority of his stories featured the so-called Monsters-of-the-Week, and in the vast majority of them Gilligan went out of his way to make his monsters seem even more ordinary with and perhaps because of their paranormal abilities.  Perhaps the most engaging of these was a Season 7 episode called Hungry, in which we followed the story completely from the perspective of the monster, a twentyish man who worked at a fast-food chain, had a craving for brains, and spent the majority of the episode being toyed with by Fox Mulder.

So many of these characters seemed to be ordinary men punching above their weight even if they had mind control or were able to regrow their amputated heads. Based on that, it’s very clear that a lot of Gilligan’s fundamental ideas have been present in both Breaking Bad and more prominently in Better Call Saul. Jimmy/Saul has been portrayed in a fairly consistent way as a low-level con artist with a certain amount of underlying greed. But what has always been clear is that he has a certain clarity that so many of the villains lack. Walter White could’ve gotten away with all his crimes had he listened to some of the advice that Saul gave him, but because of his unquestioned arrogance, he refused to listen, even when it was clearly all over for him. And it’s always been clear that Jimmy has never had the killer instinct that the rest of his world does – who can forget how aggrieved he was as Walter when he learned he’d been forced to poison a child so that Jesse could be convinced to turn again Gus Fring?

Throughout Season 5, as Jimmy has embraced his new identity as Saul Goodman, he has been looking at it as being free from the burdens that being Chuck’s younger brother has brought upon him. But as he got more involved in what Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton deserves some serious Emmy consideration) has done in pulling him into the cartel’s business. He’s had very big problems with this from the beginning, but the problem is, his inner greed keeps winning out. When Lalo convinced him to pick up $7 million for his bail, Jimmy refused – and then decided to do it for $100,000 as a ‘contingency fee’. We knew things would go wrong, but I doubt even the most loyal Breaking Bad fan could have expected just how horribly things would end up going for Jimmy.

‘Bagman’ was, in many ways, the ‘4 Days Out’ of Better Call Saul, as Jimmy found himself tested in a way that not even he could have foreseen. The fact that he had to drink his own urine was the least horrible thing that would occur to him over that episode, and seeing him out there, looking like the most pathetic version of Lawrence of Arabia you could imagine, just showed how desperate he was. It was made even more painful in the next episode, when after everything he had gone through and what he had done, what he found the most appalling thing was that he could only talk with Mike, the least empathetic man in all of this verse.

And just when you thought Bagman would be the high point of Season 5 came the last twenty minutes of Bad Choice Road. When Lalo invades Jimmy and Kim’s apartment quietly wanting to know exactly what happened on Saul’s trip, refusing to take his story serious, threatening Kim, all without raising his voice an octave, was among the most suspenseful moments in both series. I was certain that the episode was going to end with Kim dead, especially after the last few minutes when she called upon her courage to try and bluff Lalo. The tension didn’t ease for a second, not even after Lalo got into the car with Nacho and drove off to Mexico… again.

The season finale was in a way both anticlimactic and deeply satisfying. There were several contrasts to be drawn with Breaking Bad and more frightening things.

The biggest change came in the opening minutes, which took place seconds after Lalo left the apartment. Jimmy did something that Walter never did with Skyler in six years of Breaking Bad; confess everything that happened, warn her, and subsequently tell her that he was no good for her. For a man who spent his entire career in chicanery, his desire to get Kim out of the line of fire was one of the most unselfish actions we’ve ever seen anyone take in the entire Breaking universe. He then spent the entire episode, indirectly and directly trying to protect her, climaxing with a visit to Mike, where he nearly broke down in tears: “I can’t let anything happen to her.” Odenkirk has been masterful all season, but this is as pure a moment we’ve ever seen from him.

We also got a clear look at the contrast in Kim’s nature. Resigning from Mesa Verde, the account she’s spent the better part of the series trying to command to do pro bono work at the courthouse, she had an encounter with poor Howard, who’s been suffering immensely. The final humiliation came when he told her of Jimmy’s actions – and she laughed in his face.

This led to the sweetest moment in the episode – maybe the entire series – where Jimmy confessed his crimes to Kim, and she didn’t reject him. They spent several joyous hours, luxuriating at a hotel, making love, and discussing plans to ruin Howard. Then Kim, just speaking in hypotheticals, talked about a way to ruin Howard’s career so that they could get a payout from Sandpiper, the class action that has been at the center of so much of the legal travails in Saul.  What made this particularly striking is that, even now, against the man who caused him so much grief, who he considered his nemesis, Jimmy doesn’t want to go this far, because he still wants to protect Kim. Is this the tipping point where Kim out Skylers Skyler?

Then again, they may have a lot more to worry about. In the mirroring storyline, Nacho ended up in Mexico with Lalo, looking like he was due for a promotion he didn’t want, and then being forced by Fring to set Lalo up for a hit that would kill innocent people. Nacho had his meeting with Don Eladio (I’m still amazed at the makeup people who get Steven Bauer to look so good after all these years) in which he finally told the unvarnished truth to someone. “I want to be my own boss. And I don’t want to spend my life looking over my shoulder.” The fact that Eladio told him only partially in jest that he was in the wrong business is something that we’ve always know about Nacho, and gives another reason why this episode will probably be Michael Mando Emmy submission.

And then in the final minutes, we saw true horror. We’ve always known Lalo was smarter than so many of the Salamanca’s. But when Fring’s people came to kill him, he demonstrated that, by comparison, Tuco and the Cousins were far tamer beasts when it came to murder. He managed to decimate an entire squad with little more than wits, and had no problem letting all of the people he claimed to love when he introduced them to Nacho in the opening die in his place. Hector would be proud.

I have mixed emotions about him surviving. While Tony Dalton has been magnificent all season, and I look forward to him coming back for the end game, we now know just how dangerous he can be. Gustavo and Mike will be safe from his vengeance (until Heisenberg comes along), but what about the others? Will this be the end for Nacho? Will his father, who he’s done everything to try and protect, end up a victim? Or will he come for Kim? We know she isn’t Saul’s life in Breaking Bad. Is she going to be the final casualty that turns Jimmy into Saul for good?

Better Call Saul has one more stop to make. The Emmys. Compared to its parent show, this is the one area where it has been poorly treated. It has yet to earn a single trophy.  For Odenkirk, that’s a travesty. For Jonathan Banks, it’s unforgivable – he should have at least two or three by now. It’s inevitable that it’s going to get a crapload of nominations - probably a lot more now that Game of Thrones is no longer there to stand in its path. And given the immense praise that was showered on El Camino, the Breaking Bad movie that wrapped up Jesse’s saga, this may finally be the year for it. There’s also certain symmetry – this is Saul’s fifth season, and as everyone knows that the same season Breaking Bad finally won Best Drama. This year Better Call Saul cemented its place as the best show on television. As far as I’m concerned, this should be the year that the Emmys need to be ‘the one who knocks.’

Just What Happened Last Night? I May Destroy You Review

The art of the dramedy has always played badly on HBO. Showtime has turned it into something of an art form in the early part of the decade, but HBO has never fared that well with it, particularly in the past year. Mrs. Fletcher worked a lot better as a comedy, while RUN never quite worked on any level. But in the past couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a look at a series that is completely different from anything HBO has tried, and indeed, something that very few services have tried, period.

I May Destroy You centers on Arabella, a black woman living in London working on stories from her opinions on the Internet. Very much a citizen of the world, we see in the opening minutes of the pilot driving away from a booty call she has in Italy that her publishers cover as ‘research’. Hopelessly behind on her latest book, she spends the night before a meeting with her editors getting drunk with some acquaintances: Simon and Kat, who are interesting in having a threesome. She takes a break from her work, she has a drink with them, they start partying, and then… something happens.

It’s not clear even to Arabella what has happened. She wakes up the next morning, she keeps having flashes of the night before, her phone has been smashed, there’s a bruise on her forehead, and she just can’t concentrate. And when she tries to call the people about what happened the night before, they’re very vague. But what she thinks has happened is some kind of trauma, almost certainly a sexual assault. And while she goes to the police and reports it, there’s a part of her – a really big one – that just wants to move on. While another part wants to know what happened.

I’m not going to lie to you; I May Destroy You is pretty bleak. But it’s not the kind of darkness we’ve come to expect from your typical pay cable series. This takes a piercing look into what it is like to be drugged and lose the ability to consent in a blunt and unsparing way. Those who get their usual kicks about seeing Olivia Benson deal with this kind of story on a weekly basis will be very uncomfortable here, maybe because there don’t seem to be any real answers. And most of that is due to the work of the central character-showrunner Michaela Coel. It takes the perspective of so many of the internet age, and looks at them with an unforgiving eye. Arabella doesn’t fit the definition of the rape victim the television viewer has come to know. She’s trying to get answer, mainly because she doesn’t have a clear perspective on what happened to her. But she’s not in a particular hurry to change her life… at least not yet. Later episodes will demonstrate that she will do just that.

There’s also the fact that almost the entire cast are African-Brits, but even in a world where race has become ultra important, this kind of sneaks up you because no one goes out of there way to talk about it the way they would occasionally on, say, Insecure. But Coel goes to a great deal of trouble to give all of her supporting characters detail.  Arabella’s friend Terry is an actress still trying to make it; Terry is a black gay man, a whole world which rarely gets explored anywhere, and Simon and Kat just seem as lost as any other couple in a relationship.

As I said, I May Destroy You is not an easy series to watch. I can imagine most people will turn away from it just hearing the description, and I haven’t seen enough of it to know if there are rewards for staying the course or whether it’s a series that you admire more than enjoy. But I’m more than willing to give HBO and Coel a lot of points just for effort. It’s probably not going to be an example of the new HBO (my guess is they’re still focused on Game of Thrones spin-offs), but in terms of approach and execution, it really should be.

My score: 3.75 stars.  

How Much Damage Has The Police Procedural Done: Part 2, The Wolf Who Cried Cop

Dick Wolf, like many other writers of the 1990s, got his start on the classic cop drama Hill Street Blues. Even knowing that, it’s hard to connect Wolf with a dirty, gritty, and complex world of policing of the incredible series. That show involved dark issues, made the cops seem like real people, made the crime seen unrelenting, and made being upright difficult. About the only lesson Wolf seemed to take away from his time was the last one.

One can blame Law & Order for many things. Destroying the character-driven police procedural (though that may have been more due to longevity than anything else), turning the ripped from the headlines approach into such an art form that by the last few years, you could literally cut and paste a story from the news into an episode; making characters in general irrelevant from television series (though ER and CSI did their fair share of damage to, and basically becoming the backbone of syndication drowning out any other TV shows almost anywhere else. But it’s really hard to blame it for pushing the idea that police were above the law. Indeed, you could argue that Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy put more cops in jail during the twenty year run than the actual NYPD did during that period.

No, the series that may have pushed the idea that police deserve to be above the law no matter what they do was the show’s first spinoff. Law & Order: SVU.  In its opening narration “sexual assaults are considered especially heinous”, the series seems to be arguing that the criminal we will encounter are worse than the serial killers and drug dealers we meet everywhere else. The deal seems to be made with the audience right there. These criminals are murderers, they’re rapists, and they’re not good people. Therefore, the rules of decorum don’t apply and it’s okay for Stabler to rough them up and for the brass to turn a blind eye.

What makes this particularly offensive is that for much of the series run, two of the higher-ups were Capt Donald Cragen, who appeared in Law & Order’s first three seasons, and John Munch, Homicide’s most enduring character. These were cops who had spent their earlier careers watching other detectives obtain confessions from criminals who were far worse without even touching them. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this as Wolf never cared for continuity of character the same way Fontana and Simon did. Homicide’s John Munch would never touch a criminal, even if he was a serial killer; SVU’s Munch doesn’t raise an eyebrow when it happens every week. And by stacking the deck so that these criminals are so horrible, the DA, which at least played lip service to the rights of the accused on Law & Order, can nod and wink when it happens here.

Now let be clear. I don’t believe correlation equals causation. I don’t think that police brutality towards suspects became more acceptable during SVU’s run any more than the idea of torture became more acceptable during 24’s. But there is precedent for this. The CSI effect has made it a lot easier for police labs to be considering close to gospel in stations and courtrooms around the country. And SVU has been on the air for 21 seasons. It basically runs almost all the time on some cable channels. And if we get to the point where the beating of a suspect can be considered background noise, then it does have an affect.

And I should add that Wolf himself has done nothing to back away from this. If anything, as the years have gone by, he’s doubled down. In Chicago PD, his central character is Hank Voight, who has led an entire squad of detectives into “doing what has to be done to get justice.” And there are very few consequences for his actions and even less discussion. He’s basically a less corrupt Vic Mackey, which is basically why his bosses let him get away with everything. 

That’s the thing about having an episodic series rather than a serialized narrative: There are no consequences.  If they were trying to follow things realistically, Elliot Stabler would be spending every other week on a desk. Wolf has him out there every day, and the only problems he seems to care about are the one Stabler has with his family. He was eventually fired for excessive force, but that was only because Christopher Meloni could reach a contract deal. And indeed, later this year, Meloni is going to be the head of a yet another NBC franchise as Stabler. So all was forgiven, and now the audience can tune in every week to see him tune up another suspect.

There has been a lot of discussion in the past few weeks about the role of the police in our society, and many have come to think that are certain TV shows to blame. COPS, which may have been one of the biggest offenders, has finally been cancelled, as has Live PD. I seriously doubt anybody’s going to even consider removing Law and Order or any of its spinoffs from syndication. Too many cable channels depend on them these days – I know of at least five that have marathons of it at least once a week. You can’t get away from it.

 The police drama has always been, for better or worse, the backbone of the network TV system. Some writers have tried to add nuance to it; in addition to Simon, Shawn Ryan’s The Shield took a nightmare view of the rampart division of LAPD that still resonates with its power today. But nuance has never translated well for network television, and never for very many people. And television has held up a mirror to the world as often as it has been a window.

There have been a lot of changes just in the past couple of weeks to the conversation of how we approach policing. Maybe this, combined with the amount of time that Hollywood has spent in suspension due to the pandemic, will genuinely lead to some changes in how movies and TV approach the police. But the realist in me – the one who sees there are at least three or four new cop dramas every season – knows that quantity will drive out nuance every time.

And I’m as guilty as the rest of them. Every night at midnight, I’m perched in my easy chair, usually watching a Law & Order rerun. Not because I love the show, but because it’s there. Have I changed my mind because of the protests? Yes. But still, it’s always there. And I need to watch something.

How Much Damage Has The Police Procedural Done? Part 1

When I was growing up, the first truly great drama that I ever watched was NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. I’ve already written an entire book about the essence of what made it a great show, so what I want to deal with was why it was a great police drama.

Set in Baltimore, based on David Simon’s book and ran by Tom Fontana, Homicide rewrote the book on what police were supposed to be. They weren’t the icons of Kojak or SWAT; hell, sometimes you actually feared what would happened in one of tried to run. They saw just how badly broken the war on drugs was as far back as 1993. While some of them thought being a policeman was a calling, most of them viewed in a cynical way. (One of the very first lines uttered on the show was when a rookie was asking if this was homicide, a veteran detective said: “Homicide? We work for God.” The African-American Lieutenant was anything but a straw man; there were as many black cops as there were black criminals, and the bosses only cared for the rank and file as for whether they made the Baltimore PD look good.

Perhaps most strike, there was no police brutality. Confessions were extracted by getting the suspects – most of whom were portrayed not as masterminds, but simpletons – to ignore what should have been the most obvious thing: to act in their own self-interest and shut up. The greatest moments in Homicide were not chase scenes of shootouts, but watching Frank Pembleton or Tim Bayliss get a confession by barely raising his voice an octave. They would bend the law, but never break it. Nearly thirty years after it debuted, I have to see a network cop drama like it. Which may be part of our problem as a nation.

Both Fontana and Simon chafed at the level of pressure they got from the network to do things “normally”, and it was a rebellion against that pressure that led both Fontana and Simon to eventually go to HBO for more creative freedom, and not coincidentally, usher in the New Golden Age.  Most of the freedom they wanted was to express themselves using the obscenities and violence they were never allowed to do on NBC, but another part of it had to do with express ideas that network television in 1997 (and maybe even now) just wouldn’t let them.

Fontana moved out first, and ended up created the prison drama Oz. Set in a state and city that were never named, the Oswald State Correctional Facility housed criminals who were truly without redemption, officials who believe in punishment rather than reform, and a unit management trying his hardest to build a better life for his inmates, most of whom don’t want it.

Oz is remembered for the excessive brutality and nudity that it featured (I believe  that it averaged one inmate death per episode), but it would try to shout out about the injustice in the criminal justice system. Most of it was expressed through the Greek chorus of Augustus Hill, a narrator whose ability to break the fourth wall was never really explained. But perhaps the best moment where it spoke the plainest about how stacked the deck was same in the first season finale.

In the midst of a riot, Em City manager Tim McManus and leader Kareem Said have an epic conversation. McManus tries to convince Said that they ‘are on the verge of disaster… before we all join hands and jump, I want another chance.” Said tells him. “…the best prison wouldn’t be good enough. I’m not saying the men in this prison are here because of the crimes they committed, but the color of their skin! Their lack of education! The fact that they are poor! This riot isn’t… about life in prison. It’s about the whole hoary judicial system! We don’t need better prisons! Safer prisons. We need better justice! Now what can you do about that?”

And the tragedy is, McManus can do very little. Even when Em City is reestablished the next season, almost every major effort McManus and his colleagues try to do fail, mostly at the hands of a law-and-order governor who himself completely corrupt and amoral. (He gives the orders for the sort team to break up the riot that leads to eight deaths and creates a commission to vindicate his decision.) The sad thing about Oz, is that even a quarter century later, all of its arguments for prison reform are still valid and unfulfilled.

Simon’s approach was less graphic in violence but more revolutionary in execution. A lot has been said about The Wire since its premiere about Simon and company’s attempt to paint a picture of the death of the American dream, but for now, let’s just deal with its view of policing. Because the Baltimore PD of The Wire is thoroughly and completely broken, starting with the fact that the cops are still using typewriters to fill out their reports in the Pilot.

The idea of doing policework has been completely laid to waste. No one in the department is interesting in doing anything to actually investigate crime. The task force is started just to please a judge, is filled with the dregs of the department, and is just supposed to make a few “buy and busts” to please the judge. Every attempt to widen the investigation is thwarted by the brass every step of the way, not because their corrupt (ac common misconception) but because “that’s the way things are done.” The fact that the way things are done has led to a literal state of urban decay in the city doesn’t matter to the brass who are just interested in getting things done well enough to get promoted. The people who are interested in fixing things, like Captain Daniels and Detective McNulty are punished for sticking their heads out. The legal system is no more interested in making things better than the cops are. And as each successive season demonstrates, this utter decay has happened because of flaws in society: the death of blue-collar labor, the corruption and ambition of politicians, the utter wretchedness of the educational system, and the deterioration of the media.  And since no one at the national level is interested in fixing these flaws, the spiral will never end.

All three of these series have been recognize among the greatest and most revolutionary ever made. And if the world were to take them seriously as notes on reform (as Simon has constantly advocated for) as well as television, maybe our society would be in a better place. But the fact is, none of these shows were audience hits. Homicide was famously labeled by TV Guide as ‘The Best Show You’re Not Watching.” The Wire had to fight for renewal every year it was on the air. And while Oz is remembered today as a pioneer, it’s more for its (admittedly importantly) role in normalizing same-sex relationship for cable television and then broadcast television.

And it’s easy to see why. All of these shows take place in the grey area. If there is one thing that most viewers wants, it a clear cut case of black and white, good and evil. We want the bad guy to go to prison or get shot to death by the law. We don’t want to think why he became a bad guy. We don’t want to think about whether the cop believes in anything but justice, no matter how cynical he may act. We don’t want to think that the people in prison are anything other than the crimes they committed. And the fact is, television  gives us what we want.

But are there same showrunners who are more than willing to make this myth even larger than it is? That might have done their bit to paint the picture this way deliberately. I think there may be one showrunner who is guiltier of this sin than anyone else, and in my next article, I’ll tell you who he is.

The Path To This Year's Emmys - Sort of: This Year's Peabody Winners

With a pandemic going on, protests nationwide, and a major economic downturn, there’s an argument to be made that the last thing anyone should be focused on is the lead up to this year’s Emmys. Indeed, considering that shooting for TV series has just begun this week and that so much of television in the present is in limbo, one almost wonders when the Emmys will happen and in what form. Indeed, the TV Critics Association, which tends to meet in May has already postponed its annual awards for 2020 to an undetermined time.

Yet television has always prove good at being a useful distraction, and in a period where tens of millions of people have been locked down at home with little to do but what watch TV, one really does think that the medium deserves appreciation now more than ever.

So, in the weeks to come, I will proceed with my annual predictions (and hopes) for this years Emmy nominations, still scheduled to take place on July 28 of this year. And to that end, I have decided to go ahead with my look at this year Peabody awards, which can often shine on a light on series that will be recognized in the past year. The awards themselves were announced on the Wednesday.

Among the dramatic series winner were HBO’s Succession and Netflix’s Stranger Things. These are among the best choices the Peabodys have given. I’ve only seen a handful of Season 2, but what I’ve seen of Succession is truly marvelous, and given its triumphs at the Golden Globes and the Broadcast Critics in January, a lot of nominations seem in order. As for Stranger Things, it has always been one of my favorite series and my biggest surprise is that the Peabodys chose to honor a pop culture phenomena, something they almost never do. David Makes Man seems more their level, but it was recognized by the Broadcast Critics, so they’re maybe something to it.

The comedy choices were equally impressive. Few can argue that Fleabag was one of the greatest accomplishments in television (and yes, I fully admit I was late to the party) and I’m glad to see Phoebe Waller-Bridge continue her victory tour. I was also late to the party on Hulu’s Ramy, but its an exceptional series, and I fully expect it to see quite a few nominations in the weeks to come.

Strangely enough, the listing for Peabody’s paid more attention to Limited Series than they did the year before, with honors that came for the year just past and the year to come. Chernobyl and When They See Us dominated the majority of award shows for the past year, so it’s hardly a surprise to see them present here.  And it may shape up to be a rematch between Netflix and HBO – Unbelievable and Watchmen, two of the most powerful and dazzling limited series of 2019 ended up winning.  I was already expecting a major battle between these series and all of the female leads connected with it; this is the next salvo.

It’s always hard to tell if the Peabodys have any deep effect on the actual awards the same way the Golden Globes or SAG awards often do. Last year they picked Killing Eve and Pose as their favorite dramas, and while neither won, they did take the top acting prizes. It’s harder to see if the comedy awards mean anything – Fleabag has won pretty much every award between here and the Emmys – and The Good Place and Barry, last years winners, were more or less shutout. So probably Ramy Youseff shouldn’t be preparing his acceptance speech. (Then again, given what happened at the Golden Globes, he didn’t then, either.)

In the weeks to come, I will begin my annual articles. It’s still possible these pre-Emmy nominations and awards mean more to critics like myself then the Academy. (Witness Julia Roberts’ snub last year.) But in a post Game of Thrones/Veep world, and a lot of series from last year not eligible for awards this year, there are a lot more possibilities, and I think many of the races haven’t been this wide open in a decade. I look forward to telling you my predictions.

Ode to my VCR: Why I'm Still Using Mine in the Age of Streaming

Every couple of years, I take it upon myself to rewatch Lost. Even after all the controversy and the analysis and the frustration about the ending, I still consider it one of the great accomplishments in television history. (Each time I do so I come a little closer to thinking the finale works. It’s still going to take five or six more for me to believe it.). However, this time I’m watching a bit differently then the previous ones.

In the summer of 2019, I found a collection of old VHS recordings of the first three seasons of Lost available on Ebay, apparently taped when the series originally aired from 2004 to 2007. Even though I own all of the DVDs and can easily find the series on streaming, I jumped at the opportunity to get the tapes. And every so often, I’ll take a look on Ebay to see if I can find another collection of the same tapes for the second half, though I admit that the odds are slim to none.

VHS was going out of style even when Lost was airing its original episodes, and considering that one can now watch any show anytime thanks to streaming or DVDs, one wonders why someone my age would hold fast to his VCR even now. Part of is due to the fact that even decades after they aired, it is nearly impossible to find any service or DVD that is showing certain series - it was only fairly recently that all of St. Elsewhere became available to stream on Hulu, and a lot of other shows from the past – Murphy Brown, The Practice, and one of my personal favorites, Chicago Hope – aren’t available on DVD or streaming anywhere. I’ve argued that there is a great loss that some of these series are unavailable, and I can’t understand why they never got rereleased.

But even if they were available, I’d admit that there’s a part of me that clings to this old outdated format. For one thing, there’s the preciseness of it. Even after thirty years of advancement in technology, if you think you’ve missed something on a DVD, it can be a bitch and a half to try and go back to play it again. And until they manage to come up with some kind of remote for streaming, it’s still a huge pain to try and go back if you miss something on Netflix or Amazon. Yes, the iPod and your phone may be able to handle it, but it’s still never responded with the accuracy of a VCR. (I freely admit I haven’t watched enough TV online to state this with certainty but this has been my overall experience.)

I will also confess to a quirk that may come to fewer and fewer of us. One of the great virtues of recording of TV in the first place – particularly off broadcast networks – was that one could fast-forward through the cursed commercials and station identifications. It was something I did constantly through most of my life as a television viewer. A lot of the time I would hold on to the tapes even after the show went to DVD. (I still feel that the only way to watch 24 is with the commercial. Otherwise, it’s just 16.4 at best.)

Now, for reasons which escape even me, I find myself every so often pausing and watching some of those same commercials I was so eager to get through, particularly for tapes that are more than a decade old. They now seem relics of a simpler time – seeing ads for movies that proved to be inspirational (I saw one for Friday Night Lights) not that long ago and for politicians I’d never heard of. Perhaps the most remarkable are ads for certain TV programs. When watching of my recent Lost episodes, it was recording so early that ABC was just speculating that Desperate Housewives would become the next great hit for ABC (they were right) and advocating for TGIF – something that wouldn’t last much longer I’ll admit to doing it for some old movies I recorded decades ago. Somewhere in our personal archives is a recording of a rebroadcast of Peter Pan with Mary Martin. Among all its other virtues, you can find on it an ad for a series that was going to premiere soon: Quantum Leap.

And let’s face some of us will need VHS for awhile. Until the people behind Jeopardy decide to breakdown and actually live stream a larger number of the episodes, we’re never going to see some of the great games and tournaments of the series. (That’s actually a topic for another time.)

So yes, the footage is messy and it’s nearly impossible to find tapes, let alone anything resembling a VCR. But until the last model breaks down, you’ll find me watching old recordings of Twin Peaks from Bravo in 2003 every few months. By the way, do any of readers have old recordings of Lost?

Don't Trust The Vials: Homecoming Season 2 Review

In my opinion the most egregious omission of last years Emmy nominations was the near complete shutout of Amazon’s extraordinary series Homecoming. Based on a famous podcast, Season 1 dealt with two timelines: the relationship between a therapist and her patient (Julia Roberts and Stephen James) and an investigation into a complaint filed about that patient four years later – only by now, the therapist has no memory of any of her experiences four years later. Tautly written, superbly directed by Sam Esmail, and performed exquisitely by the entire cast from Roberts on down, the early buzz was such that Roberts’ nomination for an Emmy was considered a certainty from the minute it premiered. It’s easy enough for me to rant at the Emmys for ignoring Roberts in favor of that standby Viola Davis or either of the leads from Game of Thrones, but the entire series was one of the great accomplishments of 2019, and to see everybody – Esmail, Roberts, James, Bobby Canavale and Shea Whigham, all shorted was a travesty than could only be explained by the work of the evil corporation at the center of Homecoming sending out meals to the Emmy voters weeks in advance. (Then again, I’ve railed about their inconsistencies for so long, I don’t think they need any help.

Understandably, I was more than willing to see what happens when Season 2 finally dropped last week on Amazon. We all knew there would be no Roberts, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of Esmail behind the camera either. Good news, the series hasn’t been missing any of them so far.

If the first season of Homecoming hinted at Hitchcock at times, the second season sees writers Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz embracing it whole-heartedly. The episode begins with a woman awaking in a canoe with no memory of how she got there or even who she is.  Helped by a passing stranger to retrace her steps (up to a point) she finds herself in a motel roof with a wad of case, and a photograph of an army unit with every face but hers x-ed out. Finding a vial that belongs to the Geist Corporation (the evil force behind all the darkness in the first season) she finds herself tracing things back to Audrey Temple (Hong Chau, who has in a very short time become one of the most astonishing actresses in TV) the secretary who in the final episode of the first season made a power play – and now reveals that she seems completely unsuited for the job.

The second episode showed the parallel paths of the two women – Audrey, trying to fix things for the new path, and clashing with the angry head of the Geist Corporation (Chris Cooper, once again demonstrating why he is one of the most undervalued actors anywhere) and the amnesiac, trying to figure out her connection to Audrey. The episode with the amnesiac walking right up to Audrey – and Audrey kissed her, called her Jackie, and asked: “What happened to Walter Cruz?” – the man at the center of the action of last season, and the only character directly linking the two seasons together.

If Julia Roberts was the central draw of Homecoming initially, you’d think Janelle Monae, a relatively new sensation would be an odd choice to succeed her as the lead. But in the first two episodes of the season, Monae plays Jackie much in the same way Roberts played Heidi – a lot like the audience trying to figure out what had happened to her, who she was before the main action, and what she has to do with the Geist Corporation now. She plays it very carefully, measuring everything she does. Chau is just as good, revealing that she is more the meek secretary than the power player she was in the finale of Season 1, utterly unequipped for the massive undertaking she’s apart of.

How did Jackie end up in that canoe? What happened to Walter Cruz (I guess the happy ending we saw in Season 1 isn’t the end for him). Just what’s in the Geist air freshener? I don’t know how many of those questions will be answer in the mere seven episodes of this season, but I can’t wait to find out. And If the Emmys don’t recognize some of the people behind Homecoming this time, that’s another crime Geist corporation has to be convicted of.

My score: 4.75 stars.

Better Late Than Never: Ramy Season 1

When Ramy Youssef won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy, I think it’s safe to say no one was more surprised then him. The first words out of his mouth were: “I know you didn’t watch my show.” And I confess to being one of the many among them thinking that this was another fluke from the Golden Globes like Gael Garcia Bernal winning for Mozart in the Jungle or Richard Madden winning for Bodyguard. Surely, Youssef was an outlier for a category that featured such veterans as Bill Hader and Michael Douglas. No need to even bother watching it.

But I’ve had a lot of time on my hands in lockdown, and with the countdown to the Emmy nominations getting closer, I thought I might try to get ahead of the curve instead of being so woefully behind it as I was last year with Fleabag and Russian Doll. So I’ve started watching the first season of Ramy. To say that I’m astounded by its quality would be an understatement.

In format, Ramy is not much different then so many of the other comic centered shows, such as Master of None, Insecure or the king of them Atlanta. The key difference is that Ramy is a member of the Muslim community. He fully admits in the Pilot he’s not a very good Muslim. He prays every day and believes in the basic principles, but he has a lot of sex with white girls, drinks and does weed. Also, everybody thinks Ramy is a slacker –especially his own family. And it’s not entirely without merit. Initially, he works as a start up that goes under at the end of the second episode. He still lives with his parents, even though he’s in his thirties. But he also struggles with his faith. In the mosque where he goes for his prayers, the imam chastises him for not washing between his toes. (None of your prayers probably counted, he says.) He says he wants to have a relationship with a Muslim woman, but when a date set up by his parent’s starts to go well, he can’t get over the fact of a certain fetish she wants him to do. (If you haven’t seen the series yet, you need to see it for this episode alone.). And he seems to believe in the concepts of his American community, but not in the system that his parent do.

What is particularly stunning about Ramy – and why I think it deserves to cross streaming and racial barriers – is how universal the themes are while remaining so strict to the principles of Muslim community. Ramy’s parents constantly drill on him to get married and to find a real job, which would be the same principles of any other sitcom – but for a key difference. When Ramy says he wants to follow his passion, his mother says bluntly: “Passion is for white people.” Ramy makes jokes about 9/11 on his date, saying that for him personally September 11^th was a good day. And his younger sister, Dena, seems to be even less committed to finding her own way, only concerned about her brother when it might relate to her having to leave the house herself./

At the same time, Ramy goes to territory that even the best streaming hasn’t tried. When Ramy is forced to find a job with his Uncle Naseem, he says he doesn’t want to because his uncle is Anti-Semitic. (This leads to one of the greatest Mel Gibson jokes coming from the least likely source imaginable.)  We meet Uncle Naseem, who works in the diamond district, and initially he is insufferable. He torments Dena, he insults gay people, and he launches a conspiracy theory of Princess Diana’s death that is so bizarre, you don’t know which is weirder: the outlandishness of it or that Ramy’s mother believes it. When Ramy drives Naseem to the train, he finally unloads on his uncle. And then, we see a woman and a man fighting. Naseem orders Ramy to pull over, pulls the man off, and then pulls a gun on him. Ramy is awed by this, but as it ends with the man and woman still driving off together, he asked what the point was. Naseem just said the action matters. “We don’t worry about the women because of the women,” he says. “We worry because of the men.” Of course, he finishes it with a stereotype so absurd that even Ramy has to admit it’s flawed.

I’ve spent the last few years basically ignoring Hulu as a source for original programming, raves for Hamdmaid’s Tale and Casual aside. But the last few months have more than demonstrated that they are more than worthy to compete in the Emmy battles as Netlfix and Amazon. Not only Youseff more than deserve to compete in what will be a crowded field for Best Actor in a Comedy, this series will some day compete in the Best Comedy category. Trust me, Ramy, people are watching your show now.

My score: 4.5 stars.