BQB here. Can you believe that The Sopranos first premiered 25 years ago today on Jan 10, 1999? Wild, isn’t it? In honor of this anniversary, I’m going to rewatch the series and post reviews of each episode throughout the year. If you like the Sopranos, get some gabagool from Artie, then go down to your basement and turn on the air ducts to keep the Feds from listening in, then check out my Sopranos review blog:
I have been avoiding this show for a while. I love comedy and I have long believed that comedians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood. Laughter is an involuntary response, you can’t hold it back when the humor floodgates call, so anyone who can make it happen has a gift.
One such gifted person is Bill Hader, who I would argue is perhaps one of, if not the best celebrity impressionists of his generation. Like Dana Carvey, who I admired as a kid, Hader was SNL’s go to guy for mocking the famous. He just has that uncanny ability to change his face, to change his voice, to mimic another person, make you think he’s them for awhile, then make you laugh as he does funny things as that person.
But Dana Carvey, the great SNL impressionist of a previous generation, made cinematic forays outside of SNL and flopped, with the exception of his Garth character in Wayne’s World. Sometimes comedic actors go the dramatic route with great success, as Adam Sandler did in Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, then again their dramatic efforts flop, like Adam Sandler in Spanglish.
All of this is my longwinded way of explaining why I avoided this show for years because I felt like by trying to do drama, Hader was like Michael Jordan who could have given us a few more seasons of his great NBA career, but decided to fizzle as a baseball player instead. Surely, Bill should do his own sketch comedy show and keep capitalizing on his comedy gift rather than do something different.
But honestly, this show works and I’m glad I finally started watching it. Alas, I started watching it a few weeks ago only to discover it ended this year. I’m half way through so if you know how it ends, don’t tell me.
The premise? Hader’s protagonist Barry is a battle-hardened Afghanistan war veteran, having seen and done some awful things that haunt him to this day. He is emotionally crippled, distant and depressed, yearning for a happier life but happiness is an emotion that eludes him. From the start, I wondered if this character choice was on purpose, as it allows Hader to play a dramatic role without having to display a range of emotion as usually the best comedians can only play a funny person but struggle when they have to play someone who is up, down or in the middle. Make no mistake that throughout the series, Barry experiences a range of emotion, but in such a frazzled way that you can tell he’s such a depressed guy that we should all just applaud him for getting out of bed in the morning.
The show rests that on that old Hollywood cliche that war veterans can’t function in a civilian job that doesn’t require killing. I would argue that there are cops, firefighters, security guards, veterans working in paramilitary jobs and doing well but ok, Barry doesn’t have their mental stability. Got it.
And so, at the start of the show, we learn that Barry is a hitman in the employ of his handler/father figure Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root, another veteran character actor you might know as the voice of Bill on King of the Hill).
To the show’s credit, the life of a hitman is not sugar coated. There are so many hitman shows/movies where the hitman is very suave and sophisticated and conveniently only dispatches bad people so that the audience doesn’t dislike him. All the people who ever get killed are very bad, usually criminals and killers themselves.
Sure, Barry deep-sixes plenty of baddies, but as a murderer for hire, he kills plenty of people who arguably don’t deserve it. Spouses who want revenge on a cheating spouse or the spouse’s lover, people who would stand to benefit if someone else was out of the picture, bottomline if you want someone dead and you know how to reach Fuches, and you’re willing to pay, then Barry will kill that problem person in your life, zero morality questions asked.
Oh, and if there’s a witness, just some poor schmuck who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Barry will shuffle that person off their mortal coil as well. We even get a look into the sad lives of family members of those whose loved ones were taken from them by Barry. Their suffering is very real.
All in all, this isn’t your standard hit man show. The real consequences of a death for cash biz are seen.
Then how, you might ask, is this show funny? Truth be told, it is a very dark comedy.
As our show begins, Barry tracks a target to LA, only to discover the dude he’s been hired to snuff is an aspiring actor. He stalks said target to an acting class run by the wacky Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler in literally his best role since Fonzi.)
As he sits back and watches the fledgling thespians work on their craft, Barry instantly falls in love with the acting profession, seeing it as a way to work through his own emotional problems as what is acting other than humans trying to understand and recreate emotions?
And thus our anti-hero’s journey begins. Much to Fuches’ dismay, Barry dives into the world of acting, going to acting classes, trying out for parts in plays and movies, the works. Not the best move for a man who has committed multiple heinous crimes because you know, the more famous you get, the more people will sniff around your past.
Somehow, Barry must learn to juggle his acting work with his hitman work. It’s not a profession that is easily quit. Fuches keeps dragging him back in, as does NoHo Hank, Anthony Carrigan in a show stealing role as a Chechen mobster who is a fan of Barry’s murderous skills and won’t take no for an answer when it comes to dispatching his rivals. The humor in this character comes from a guy with an outlandish Russian accent saying very silly American things. The best description I can give is if Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s hard partying, East European accented “wild and crazy guys” from 70s SNL had a grown up son.
As if he didn’t have enough to hide, Barry finds a love interest in Sally (Sarah Goldberg), a fellow struggling actor from Cousineau’s class. If you divide the show into two halves, one part is about Barry’s murderous secret life and the other part is about Barry and Sally navigating the ins and outs of Hollywood, from those early years where they struggle to get any part, to those later years when they find success but have to deal with schmuck executives who want to water down their success in the name of profits. And of course, Barry is always murdering people between auditions and then going to great lengths to cover it up.
The true show stealer here is our beloved Fonz. Cousineau is portrayed as one of the most despised and reviled actors in Hollywood, his behavior so boorish that he was blackballed from ever getting a part again and subsists on his own personal acting studio where he overcharges young naive wannabes for copies of his lousy book, his lessons and other products unlikely to get them anywhere. “No refunds” is his constant refrain.
As the show progresses, occasional real-life actors playing themselves stop by just to dump on Cousineau and relay to the audience the horrors of what this self-absorbed prick has done to them. People who work behind the scenes also have tales to tell. One producer humorously recounts a story about how as a young production assistant, Cousineau threw an omelette at him, plate and all, because he forgot the chives.
But like Barry, Gene is on his own journey toward growth and change, trying to make amends for the wrongs he did in his youth and convince the industry that he offended to give him one last shot as an old man. Barry becomes torn between dueling father figures, the handler that wants him to keep killing for money, the acting coach who wants him to be a success, and of course, the girlfriend/love of his life who would be horrified if she knew about his night job.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Again, don’t tell me what happens if you know, but I’m wagering the ending is not happy. While I can’t say the show is realistic (I don’t think anyone could kill as many people as Barry has without being caught in the first season) it doesn’t sugar coat things and it recognizes that bad deeds lead to bad consequences so those who do bad eventually get theirs.
My one criticism would be the episodes are a half hour and the whole series feels like it could all be just one season. It all centers around Barry trying to be an actor and being with Sally but getting pulled back into crime by Fuches and Hank and if the show had been given more seasons, who knows what villains Barry might have encountered by day while he scores those big parts by day.
Watch on HBO Max, which is now just Max. How pretentious. Bonus that some of Hader’s past SNL friends stop by once in a while.
I’m good at everything except the things I can’t do, 3.5 readers.
BQB here with a review of this super creepy, uber violent yet oddly addictive pop cultural phenomenon.
In my mind, I view most Netflix TV show greenlight sessions as a chimpanzee in a suit tossing bundles of cash to any old drunk hobo who shuffles in off the street with a half-baked idea for a show. Thus, when I saw this in the line-up of my Netflix account about a month ago, my response was a solid hard pass. All I knew at the time was that it had dudes walking around dressed up like pink Playstation controllers and if that doesn’t sound like a show dreamed up by a hobo and greenlit by a chimp then what does?
Flash forward to this past weekend and SNL parodied it. That and some mumblings motivated me to give it a try and down the rabbit hole I went, instantly hooked.
First off, it’s a Korean produced show and the actors’ voices are dubbed over in English, sometimes to comedic effect. I’ve found some foreign language gems on Netflix – Donnie Yen’s Ip Man series or the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made in Sweden. With those, I preferred to read the subtitles and listen to the actors speak in their language but here I think there’s so much going on that you don’t have time to read and you have to go with the English dub, even though sometimes the words don’t quite match up with the lips – not to mention there are cultural differences, differences in phrasing, word choice – sometimes things don’t quite translate but whatever. It’s good and I tip my hat to the voice over artists, especially whoever did the voice of the crazy eyed lady.
Moving on…the plot! As it turns out, life in Korea isn’t all that different than life in America. Everyone is in debt up to their eyeballs yet everyone still wants more, more, more. When a group of 456 people suffering from enough financial woes to choke a horse are transported to a remote island to compete in a series of kids’ games (the titular Squid Game being a Korean kids’ game, kind of like a combo of hopscotch and football is my best attempt at a description) with the chance to win a big cash prize (you can try to figure out the exchange rate between won and US dollars or just be lazy and assume it’s a lot like I did)…they think their prayers have been answered.
Ah, but nothing in life is that simple…or free. When the losers of a game of Red Light Green Light are shot dead, the competitors realize they have signed up for a far more dangerous experience than they bargained for. Deception, betrayal, intrigue and infighting breaks out amongst the players with everyone trying to cheat and connive their way to the top.
Sadly, the BLAM! of the guns packed by the video game themed guards looms large over the series like a sinister presence, as a simple mistake is all it takes for a contestant to be fed a heaping helping of hot lead. In the true show don’t tell style that all good writers must adhere to, the series never quite comes right out and says it, but the point is clear – life is like a game, and while a mistake, in most cases, won’t (thankfully) lead to a video game man in a pink coat blasting you in the face, said mistake could cause you to lose your house, spouse, kids, career, livelihood, money, friends, family and more. All it takes is one moment of bad judgement and boom, your broke, penniless, outcast and shunned and no, it’s nowhere near as bad as being shot by the pink dudes but there might be times when you find you have screwed up so bad that you might pray for the pink dudes to…no, wait, it’s never that bad, right? I mean, even if you’re a fully grown middle aged man living with your mother, it’s still not that bad, right? Right?
Enter Gi-Hun (Greg Chun) as the protagonist who holds it all together. Somehow, despite being the quintessential nice guy who always finishes last (one time he did something noble and his reward was to lose his wife, daughter, job and end up living with his mother who as mothers go is pretty nice but still, no self respecting single dude wants to live with his mother) will have to find a way to survive against contestants adept at cheating to get their way…another life point as unfortunately, rare is the person who goes through life without having to get their hands dirty, who doesn’t have to do something that leaves a bad taste in their mouth and those who don’t sometimes end up as noble yet poor and alone, wishing they’d done X dastardly deed back in the day so they could be rich now.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Not for the squeamish as it does put the U in ultraviolence, such that Stanley Kubrick’s droogs might even clutch their pearls at the scenes that lie within. Life is definitely cheap in this competition, the underlying argument seeming to be that life is treated rather cheaply in the real world as well. Heartbreaking, as it might dredge up your old memories of times when you had to put yourself over others and neither option felt totally kosher.
Finally, I’ll just say this. It’s been two long years since Game of Thrones ended and since then, I’ve felt like a stranger in a strange land when it comes to TV. There just hasn’t been anything with the same chutzpah or level of storytelling, that trail of breadcrumbs that lures you in and rewards you by tying up all of those pesky loose threads.
So ultimately, that’s what I’m saying. A bunch of plucky Koreans in track suits playing kids’ games to the death somehow adds up to the best TV show since Game of Freaking Thrones…at least in this humble blogger’s opinion.
But do think twice before watching if you are squeamish.
SIDENOTE #1 – I have to give props to this show for not only allowing the hero to be played by a man in his late 40s, but to actually come right out and say that Gi-Hun is 47. His childhood friend/competitor Sang-Woo is also in his late 40s. The ages of the competitors run from early 20s to 40s and one very old man but I assume this is a cultural difference between America and Korea. In an American reboot of the show, Gi-Hun’s character would be like, a worldly 21-year old who somehow has seen it all and done it all and is very wise despite being twenty-freaking one. (Honestly, in my own personal experience, I’ve found that life sends the equivalent of the pink coated video game guards to blast you in the face the second you hit 30, 35 tops. Had I known this when I was 21, I would have pushed myself much, much harder but unfortunately, I was dumber than a box of rocks when I was 21…not like all the super wise all knowing 21 year olds on TV today.
All I’m saying is kudos to Korea for supporting a show where a 47 year old character isn’t treated like a useless piece of trash ready for the dumpster. I mean, his family, friends and potential employers still treat him like that, but competition wise he hangs in on those games with the best of them.
SIDENOTE #2 – Often when a show or movie takes off overseas, it is treated to an American reboot, often with disastrous results. Ironically, Netflix is one of the chief perpetrators of such reboots. Since the show has become popular in its own right, I doubt you’ll see an Americanized reboot. I’m not dumping on American movies/shows but it’s just…sometimes something is good in part because of the world in which it is created and it was interesting to learn about Korean life as I watched the show.
SIDENOTE #3 – If I’m reading the figures in other reports right, it cost $21.4 million to produce but raked in 900 million for Netflix. Mmmm boy that’s a good return on investment!
It came. It went. I’m sad that it’s over but I’m glad that it happened….title of your sex tape.
BQB here with a review of Andy Samberg’s long running police comedy series.
It’s funny, I watched the first season of this show regularly when in the first season. I enjoyed it and a year later, I meant to stream the next season, then the next…and the next. I always considered myself a fan, but whoops, in the literal blink of an eye, 7 years flew by and finding myself devoid of new stuff to watch during this pandemic, I checked into it and discovered I had a lot of catching up to do.
Timely, because half way through my binge (I started this summer and just finished the last episode this week) I realized the show concluded this month. Amazing how time flies.
For those new to it, SNL alum and wacky funnyman Andy Samberg heads up the cast as Jake Peralta, a goofball detective in a Brooklyn police precinct. If you think too hard, its an odd show as in it takes place in a world where funny rarely happens. Jake and his colleagues solve crimes, catch crooks and murderers and yet somehow, wacky hijinx always transpire. In the real world, these types of shenanigans would probably get people killed and cases thrown out of court, but this is the comedy world, so you must suspend disbelief. To the show’s credit, they do manage to walk that fine line of providing goofball slapstick yet the bad guys are still always caught.
The other thing the show does well is character development. It’s a large ensemble cast, yet somehow each character gets their time in the sun. Jake’s crew includes Sgt. Terry Jeffords (uber strong ex-football player Terry Crews who wows us with his strength and pecs), Jake’s partner Charles Boyle (Jake’s partner, a loser who starts the series dating elderly women and living in his ex-wife’s basement, only to slowly but surely dig himself out of that hole over the course of the show), Amy Santiago (Jake’s love interest who worships organization and drools over file folders), Rosa Diaz (a tough, no nonsense detective with a permanent scowl and a deep voice, a far cry from actress Stephanie Beatriz’s real life bubbly, girlish voiced personality), civilian administrator Gina Linetti who ignores her duties to concentrate on social media and trash talking the rest of the gang, and of course, the glue that keeps the precinct together, Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street fame, a tough police captain, the running joke of the show being that Holt is often forced to say absurd, ridiculous things in his deep, authoritative voice. Somehow, IMO, that joke never gets old even after 8 seasons.)
Last, but not least, Scully and Hitchcock. Do you have an old, washed up person in your office? Someone who probably had a real zest for life when they were young but the years crushed their spirit and now they just loaf away at their desks, eating snacks while they count the days till retirement? Dirk Blocker (yes, the son of Dan Blocker aka Hoss Cartwright from Bonanza and Joel McKinnon Miller) plays these sometimes wastes of spaces and occasional fonts of wisdom whenever one of the younger cops dares to wade past their buckets of chicken wings to seek the rare tidbits of wisdom rolling around in their heads. One episode that gives us a flashback to the 1980s when these two were hunky studs, kicking mafia ass and taking names is equal parts funny and sad, a hilarious yet grim reminder that we all must make the best of our youthful primes, because it all goes downhill at a certain age.
Overall, I enjoyed the show very much, though the show got very real in the last season, reflecting a real world and a difficult time period in recent history that has more realness than a zany comedy can handle. Andy Samberg is great at what he does, but IMO, he is, perhaps, one of the last true funnymen, “true” in that his comedy is just that…comedy. If you watch his sketches or listen to his albums, his repertoire consists of silly voices, silly faces, silly premises, silly songs. He was in it for the laughs, never the type of comic who feels the need to impart political or special messages or take a serious turn. Alas, 2020, between the pandemic and the public outcry over police brutality forced the show to tackle serious issues, a challenge the show tried its best to do, and I’m not knocking it but a show such as this isn’t really equipped to do it. Asking Andy to be serious for a moment is like asking Andre Braugher to be serious for a moment. Somehow, when the very serious Braugher says uncharacteristically funny things, it comes off as funny, yet when the consummately goofy Andy says serious things, we just check our watches and wonder how much longer we have to wade through this attempt at drama until he acts silly again.
Unfortunately, in a climate that saw the cancellation of the Cops reality show where cameras follow the police and even the kids’ show Paw Patrol about police officer puppies, the powers that be behind Brooklyn 99 apparently felt a show about silly cops who bungle their way through saving the day wasn’t going to make it in a world that’s doing a lot of introspection about policing. I do think the show was one of the last of its kind, a silly comedy with a primary goal of making the viewer laugh. So many comedies and comedians now feel the need to make us think, give us a message, or to demand that we pick a political side and it’s just…sure, we live in a free country and comedians can do whatever they want but its unfortunate because the best comedians always realized we turned to them for escape and distraction, to get that laughter that makes us feel good…and truly adept comedians might even be able to sneak in a message or two that makes us laugh and think (not the political rallies that the late night talk shows have become.)
One last criticism of the final season, I get they had a tough challenge to be funny while tackling serious but, and spoiler alert…there were one or two moments that left me scratching my head. Turn away if you haven’t seen it, but for example, Jake has a long running friendship/enemyship? with renowned car thief Doug Judy (Craig Robinson) aka The Pontiac Bandit, constantly trying to bring him in yet he either eludes Jake or he and Jake have to team up to catch a bigger fish. In one of the last season episodes, it is implied that Jake helps him escape prison which…I mean I know its a comedy but the implication of a cop helping a crook escape? Holy shit. I always gave the show credit in that it managed to straddle the line between silly comedy and yet reminded us that cops have hard jobs and are expected to make tough calls…so as much as a cop might think a perp got a raw deal (Judy ends up going to jail over a dumb thing he did as a kid years ago), a cop can’t just assist the bad guy in getting away. They dont come right out and say Jake did it, but it is heavily implied.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Great show that unfortunately was a casualty of its time. From here on out, I guess sitcoms will just be a smorgasbord of millennial navel gazing and ennui.
BQB here with a review of the BBC series, Sherlock.
I heard good things about this over the years, but was never an early convert. It came out in 2010, right around when Hollywood made the Robert Downey Jr. movies and ABC came out with their Elementary TV show.
It just seemed like the entertainment community had gone gaga for Sherlock and had created too much Sherlock supply for not enough Sherlock demand.
But I found myself developing a Sherlock interest as of late and decided to give it a go. And you know what? It’s pretty great.
As a Yank, I had to get over a few things. It’s made by BBC and is, you know, British…and made for a British audience…not like what we’re used to i.e. something filtered down for us Americans to enjoy what with all our fast fun and guns and monster trucks and so on.
Another interesting point is that each episode is roughly an hour and a half long. Thus, there are less episode. It shifts from season to season but you’ll notice seasons that are like three or four episodes long. Each episode is basically like a full length movie, so while you get less episodes, you get stories that are told in better depth.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock as the self-proclaimed high-functioning sociopath. His friend, roommate and assistant detective, Dr. Watson is played by Martin Freeman.
Cumberbatch and Freeman were in everything in the 2010s. Cumberbatch, most noticeably as Dr. Strange in the Avengers universe. Freeman was The Hobbit, though he also was a SHIELD agent in the Avengers.
Funny thing is as I watched this show, I realized how these two became so big over the past decade.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are given new breath as the series is set in modern times. Watson keeps a blog on Sherlock’s adventures. Sherlock only puts on his hunting cap to mug for social media photos. Sherlock’s love interest/nemesis Irene Adler is a dominatrix with a phone full of photos of the rich and powerful in compromising positions. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a secret government experiment, and so on.
Overall, I enjoyed it. One thing with TV is I usually turn to it when I need a quick brake, whereas I usually put on a movie when I’m done for the day. You might want to leave the episodes till when you’re done for the day too, unless you don’t mind pausing and watching later.
My main criticism? The show ends rather abruptly as of the 2017 season. I don’t know why other than I assume Cumberbatch and Freeman are busy being in everything now.
My complaint is I thought they handled Sherlock’s longtime nemesis, Moriarty, well in an episode where Moriarty (SPOILER ALERT) frames Sherlock, making it look as if Sherlock is less of a genius and more of a weirdo who fakes crimes so he can solve them and garner media attention. That episode has a lot of thrills and chills and pretty much resolves the Sherlock vs. Moriarty arc.
Watson’s wife Mary comes in later with a whole SPOILER she’s a secret agent storyline and then before you know it she’s out of the picture. Moriarty comes back posthumously, sort of dangling the possibility that Old Jimbo might return from the grave at some point though the series has already used the old bringing a character back from the dead trick already so…I don’t know. Seems like they could have left Moriarty dead and moved on.
The show ends with an episode with a startling reveal that Sherlock and brother Mycroft have a long lost sister who is the world’s foremost psychopath, so evil that she can manipulate anyone, to the point where she apparently turned all the guards and staff at the prison she has been held in to her own personal slaves for years, thus trapping Sherlock and Watson and Mycroft in her own house of horrors.
It was interesting to watch them escape, but then the series just ends on a meh note. Watson finds a DVD left behind by Mary and all that happens is Mary basically says that Sherlock and Watson will keep going on solving crimes.
In other words, it was one of those holy crap we have to end the show but we didn’t have time to end it so we’ll piece it together really quick.
Perhaps there’s the rub. Each episode mainly focuses on a case, thus bits of the characters’ personal lives are worked in. The cases can’t necessarily go on forever and I suppose cases don’t always tie in together in a neat little ark.
(Except usually in Sherlockian lore, the underlying idea is that Moriarty is behind it all, so the big Sherlock vs. Moriarty showdown might have been better off left for the end.)
Overall, I enjoyed it and I’m hoping for further episodes down the line. Since the episodes are basically movies, they could always make another movie.
BQB here with a review of the Netflix series Russian Doll. (SPOILERS ABOUND)
I have to say it, 3.5 readers. When I was a kid, there were a ton of TV shows and movies were single adults partied hard and lived fabulous, interesting, adventurous lives well into their forties.
Lies. All lies, I say! This lifestyle may work for a handful of ultra rich, ridiculously good looking people but for the rest of us normals, your best bet is to find someone you can stand being in the same room with before you hit 30, maybe 35 at the latest.
At first, from the opening scenes I thought this show was celebrating that lifestyle but in reality, it is far from it. I’m not saying that 30 plus single people should be dumped on, I’m just saying there’s a certain point in time when you’re just too long in the tooth for the jet set crowd.
Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia has just turned 36 and her BFF, Maxine (Greta Lee) has thrown her a much undesired birthday party. Now over 35, Nadia must come to terms with a fact that she has long been avoiding – she isn’t going to live forever. She must find her happiness and yet, how does a misanthropic cynic who, with a dry wit and dark sense of humor, manages to openly mock everything and anything in life with great gusto find some sort of meaningful purpose in life?
Long story short, Nadia dies. Again and again and again. Sometimes in scary ways. Sometimes in hilarious ways. To put a chill in your shorts, many of the deaths (falling down a flight of stairs, accidental electrocution, gas leak) are all things that could easily happen to any of us at any time if we aren’t careful. When you think about it, it’s amazing that we all don’t croak again and again, what with our bodies being so fragile and all.
My early assessment was wrong. This isn’t a show that glorifies the post 35 single life. It doesn’t dump on it either. Equal time is given to the fact that people who act like posers and social climbers after 35 are lame, but also, to the fact that not everyone finds love easily and sometimes love and/or happiness doesn’t come easily for everyone and that doesn’t make those people bad either.
This is Natasha Lyonne’s magnum opus, her Mona Lisa and her piece de resistance all wrapped up into one. From the time she hit it big as Jessica, one of the funnier yet more street smart teens in 1999’s American Pie, audiences have gotten the sense that Natasha excels at playing jaded ball breakers whose fast talking, cynical facades mask deeper pain that few could handle, yet manage to joke about…all with a dose of Jewish guilt mixed in.
In recent years, her character on Orange is the New Black has cemented her status as this archetype and in Russian Doll, I get the impression, at least IMO, that Natasha is trying to say, “This is me. This is who I am. I’m troubled. I carry around a lot of pain but I deal with it by tossing out a snappy one-liner that will kick you in the nuts. You’ll get mad for a second until you realize that my assessment of you is correct and then you’ll laugh as you nurse your nuts back to health. Oddly, you’ll find me so charming that you’ll come back for more, which is confusing, because I’m as cuddly as feral cat yet strangely, someone you can lean on, like a loyal puppy. Although, I will bark at you.”
Was she trying to say all that? I don’t know. That’s what I got out of it anyway.
The repeated loop genre seems like it has been done to death, with Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day being, to the best of my knowledge, the first to tackle the idea of someone who has to repeat a day over and over. Other films and shows have put their own spin on it. Hell, this week, “Happy Death Day” releases the second in a series of films about a girl who gets murdered again and again only to wake up and get murdered again.
Creative? Sure. Overdone? Yes.
So why should you watch this addition to an overdone premise? Well, it’s different. Easy to say but it really is.
First, much of the series is devoted to the what of it all. I.E. most of these films focus on something the looped character must do to make the loop stop. This series spends a lot of time trying to figure out the why of it all…or better yet, the how of it all. How the heck is this happening? Nadia plays junior detective, investigating a number of theories – for example, maybe it’s spiritual energy in Maxine’s apartment caused by it being located on a former Yeshiva school, drawing her back to the same place at the same time after each untimely demise. Hallucinations brought upon by a ketamine laced joint are another possibility.
Other theories are researched and personally, I’m torn as to whether or not the ending gives justice to the how of it. I can see an argument for and against vis a vis whether it explained the how, but at any rate, the show does eventually make a shift from the how to the what, as in, what does Nadia need to do to make all this craziness stop?
The show is also different in that Nadia has a partner in crime. While Nadia keeps returning to her birthday party, Alan (Charlie Barnett) gets it much worse. He must continually return to the most unwanted of situations, reliving a scene where his girlfriend reveals that she has been cheating on him.
Eventually, Nadia and Alan meet and they must solve this mystery together. Nadia might be cynical but at least she has somewhat of a can-do spirit. Alan is deeply morose, ready to curl up in a corner and cry over the slightest of obstacles. One’s a fighter and the other’s a sad sack. Somehow they balance each other out and whether or not they resolve this never ending loop is a question I’ll let you answer when you watch it.
Stop by sometime and discuss the ending with me. Those who haven’t watched it yet, just avoid that discussion until you do. I think it is a great ending, not what I expected and it is rather complicated. The show trusts you to use your brain to figure it out and doesn’t spoon feed it to you, that’s for sure.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Not sure I see it lasting more than one season. It’s binge-worthy but I think to do a second season would be to spoil it. Sometimes all a show needs to say can be summed up in one outing and this show is that. Kudos to Lyonne for baring her soul for us Looky Lou’s to pick over and analyze, and for Netflix for letting her do it. This isn’t the traditional kind of show that network TV would go for, and probably wouldn’t exist at any time other than this streaming golden age. Also, to producer Amy Poehler. She doesn’t star in this but by backing it, she steps out of her usual comfort zone of upbeat, silly comedy and into the world of dry, dark comedy. Just don’t get sucked in too far, Amy. The world still needs plenty of kindhearted Leslie Knopes, just as it needs Nadias to dump on them.
It often astounds me what the network suits decide should be cancelled and what should stay on. It was truly a “grave” (ha, puns!) injustice that this show didn’t get more seasons.
How to explain it?
As a child, Ned learns he has a mysterious, supernatural power – he can bring the dead back to life with his touch.
Of course, nothing is that simple and there are some catches:
If he brings a dead someone or some thing back to life, a live someone or some thing in the surrounding area will die to balance things out.
If he touches the revived dead again, he/she/it will die again, this time permanently, and the touch will not work on that subject again.
As an adult, Ned (Lee Pace) has opened up his own pie show, “The Pie Hole” but it is failing financially.
So, he teams up with private investigator Emerson Cod (Chi McBride). Ned touches murdered people, he and Emerson ask them how they died and (hopefully if they know, who killed them). They only have sixty seconds to make their inquiries and then Ned must touch the person before someone else in the area dies in the revived dead person’s place.
Emerson then passes it all off as though he solved the crime through his masterful detective skills and splits any ensuing reward money with Ned.
The situation becomes complicated when his childhood friend Charlotte aka “Chuck” (Anna Friel) returns to her hometown, but not as Ned would have hoped.
Chuck has been murdered, but when her body is shipped home for burial, Ned brings her back to life.
Chuck is grateful and joins in Ned and Emerson’s crime solving routine. Alas, Ned and Chuck must figure out a way to keep their romance alive despite Ned not being able to touch Chuck ever again because if he does…she’ll die.
Without giving too much away, it involves a lot of plastic wrap.
I’m not sure where you’ll be able to watch it, 3.5 readers. At the time of this writing, I wasn’t able to find it on Netflix. I’m sure it must be around somewhere and I suppose if you have the dough and love the show enough you could buy it but if you know where it can be streamed let my 3.5 readers and I know.
“Little houses, little houses, and they’re all made of ticky tacky…”
What the hell is ticky tacky?
Oh well. Hot mom + marijuana = Showtime’s Weeds.
BQB here with another TV review.
This is another show I never watched when it was on for the first few years, then I got into it once streaming media came around in a big way.
Uber MILF Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) has her life turned upside when her husband dies from a heart attack unexpectedly at age forty.
She’s been a suburban housewife forever, but with two kids to raise and bills to pay, she turns to a life of crime i.e. marijuana dealing. Her product comes to be known as “MILF weed” due to her Milfyness as well as a chance encounter with Snoop Dogg (playing himself)
The first few seasons are the best of the series. Here, the story isn’t so much about the marijuana as it is about hum drum suburban life, how Nancy is able to make tons of money selling to her neighbors who, on the surface, are stuck up yuppies but given the chance to spark a doob and party, they do – often in funny, sometimes in tragic ways.
Kevin Nealon as family friend Doug Wilson helps Nancy in her illegal endeavors. His role in this show as a degenerate scumbag is his best work since SNL.
Meanwhile, Nancy ruins her chances at being nominated mother of the year by bringing her young sons into the business. (Hunter Parrish as Silas and Alexander Gould aka the voice of Nemo in 2003’s Finding Nemo as Shane.)
What really makes the show early on is the love/hate relationship between Nancy and her frenemy Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins). Celia is that super perfect/judgmental mom who serves as Nancy’s foil, first by trying to ruin her and later as joining her in the drug game.
While the first few seasons in suburbia are the best, the show eventually moves on and the Botwins find themselves in crazy situations every season. Often, it seems like series creator Jenji Kohan (now the creator of Orange is the New Black) was trying to outdo herself in each season with the wacky, borderline but not quite shark jumping predicaments the Botwins get into (Nancy marrying a Mexican drug kingpin, the Botwins going on the run being two big examples that stand out in my mind.)
Overall it is funny, and there are some interesting cliffhangers and plot twists. Not to repeat myself, but IMO, the suburbia seasons were the best and then it gets a little goofy from thereon.
I credit this series with giving us more of Mary Louise Parker. Though she’d been an actress for years (she had a role in 2002’s Red Dragon that springs to mind) this was the show that really put her over the top and now I get to see her in more stuff.
“Dayman! Uh ahh ahh! Fighter of the Nightman! Uh ahh ahh! Champion of the Sun! You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone…Dayman!”
I can’t believe this show has been on the air for ten going on eleven damn years.
BQB here with a review of FX’s long running comedy series, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I can’t quite put my finger on the exact date but at some point in the early to mid 2000s, the traditional sitcom format died.
Don’t get me wrong. Surf the channels enough and you can still find that sappy “the dad is so dumb and the kids are so smart and mom’s the best” show somewhere, but by and large, people started gravitating towards non-traditional sitcoms.
Always Sunny does involve a situation – four friends and their elderly friend/step-father (depending on the character) own and operate a dive bar in Philadelphia.
In their spare time, which they have oodles of because they avoid hard work and contributing to society at all costs, they undertake a series of schemes, scams, and cons in a never ending quest to get rich overnight without having to do anything for it.
Situation? Check. Comedy? Check. Traditional? No.
Our characters are:
Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) – the bar’s janitor and rat killer, naive dummy, epically disgusting dumpster diver, eternally obsessed with a woman we are only introduced to as “the waitress.”
Ronald “Mac” McDonald (Rob McElhenney) – Obsessed with 1980s action films, physical fitness and martial arts. Always wears sleeveless shirts to show off his guns. He’s not really that cut but believes himself to be. Constantly checking out other men’s physiques, claiming purely as an appreciator of muscles but the running joke is he is clearly gay and overcompensates to avoid admitting it.
Dennis Reynolds (Glenn Howerton) – Narcissistic sociopath. Obsessed with himself, literally no lie he isn’t willing to tell or bad act he isn’t willing to carry out to get himself ahead or to get into a woman’s pants. Inventor of the D.E.N.N.I.S. system to pick up chicks.
Deandra “Sweet Dee” Reynolds – Dennis’ twin sister. Good looking woman but suffers low self esteem due to constantly being called a “bird” but her brother and dumb friends. Dreams of becoming an actress. Has no talent and sadly, unable to recognize this fact.
Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) – Dennis and Dee’s step-father. Has amassed great wealth due to a variety of illegal activity over the years. Could live in style but prefers to slum it as Charlie’s roommate. Big time scumbag who teaches the youngsters how to be scumbags.
I’ve watched this show since the beginning and wow has the time flew.
I’ll say this – there are times where I have laughed hysterically, times when I thought it was pretty creative and yes, even a few times where I thought, “well, they might being going a tad too far there.”
How they have remained friends so long, I don’t know. Its nothing but a sea of them calling each other names, backstabbing and trash talking one another and so on.
Every week, they try a new scheme or get themselves into a bind.
Here are some of the most memorable off the top of my head, in no particular order:
Dayman/Nightman Song aka “The Nightman Cometh” – Charlie writes a musical and is too stupid to realize that it is filled with sexually explicit innuendo.
Kitten Mittens – Just how it sounds. Charlie puts mittens on kittens.
“World Series Defense” – the gang explains to a judge a terrible ordeal they had while trying to attend the World Series. Charlie dawns his “green man costume” and a generation of drunk frat boys running around in face-less green suits is born.
“Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare” – and to convince the welfare office they’re destitute and hopeless, they acquire and smoke crack….and become hooked. You wouldn’t think crack is a funny subject but darned if they didn’t find a way.
“Who Pooped the Bed?” – a poop is found in a bad. The gang, in classic whodunnit mystery style, becomes determined to solve the crime.
“Storm of the Century” – a massive storm heads Philly’s way. Dennis becomes obsessed a well endowed TV weather girl, so much so much so that whenever he spots her ample bosom, he hears the lyrics to the 1980s hit song “Alone” by Heart. He spots the boobs, he hears and apparently thinks, “Till know…I always got by own my own…” Priceless.
I don’t know. I could go on forever with my favorite episodes. If I do, I’ll ruin them. You should just go on Netflix and watch them.
Above all else, what I love about this show is that it was created by a group of friends who were trying to make a go of it in Hollywood and after struggling for years, got together, made their show, sold it to FX and were even able to get a well-known star like Danny DeVito to not only sign on in the second season but to be willing to completely debase himself over and over again for a decade.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, 3.5 readers. If things aren’t working out, take a page from the Always Sunny crew and make things happen (but uh, try to not be so alcoholic…or gross…or engage in any of their 9 million bad habits.)
“All of this has happened before and will happen again.”
Umm…except no matter what, my site will only have 3.5 readers before and again.
Seriously, it’s like shouting into the deepest reaches of space here!
I just hope if a Cylon gets me its the Tricia Helfer model. Awooga!
BQB here with a review of Battlestar Galactica.
Just so that we’re all on the same page here, I’m talking about BSG that aired on the SyFy channel in the 2000s, not the 1970s original where the actors wore capes and the cylons looked like tin cans and shit.
This show was a real coup for sci-fi nerds. After all, it isn’t like anyone was really clamoring for a remake of the cheesy 70s version, but series rebooter Ronald Moore delivered and delivered big time.
Twelve colonies, all named after the astrological signs, are filled with humans who work together under one government.
Alas, the cylons (robots run amuck) blow shit up big time.
In a surprise turn of events, Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) becomes the president as every other head of state above her dies.
Thereafter, Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos), at the command of Battlestar Galactica, leads a convoy of ships filled with humans on an epic search for the mythical lost planet known as “Earth.”
You might have heard of it. You’re sitting on it, dummy.
Along the way, there’s political intrigue, backstabbing, sex, violence, and the constant fear that someone in the ranks might in secret, be a damn traitorous cylon as, what a twist, Cylons are able to take human form now.
Did I mention that the Cylons chase the humans all over space? Cy-douches if you ask me.
Over the years, SyFy has given us such wondrous films as Sharknado and Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf.
In other words, you sort of get the impression that they phone most of their shit in, but somehow, everyone involved with this show was firing on all cylinders. Why they haven’t been able to recreate this success before or after is beyond me.
Add to the mix the exploits of space fighter pilots Lee “Apollo” Adama aka the admiral’s son (Jamie Bamber) and super hot nerd fantasy girl Katee Sackhoff as Kara “Starbuck” Thrace and you’ve got a great show.
Honestly, the show could have introduce Katee Sackhoff to the world and stopped there. She’s built a career on starring in sci-fi nerd movies/shows ever since and I hope she never stops.
Oh, and there’s James Callis as the duplicitous scheming super weenie Dr. Gaius Baltar who, we learn early on, basically helped the Cylons destroy humanity through his douchebaggery and then somehow he must hide this info from his human compatriots throughout the series or be thrown out the airlock.
Yup. Somebody was always getting thrown out that airlock, often at the behest of grumpy Cylon hater Colonel Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan.)
I hate to say it, 3.5 readers, but this isn’t available on Netflix at present.
However, you can check it out on Hulu and if you’re a sci-fi space geek, it is worth the subscription fee, even if you just decide to subscribe until you’ve binge watched the whole thing.
And it is binge worthy. There are many cliff hangers and ongoing arcs, plot points you can’t help but want to see resolved.
And Moore and co. are creative in taking pieces of our earthly world and implanting them in the BSG world with the suggestion that the culture we experience now has its roots in this ancient space faring group of explorers.
Bookshelf Battle 