Category: Television

TV Room: ‘Mountainhead’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

Jesse Armstrong’s new movie Mountainhead premieres on HBO May 31. I reviewed it for Slant Magazine:

By following Succession with another acid-singed comedy about a slightly different subset of 0.01 percenters, Armstrong is sticking to a kind of satire he knows well. Mountainhead’s tech bros have many pathologies familiar from the Roy family in Succession, but even though just two years have passed since that show’s finale, the landscape of wealth and power mapped by Armstrong has changed immensely—though it feels more like devolution than progress. Vicious and powerful as the Roys were, the bros of Mountainhead would have annihilated that old-tech clan’s business and net worth with the flick of an algorithm, followed by laughter…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Disclaimer’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the new Apple TV series Disclaimer was just published at Slant Magazine:

Alfonso Cuarón’s potboiler Disclaimer, an adaptation of the Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, begins with famed documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett) being fêted at an awards ceremony. Scenes of Catherine and her husband, Roger (Sacha Baron Cohen), living a posh life in their gorgeous London rowhouse are intercut with a storyline about a pair of students, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), having a gap-year escapade in Italy. Meanwhile, a gloomier third narrative tracks Stephen (Kevin Kline), a widowed schoolteacher who seems to have lost every reason for living except for the drive to exact vengeance on Catherine for a crime that he believes she got away with…

The seven-part series premieres October 11. Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine:

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s novel, about a Navalny-like political prisoner in Russia, serendipitously makes its premiere not long after Navalny died in a Russian prison camp. But the comparisons between reality and fiction largely end there. A Gentleman in Moscow is a glossy, romanticized series that mostly suggests rather than shows the horrors of a totalitarian regime…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: Best Shows of 2023

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Reservation Dogs (Hulu)

Slant Magazine just published their big year-end TV roundup for 2023. I contributed the intro and wrote about one of my favorite shows from the past year, Fleishman Is in Trouble.

Read it here:

We’re well into the so-called post-Peak TV era. Tightening budgets and consolidating streaming platforms suggest an uncertain future for the medium. With the exception of new staples like The Last of Us and Poker Face, many of the best television shows of 2023 wrapped things up with their final seasons (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Succession, Barry, Reservation Dogs) or had only limited runs (Dead Ringers, Fleishman Is in Trouble). And due to the Hollywood strikes, the TV landscape could look quite different by this time next year…

TV Room: 10 Best ‘Community’ Episodes

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So what were the ten best episodes of Community? Glad you asked! I made a stab at ranking them for Slant:

The most common criticism levied against NBC’s Community during its chaotic and generally acclaimed six-season run was that it was all snark and no heart. It’s a complaint that’s been levied at many self-aware, pop culture-literate works by Gen Xers. But in this case, it was flat-out wrong. Threaded alongside creator Dan Harmon’s meta-sitcom-as-sitcom commentary was a poignant and gut-twisting look at loneliness and purpose that suggested that even being part of a co-dependent hot mess of a friend group was better than navigating life solo…

Final word goes to Troy and Abed:

Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Six Seasons and a Movie’ is on Sale!

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, DVD - Television, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

So it’s official, the latest book that I threw words at is in bookstores and on all your better Internet-y sites. Co-written with my Monty Python FAQ fellow travelers, Six Seasons and a Movie: How Community Broke Television is an episode-by-episode trawl through one of the greatest sitcoms too many people have never heard of.

It also includes scads of research into the cast and crew, including creator Dan Harmon who went on to do a wee little thing called Rick & Morty and Donald Glover who went on to do just about anything he wanted.

Here’s what our publisher says:

Covering everything from the corporate politics that Harmon and his team endured at NBC to the Easter eggs they embedded in countless episodes, Community: The Show that Broke Television is a rich and heartfelt look at a series that broke the mold of TV sitcoms…

Indeed! Watch the show, read the book, enjoy.

Last word to Troy and Abed (books!):

TV Room: ‘The Afterparty’

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The second season of The Afterparty ran its last episode this week. I wrote about the show as an example of the maybe-soon-to-disappear peak streaming show for PopMatters:

Shows like The Afterparty will probably not even get greenlit in a few years. Once the streaming services start merging and slashing production schedules, things are more likely to revert to the televisual mean: Simple, easily replicated formulas generated on an industrial scale. (Tiffany Haddish in a Murder, She Wrote reboot, with self-contained mysteries solved in a half-hour, sprinkled with a handful of slightly self-aware jokes to pretend at relevance? That will get picked up for 30 episodes.) An odd, ornately designed, low-key funny, and highly expensive concept like The Afterparty is unlikely to be seen as a good investment in the near future…

Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: Talking with David Simon

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic Novels, TelevisionLeave a comment

I recently had the great honor of talking with the great David Simon (The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill) about policing, writing, crime, and the graphic novel adaptation of his classic study of a Baltimore detective unit, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

A part of my interview with Simon is at Publishers Weekly:

… They took a vote and only three guys wanted me to be there. The rest thought it was a terrible idea. But, it not being a democracy, they put me in the unit anyway. Nobody was hostile. They got used to me. One guy, Terry McLarney, we were drinking at the bar and he said, “I see what you’re doing. This isn’t really about the cases. This is about us.” I said, “Don’t tell anyone” …

TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’

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My review of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations ran on PopMatters:

One difference between The Day After Tomorrow and the release of Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change anthology series Extrapolations in 2023 is that now the human causes of environmental disaster can be openly discussed in a big-budget science-fiction production. The issue has become less contentious as the potential for catastrophe looms. A broader swath of the public now understands that human activity is heating the planet. Even some diehard denialists have started to acknowledge the fact of sinking coastlines and scorching summers. While such half-hearted converts are often still resolutely opposed to conservation, preferring techno-solutions (cloud seeding, fusion reactors) or reality-detached boosterism (warming temperatures mean farming in Greenland!), this mind-shift is still progress…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

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The last season of Amazon’s highly addictive The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a screwball comedy as filtered through Mad Men and mid-1960s Broadway farce, starts this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in disbelief and laughter, and always felt on the brink of losing sight of its main story and character. The fifth and final season of the Amazon dramedy is a course correction of sorts, paring back the clamorous side plots that had started taking up too much of the show’s oxygen while retaining its electric spirit…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Slow Horses’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

The new Apple TV series Slow Horses is an adaptation of the first entry in Mick Herron’s superbly semicomic spy novels. It stars Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas and premieres this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

The six-episode series at times recalls The Americans, with which it shares an executive producer, Graham Yost, and an appreciation for the workaday realities of spies’ tradecraft, as well as a tendency to resort to sudden bloodletting. Slow Horses similarly breathes life into a somewhat moribund genre due to its grumpy antihero, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), and the nontraditional gaggle of spies whom he has to rely on to save the day…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Watch TV and Learn

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

Say you have written a book. You have been lucky enough to have your book published by a major house. Maybe you have even gotten some good press. But nevertheless, the income stream is negligible. What do you do to keep writing and not have to hold down a separate job?

Maybe write a book that has a better chance of being optioned for a streaming or television adaptation. In “The Rise of Must-Read TV,” Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, and J. D. Porter note how streaming services like Netflix (which has had great success with book-sourced series like The Queen’s Gambit [pictured above]) have been on a “buying spree” of book properties.

The writers studied what makes a book more appealing to the interests of TV producers looking to populate a big, broad-appeal series. They identified a few common characteristics:

Although not every novel under contract for potential adaptation shares all of these features, they do seem to possess a consistent set of what we call “option aesthetics”: episodic plots, ensemble casts, and intricate world-building. These are the characteristics of contemporary fiction that invite a move from the printed page to the viewing queue.

These are just dramatic choices you can make. If (and only if) they work well for the story you have in mind, then run with it. Remember: Jennifer Egan modeled A Visit from the Goon Squad on The Sopranos.

TV Room: ‘Monty Python: A Celebration’

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There is a nifty four-part show on PBS right now called Monty Python: A Celebration. It’s essentially a plus-sized clip show of fantastic Python bits intermixed with various comics like David Cross and Patton Oswalt reminding us why that troupe of fish-slappers and parrot-killers helped set the stage for almost everything interesting in modern comedy.

For some reason, they also asked me to hold forth on the same.

You can find it streaming here. Otherwise, as they say, you can check your local listings.

Lest you forget, Monty Python FAQ, which I co-authored with the good messrs Cogan and Massey, can still be purchased wherever you get your books. Like here. Or here. Maybe here.

TV Room: ‘Night Stalker’

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My review of the new Netflix true-crime series Night Stalker ran at Slant:

Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, a four-part series about Richard Ramirez, the sadistic serial rapist and murderer who terrorized the citizens of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1980s, is dramatically satisfying but structurally rote. Director Tiller Russell glosses the story over with more cinematic panache than you might see on 48 Hours, all straight from the Southland-noir template, including eerie tracking shots of a full moon behind dark palm trees and Michael Mann-ish overhead views of nighttime highways. But despite a story filled with big-hearted good guys, a depraved villain, and an edge-of-your-seat finale, the series feels overly pat and formulaic…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘City So Real’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film-Documentary, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

The latest documentary project from the great Steve James (Hoop Dreams) is a five-part miniseries that tracks the tumult of a Chicago mayoral campaign.

City So Real is streaming now on Hulu. My review is at The Playlist:

It’s a noble, heartfelt, and eye-opening look at the American city, matching the scope of Frederick Wiseman’s recent scoping of a similarly fractious Boston in “City Hall,” but giving it more of a warmly human pulse…

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vaHmjn95Q