Tag: streaming

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

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment
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

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

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:

TV Room: ‘The Afterparty’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

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:

TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

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: ‘The Invisible Pilot’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film-Documentary, streamingLeave a comment

The new HBO documentary miniseries The Invisible Pilot starts on Monday.

My review ran at The Playlist:

Some jobs do not prepare you for much of anything else. Work as a barista and you will know how to make a great latte, perhaps with that cute little leaf in the foam, but that is it. Other jobs provide more marketable skills. The buzzy new three-episode HBO documentary series “The Invisible Pilot,” for example, reveals that being a crop duster was excellent training for anybody looking to set up shop as a drug smuggler. The skill sets are roughly the same—flying heavy loads, often in bad weather, low to the ground, and landing on rough ground—only, when the cargo is illegal drugs, the pay is quite a bit better…

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.

Screening Room: ‘False Positive’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

In John Lee’s oddball horror flick False Positive, a young woman (Ilana Glazer from Broad City) is thrilled after a fertility doctor (Pierce Brosnan) helps her get pregnant. But pretty soon it becomes clear that this will not be an easy and happy birth process.

False Positive will be available this week on Hulu. My review from the Tribeca Festival is at Slant:

Feeling at times like a new-millennium gloss on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach…

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WtWjH8GGqE

Screening Room: 20 Years of IFC Films

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

Given the extra time that so many of us have on our hands right now to catch up on movies, the issue tends to be narrowing down our choices.

IFC Films just had their 20th anniversary and wouldn’t you know, there’s a 30-day free trial of their streaming service. My survey article at Slant runs through a quick history of the distributor’s varied output (Linklater to Soderbergh to Herzog to…) and then rounds up 20 of their movies worth seeking out:

IFC Films has spent the last two decades championing some of the world’s most innovative cinema in a no-fuss, under-the-radar manner. Less attention-grabbing than distribution houses like A24, IFC also cast a wider net of aesthetic styles than distributors such as Grasshopper and Oscilloscope. Across its 20 years, the company has continued to release a fairly eclectic grab-bag of movies—from mumblecore to earnest kitchen-sink drama to more unclassifiable what-the-fuckery—that other labels would likely have passed on…

TV Room: Season 2 of ‘Ozark’

On By chrisbarsantiIn TelevisionLeave a comment

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in ‘Ozark’ (Netflix)

In the second season of Netflix’s Missouri noir Ozark, the Byrd family finds themselves being mired ever deeper in a cycle of moral compromise.

My review is at The Playlist:

Like almost every other show on Netflix, “Ozark” follows the “If Only BBC” rule. (Meaning things would have been a lot snappier if they’d lopped off two, three, even four episodes. Unless we’re talking about the new seasons of “Arrested Development,” in which case full cancellation is the only answer.) The first season started off with a hell of a setup. Early episodes were packed with grit and speed like some godsend of modern noir. Season 1 soon lost its way, not sure just how Southern Midwest gothic it wanted to go. That same schizoid attitude, a little from here and a little from there, prevails in Season 2…

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Altered Carbon’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, TelevisionLeave a comment

Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunk noir novels posited a future world where death is mostly a thing of the past. Everyone’s mind can be downloaded into a surgically implanted “stack” which at the point of death can then be “resleeved” into a new body of whatever gender or race one prefers. It’s a fascinating concept that Morgan mined for a hardboiled capitalist critique but is worked out for mostly action-junkie hijinks in the derivative 10-part streaming adaptation of Altered Carbon, the first novel in the series.

Altered Carbon premieres on Netflix February 2. My review is at The Playlist.

Here’s the trailer:

TV Room: ‘Wormwood’

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

Launching Friday on Netflix is Errol Morris’s immersive new six-part series Wormwood, which mixes hardboiled investigative documentary filmmaking with David Lynchian recreations. A four-hour theatrical edit is also playing in limited release.

My review is at Film Journal International:

When Eric Olson was still just a child in 1953, his father Frank died while away on business. The official explanation was that Frank fell or possibly jumped out of a hotel room. “At that moment,” Eric says in Errol Morris’ epic new investigation of the mysteries surrounding Frank’s death, “the world stopped making sense entirely.” That burning ember of uncertainty stayed with Eric the rest of his life…