Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped at some indeterminate point. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.
We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime)-W. Kamau Bell does his homework here in this thorough and emotionally moving look at Bill Cosby’s rise to fame as well as the development of the Dr. Jekyll behind one of Black America’s most steadfast role models. Bell has always been a relatively neutral journalistic storyteller and he does his best to treat even-handedly the people who might be accused of enabling Cosby or supporting him past the point of no return. For the most part, the target is Bill Cosby himself and the documentary hammers home pretty well how awful this person’s actions were. Through his monstrous smears against media outlets and academics who covered him unfavorably, the documentary establishes a pattern that gaslighting and its subsequent forms of psychopathy that were a long part of Cosby’s persona. If you didn’t already know, Cosby’s rapes very much went hand-in-hand with gaslighting as he roofied his victims, violated them while unconscious, and then insisted to them that nothing had happened (even those who might have partially awoken or smelled something fishy). Many a brave victim bears their story in a very matter-of-fact way and there’s a lot of resonance in hearing the same story over and over.
The After Party (Apple TV)-Although we like to tell ourselves and our peers that we’re past high school, I suspect the abundance of TV shows about high school with adult audiences is good evidence that we never completely leave those formative years behind. It’s for that part of our identities that “The After Party” hits on the nose so well. Sure, we don’t spend every waking moment thinking about high school by the time we are 15 years out. However, put us in a room with our high school cohort and I have no doubt that there are always unresolved threads — an unexpressed attraction, a latent inferiority complex, a what-if ticket to stardom, a misbegotten grudge — that is rife for drama fifteen years later. That’s essentially where the show places us. And there’s a murder mystery on top of it because why not? That the show could function well enough without a murder to solve, bodes well for how solid the show’s comic infrastructure is. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is a pretty solid blend of random comic talent (Ben Schwartz, Tyia Sinclair, Ilana Glazer, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz among others).
Dropout (Hulu)-The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy.
Played by the always-talented Amanda Seyfried, Holmes is portrayed early on as an overachiever with curious asocial tendencies. She comes off as a social pariah when she insists to her fellow students in a Mandarin immersion program that they speak Chinese like an unpaid dorm RA and she even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with her male benefactors. It’s hard not to admire her pluck and her underdog nature as a diminutive woman in a man’s world. It’s equally hard to put a finger on what or who Elizabeth Holmes is but she’s a fascinating enough figure (even for someone like myself who had no knowledge of her real-life counterpart) to try to pick apart.
Then, of course, there’s her inevitable downfall. While the show does a good job of forecasting how her inability to give up would lead Holmes to divorce herself from reality when things go wrong, the demise gets overly long and protracted until the show becomes smart enough in episode six to figure out she’s no longer the most interesting part of the story. That’s when two interns (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) start to go All the President’s Men on Elizabeth’s ass and things start heating up again.
Home Economics (ABC)-I’ve previously heralded this show as a worthy successor to “Modern Family” in that it’s sustainable comfort viewing with some nicely contrasting characters working through familiar family sitcom tropes.
I might even posit that there’s a little more meat on the bones of this premise as there’s a subtle classist examination on the lives of the three adult siblings at the center of this story: Oldest sibling Connor is decidedly more wealthy than his two siblings and that dynamic isn’t ignored as the story saunters along.
I also admire the show’s decision to go for a more horizontal than vertical approach with far less emphasis on the kids or grandparents. For all I care, they can switch up the child actors next year and I wouldn’t notice. Take away their bargaining power like Ray Romano’s kids, I say.
Lately, however, some of the plots are getting awfully basic. In the first season, there was a case of two of the adult siblings re-uniting with a girl they both hooked up with in summer camp. That episode had mistaken identities, cross talk, juicy secrets, and most importantly, real stakes.
A recent episode had two siblings bickering over writing a middle school play and a B-plot over whether two of the spouses are being cliquey by not letting one of the siblings in their friend group. In another plot, one of the spouses (who I assumed was Colbie Smothers, but is not which is another minus) wants her kids to be proud of her Mexican heritage and starts emphasizing words with Spanish pronunciations and cooks them guacamole. Sorry, these episodes have almost nothing to offer outside of the mildly pleasant characters. Here’s hoping things turn around.
Mr Mayor (NBC)-It’s good to have an old favorite back. Now that it’s the second season, can we do a little more world-building. I’m having trouble buying that in one of the 15 most populous cities in the world, the government can be run by only about five people (including one who’s semi-literate) and everyone else is just background. Maybe through in Tina Fey favorites like Tituss Burgess as a frazzled city department head, Dean Norris as the Los Angeles County sheriff, or Jon Hamm as a charismatic district attorney?
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