Deep Water Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Meets an SNL Sketch

 

This film presents an askew world that can be so jarring, it comes back to being unintentionally humorous before settling into a tense plot. If I didn’t know it came from two masterminds of the psychological thriller genre who knew what they were doing — the source material by novelist Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Talented Mr Ripley) and Adrian Lyne as director (Fatal Attraction)---I would describe this as an extremely bizarre cross between the 2009 Saturday Night Live sketch “I Have Sex with Your Wife” and the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in which an older couple (George and Martha, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) unleash a 90-minute burst of raw, sociopathic marital dysfunction on an unassuming young couple they’ve invited to dinner.

The key players are Vic (Ben Affleck), a lower-middle-aged entrepreneur who’s now a member of the idle rich after retiring off a technological invention. His wife, Melinda, (Ana de Armas) is a gorgeous firecracker with a voracious sexual appetite who seems to get off on having affairs right under her husband’s nose.

It’s initially kind of vague whether seeing her wife gallivant with other men in such close proximity is something he welcomes as a kink or just tolerates it, but yikes! These two need therapy before things get all murdery and out of hand.

Or maybe, things have already gotten that far? Vic even admits it out loud to one of Melinda’s lovers.

On the surface, little about this film makes sense. Why do all three of Melinda’s on-screen lovers seem so blase about violating Vic and Melinda’s marriage after coming face-to-face with Vic? They all consistently seem to feel little guilt and have little concern for their own safety at this transgression. What is up with Vic and snails? If it’s an open secret that Vic killed someone in what appears to be a tight-knit neighborhood, why isn’t he a social pariah?

This is up there with Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch in terms of mind-f***ery, but here’s the thing:

There’s a great internal consistency to this world that demands admiration. These two might be less memorable than George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that’s partially because George and Martha were the king and queen of mood whiplash.

Instead, Melinda is always a suburban temptress and Vic is always a mysterious cauldron of dark impulses.

If you feel like this film doesn’t feel right, it’s not supposed to. It’s a skewed universe where these people are too insane to exist but they do resemble certain aspects of an unhealthy marriage pushed to extremes. And to the degree that anything still doesn’t match up, it’s certainly discussion-provoking.

Every 2021 Film I Saw: Quick Takes

1.            Blue Bayou-Filmed, directed, and starring South Korean Justin Chon, the story of a Korean immigrant born and raised in Louisiana facing deportation is difficult with glimmering vestiges of human triumph. I was floored by the sentiment.

2.            House of Gucci-Very Shakespearean in all its delicious tragedy and back-stabbing. These people were larger than life and the story takes on that grandeur.  

3.            West Side Story-The degree of difficulty to adapt a classic and make it your own is high, so many great decisions went to make a fuller and richer story and put character developments in historic context 

4.            Last Night in Soho-I admire that a director who has always had comedy in each of his pictures was able to do something entirely without it. It was a great mystery, time capsule and comic of age story and I was overwhelmed with the kinetic frenzy. My one minor complaint is I didn’t love the horror elements.

5.            Licorice Pizza-There was an extremely icky age difference but I enjoyed so much of the nostalgic drench and vignette-like nature of the story.

6.            Nightmare Alley-This visually beautiful tragic tale of a drifter is very rewarding on second viewing

7.            Concrete Cowboy-Idris Elba played the hard black dad like Denzel Washington in Fences but convincingly added the layer of empathy and caring for his child and that vulnerability in their relationship really got to me. I didn’t understand what this horse stable was doing in the middle of Philadelphia but I also got that it was important to them

8.            Last Duel-Slightly slower than ideal in terms of authenticity but the trade-off is authenticity.

9.            Power of the Dog-An incredibly strong attention to detail, great performances, and, in my opinion, a thematic thrust worthy of a Best Picture win.

10.          Free Guy-Yes, it's fun, but a lot of world building and the kind of detailed storyline that could transfer over to a robust sci-fi film

11.          Jungle Cruise-More just fun, but I found the central relationships moving enough, and I'm a sucker for Amazon stories

12.          Courier-It had a first half that was markedly different than the second (kind of like the Dev Patel film Lion) that was tonally a bit jarring, but it was a spy film that moved at the speed of life.

13.          Mayday-Very eerie and quiet film that sneaks up on you about a violated teenager who's taken away to a fantasy land where she can be in the protection of woman but she's also lulling men to their deaths

14.          Don’t Look Up-Yes, it was depressing, but it was sharp

15.          Queen Bees-Another entry into the "Old People Team Up to Make a Movie" genre with Jane Curtin, Ellen Burstyn, Loretta DeVine, Ann Margaret, Christopher Lloyd, and James Caan. Very sweet and tuned into the twilight years

16.          Moxie-A high school melodrama directed by Amy Poehler (maybe a companion piece to Mean Girls?) that's sharp and funny at times. Navigates the current climate well without casting feminism or men as villains.

17.          Woman in the Window-A Hitchcockonian mystery that oozed suspense and mystery

18.          Val-The only documentary I watched this year about Val Kilmer. A very self-conscious look at fame and coming to terms with his physical demise

19.          Ride the Eagle-An impressive small-scale production about a guy (Jake Johnson) coping with the death of a mother (Susan Sarandon) he barely knew

20.          Eyes of Tammy Faye-A nicely focused biopic which picked the right parts of Tammy's life to focus on and had a good villain in Vincent D'Onofrio's Jerry Fallwell. There was a tremendous amount to appreciate in Tammy Faye's arc as evidenced by Jessica's Oscar BUT I would've liked a litle more development to Andrew Garfield's character

21.          Coda-It was sweet and it did show us a world we hadn't seen before, but I felt the music part itself was full of plot holes and the piano teacher to the rescue at the audition is an old trope. Still I'm happy it won in an odd way: The Oscars are extremely predictable with the glut of precursors so a bizarre upset is welcome.

22.          Passing-Well-shot and acted and I’d even buy the score on CD. The conversations were really interesting as well but at times they felt a little theatrical as if they were playing for a small art-house audience.

23.        Ice Road-I love the guts of whoever pitched this film: “Speed but twice as slow and they’ll be going on ice.” Amber Midthunder could be a star down the road.

24.       Space Jam 2-I love the Looney Tunes though they feel a little off in the looniness department and, even in the first Space Jam, Bugs, Duffy and Lola had bigger roles which set them up to fuel more of the comedy (Michael Jordan/LeBron James is the straight man). Still, the film was fun, the plot felt updated in clever ways (taking a page from the e-sports world and lampooning entertainment’s overemphasis on IPs), and I enjoyed the greater focus on the son-father relationship that the original Space Jam should have also been about.

25.          Beckett-It's a contextless action film like the Bourne series where we're just shown a guy doing lots of amazing fighting but we don't know the why of anything. Tonally, the film held but barely.

26.          Worth-The film was executed well, but it was kind of dull. At the same time, it's not that easy to make a film about an accountant making risk assessment calculations.

27.          Cruella-Beautiful to look at and Emma Stone's iteration of the character was a fun underdog to root for. Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Frye also make excellent sidekicks. Still it went on way too long and there’s a such thing as too many twists.

27.          Pig-It's nice to see Nicholas Cage celebrated for his acting, but the film is a bit self-serious. It’s just food seasoning, guys: No need to start a fight club over it or build an organized crime empire around it.

28.       Legend  of Shang-Tsi and the Ten Rings-I could predict almost every plot development five minutes in advance, and what I couldn’t predict, I didn’t care about.  I was also bothered that the film expected me to know who Trevor whatever-his-name-is, F--- Off Marvel, I don’t care about crossovers. And shouldn’t side kicks have some use? (I’m looking at you Seth Rogen as Green Hornet, who punched out maybe 2 people in comparison to Kato single-handedly fighting dozens of goons at once).  But, that sky scraper fight scene was next level.

29.         Flag Day-This was a film…..that I watched…..sorry, I barely remember watching this..

31.          Being the Ricardos-Aaron Sorkin had been on a really good streak—Molly’s Game, Trial of the Chicago 7—but this is like “Studio 60” backwards in terms of egotistical awfulness. Yes, the actors handle the smug material well, but the material is all about praising the ego of the creator at the expense of others (the producers, writers and co-stars are secondary to Lucy’s brilliance) and had little to do with Lucy who was funny.

32.          French Dispatch-The only Wes Anderson film I wouldn’t recommend. There is such a thing as too bloated of an ensemble and too much attention to detail.

33.          Electric Life of Louis P Wain-Too cutesy-wutesy and by the numbers.

34.          Lost Daughter-Slow and dreary. It might have all the right moves to offer but it didn’t hook me.

35.        Mitchells vs Machines-Don’t know if I remember this too much either. That’s not a good sign.

36.          Tomorrow War-Sooo much uncanny valley and ugly creatures on the screen and this is probably one of the few times when there’s no debate that a time travel film makes no sense. Normally that genre can hand-wave a lot of plot holes.

37.          Barb and Star Go to Mar El Vista-I know it had its fans, but I found this overly low-brow and couldn’t find a single scene that screams “Brilliant!.” Maybe Barb and Star being fired from their jobs comes close but that’s in the beginning of the movie and front loads with lots of expectations.  You realize that these two made Bridesmaids? It’s mostly standard mix-em-ups and a comedy of doors.

 This felt like when Mike Meyers or M. Night Shyamalan refuse to listen to studio notes about a bad idea.

38.          Thunder Force-Because it stars Melissa McCarthy, one might assume it’s a send-up to superhero tropes but the film plays the superhero story pretty straight despite the film still having the outlines of a comedy. It’s a pretty awkward clash. At least Jason Bateman seemed to know he was in a comic film.

39.          Breaking News in Yuma County-A dark comedy that feels as if someone read cliff notes on the Coen Brothers films (people fabricate dumb schemes, people get blackmailed, people are violently hurt, etc) and tried to make a film solely off that. It probably doesn’t help that the scheme is not just dumb but uninteresting. Allyson Janney pretends to know details about your husband’s death because she likes being on the news and the fame it brings her, but do people really like being a talking head on the news?

40.          Kate-Like Beckett, it’s a contextless action film (we’re not meant to know much about the hero) but, it’s also a contextless shoot-em-up and it’s too high in the ratio of violence to context for me to not see it as gratuitous.  

41.          Stowaway-Boring attempt at sci-fi and it’s lifeboat ethics weren’t anything I agreed with. 

The Art of the Interview in Journalism

 Interviewing:

When you interview a source, you have to be chummy and professional, but remember that they are not your customer or the person you are serving.

It generally is in your source’s best interest that they’re talking to you. The source could have something at stake in a number of ways: They could have something to promote (often more the case in soft journalism), they could have a message they want to get out, or they could use the publicity. On the other hand, they might just have time to kill and might find it polite to answer questions. 

If it’s someone with skin in the game, I find it best not to be overt about the transactional nature of this relationship. I can often smell from a mile away that they have an angle, but by not acknowledging it, I’m setting an expectation that I have my own job and it’s the same job I always do.

What if a source backs out?

The only exception is if someone’s the subject of my story where I might be completely screwed if they back out of my story.

To provide some more background, there are (for the purposes of this explanation) two types of sources: The subject of your story and secondary sources. The type of writing I do is largely human interest meaning that I l don’t have a story without the subjects’ cooperation. If, for example, the story is Joe Blow and Joe Blow doesn’t want to be interviewed for a story, then I’m SOL. The best thing to do is ascertain as early as possible if Joe Blow is down so I don’t waste my time. Now if Joe Blow is an exceptional cupboard maker and the story is about cupboard makers, I could potentially just go to someone who’s also a cupboard maker and make the story about them.

There can be complications to this. Once, I did a short pre-interview (letting someone know you’re interested in working with them and getting some initial questions in to ensure they fit the story I’m trying to write; they often come back with a request to clear it by some PR person before they talk back to me) with a mini-golf champion. I got her agreement and the story was approved. I never heard from her again. I once did about 75% of an interview with a rug owner and then when I got back from lunch, he said he was uninterested. I pulled out my hair trying to figure out a way to get back in his good graces.
 
For the most part, I don’t try to say “if you do this, I will promise you that” or latch onto their angles, but I make general overtures of how I would love to tell their story and talk about doing it in a way that will be as unintrusive on their time as possible.

In one case, I interviewed the son of a Salvadorian pupeseria owner in 2018 and there was sensitive material his father didn’t want to share (he was involved with the Civil War). At a certain point, the son capitulated to his dad. I wasn’t going to put the dad’s story in so I knew that the story addressed the dad’s needs and I just worked around the family to get the final pieces of information because various forces (economics, not letting down the editor) made it advantageous to get the article in. After the article was published, the son read it and he was very pleased.

Human Interest verse Hard-Hitting News

Note that I also say human interest, because that is different from hard hitting news. If say Joe Blow was a cupboard maker who was very controversial or affected the public in some other way, I can write a story about Joe Blow without his consent. It’s a free press and I could always write stories about people without their consent but alienating random cupboard makers who are just doing their own thing, isn’t really a good business model for local journalism. Now it’s worth noting that on a couple occasions, I finished articles about people without their consent.

How to Conduct the Interview

The largest thing to keep in mind is time. Your subject is not on the clock to answer questions so it’s sometimes good to let your subject know you’re at the halfway mark or have five or ten minutes left. If you’re on a time crunch and your subject is long-winded, you might even have to do something that might be a little rude in regular conversation which is explain as politely as possible that you don’t mean to be rude but in the interest of the interview, you would like to move the conversation in a different direction. I just let them know up front (and am socially awkward anyway) that this conversation might be different than a regular interview.

You should have a few questions that are important, but it’s best when it’s an unscripted process. I’ve entered interviews with instructions to write about someone with only a vague idea of who they were and why they were important and the subject informs me along the way of what the story is.

I follow my curiosity because I see curiosity as my gift. The interview is data collecting. You’re not sure what you’re looking for, but just ask as much as you can and don’t think too much what the final article is going to look like.

The Kicker: They’ll want to see the piece.

At the very end, there will often be the uncomfortable moment when someone asks if they can see the piece before it goes to publication. The answer is always no. But here’s the thing: You have the upper hand. You already have the answers and you are free to publish it. At that point, you can stop interviewing them and write your story. Remember, you are being chummy, but it is a transaction and they’re asking you to do something that will compromise your job.

At the same time, in most situations with regard to local journalism, you absolutely need to be diplomatic at the very least. Outright hostility is not going to go over well and if you get a complaint, it could even cost you standing or your job. But, again you are in the right here.    

The best thing to do is show them this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-you-cant-review-article-before-goes-print-craig-guillot/

What you can do is read quotes back to the source AT YOUR DISCRETION.

You also should mention that it’s not your final copy that goes into print because it goes through an editor anyway. I once interviewed a local stamp and coin store and the editor made the unusual decision not to have me to correspond with the stamp owner about areas of concern. I called the stamp store owner about it and he got very upset and I explained that my promises that I made to him were contingent upon an editor who had say over me. He got upset and I felt dragged in the middle. A few years later, I passed by his shop and I apologized about the whole thing and told him I didn’t like the situation any better than he did. It was a pleasant reunion. Often times, I play good-cop-bad-cop with my invisible editor as the bad cop if I have to explain rules.

Wrapping Up

You will have tons of information at your hands and then you’ll lay it out at some point in the future. Thank them profusely for their time. Tell them you might need follow-up questions. At this point, you wait until you write your entire story and see where the holes are.  Put blanks in the spaces where you don’t know the answer and put those follow-up questions on top of the text.

That way you only have to bother them once more and not persistently.

Any follow-up questions?

What I'm Watching March Edition: We Need to Tall About Cosby, Home Economics, Mr Mayor, The After Party, Welcome to Flatch

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?

Oscar's Class of 2021

So many thoughts on the Oscars, but here's a stat list I keep every year: Actors appearing in a BP nominee who've been in three or more BP nominees:

10 Leonardo DiCaprio-Titanic, Gangs of New York, Aviator, Departed, Inception, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Revenant, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Don’t Look Up

9 Cate Blanchett-Elizabeth, LOTR 1-3, Aviator, Babel, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Don’t Look Up Nightmare Alley,

8 Meryl Streep-Kramer vs Kramer, Julia, Deer Hunter, Out of Africa, The Hours, The Post, Little Women, Don’t Look Up

6 Bradley Cooper-Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, American Sniper, A Star is Born, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza

6 Jesse Plemons-Bridge of Spies, The Post, Vice, Irishman, Judas and the Black Messiah, Power of the Dog

6 Benedict Cumberbatch-Atonement, War Horse, 12 Years a Slave, Imitation Game, 1917, Power of the Dog

6 Willem Dafoe-Platoon, Mississippi Burning, English Patient, The Aviator, Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightmare Alley

6 Stephen McKinley Henderson-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Lincoln, Manchester by the Sea, Fences, Lady Bird, Dune

5 Judi Dench-Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat, Philomena, Belfast

5 Timothee Chalemet – Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Little Women, Dune, Don’t Look Up

5 David Strathairn-LA Confidential, Good Night and Good Luck, Lincoln, Nomadland, Nightmare Alley

5 Sean Penn-Thin Red Line, Milk, Mystic River, Tree of Life, Licorice Pizza

4 Rooney Mara-Social Network, Her, Lion, Nightmare Alley

4 Josh Brolin-No Country for Old Men, Milk, True Grit, Dune

4 Mark Rylance-Bridge of Spies, Dunkirk, Trial of the Chicago 7, Don’t Look Up

4 Jonah Hill-Moneyball, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Don’t Look Up

4 Jennifer Lawrence-Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Don’t Look Up

4 Toni Collette-Sixth Sense, The Hours, Little Miss Sunshine, Nightmare Alley

4 Christine Ebersole-Tootsie, Amadeus, Wolf of Wall Street, Licorice Pizza

3 Jon Bernthal-Wolf of Wall Street, Ford v Ferrarri, King Richard

3 Rita Moreno-West Side Story, The King and I, West Side Story

3 Richard Jenkins-Hannah and Her Sisters, Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley

3 Aunjanue Ellis-Ray, The Help, King Richard

3 Frances Conroy-Aviator, Joker, Power of the Dog

The Dropout (Hulu) review

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. The message is clear: Friends are secondary to her goals. She even practices a form of code switching by deepening her voice with male funders. It’s 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. 

More so, as a plucky underdog with few social friends and a woman with diminutive stature in a man’s world she initially makes for a good underdog as she genuinely wins the respect of accomplished scientists decades her senior (at least at first).

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 through several episodes. For a number of episodes, the corner-cutting of Elizabeth Holmes seems like the natural course of action: She doesn't want to screw over her employees or investors by having the company fail. At some point, her cycle of short-term patching without seeing the big picture makes her the least interesting part of the story.

Fortunately, new blood in the form of two green recent college graduates (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) serving as interns shake things up pretty explosively in the sixth episode. Minnette's character is the product of nepotism whereas Kim comes from poverty and she has too much to lose by being a whistle-blower. The two start out as sleuths resembling a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew (with more bio-technobabble, of course) before turning into Woodward and Bernstein. 

Heading into the final two episodes, there's hope that this series could close out on a high note. 

What I'm Watching February Update

As We See It (Amazon)-The story takes place in the Bay area with three autistic people with wildly different wants of life and situations sharing a house under one roof with the guidance of their ridiculously awesome life coach Mandy (Sosie Bacon). Half the appeal is watching Mandy show understanding, commitment, and love in ways that I’m not even capable of in the presence of other autistic people, and I’m on the upper end of the spectrum myself. The story progresses well and trisects with the three central autistic characters diverging towards different paths of which the other two are only marginally aware of.

As someone who is both on the upper end of the spectrum and spent most of my life either unaware that I was on it or actively denying I had it, I can imagine these desires — impatience at people dumber than you, defining your adolescence by sexual experience, the desire to grow up, how desperately you might need a friend if you don’t get out much — as relatable to anyone. The difference is that an autistic person might have a greater barrier to processing these problems.

It’s also worth noting that outside of “Everything’s Gonna Be OK” (which is really not my cup out of tea outside its autistic character), few shows have had characters that are officially identified with this label. Before we give the two shows I’ve covered so far such big accolades, it’s worth noting that TV has had characters appear on TV who had an amiguous disorder because the writers didn’t dive into the psychology manual and weren’t living in a society that rewarded the breaking of glass ceilings. On “The Big Bang Theory”, for example Jim Parsons didn’t realize that Sheldon was likely a person who had Asperger’s until well into the show’s run. Perhaps there’s something to be said for the way a character like that evolved organically, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Space Force (Netflix)-This was on my top 12 shows of 2020 Honorable Mention list even though it has a non-sensical premise. Even if it did happen in the four upside down years of real life during the last presidency, it’s never not jarring hearing a show about a Space Force. It’s growing on its character beats. The romantic story in the middle between the characters played by Tawny Newsome and Jimmy O. Yang is actually played out well in an inverse of the “will they-won’t they” because the two have already slept together and now they’re trying to figure each other out afterwards. Yes, the show is easy fodder for a punchline because the whole show is based on a throwaway punch line, but that doesn’t mean it can’t eventually make its way to be watchable TV.

At the show’s center, one problem is that General Naird (Steve Carell) isn’t a particularly fertile well for any sort of comic tension or anything else for that matter. He’s slightly stubborn in the way most military leaders are (probably by design of their job) and has the requisite stiff demeanor, and there’s an inkling of an ark where a stubborn man might learn his lesson of listening to others (a la Home Improvement) but Naird is fundamentally a decent guy so the bell curve of his arc is pretty flat.

Running Wilde (NBC in 2010, now playing on Tubi)-Mitch Hurwitz’s follow-up to Arrested Development that brings together AD veterans David Cross and Will Arnett with Keri Russell (pre-Americans, post-Felicity). It’s fascinating for a reassessment because there are glimpses of Hurwitz’s brilliance at winding plots together and exposing characters’ blind sides. This time Hurwitz’s genre of choice is the screwball comedy which is about characters negotiating romantic, gender, and class divides in various factions.

The premise, however, is far less adaptable to sustainable comedy in that the central character idle rich Stephen Wilde (Arnett) devotes a tremendous amount of effort and money to courting a childhood crush who is engaged (to Cross). Throwing all the romantic comedy tropes at the fan still doesn’t justify any of these characters’ efforts (I’m not commenting on anyone’s ethics, I’ll leave that to feminist or anti-feminist reviewers to fight amongst themselves over) though it does help the absurdity of it all that Keri Russell’s daughter (Stephania Owen) narrates the absurdity of it all knowing full well that the three principals of the story are supreme idiots.

Disenchantment (Netflix)-The fourth season is slightly better than Season 3. It made my Honorable Mention list in 2019 and my Top 12 in its debut season.

Doll Face (Hulu)-This charming show about female bonding separates itself a little from the “Sex and the City” template by prioritizing a focus on female bonding over the requisite relationship drama. Its as if the show is aware that it can’t pass the Bechdel Test organically and that’s ok.

What’s more problematic is that the show’s quartet is a little bit distant from a Middle America perspective in that they all have jobs in the quaternary and quinary sectors as influencers and marketers. Sort of millennial faux aristocracy.

Kat Dennings is so charming, in my eyes, that she makes material as hackneyed as the double-entendre-laden drivel of “Two Broke Girls” work and she only gets better as the material becomes decent. Esther Povitsky is a gem as well. She’s half with-it and half helpless dork. The other two members of the quartet are forgettable.

Inventing Anna (Netflix)-A journalist (Anna Chlumsky) who is trying to survive in a sink-or-swim work environment sees a fraudulent heiress on trial (Julia Garner). It might have been better if I didn’t read how it all ends but it gets a lot of mileage out of Julia Garner’s vague European accent and the scenery porn. As a journalist I know what it’s like to have the doubly hard task of getting your sources cooperation and getting your editors on board your story idea. Most people don’t realize that you need both those orbits to align to get your story.

Top 12 TV Shows of 2021

 

1. White Lotus (HBO) Season 1-Mike White’s astute tableaux of human shallowness explores whether people on vacation can truly escape who they are through three interlocking groups of vacationers in Hawaiian paradise. For those who still mourn the cancellation of “Enlightened”, this is sweet redemption (More here and here)

 

2. Wanda Vision (Disney Plus) Limited Series- With such mind-boggling layers of symbolism, this is as if the world's best escape room writers were tasked with writing a sitcom that entrusts viewers to be active rather than passive participants in decryption. The series takes the viewer on a journey through various sitcom tropes on a decade-by-decade journey with underlying storylines dealing with grief, manipulation, and escapism as a form of evil. With all the painstaking detail that the prodution team implants its easter eggs, this is a sure contender for the most intricate show on television if not its most ambitious. I have little familiarity with the MCU (full disclosure: I hate the MCU) but was able to peace most details together.

 

3. Resident Alien (SyFy) Season 1-Alan Tyduk hits the right notes of not-to-be-believed silliness, as an oblivious alien who improbably manages to integrate into a small town in Colorado. In its own hokey way, the show is endearing, rich in character, and features a marshmellowshly  portrait of small-town life with plenty of scenery porn in the background. The show also features a sizeable Native American cast but doesn't resort to being pedantic. (More here)

 

4. We Are Lady Parts (Peacock) Season 1-A six-episode inaugural season takes us into the often unseen world of Muslim urbanites in Europe. The diverse quintet of women in London are united by their love of punk rock. If Dewey Finn’s mantra (whose words, ironically were written in “School of Rock” by Mike White of “White Lotus”) that “one great rock show can change the world”, these hijab-clad women are rocking their way to just that. (More here)

 

5. The Great (Hulu) Season 2-The spiritual sister to “The Favourite” (Show runner Tony McNamara also wrote that film about the decadent court of a European royal) is set in the glorious decadence of the court of 18^th Century Russia with bored aristocrats feeding their basest desires. In “Hamilton”, Washington says to the titular character, “Winning was easy young man, governing’s much harder” which is an apt description of this season as Catherine the Great has won.  Now what? This is a slate of psychologically multi-layered characters who are constantly re-evaluating which side of the fence they sit on.  (More here)

 

6. Never Have I Ever (Netflix) Season 2- Never Have I Ever tells the story of a teenage girl breaking away from the mores of a traditional Indian-American family grieving for her late father, and discovering boys. This year, the show proved the epitome of how a show should expand its side characters and mix up the dynamics in its sophomore season.

 

7. Doctor Death (Peacock) Limited Series-Adapted from a podcast, this is a high-takes parable of a medical narcissist (played by Joshua Jackson, yes, that Joshua Jackson) who left a trail of paralyzed patients in his wake while the medical establishment took way too long to catch up with him. It’s a tale of bureaucracy working exactly as it should and still leading to classic nightmare fuel. It’s also a tale of the upstream battle two doctors (Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater at the top of their game) must take to stop an atrocity.

8. What We Do in the Shadows (FX) Season 4-It’s been the best of times (for Colin Robinson who appears to have made at least one trusty comrade) and the worst of times (geez Nandoor, you need some Prozac) for our gang of Staten Island-based vampires. The joke here is that as the quartet (plus everyone’s favorite lackey, Guillermo) ascends the ranks of the vampiric council, they continue to be tripped up by the banalities of life (chain letters, toy store, neighborhood meetings).

9. Mr. Mayor (NBC) Season 4-Another entry in the canon of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock that's a little more "30 Rock" than "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." The humor is clever but skin-deep. Don't expect pathos-driven growth with the narrative highs of Kimmy, Titus and Jaqueline. At the same time, the show, set in the Mayor's office of L.A., has much less of an insider vibe. As it's mostly episodic, the show lives or dies by the episode but it's hard to deny that the show has been hitting a lot of home runs in the back half of the season.

 

10. Bless the Harts (Fox) Season 2-Though the show was cancelled, we can at least celebrate how the show got a lengthy second season run. The brainchild of ex-SNL writer and former North Carolina native Emily Spivey, the show split the difference between homage and parody of small-town Carolinian life. The show is about a lower-class family in small town North Carolina features a waitress with modest aspirations to rise within her station, her sly mother (whose primary motivations in life are besting her rival, feeling young enough that she can flirt with construction workers, and pulling off semi-fraudulent schemes), her boyfriend (a trucker persona with a teddy bear persona underneath), and her dead panning daughter. It’s an extremely strong quartet of characters who exhibit great chemistry.

 

11. American Crime Story: Impeachment (FX) Season 3-As a child of the 90s, I knew very little about this incident other than feeling my heart broken by Bill Clinton when  he went on TV and flat-out admitted to saying he did the thing he previously said he didn’t do a million times. Boy, would 8^th grade me loved to have heard all the juicy details (for educational purposes about sex, if nothing else). Better late than never! ACS is essentially found art: Monica and Bill is such a juicy news story, that even in mediocre hands it would make good TV. However, the credit goes to Ryan Murphy and crew for such adept casting and editing.

12. House Broken (Fox) Season 1- Lisa Kudrow plays a poodle, Honey, who leads a therapy group for all the neighborhood pets. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here for the jokes—simply imagine what your pet would say if they could talk to a therapist and viola! – but the jokes really hit and the large ensemble of characters (for example, Will Forte voices a turtle who’s in love with a croc shoe and Clea Duvall plays a rescue cat in desperate need of validation) establishes their comic beats with an extremely impressive speed. (More here)

Honorable Mentions:

AP Bio (Peacock) Season 4, The Chair (Netflix) Season 1, Cruel Summer (Freeform) Season 1, Ghosts (CBS) Season 1, Locke and Key (Netflix) Season 2, Kevin Can Go F*** Himself (AMC TV), Maid (Netflix) Limited Series,  Studio C (BYU TV) Seasons 13 and 14, Saturday Morning All-Stars (Netflix) Season 1, Schmigadoon (Apple TV) Season 1

Everything Else I Saw:

And lest you think I’m being hard on these shows, this is everything else I watched this year that didn’t make my top 12 or Honorable Mention list that these shows rank above:
Abbott Elementary (ABC)^,  Animaniacs (Hulu), AP Bio (Peacock), Attack of the Movie Cliches (Netflix), B Positive (CBS)^, Call Me Kat (ABC), Call Your Mother (ABC), Cobra Kai (Netflix), The Circle (Netflix), Disenchanted (Netflix), Frank of Ireland (Amazon), Explained (Netflix),  Great North (Fox), Inside Job (Netflix), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX), Home Economics (ABC), Kevin Hart’s Olympic Show (Peacock), Kim’s Convenience (CBC), La Brea (NBC/Peacock), Lost Symbol (Peacock), Love Death and Robots (Netflix), Mr. Mercedes (Amazon), Mighty Ducks (Disney Plus), Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail (TBS), Mosquito Coast (Apple TV), McGruber (Peacock), Mr. Corman (Apple TV), Mythic Quest (Apple TV), Nora From Queens (Comedy Central), Nine Perfect Strangers (Hulu), Only Murders in the Building (Hulu), The Premise (Hulu), Rebel (Amazon Plus), Reservation Dogs (Peacock), Rutherford Falls (Peacock), SNL (NBC), Solar Opposites (Hulu), Squid Game (Netflix)^, To Tell the Truth (ABC), Young Rock (NBC)^

 

^ means I watched just one or two episodes. I didn’t necessarily watch every episode of a show if it’s not marked